SPECIAL:
THE FUTURE EDITION
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he title of MrBeast Burger’s launch video, I Opened A Restaurant That Pays You To Eat At It, might sound like clickbait. It’s not. In the 10-minute YouTube clip one can see Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, and his team giving
away free burgers and wads of cash (as well as several iPads and a brand-new car) to thousands of people waiting in line. This type of stunt is unprecedented
for promoting a restaurant, but quite normal for Donaldson, one of the most popular YouTube celebrities with more than 100 million followers. The 24-year-old from Wichita, Kansas, is known for very expensive philanthropic challenges where he gives away hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete strangers. In 2021, Forbes ranked him the highest-earning YouTube personality, with $54m.
While the promo video was shot at
a physical drive-thru, MrBeast Burger is in fact a virtual restaurant available for delivery and pick-up only. Rather than using ghost kitchens to prepare its burgers, the brand prefers to partner with existing restaurants with spare cooking capacity. The setup of the whole operation went on for almost a year, in partnership with virtual brand incubator Virtual Dining Concepts, which helped Donaldson find partnering restaurants and suppliers.
This collaboration between virtual
and physical restaurants is a type of franchise that was pioneered in 2016 by Uber Eats and other delivery giants and has been gaining ground since. With this model, virtual brands can scale up quickly without building new ghost kitchens, while restaurants can increase revenue without having to worry about marketing and logistics. For William Bender FCSI, founder and principal of W.H. Bender & Associates in San Jose, California, it
can be a win-win partnership for many struggling restaurants in the post-Covid era: “I think that virtual dining can coexist with physical restaurants, and both can succeed, as long as brick-and- mortar establishments are creative and find a way to use this model without detracting from the location, and making sure the target market of the virtual brand is not in competition with them,”
Breaking barriers On opening day, in December 2020, MrBeast Burger was available at 300 locations across the US. The success went beyond expectations: two months later Donaldson tweeted that it had sold over one million sandwiches, and today the virtual chain has more than 1,000 locations in the US and has expanded to Canada, the UK and UAE. These numbers proved that it’s not
necessary for a virtual restaurant brand to be a spin-off of a large brick-and- mortar chain (such as Applebee’s Cosmic Wings and Denny’s The Meltdown) to
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