The Apprentice 2025: What is a dark kitchen? Term explained as finalist Anisa urged by Lord Sugar to utilise 'dark kitchens' in business plan

Pizza owner Anisa Khan will take on air conditioning entrepreneur Dean Franklin in the final of the hit BBC show on Thursday evening (April 17). The pair will go head-to-head and pitch their business plans to convince Lord Alan Sugar to bestow his £250,000 investment on them and their business.

Anisa impressed during last week’s Interview Stage, with the businesswoman being commended by Lord Sugar’s trusted advisors on her delicious South Asian-inspired pizzas. However, one sticking point in her business plan was a move away from dark kitchens to create a brick-and-mortar store, with Lord Sugar urging the candidate to rethink her business plan.

We were told in last week’s episode that Anisa’s company Bombay Pizza currently operates under a dark kitchen format in her father’s Indian restaurant. Although she believed that a physical store would be good for marketing, Lord Sugar disagreed saying that opening a store would be “wasting my money” and instead urged her to focus on dark kitchens to scale the business up.

But what exactly are dark kitchens - and how do they operate? Here’s everything you need to know.

What is a dark kitchen?

A dark kitchen is a term used to refer to a food outlet which operates as a delivery and takeaway-only service. Dark kitchens will often include no indoor seating or public area, with some even not having any exterior branding or logos, instead using the kitchen purely as a base to cook and package delivery and takeaway orders from.

A dark kitchen may also be referred to as a ‘ghost kitchen’ or a ‘virtual kitchen’. Due to the lack of branding and its efficiency in processing orders, one kitchen may serve a number of different food brands or restaurants from the same location.

Many well-known restaurants may use a dark kitchen to fulfil delivery orders, with the kitchen following the exact same recipe used in the brick-and-mortar walk-in premises. The advantage of this is that it makes the process much quicker and efficient than trying to fulfil orders in the restaurant kitchen while prioritising sit-in diners.

The final of The Apprentice series 19 airs at 9pm on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Thursday April 17.