JustKitchen (JK.V) announced they have acquired the virtual branding rights to Life Kitchen and Kai Guo Ji, which translates to Hot Pot Festival, as third-party Taiwanese food brands.
JustKitchen has added these new partner brands to their JustKitchen app. The agreement is royalty-based and will begin on a three year term, which JustKitchen has the option to extend by two years. The deal provides JustKitchen with branding rights across the entirety of Taiwan, except within a 4 km radius from Life Kitchen’s four existing locations.
JustKitchen also launched four new in-house food brands. The four new brands are Bodyfit Breakfast – an extension of their existing Bodyfit menu to the morning, Burger & Dogs – American-style food, Craftsman’s Soul Made Ramen and Donburi – Japanese-style ramen noodles and donburi rice meals, and Old Brew Soup Noodle Shop.
The in-house brands were conceived of using analysis of trends in JustKitchen’s data. They were able to bring the new brands to market using minimal capital investment in an average of 45 days.
“The addition of Life Kitchen to our growing portfolio of partner brands, in combination with our proprietary menus from Bodyfit and Go Lean, positions us as the leading provider of healthy delivery-only food items in Taiwan,” said Jason Chen, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of JustKitchen. “The offering of Hot Pot Festival creates a unique, single-serving experience that would otherwise only typically be served in a group setting. The acquisition of the virtual branding rights to these two partner brands and the launch of our new in-house menus showcases how technology enables us to adapt to culinary trends while executing to a high standard, which we feel results in JustKitchen providing its customers with a better overall experience.”
JustKitchen is an emerging player in the “ghost kitchen” world. They use a hub-and-spoke model, in which a larger “hub” supplies the smaller kitchens (the spokes) with ready-to-cook ingredients, who then prepare the food as orders come in, before being sent out for delivery.
These kitchens don’t have a typical sit-in, brick-and-mortar restaurant location, instead, everything is ordered online and delivered rapidly. By setting up lots of smaller ghost kitchens around a city, deliveries don’t usually have to go very far and can offer cheap or free delivery. Additionally, by having most of the prep done at the larger “hub” kitchen, the spoke ghost kitchens don’t require much staffing or space. This kind of model makes sense for very dense urban areas where space is expensive.
The company, which only joined the TSX Venture last month, stated they believed they are the only ghost kitchen to go public on North American exchanges. They currently seem focused on building up their branding, but they also have their sights set on expansion to Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, and the US.
Following the news, JK’s share price is up 11 cents and it is currently trading at $1.71.