As soon as Echo Park Eats opened on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Douglas Street in the fall of 2023, Sandy Romero said her neighborhood became overrun with delivery drivers. "The first day that they opened business it was chaotic, unorganized and it's just such a nuisance now," she said. Echo Park Eats is a ghost kitchen, a meal preparation hub for app-based delivery orders. It rents its kitchens to 26 different food vendors. The facility is part of CloudKitchens, led by Travis Kalanick, co-founder of Uber Technologies, which has kitchen locations across the nation including 11 in Los Angeles County.

Restaurant meal delivery has been rapidly growing in the last few years. The main challenges in operating it are the temporally and spatially dispersed stochastic demand that arrives from customers all over town as well as the customers' expectation of timely and fresh delivery. To overcome these challenges a new business concept emerged, "Ghost kitchens". This concept proposes synchronized food preparation of several restaurants in a central complex, exploiting consolidation benefits. However, dynamically scheduling food preparation and delivery is challenging and we propose operational strategies for the effective operations of ghost kitchens. We model the problem as a sequential decision process. For the complex, combinatorial decision space of scheduling order preparations, consolidating orders to trips, and scheduling trip departures, we propose a large neighborhood search procedure based on partial decisions and driven by analytical properties. Within the large neighborhood search, decisions are evaluated via a value function approximation, enabling anticipatory and real-time decision making. We show the effectiveness of our method and demonstrate the value of ghost kitchens compared to conventional meal delivery systems. We show that both integrated optimization of cook scheduling and vehicle dispatching, as well as anticipation of future demand and decisions, are essential for successful operations. We further derive several managerial insights, amongst others, that companies should carefully consider the trade-off between fast delivery and fresh food.

For me everything is evolution," he says. Nor is he a big fan of the "gig economy", the use of often poorly paid contractors, which has been used to power so many other "disruptive" tech platforms like Uber and Lyft. Reef kitchen employees are staff and get paid $20 an hour. "Our approach from the beginning was that this has to be a business built on ownership and accountability," he says. "In general I don't believe in the fundamentals of building a business on gig workers.

To mitigate local warming, cities including Milan have wrapped condominium balconies and high-rise facades in expansive vertical gardens. A dense stack of vegetation can help keep a building cool by creating natural shading and releasing moisture into the air, says Theodore Endreny, a professor of environmental resources engineering at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. The compact foliage augments the benefits trees and plants naturally provide when planted on sidewalks or roofs, including pollution removal, carbon dioxide sequestration and oxygen production. A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. Crews of urban arborists certified as tree climbers will be hired to rappel down buildings and maintain these ecosystems as they sprout on more buildings, says Dr. Endreny.

Close-up of sign for gig economy meal delivery app Doordash, with text reading Doordash Pick up ... [ ] Here, in a restaurant setting in Lafayette, California, May 23, 2019. Earlier this year, Hudson Riehle from the National Restaurant Association said we're at a tipping point in the restaurant industry, pointing to the emergence of "essentially a new business model." In a nutshell, that means a majority of consumers, especially younger consumers, now prefer to eat their restaurant meals somewhere other than an actual restaurant whether that be via drive-thru, delivery, takeout, whatever. So, what comes on the other side of this tipping point? According to industry technology providers (in many cases, disruptors), the major narratives for 2020 include even more delivery, ghost kitchens, a more sophisticated point-of-sale system and artificial intelligence.