A tatty car park under a railway line is squeezed between a busy road, an industrial site and a semi-derelict pub covered in graffiti. It’s one of the grittiest parts of east London and probably the last place you would imagine some of the trendiest eateries in the country to be preparing meals.

But the grimy spot is just a short moped ride from the gleaming office towers of Canary Wharf and upmarket docklands apartments, and is therefore the perfect location for the latest idea from Deliveroo, the food courier service. It is setting up dozens of “dark kitchens” in prefabricated structures for restaurants that want to expand their businesses without opening expensive high street premises.

Ten metal boxes of a similar size to a shipping container are on this site in Blackwall. They are fitted with industrial kitchen equipment, and two or three chefs and kitchen porters are at work in each, preparing food for restaurants including the Thai chain Busaba Eathai, the US-style MeatLiquor diners, the Franco Manca pizza parlours and Motu, an Indian food specialist set up by the family behind Mayfair’s Michelin-starred Gymkhana.

The boxes have no windows and many of the chefs work with the doors open, through which they can be seen stirring huge pans or flipping burgers. Outside there are piles of spare equipment, mops in buckets, gas cylinders for the stoves and large cans of cooking oil.

A Deliveroo rider sets off from a Roobox dark kitchen in Hove, Sussex. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

This is one of the biggest of 11 sites currently operated by Deliveroo that are home to 66 dark kitchens. Five sites use the metal structures, known as Rooboxes or Deliveroo Editions, while others are in adapted buildings. The majority are in London, but there are others in Leeds, Reading and Hove, tucked away in car parks or on industrial estates. All are close to residential and office areas filled with customers hungry for upmarket takeaways.

The locations may be unglamorous, but one dark kitchen in Southwark, south London, is turning out rotisserie chicken for the pricey Notting Hill-based specialist Cocotte. There are also outposts for Gourmet Burger Kitchen, the trendy pizza joint Crust Bros and the Soho sushi bar Yoobi.

Deliveroo has big ambitions for its Rooboxes, with plans to open more in London’s Swiss Cottage, Nottingham and Cambridge soon, and Manchester and Birmingham lined up for more boxes next year. Deliveroo finds and equips the locations, then rents them out to the restaurants, which employ and train the kitchen staff.

Two chefs tell the Guardian that working in the metal boxes is either hot or cold, depending on the weather and whether they are cooking or prepping. In one kitchen, there is only a small fan heater for cold days. Another houses a pizza oven that takes up more than a third of the space and makes it extremely hot.

Javed Akhtar, the operations director of Franco Manca, says the company is testing out a Roobox at the Blackwall site so diners and chefs at its busy nearby restaurant can avoid being troubled by takeaway delivery drivers. Franco Manca chefs get extra money for working in the box, he says, because “there is no interaction with front-of-house staff”. It also encourages chefs who may not be keen to work in a metal box in a car park.

But more chefs are likely to soon be swapping central locations for less salubrious surroundings.

Deliveroo couriers pick up meals for delivery from a restaurant. Photograph: Eric Feferberg/AFP/Getty Images

Deliveroo’s sales soared sevenfold to £128.6m last year as it expanded its operations in the UK and overseas, to 25,000 restaurants in more than 140 cities and 12 countries. The food delivery market, which includes the Deliveroo rivals JustEat and UberEats as well as traditional takeaways, is expected to increase by 10% a year to £53bn by 2020, according to the market analyst NPD.

But it is not all straightforward for Deliveroo. The company had planned to have more than 200 dark kitchens on 30 sites across the UK by the end of 2017, and even more overseas. That target has been missed and there have been complaints from residents and councils, who accuse the company of bypassing planning rules.

The Roobox site in Camberwell, south London, may be forced to close after Southwark council said the noise of delivery vans and mopeds was a nuisance to neighbours and the operations had been set up without planning permission.



Dan Warne, Deliveroo’s UK and Ireland managing director, admits the company did not move quickly enough to speak to the council and residents in Southwark, but says Roobox kitchens are clean, hygienic and checked by the Food Standards Agency.

He says Deliveroo is considering the use of more pushbikes to deliver food, rather than mopeds, in order to reduce noise where that is a problem. The company has a team of staff especially to deal with queries and complaints from councillors and residents. “We are keen to adapt our operations to meet the concerns that people raise,” Warne says. “We do understand this is a new thing coming into an area and some people will have questions about it.”

Some residents living in and around Rooboxes say they welcome the opportunity for jobs for young people. But in Dulwich, south London, Pasquale Mereu, a chef at the nearby Italian restaurant Il Mirto, says Deliveroo has been a “very bad thing” for the business. He says the restaurant’s delivery orders have more than halved in the past year and they have had to lay off one of two couriers.