If you’ve ever thought Rachel Ray’s 30-minute meals or simple family-pleasing meals would be better if someone else made them, you’re in luck. Under a new partnership between Rachel Ray and Uber Eats, 10 cities will get their own Rachel Ray delivery-only kitchen for 10 weeks starting around the October 15 launch of her new book: Rachel Ray 50.
Uber Eats will be the exclusive delivery provider for the virtual kitchens for 10 weeks, delivering prepared menu items from her book.
It’s an interesting evolution for the idea of a virtual restaurant, and a fascinating marketing tool for all those food celebrities who run parallel to actual foodservice, like the three-way partnership between Grubhub, Bon Appetit magazine and restaurant-operator giant Lettuce Entertain You. It’s all the fun of providing food to consumers without losing your shirt in an actual restaurant.
The details around the Uber partnership are a little light, but Uber’s food delivery arm already has opened more than1,500 virtual restaurants across North America. Whether Rachel Ray’s recipes will be pumped out of those facilities, those of other partners or something new remains to be seen.
As more companies toy with their own version of virtual restaurants, it’s a marketer’s dream for the right brands no matter where they are on the food spectrum. Maybe Downtown Abbey could deliver finger sandwiches and elegant cupcakes to super fans for the rental release of the movie. Maybe Fortnight wants to let gamers order up food and get some exclusive digital gear. The possibilities are almost endless, heck why not a babka restaurant to coincide with the Netflix launch of Seinfeld?
