A ghost kitchen is a virtual restaurant. It has no shopfront and services customers via delivery apps.

The most important thing for any entrepreneur is to immerse yourself and become an expert in whatever it is that you're doing. Learn from other people, make contact and ask for their advice.

Undesirable real estate in South Africa is not the same as in other countries. We are a shopping mall country. That means that sometimes smaller centres would get left behind as people go to the new and shiny ones, and nobody wants to go back to those smaller, undesirable shopping centres. So we started looking at those.

The design was purely based on what we saw on YouTube. We watched a video where one of the founders of Kitchen United in the United States was doing a presentation during which he showed his facility. We paused the video on one of his slides and literally started taking notes on that slide.

Tenanting was a big challenge, funding was a big challenge and obviously the other big thing was just being a first mover. You don't know if what you're doing is correct or not. There's no reference point. All our reference points were in the United States, England or India.

Initially it was very difficult convincing landlords to allow us to build 10 kitchens, but now it's so much easier. We've got a facility that works, so any landlord that wants to see it can see it and check it out and can actually see how it functions.

Going into a restaurant used to be a very closed-off segment of the industry, but ghost kitchens have allowed your ordinary entrepreneur, a young entrepreneur, to come into this space. Ghost kitchens can be a launchpad into becoming a fully-fledged restaurant owner.

Looking at cloud or ghost kitchens specifically, you look at your sales that are tied to your order volumes that are tied to your basket size. Those are the three most important metrics to figure out from a sales perspective.

The most important thing is making sure that the product that you want to sell makes sense in the area that you want to sell it in. If you're going to come with a niche product but that market doesn't exist, even if the product tastes great, no one's going to buy it because there's just no market from there.

In my opinion innovation is easy in a ghost kitchen simply because it's low risk. You can easily start a brand and if it doesn't work, you can just shut it down. It's very difficult to do that in brick and mortar but ghost kitchens allow for that sort of innovation.