“I wish people didn’t want fries delivered,” Michael Joseph says, explaining that the spuds just don’t hold heat long enough to arrive at his customers’ doors warm. If Joseph had his way, he’d drop them entirely from the menu at Scratch Kitchen, the two-year-old takeout-and-delivery restaurant chain he co-founded in Boulder. “At the same time, we want to sell the customers what they want,” he says. So the fries remain, but they’ll soon see competition from tots, which testing indicates stay warmer longer. Then, if the data shows a positive change in customer behavior, Joseph will move the spuds to a more prominent location in his online ordering platform to further increase sales.
If using data analysis to quibble over the menu placement of fries versus tots seems, it’s not too far from the truth. Two stories above Scratch Kitchen’s first location, Joseph and I are sitting in what is unmistakably a tech startup office. A handful of slightly unkempt 20- and 30-somethings hunch over messy desks, stacks of La Croix lean against the walls, and wires seem to go everywhere at once. All of this is fitting because Scratch Kitchen isn’t your typical eatery. It’s a new breed of ghost kitchen, the tech-centric restaurant model that is to the food service industry what Uber is to taxis: a disruptive force.
