Virtual Dining Concepts (VDC)

Hospitality
Series A
Orlando, Florida

Automated revenue recovery for ghost kitchens, starting with $300,000 found in the first month.

$300K
found in month one
Tens of thousands
recovered monthly
Thousands of locations
hundreds of thousands of orders
New enterprise clients
incl. Red Robin & Del Taco
Product Discovery
Product Management
UX/UI Design
Custom Software Development
Quality Assurance
THE OAK'S LAB HQ
The situation

VDC faced significant revenue leakage through delivery service provider (DSP) refunds, with no efficient way to contest improper charges across thousands of locations and hundreds of thousands of orders.

VDC runs celebrity-branded ghost kitchens across thousands of locations, operating entirely through delivery platforms. At that scale, money was quietly leaking out: improper refunds and charges from delivery providers with no efficient way to contest them, bundled payouts that were nearly impossible to reconcile against actual orders, and manual processes that were slow, error-prone, and blind to the operational data behind it all.

Before
  • A novel ghost-kitchen model with no software built to run it
  • Multi-brand orders and shared-kitchen routing handled manually
  • No way to license the operating model to other operators
After
  • A modular platform running multi-brand ordering and kitchen fulfillment end to end
  • Real-time order routing across shared prep stations, from kiosk, mobile, and QR
  • A white-label SaaS other operators and major brands can license
The approach

A modular platform running multi-brand ordering and kitchen fulfillment end to end

VDC is a pioneering ghost-kitchen management company behind celebrity-branded virtual restaurants like MrBeast Burger, Mariah Carey's Cookies, and NASCAR Pit Stop. It partners with existing restaurants to use their spare kitchen capacity, operating entirely through delivery platforms and sharing revenue across brands, VDC, and restaurant partners.

That model runs on thin margins across enormous volume, which is exactly why the revenue leaking through delivery-provider refunds and unreconciled payouts mattered so much. VDC needed automated financial software to plug the leaks and reconcile at scale. They partnered with OAK'S LAB to build it.

The work

Automate revenue recovery and reconciliation across thousands of ghost kitchens

The mandate was to stop the revenue leakage: automatically identify and contest improper delivery-provider refunds where the restaurant wasn't at fault, and reconcile bundled bi-weekly and monthly payouts against actual orders, across thousands of locations and hundreds of thousands of orders.

It also had to turn scattered delivery-platform data into clean, usable information, and be flexible enough for VDC to package and resell to other operators.

The solution

OAK'S LAB built Linked Eats, an automated revenue-recovery and reconciliation platform

We built the Linked Eats platform on clean data pipelines that ingest and process information from delivery platforms like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub. We designed it as a modular widget system, so VDC could tailor dashboards to the features they needed, and sell individual components to external clients.

The results

Found money, at scale, and a new business line.

$300K found in month one. Recovered tens of thousands in monthly revenue through automated refund contestation, and surfaced $300,000 in a disconnected bank account within a month of the MVP launch. Deployed across thousands of ghost-kitchen locations, automatically processing hundreds of thousands of delivery orders.

A new revenue line. Packaged the revenue-recapture technology as a product VDC now sells to restaurant chains, onboarding national clients including Red Robin, Del Taco, and California Pizza Kitchen.

A platform to build on. The modular widget system supports VDC's shift toward becoming a restaurant-technology aggregator.

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Work

Work that speaks for itself.

High-compliance industries where getting it wrong isn't an option.

Finance

Healthcare

Cybersecurity

Education

Product decisions in these spaces aren't just product decisions. They're business decisions with legal, regulatory, and reputational stakes attached. We know where the pressure sits, and where the edge cases tend to appear.

See all work

★★★★★

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