Karma Kitchen

Karma Kitchen is a UK-based provider focused on transforming industrial spaces into fully outfitted commercial kitchens, co-working, and storage spaces. The company offers three types of units: Shared Workbenches, Private kitchens, and Anchor Production Units.

The company's tenants include Taster UK, the multinational virtual brand operator that launched its UK business straight from Karma’s Hackney kitchen. Prior to the pandemic, Karma’s customers were split 50-50 between delivery and small businesses. Since then, deliveries have increased to around 85% of the company’s business, a majority of which is conducted through delivery partners like UberEats and Deliveroo.

As of March 2022, the company had four facilities in Hackney, Wood Green, London Fields and Camden, with one more in the pipeline in Bermondsey. The Hackney kitchen site is a large shared kitchen, where smaller distributors can rent a spot, and it is surrounded by private kitchens, where teams can prepare meals for food delivery apps over a longer shift. According to the company, it charges USD 50–100 per eight-hour shift with the annual cost of renting Karma’s kitchens standing at around USD 34,000.

In July 2020, Karma Kitchen partnered with Uber to launch a three-week restaurant accelerator program in London, catering to unmet demand from customers on its UberEats food delivery platform. Uber would pick five to seven restaurant concepts to join the accelerator based on selection gaps in locales within 2 miles of the Karma kitchen in Hackney. Restaurants selected for the three-week program would then work out of Karma’s Kitchen facility in Hackney, learning everything from photographing food to streamlining delivery operations.

In July 2020, the company also raised USD 319 million in Series A funding from investors including property real estate investment management firm Vengrove Asset Management. Notably, Karma Kitchen’s founders had initially intended to only raise USD 3.8 million through the venture capital route, with a view to leasing sites and investing in capex to outfit them. Instead, by going with Vengrove, Karma Kitchens has a real estate partner with a set fund to buy the freeholds of the sites and fit them out on the cloud kitchen operator’s behalf. The funding was to go toward opening 53 new sites over a five-year period, starting with a deeper UK presence in locations like Dublin, Glasgow, and London before moving into the rest of Europe.