Delivery-only kitchens and grocers: shining a light on ‘dark’ businesses
Written by Ted Culley - 3 March 2026
With an online food delivery market valued at around £38 billion (the third largest in the world), it’s clear to see that the UK loves a takeaway. Between 2022 and 2024, food delivery sales grew at a faster rate than dine in sales (27.3% versus 13.9% growth respectively).
Since 2020, the UK’s insatiable appetite for delivered food and groceries has increasingly been serviced by ‘dark kitchens’ and ‘dark grocers.’ A report identified that 1 in 7 takeaways have been found to be ‘dark kitchens.’ Only 25% of people have heard of them, and just 9% have knowingly used them.
Through an extensive research project funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research, major academic institutions were able to define dark kitchens and dark grocers as ‘technology-enabled commercial kitchens [or grocers] operating primarily for delivery, to fulfil remote, on-demand, consumer online orders of food for immediate consumption’. The advantage of the ‘dark’ model for takeaway kitchens and grocers is that they don’t have to cater to walk-in or sit-in customers.
Deliveroo, one of the largest operators of dark kitchens in the UK, recently reported that there has been a 70% increase in the average order volume per dark kitchen since March 2020. This means that dark kitchens and grocers often occupy far smaller and less traditional premises in areas that are out of town centres and have a lower level of public footfall.
Whilst occupying less traditional business premises often results in lower rents being paid by dark kitchens, by doing this they risk coming to blows with UK planning legislation. How dark kitchens are currently classed under UK planning legislation remains a contentious issue.
Local authorities take different views on which use class dark kitchens should fall under. On paper, it had been assumed that dark kitchens fell under use class E (which covers light industrial processes) of The Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2020. It was thus assumed that dark kitchens could operate out of class E industrial units without planning permission.
Recent decisions by some local planning inspectors in cities such as Portsmouth and Birmingham have contradicted this though, with both councils classing dark kitchens a use class of sui generis; a category which means a business should be treated as a unique case and requires specific planning permission. A Birmingham planning inspector concluded that large amounts of small deliveries was one of the reasons why a specific dark kitchen did not fall under the class E use.
One can imagine a scenario where a dark kitchen owner has entered into a rental agreement with a landlord but is unable to continue to pay rent because they were not able to attain the correct planning permission. A good landlord, (of course under guidance from a good solicitor), would seek specialist planning advice to determine which use case the business falls under in the local area.
From there, they would ensure that both parties agree exactly who’s responsibility it is to ensure that the correct planning permission can be obtained, and how to correctly deal with the risk that planning permission might not be granted. This might include an opportunity to break from the lease if planning permission has not been given by a certain date.
Ensuring dark kitchens are meeting health and safety standards can also be a difficult task for UK regulatory bodies. To better market their product and to take advantage of algorithms on delivery apps, dark kitchens often have multiple online restaurant facades with multiple different menus. This can make understanding how many different businesses are operating out of one premises very difficult.
As one environmental health officer recalled, ‘every time we do a trawl of Just Eat, we will find businesses or business names that we didn’t know about and that really frustrates me.’ To make matters worse, businesses that are awarded low hygiene scores often rapidly rebrand. Anecdotal accounts of environmental health officers showing up to dark kitchens, just for them to appear closed, also exist.
In 2021, the food standards agency released a report that acknowledged the that dark kitchens complicated the enforcement of food standards and called for more research to help address the challenge.