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I have talked to a lot of delivery drivers for this series, and one story stood out to me in particular. It was from my conversation with Charlie Walsh. He lives in Connecticut, and he told me about a delivery he did that had both of us scratching our heads. Walsh showed up to pick up a DoorDash order at a restaurant that didn't exist. It was at West Farms Mall.
Walsh is a longtime resident of the area, and he's been delivering for a while. He knew you couldn't sit down and eat at a Mr. Beast Burger at the mall. But he had an order from it. I had to Google this Mr. Beast Burger.
Turns out it's affiliated with THE MrBeast. As you guys know, I like to give away money. But in this video, we're going to do it a little different. I'm going to give people a choice. He's one of the biggest YouTubers in the world. His thing is he gives away literally millions of dollars to strangers. But he also published a different kind of video in 2020, announcing his new burger shop. I've never ran a restaurant before. Money for you. Money for you. Money for you. Money for you. You better come get a Beast Burger.
But this video wasn't shot at West Farm Shopping Mall in Connecticut. There's no way Mr. Beast was actually setting up shop slinging burgers there, right? And when Charlie Walsh arrived at the address for Mr. Beast's burger, he saw a completely different place. A place called Brio Italian Grills.
It's some bullshit Italian chain. Walsh knew this restaurant. This was a place you could plunk down after a day of shopping and order calamari and a Caesar salad. But when he pulled up to curbside parking designated for pickup, he noticed something on the entrance to Brio. There were other little stickers for even more restaurants, like Guy Fieri's Flavortown Kitchen, Mariah's Cookies,
And he learned that all those restaurants, they live inside Brio. But a customer couldn't walk into the Italian restaurant and order from any of those other menus because they are online, delivery-only restaurants. It almost feels like we've stumbled onto a secret of the industry. Like, there are customers all around the area ordering Mr. Beast Burgers. And little do they know, their food is coming from the same kitchen, the same line cooks as Brio Italian.
How did this happen? How did Mr. Beast, Guy Fieri, and an Italian food chain in a Connecticut mall get into business together? The short answer is the apps led us here.
This is Land of the Giants from Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Amadal Yuckber, food writer and host of the show's first ever miniseries, Delivery Wars, a collaboration with Eater. I'm Amanda Kloot, Eater's editor-in-chief. Today we take you into a world that wouldn't exist if it weren't for the food delivery companies. A world that Charlie Walsh wandered into when he went to pick up the Mr. Beast Burger order.
And that's why it's so striking that Charlie Walsh, a seasoned delivery driver, didn't know what Mr. Beast Burger was. This is a really important disconnect.
Because like many collisions between tech and whatever industry it disrupts, this new world of digital delivery-only food is charging ahead, sometimes in ways that are totally detached from the people it affects, like drivers and cooks and you, the consumer, who buys and eats this food. But these models are also unveiling a whole new way for restaurants to thrive in the app economy.
The world they're creating is an uncertain one, full of promise, but also unknown consequences. In our first episode, we started the series with restaurants. And today, in our final episode, we go back. We tour this new world through the eyes of the owners, how they're facing the inevitability of these shifts, how they're adapting, and how some are even leading the way.
So for our first stop on this tour, we're going to talk about the delivery-only concept that came first. This was before virtual brands, the thing we heard about from our delivery driver, Charlie Walsh. We're going to talk about ghost kitchens. Ghost kitchens are essentially restaurants without the dining room or public space. They don't have a visible storefront. They're delivery-focused only. ♪
Ghost kitchens have been around for a few years now, but the owners of Crazy Hog BBQ decided to try out this business model last year. So this new order of business has really been very interesting for us. This is Vic Cooksey. He and his wife, Dana, are the owners of Crazy Hog BBQ in Chicago. Community means a lot to them.
Before the pandemic, you might find a karaoke party taking over the restaurant on Saturday nights, or people gathering for a book club, retirement party, or fundraising event. Our customers were like the best. They would tell us, you know, I feel like I'm at my grandmother's house when I come here, or I feel like, you know, I'm at a barbecue at my aunt's house. But then indoor dining shut down. Community events were impossible. So they tried out curbside pickups.
But because the barbecue business is such a labor-intense business and we knew our numbers, it was hard to adjust. So we would smoke 400 pounds of meat because we knew 400 pounds of meat were going to get sold. But they were wrong. Customers didn't seem to be leaving their homes much at that point, much less picking up Crazy Hog's food to go.
The Cookseys tried smoking less meat, but they still found themselves wasting a lot of food. They thought about minimizing their menu, offering only grilled chicken or fried chicken. They even considered starting a food truck, but nothing seemed feasible. We just kind of closed our doors to figure out, like, what was our next move? You know, where does the world go? Then, in mid-2020, the Cookseys got a call from DoorDash.
which had learned about Crazy Hog from a popular food blog. A DoorDash rep sat down with the Cookseys and told them that, from its data, DoorDash knew people were ordering a lot on the apps in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago. The data pretty much said that if you guys are offering your barbecue in this area, it's going to be hugely successful. An area about 30 miles north of Crazy Hog's now-closed brick-and-mortar location.
And DoorDash's suggestion for how Vic and Dana could move into that delivery zone was open a ghost kitchen. DoorDash would help the Cookseys find a space that would allow them access to the Lincoln Park delivery zone. Customers would order Crazy Hog on DoorDash. The Cookseys would package up the food in the spot and send it on its way. No sit-down customers allowed.
Going ghost kitchen meant going cheap on certain things too. Crazy Hog, at its old brick-and-mortar location, operated out of a 5,000 square foot facility where the rent was close to $6,000 a month. This new space, one the Cookseys actually shared with a bunch of other ghost kitchens, was way smaller. Now we pay a fraction of that in rent for the space.
They also didn't need to paint the walls, put up a sign or a menu, or even build out a kitchen. A shared kitchen space also meant sharing resources, a huge save on their utility bills. Now we go from paying $1,500 a month in utilities to, again, a fraction of that. And less space means less staff.
In our space previously, we had bartenders and bar runners and waitresses and hosts and all of that. Now it's just three people. You know, on a regular day, it can be one manager and one person. The Crazy Hog Ghost Kitchen is an entirely different game than the Crazy Hog Brick and Mortar. It's like plus 1,000 minimum percent people.
increase in revenue, and then some of the additional expenses that we had in terms of overhead is not there anymore. The ghost kitchen model is appealing to an increasing number of business owners. The UK-based market research firm Euromonitor recently estimated that ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants could be a $1.5 trillion business by 2050 globally. For the Cookseys, going ghost kitchen has resulted in a clear financial gain.
But they have felt some loss in this evolution, too. There's no customer interaction, which, you know, of course, our business was built on customer interaction and having relationships with our customers who love to come inside and just to visit, if nothing else. This new way of doing business has meant putting the focus on the food instead of the full experience the Cookseys built out in their original brick and mortar.
Virtual customers certainly aren't coming in for karaoke Saturdays. But there is another ghost kitchen model that traditional restaurants can opt into. And this is where we get deeper into the world that wouldn't exist without the apps. We're still talking about ghost kitchens, but ghost kitchens inside existing traditional restaurants.
Cantor's Deli is one of the largest and oldest restaurants in all of Los Angeles. Originally started by my great-grandfather in 1931, and it's been in my family for four generations. This is Alex Cantor. And as he says, Cantor's Deli is an L.A. classic. It has kind of an L.A. noir, old Hollywood vibe.
The deli was a backdrop to scenes from Mad Men. Celebs like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and even former President Obama have visited the diner. Cantor grew up working in the restaurant, so he knew the rhythm of the place. At Cantor's, our busiest time of the week was actually Sunday during brunch, from about 11 a.m. to call it 2 p.m. But for most of the rest of the day, our kitchen had a lot of excess capacity to handle more orders.
As Cantor noticed this excess capacity, he also noticed how ghost kitchens were popping up across the country. And so he approached his dad, who was running Cantor's Deli, with a question. I said, if you can sell more of any item on the menu, what would it be? And he thought about it and said grilled cheese sandwiches because the food cost is extremely low for us.
We never run out of those ingredients and it's really easy for us to crank out grilled cheese sandwiches. It takes about two to three minutes on the grill. Cantor went to work and designed his first ever ghost kitchen. The sandwiches would come from the same kitchen as Cantor's Deli, but under a different name. Grilled Cheese Heaven.
Customers can now order grilled cheese sandwiches with all kinds of fillings and toppings. Fried egg, bacon, coleslaw, even mac and cheese.
But when they place their orders... They may or may not realize that a driver is actually driving to Cantor's Deli to pick up this grilled cheese heaven bag that has a different sticker and label.
Cantor wasn't sure what to expect at first. But in the first year, we did, I think, $250,000 of incremental gross sales without having to hire any extra staff, without paying any more rent. The lights are already on. So there's a lot of fixed costs with running a restaurant. But because we had that excess capacity, we were able to turn on this new brand in the kitchen that Cantor's is already operating in.
By Cantor's metrics, that was a success, and Grilled Cheese Heaven was not the first successful venture Cantor brought to food delivery. In 2017, he and some business partners created a company to streamline how restaurants manage orders coming in from the many apps. They did it by creating their own app, one that could integrate every platform onto one device. Sounds simple, but that company called OrderMark also opened up a whole world of possibilities for Cantor. Be
Because it supplied him with data about hundreds of thousands of consumer transactions. He could see consumer purchasing behavior and what menu items were trending. Which helped lead Cantor to yet another idea, a company called NextByte, which he co-founded in 2019.
Nextbyte brings us deeper into a world you've heard about a bit already, the world of virtual brands, because this company is all about building up that world and inventing delivery-only digital restaurants.
Here's how it works. Through OrderMark, NextByte has access to key data about consumer transactions and behavior, and it applies that data to some key questions. You know, what's going to be hot next year? And how do we take concepts that are doing well in certain areas and bring them to new areas and really spread food in new ways that have never been able to be done before? For example, one trend that NextByte noticed was hot chicken sandwiches were becoming popular in cities like L.A. and New York.
Obviously, Nashville is kind of where it all started, but there were still so many areas around the U.S. that had no access to Nashville hot chicken sandwiches and had no idea what that even was. So in 2019, NextBite created the virtual brand now known as Miss Maisie's Amazin' Chicken.
Restaurants sign up to sell this brand and use their kitchens to make the chicken sandwiches inside their existing restaurants. They get the approved list of ingredients, the recipes, the packaging, everything needed to make and sell the concept. And they profit from the growing consumer desire for hot chicken sandwiches. And we were able to essentially overnight bring this concept to restaurants everywhere to participate and to bring this new genre of food to their market.
New genre of food. In this data-powered, targeted, and accelerated way, virtual brands like the ones created by NextBite have so much influence. So much so, they're literally reshaping the kind of food we eat across the country. And if you didn't think that was enough... Yo, what up? It's your boy Wiz Khalifa, man. So make sure you guys roll up and order some Hotbox by Wiz.
They even got celebrities involved. Yeah, like Wiz Khalifa. His virtual brand with Nextbyte is called Hotbox by Wiz. And it is what it sounds like. Cantor describes the menu as stoner-themed.
And I would say accurate. Do you want to hear an item from the menu, Amanda? I would love to hear an item from the menu. So one of the items that stood out to me was the fully packed bowl, which is basically a bowl filled with tater tots, mac and cheese, chicken nuggets with spicy buffalo sauce, and hot Cheetos. Wow.
Does that sound good to you? I mean, I would at a certain time of night, I would eat that. So Cantor says Hotbox by Wiz caters to a market that NextBite noticed was particularly untapped.
Late night diners. So Nextbyte pinpointed the opportunity. And then, Cantor says, Wiz Khalifa helped create the menu, the branding, the advertising campaign. He can have a restaurant without actually having a restaurant. He's not hiring a staff or finding a venue or anything. He's helping to create an identity.
And everyone gets a cut when the concept and food sells. Next Bite, Wiz Khalifa, and the local restaurants tapping into national brands. Cantor argues this is a win for everyone involved. But the service workers are often doing more work for the same pay.
And it's a kind of work they may not be used to. Restaurants are trying to prepare food for people that are eating on premise. So if they significantly increase their takeout and delivery, it can be challenging to prepare all that food in one kitchen.
This is Andrew Ritchie. He's the executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, a not-for-profit organization that represents restaurants, bars, and nightclubs throughout the city. So when a restaurant, brick-and-mortar kitchen, is trying to prepare one type of cuisine, it's
It's difficult enough, especially for all those cooks and all the employees. So as you increase your delivery business, it puts more pressure on those restaurant workers. And if you're starting to introduce additional virtual restaurant brands and cooking different cuisines, it becomes even more complex to operate the kitchen. Of course, the owner's first priority is keeping the restaurant open and keeping their workers employed.
The apps have played an important role in the survival of restaurants, but questions about sustainability persist. The restaurateurs aren't paying much more in labor costs, but they still pay for ingredients and they still aren't taking home as much as if they were doing dine-in.
So even though you are expanding and growing your revenue by creating virtual brands, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are making a lot more money. It can just be a lot of churn and burn and puts a lot of pressure on workers.
Investors, though, see efficiency and potential. Ghost kitchens and virtual brands could turn those razor-thin margins that we always hear restaurant owners talk about into much wider ones by cutting down on costs. So it's one reason investors are throwing money at this industry with high hopes.
In October 2020, OrderMark, which owns Nextbyte, received its largest investment, a round of venture capital worth $120 million, led by SoftBank, the same VC that invested more than a half a billion dollars in DoorDash. In a statement, the Japanese investment firm pointed to the company's virtual brand business as one of the reasons for investing.
Virtual brands, ghost kitchens, their digital presence wouldn't have been possible without the ecosystem that's been created by the food delivery apps. This push for optimization and to get consumers to embrace food genres is a significant shift that might be thrilling for some restaurant owners, but is also presenting challenges for many other people in the restaurant world. So how are the apps approaching these digital operations?
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So far, the major delivery apps don't own and operate any ghost kitchens or virtual brands in the United States. But these models excite them. After all, they're designed for app delivery. So every order means a commission fee. And so the apps are definitely encouraging virtual brands and ghost kitchens. We all know dining is going to change. It has changed.
DoorDash is a vehicle. It's a way to put our food in the hands and homes of families everywhere. Kobe can't stop us.
This is Dana and Vic Cooksey again, here from a promotional film for DoorDash's Reopen for Delivery program. It's a program that helped restaurants that had shut down during the pandemic reopen with delivery-only concepts. A year before that, DoorDash opened its first shared kitchen facility in Redwood City, California. Basically, a space where a bunch of independent ghost kitchens operate at the same time under one roof.
DoorDash has also helped national restaurants build and operate their own brands. Last year, DoorDash worked with Chili's to launch a virtual brand, It's Just Wings. Chili's offers wings already, but by spinning out an online brand, their kitchen can get orders from a new set of It's Just Wings customers who may not otherwise order delivery from Chili's.
DoorDash's approach to partner with restaurants big and small is pretty representative of how the major apps are dipping their digital toes into this business.
Take Uber, for instance. It doesn't own any ghost kitchens or virtual brands, but it advises restaurants that may want to get into the ghost kitchen business. We sit down with them on a very regular basis. And one of the questions that typically come up is, hey, how can I expand faster? And that's where dark kitchens come as a very logical option. That's Pierre-Dimitri Gourcote, vice president of delivery at Uber.
He's in charge of Uber Eats. He says Uber Eats analyzes its data to look at potential opportunities for partner restaurants, like demand for certain kinds of cuisine. We try to do our best to integrate with those partners to make sure that for restaurants, it's nothing more than flipping a switch, basically. Restaurants turn to apps like Uber Eats and its competitors because they've been gathering customer data for years, data the restaurants don't have access to.
Uber says there are more than 10,000 delivery-only restaurants listed on Uber Eats across North America, most of which operate out of existing brick-and-mortar restaurants.
As for Grubhub, the third major player in the third-party delivery world, it recently partnered with a company called Virtual Dining Concepts. It's kind of like Alex Cantor's Nextbyte, a company that builds a portfolio of virtual brands. Virtual Dining Concepts recently launched two new celebrity-driven virtual restaurant brands, Mario's Tortes Lopez and Polly D's Italian Subs. And you can only order from those virtual brands on Grubhub.
This partnership is the biggest play we've seen by a major app when it comes to the virtual brand market. But it's still just that, a partnership. None of the apps have fully delved into creating their own ghost kitchens or virtual brands in the United States.
Andrew Ritchie from the New York City Hospitality Alliance believes that's because the apps realize preparing and cooking food is very labor-intensive. But at the same time, I think it may be premature to say these companies are not going to get into the food cooking game. And this concerns Ritchie because he says the major apps already have a lot of power and leverage. If they start getting into the ghost kitchen...
business. They control the facilities where the food is produced. They control the marketplace where the food is sold. They employ or have independent contractors that are delivering the food and they are doing all of the consumer facing marketing with hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars behind them. There's no way local restaurants can compete with that.
Ritchie says that at each intersection, the customer transaction, the delivery worker who picks up the food, the ghost kitchen that makes the order, the food delivery companies are taking a cut. So the next logical conclusion would be that these companies could just start cooking the food and creating their own brands as well. That way they don't need to deal with these pesky restaurants that are giving them food.
a headache because they want fee caps or they want access to their customer data or they're sick and tired of these third party companies charging them bogus fees for phone calls that never result in an order. And then they basically own the whole entire marketplace. And we've seen it before. Amazon Basics.
Ritchie points to Amazon as a roadmap of what can happen in the food delivery industry, where people once sold products on Amazon's third-party marketplace and Amazon noticed the success of certain products and then created its own similar products branded under Amazon Basics, giving them prominent placement on its site and selling them for less money. There's no evidence that this is what the apps are planning. But Ritchie says even if these companies do start their own digital operations, they're
it might be harder than they think to win the hearts and stomachs of consumers. I think what these companies have to understand and what these companies have probably recognized and know is that you can't just start a random brand. If you just start some random wing company or ramen company or taco company, you know, it has no soul.
It's just some boring, bland brand that is created essentially in a factory. And now that may work in some places some of the time, but the reason people love restaurants and the reason people love delivery so often is that they've connected with the restaurant brand. They've been there. They know the people. And restaurant owners like Christopher Puglisi of Tompkins Square Bagels in New York City agree.
We started our season with Puglisi, navigating his growing dependence on the apps. Puglisi is uncomfortable with technology edging its way into his relationship with his customers. So you can kind of predict how he feels about ghost kitchens and virtual brands. I think the food business for a lot of companies, it's the last frontier. It's the last thing that hasn't been conquered and corporatized and sort of like suffocated, you know, all the life out of it, homogenized.
Puglisi says he was contacted by Grubhub and asked whether he'd be interested in distributing one of its exclusive virtual brand partners, such as Mario's Tortas Lopez or Polly D's Italian Subs. This set off an alarm for Puglisi. What would it mean for his business to let a generic brand into his kitchen, to ask his staff to not only make bagels and cream cheese from scratch, but also a completely new menu?
That's not the only offer Pugliese has had in this space. He told us about a time he and his restaurant manager got an invitation to tour a kitchen space owned by Cloud Kitchens. That's a ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant company started by Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber. You know, I toured the Long Island City space and they have you in these little matchbox-sized kitchens where you can't even move. But I guess they wanted to pack 50 of them in there.
And so they made them real small and tight. And we were looking at each other like, how are we going to work in this space? But Puglisi still feels an urgency about tapping into these virtual trends. He knows that more and more customers are using food delivery apps. And so he, too, needs to be open to new business opportunities that are made for the apps. I don't know what's going to happen, if I'll do it or not. But I guess we'll see. Because I know, like,
You can't rail against change, right? You're either going to keep up or you're going to be gone. You're going to be a dinosaur and become extinct. So there's a part of me that knows that I have to keep current, I have to follow trends, and you have to see which direction the world's going, right? And adapt.
So Amanda, when we first started reporting this series, you mentioned that VC money had kind of floated this whole food delivery business. And it's still not profitable even after the pandemic massively grew demand for the service. And it's become clear how right you were and that VC money allows for a lot of new business models. Both of the concepts we talked about in this episode, the ghost kitchens, virtual restaurants, they're funded by VC dollars. And both are kind of reacting to the increased power of the delivery apps in our lives. And I think that's a really good point.
But also their kind of responses to the same challenges that we've been hearing restaurants talk about, that the restaurant industry has thin margins and you need to be hyper-optimized to make the economics of delivery work.
Yeah, I think there's a bright side to all of this, which is there's more opportunities for people in this business, which, as you say, is a tight margin business, to succeed. They're using the data and the technology that's available to them. They're using inventive marketing. They're using efficiencies to try to make more money. So thinking back at all of this, what's the drawback of this?
I think from the consumer point of view, we're going in a direction of a homogenized dining experience with delivery. So I could see a world where this whole ecosystem is dominated by these national virtual brands that we've been talking about this episode.
Right. And after reporting this episode, though, I have to say that when I'm looking at the online marketplace now, I kind of can't unsee the virtual brands. Exactly. You scroll through the apps and you see like Cosmic Wings, Big Belly Burgers, like there are obviously virtual brands. The names are just so generic sounding.
And then there's like now, I would have never known Mariah's Cookies was Mariah Carey, but now I'm looking for restaurants that could be tied to a celebrity. And then I also know it's a virtual brand. Yeah, it's not really what's exciting to me as a diner or as a journalist covering this industry. You're not excited about algorithms optimizing for our needs? No, and I just don't want to get to a place where the SEO wizardry and all of this VC money ends up pushing out
The smaller guys that aren't making it to the top of our feed because they don't really have the advertising dollars. They don't have the scale. They don't know how to play the algorithm. Yeah, I mean, it feels like they built the industry on the back of local restaurants. But from a consumer point of view, it's troubling, too, because it's like you don't know where your food is coming from.
Yeah, I think the opacity is a huge point for a lot of consumers. We generally like to know where our food is coming from.
And I feel like these virtual brands are almost taking advantage of the fact that the average delivery customer is kind of lazy and lacks curiosity. And also, which we talked about in episode one, the distance the apps have created between the operators and the diners. They've kind of come between that relationship.
When we first started reporting this story, one of the things that we looked up that we didn't really get into is that Chuck E. Cheese's owns an online-only delivery company called Pascali's Pizza. Like, there's a real world in which I order from Pascali's Pizza and...
realize it's Chuck E. Cheese, and I feel incredibly betrayed, right? Like, I'm like, how did they trick me into ordering Chuck E. Cheese pizza? I'm an adult. I just wanted pizza. Exactly. You see a lot of online reviews, and they do feel betrayed, a lot of these customers, when they realize that they're ordering from Cantor's when they don't mean to or Chuck E. Cheese when they don't mean to. Right. But some people do just want a stuffed grilled cheese. They don't care what it is. They might not care it's coming from Cantor's or Chuck E. Cheese or whatever. Yeah, and I think that's really important to...
to note, I don't want to overly romanticize the restaurant delivery industry. Consumers who really want to order from their favorite place can still order from their favorite place. And people who are maybe just blindly ordering pizza or wings, maybe they'll get it from Chuck E. Cheese or from some restaurant down the street with a C health rating or the bodega or the sports bar.
For me, I would rather order from my local hot chicken place that has built trust in my neighborhood and developed the recipe over decades than the one that NextBite just spun up after looking at the data around hot chicken. In some way, tech is looking at food as a profitability enterprise. But in many ways, for many people, it's their culture and their history and their story that they're trying to share with people.
Yeah, I think that's a huge thing. And I think it does all go back to convenience culture. And I think for a lot of people, we're going to get to a place where the in-person dining experience is the thing that is specialized and social and personal, where you know a lot about what's happening. And delivery is something that you just do on your phone without thinking. And it's quick and easy and seamless and robotic. And
You're ordering without speaking to a human from a kitchen that exists somewhere out there. You have no idea where. Made by people you never see and delivered by a person you barely interact with who gets paid an amount you may or may not be comfortable with. It's kind of dystopian the more we talk about it, but it doesn't really take too much of a stretch of the imagination to get there. Yeah. I mean, coming out of the pandemic, the future is a little unclear. But one thing that is clear is that the apps, this technology, none of that is going away.
Whether these apps ever turn a profit or face tougher regulation via commission caps or labor laws, these apps have had an indelible impact on consumer behavior, low-wage workers, and on the business of a whole industry. Right now, we kind of have it all. We have relatively low fees, we have delivery available pretty much nationally, and we have the selection of both national chains and mom-and-pops on the apps.
But whether through market forces or the regulatory machine, that might not last forever. And the check for all that convenience might come due. Land of the Giants Delivery Wars is a production of Recode, Eater, and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Noor Wazwaz is the show's producer. Megan Kinane is our editor. Brandon McFarlane engineered this episode with help from Adrian Lilly. Alex Letterman is our fact checker. Thanks to Recode's deputy editor, Adam Estes, for his help with this episode. Thank you.
Thanks also to Deepti Sharma, Jihae Kim, and Adam Fry. A special thanks to The Verge Investigations editor Josh Jezza. His recent piece on virtual brands really helped us understand how this space works. He also took the time to answer so many of our questions. The piece is called The Great Wings Rush. Check it out. Sam Altman is Ricoh's editor-in-chief. Jolie Myers is our showrunner. Nishat Kerwa is our executive producer. I'm Amanda Kloot, Eater's editor-in-chief. And I'm your host, Amidala Yukhbar.
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