TikTok is getting into the food and restaurant business.
The video-sharing platform announced its partnership with Virtual Dining Concepts, which will launch delivery-only TikTok Kitchen locations across the country, set to start in March.
Food and recipe videos have played a large role on the site, including clips that have garnered millions of views. The company also reported that over 1 billion people worldwide use the platform monthly, Bloomberg reported.
Virtual Dining Concepts has continued to successfully back celebrity and non-celebrity restaurants, including MrBeast Burger, which has been a hit since it was created last year by YouTube star Jimmy Donaldson.
MrBeast sold 1 million burgers in just three months and there are now 1,500 locations across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.
Co-founder Robert Earl announced there is a plan to have about 300 TikTok restaurants across the country for the launch, and more than 1,000 are expected by the end of 2022 and foresees the same success as with MrBeast.
“Look, you have a platform with a billion viewers monthly who are constantly engaged, as the numbers show,” says Earl. “It’s the first time there’s a brand like this out there—an audience of hundreds of millions of people.”
Among the restaurants that TikTok Kitchen will operate from are national chains the co-founder owns, which includes Buca di Beppo and Bertucci’s.
The TikTok Kitchen menu will come from the app’s most viral food trends, like baked feta pasta, which was this year’s most-searched dish of 2021 on Google.
Pasta chips—which are cooked pasta shapes coated with cheese and air-fried—, smash burger and corn ribs made from peeling off sections of corn and coating them with spices and Parmesan will also be on the menu.
The menus will change every quarter and if an item goes viral, Earl says there will likely be added to menus.
TikTok released a statement saying it would give its profits gained from the restaurants to the creators of the menu dishes and to support promising culinary talents featured on its platform.
“I’m doing it as a business, TikTok are doing it for the development of that category. It’s an investment in their business,” says Earl.
It is still uncertain how TikTok will figure out the authorship of viral dishes—which can oftentimes belong to more than one person—or what revenue it expects to gain and dish out. But it’s been stated that the names of the dish creators will not be listed on the TikTok Kitchen menus.
