Cloud kitchens have a different cost structure from restaurants because there is no front of house, the order profile is spikier, and multiple brands often share one facility. Equipment decisions follow from those three facts.
What a delivery kitchen actually needs
The equipment list is shorter than a restaurant’s but more heavily loaded, because a delivery kitchen runs at peak for a narrow window rather than steadily across a service.
- Refrigerated assembly bases sized for the peak-hour order volume
- Cooking equipment weighted towards fast-recovery items — fryers, griddles, conveyor ovens
- Hot-holding capacity for the dispatch queue
- A dispatch and rider-handover point separated from production
- Packing benches with packaging storage at hand
- Shared wash-up sized for the whole facility, not per brand
Indicative budget by facility size
Ranges cover fabricated scope plus basic bought-out equipment, excluding civil work and utilities.
| Facility | Brands | Indicative range |
|---|---|---|
| Single-brand starter | 1 | ₹ 6 – 12 lakh |
| Small multi-brand | 2 – 3 | ₹ 12 – 25 lakh |
| Mid multi-brand | 4 – 6 | ₹ 25 – 45 lakh |
| Large facility | 7 – 10 | ₹ 45 lakh + |
Where multi-brand facilities save
The saving in a multi-brand facility is not in the cooking lines, which must be separate. It is in everything else: one wash-up, one dry store, one cold room, one dispatch point, one extraction system with per-line dampers.
Design that shared spine first. Brands added later then plug into it rather than forcing a refit.
The mistakes that cost most
Under-sizing extraction because the kitchen is small — a delivery kitchen at peak generates heat comparable to a much larger restaurant.
Placing the rider handover inside the production area, which creates a hygiene and security problem within a month of opening.
Buying domestic-grade refrigeration for a commercial duty cycle.
