Th3 Core

I drove through that area a couple times on the way from Florida to Ohio (wife's family from Columbus). Very beautiful area. Wish we had more time to spend there.

I saw a restaurant soft serve machine for sale on FB Marketplace from a restaurant that closed down. Have to say I was a bit tempted to pick it up.

>Ghost Kitchens

I had seen a few articles about ghost kitchens even before COVID. Makes total sense. Why pay for all the overhead of a dining room, large menu, diverse options, etc. when you can just get a small kitchen and crank out a handful of dishes and do them reasonably well? They can also focus on food that travels well and has little degradation if delivery takes 15-20 minutes. They can also make sure things make sense economically and focus on higher margin foods when the delivery services take their 20-30%

There have been a number of restaurants around here that have done some pretty amazing pivots as well. One used to do kind of upscale burgers and modern takes on classic dishes. Over the last couple weeks they have shifted to making burritos you can just grab and go. They only need a 6-10 ingredients on hand and one or two people can crank them out at a good pace. There are a lot of restaurants here that do a lot of whining and complaining but the ones who have been able to adapt, change their menus, swallow their pride a bit and focus on what kind of food needs to be cooked vs. what they want to cook, etc. seem to be doing reasonably well.

The previous daily record in our county was ~200 confirmed cases and yesterday we had 694 or something like that. There was a big outbreak at the prison here (about 700 confirmed cases) and those are going into the daily numbers for the last couple days and probably more hitting today so it is a bit artificially inflated but even taking those cases out we are still not trending well. I think the post-Thanksgiving surge is hitting here and I expect some big numbers this week.

I would guess the spike after Christmas will be worse. The governor extended the "no social gatherings with people outside of your home" recommendation for three more weeks. The people who ignored that for Thanksgiving will ignore again for Christmas and there will also be another group of people who sucked it up and complied for Thanksgiving hoping they could do a larger gathering for Christmas will ignore it this time and go ahead with their plans.

Just got word that FedEx and UPS have been tapped to move huge amounts of vaccines so they are capping all merchants at their current contracted express volume. Basically once it gets to the last week before Christmas merchants won't have the same ability to get expedited (next day, 2 day, etc) shipments out on time.

Get your shopping done this week.

>usually I'm good with dark, but my wife doesn't like dark shows

My wife is the same way but she really enjoys it. Not really that dark. We are about 5 or 6 episodes in and I really like it so far.

>rent commercial kitchen space

This will be huge. Locally here there is a guy who has been working with restaurants to partner them up with other food producers that can utilize their facilities during times the restaurant is closed.

My wife and I have been looking into some commercial kitchen space recently. There are some shared kitchens but they are all pretty limited in what they can do. But if we could get some space a day or two in an existing restaurant kitchen that would be ideal. She has been making and selling out of our home but we have had some interest from restaurants that want to sell her biscuits but in order to do that we would need commercial space.

In the local food groups I am in there are at least a couple dozen people doing the same type of things. Stay at home moms selling cheesecakes, guys selling some bbq on the weekends, people selling ethnic foods that are hard to find in restaurants here (tamales, lumpia, empanadas, etc.). Easy, affordable access to commercial kitchen space will definitely help grow a LOT of small businesses. Most of these people don't want a normal restaurant but just want to be able to sell their products for people to take home and eat.