Excuse My French Toast. I recognized that name from somewhere. Googling it led me to a pizza place in Panorama City, CA that I had identified as listing a number of the brands that Devil’s Pizzeria was using. Could it be that these concepts and Excuse My French Toast came from one and the same source?“The bigger implication is that you just have no way to be accountable with how you spend now.”
He outlines a hypothetical scenario in which a long-time Devil’s customer stumbles upon a Future Foods brand like Groovy Island Pizza online. “Instead of ordering from somebody else, she’s ordering from me again,” he said. “Maybe Future Foods is doing some kind of promotion—$5 off for Groovy Island. She takes advantage of that.”Listening to him talk about the various concepts he’s tried, I realized that last year, my partner and I ordered two late-night pints of ice cream from Devil’s without knowing it—via a virtual restaurant created by Unilever.Other restaurant owners I interviewed signed on with Future Foods to carve out new streams of incremental revenue during the pandemic. One of them, Amin Bitar, runs an Eastern Mediterreanen gourmet grocery and prepared foods shop in South Philadelphia called Bitar’s with his brother, Jude. Opened by the brothers’ Lebanse immigrant parents in 1974, Bitar’s has the historical distinction of once being home of Philly’s first pita bakery—and has earned press kudos and a local cult following over the decades for its hummus, babaganoush, stuffed grape leaves, and falafel balls, which are grilled instead of fried. But in March 2020, as word of the novel coronavirus spread and offices in Center City started closing up, revenue from catering orders “dried up overnight,” Bitar said—and he began looking for ways to make up the shortfall.“I don’t want anyone to think that I am trying to do something dishonest. We didn’t build our business on dishonesty.”
He likens Future Foods’ brands to a “Trojan horse virus”: “It’s their way of getting into a space, without physically having to go and count how many orders are going out the front door.”
One can only hope that the architects of food’s future will have the honesty to acknowledge that consequences of a single misstep along the way won’t look the same for everyone involved. Though a customer can bounce back after an under seasoned hamburger arrives at their door, a restaurant won’t always be able to recover from an onslaught of negative reviews—even in the best of economies. If a storefront for a brand like “F*cking Good Pizza” generates too much negativity, McDowell pointed out, Future Foods can just “shut down that listing and open up a brand new one with the exact same name.”For now, restaurants hoping to make it to the other side will have to make the best of the tools at their disposal. At the very least, companies like Future Foods seem to know which way the wind is blowing. When I vented to Bitar about how fast the internet seemed to be changing the way we eat, he hit me with a dose of common sense. “If you walk outside your office, everybody’s head is in their phone!” he said. “It’s amazing people don’t fall into potholes walking down the street! So if that’s where everybody’s attention is, it’s smart for the people that figure out how to separate you from your money while your face is in your phone.” And unless, like me, you have time to trace an eye-catching restaurant listing back to its source, you may never know where your dinner is coming from. When I drove out to an industrial area in Raleigh this past weekend to check out 3309 Durham Drive, the property that Alliance Health noted it was selling to City Storage Systems, I half-expected a scene that was buzzing with activity—a line of delivery drivers standing outside the facility and checking their phones, waiting for their orders to be called; a cloud of cooking exhaust floating into the sky. Instead, I found an empty parking lot next to a squat, mostly windowless brick building. And out on the street, a sign: “For lease.”Follow Emilie Friedlander on Twitter.Have you worked with or for Future Foods, CloudKitchens, or a related entity? We would love to hear from you. Contact reporter Emilie Friedlander at emiliefriedlander@protonmail.com