Cloud Kitchen

Project Description

Cloud Kitchen is a ghost kitchen concept that CSS Company started in California and is now spreading throughout the nation to include Dallas/Fort Worth. Ghost kitchens are a low cost, low risk, quick return option for businesses that want to focus on making food and maximizing order fulfillment. Essentially, these are food preparation facilities that focus solely on the delivery aspect of the food industry, rather than the customer’s in-store dining experience and other aspects of running a full dine-in restaurant.  

The objective is to occupy an existing industrial building and build out multiple test kitchens for different operations to occupy and use the services of GrubHub, DoorDash, UberEATS, etc.   

Challenges

• The city refers to this land use as Catering, mainly because of an outdated code that has not transitioned with the times. A catering land use has a high parking ratio of 1 per 200 square feet. Existing industrial buildings that were constructed to be parked at either 1 per 1,000 square feet or 1 per 600 square feet at the highest do not provide the required parking for a catering land use.
• We needed the City of Dallas to recognize this land use as an industrial land use as opposed to the retail land use of catering.
• Additionally, we needed to figure out how the health department would look at this land use and how health requirements would be met both individually for each kitchen and overall, for the entire structure. 

Strategies Used

• Acted as point of contact between the city and all parties involved with the project.
• Followed up with plan reviewers on behalf of the client
• Minimum of weekly check-ins with the client to provide timelines and updates

Results

• Permitting: Taking over the finish out permitting for Common Desk, Masterplan started with a clean slate. Everything that was previously submitted to the City of Dallas was deleted from the system and started from scratch to ensure every piece was accurate. Working with the development team, every single comment was addressed and corrected to meet the city requirements. Common Desk needed another permit for their expansion, which would allow for an additional 1,400 square feet of space on the first floor. With all the initial documentation corrected and in place, the second permit was quickly issued.
• Parking: After completing the parking analysis, Masterplan worked with the team to develop parking solutions which ensured all the issues were rectified before submitting to the city for final approvals.
• TIF: Tax Increment Financing, or TIF, is an economic development program through which funding is available from the City. Our team worked to get all of the permitting and documentation necessary to meet the TIF deadline. With the support of TIF funds, the building owner was able to get a great tenant for the building, and keep the rent at an affordable rate.

Conclusion

The contractor, Hill & Wilkinson, was able to keep the construction schedule on track. Permits all met the TIF deadline to ensure funding for the owner.