Kitchens

The pizzeria three streets from my house in Berikon closed in October. I had eaten there for fifteen years. The owners are good people, the wine list had character, and their gnocchi beat dishes costing three times as much in the city.

The note on the door said, "Wir bedanken uns für Ihre Treue". That was that.

I went home and looked at the numbers. The trade calls it Beizensterben, the dying of the pubs. According to GastroSuisse and Creditreform, Switzerland lost a net 856 restaurants in one recent year. Insolvencies rose 22% in 2025 versus 2024. A 200-seat Zurich restaurant can face rent of up to one million Swiss francs a year. Energy costs rose 35%, lunch traffic fell 15%, and a simple lunch crossed the psychological line of 25 francs as more people ate at home in front of a laptop.

The familiar Swiss restaurant model is breaking. The replacement is already taking shape.

The delivery layer

If you live in Zurich, Geneva, Bern, Basel, or any other major Swiss city, you currently have four delivery options that matter.

Eat.ch, owned by Just Eat Takeaway, owned by Prosus. The widest coverage in the country, more than 50 cities, the broadest restaurant network.

Smood, headquartered in Geneva since 2012. 1,150 employees, 25 cities, 2,500 partner restaurants. The only Swiss platform where the delivery riders are actual employees under a Swiss collective labour agreement. That alone makes them notable.

Uber Eats. Global, growing, predictable, expensive in commission terms.

Lieferando, which is just Just Eat Takeaway under a different brand.

That is it. Three of those four platforms are owned by the same parent company. The Swiss food delivery market has the same consolidation problem as the rest of Europe, just compressed into a smaller geography.

Future Kitchens, the Swiss bet

Future Kitchens AG is a Zurich startup founded by Dominik Sträuli at the end of 2022. He is an EHL Lausanne graduate. He started by frying his own burgers in a corner of someone else's kitchen. Three years later the company runs two of its own ghost kitchens, has a partner network of more than 50 licensee restaurants, and pulled 179% revenue growth in the first half of 2025.

The model is simple and clever. Future Kitchens has built six branded virtual restaurant concepts: SmashClub for burgers, KNOCKOUT for chicken, TMRRW for bowls, Pizza Project for square pizza, Studio Kebab, and Gulabi for Indian. The recipes were developed with Laurent Eperon, formerly a two-Michelin-star chef at Baur au Lac. They license those brands to existing Swiss restaurants. The licensee uses their existing kitchen during slow hours, gets professional recipe development, branding, and platform integration, and adds another revenue stream without buying any new equipment.

The host-kitchen model worked in the US and the UK; Future Kitchens has adapted it to the Swiss restaurant market with Swiss attention to quality. About two new licensees onboard every week. Annual revenue run-rate hit CHF 10 to 12 million in 2025. They just closed a crowdfunding round to scale beyond Switzerland.

If you have ever ordered SmashClub or Pizza Project on Just Eat or Uber Eats and wondered "where is this restaurant?", the honest answer is: someone's existing kitchen in Wettingen or Wallisellen, with Future Kitchens supplying the brand and the recipe.

It adds a new operating layer on top of the restaurants we already have.

The Greater Zurich foodtech machine

Zoom out one level. The Greater Zurich Area is one of the most concentrated foodtech ecosystems in Europe.

Aleph Farms, the Israeli cultivated meat company, picked Kemptthal as its European launchpad. They are scaling cultivated beef production there with Swiss biotech partners.

Planted Foods, the ETH spin-off making chicken-style meat from yellow peas. Already in Migros, Coop, and on Gault-Millau-rated restaurant menus.

Luya in Zollikofen turning organic okara, the by-product of tofu and soya milk production, into plant-based slices and patties. Available in Coop, Migros, and Alnatura.

Cultivated Biosciences in Fribourg making creamy fat from yeast and sugar for plant-based cheese and ice cream.

Sallea, founded in 2023, building 3D scaffolds for cultured meat producers.

The Cultured Hub in Lindau, opened jointly by Migros, Givaudan, and Bühler, providing lab space and equipment to food startups. The FoodHUB Wädenswil, run with ZHAW. The Swiss Food and Nutrition Valley with 150 partners from EPFL Lausanne to Vevey.

Switzerland is one of the very few European countries with a clear regulatory pathway for novel food products. That pathway is now being used.

The Migros and Coop problem

The catch is Switzerland's concentrated grocery duopoly. Migros and Coop together control around 70% of Swiss grocery shelf space. Both have their own in-house food manufacturing arms. Migros owns Hilcona. Coop has Bell. They will source from their own subsidiaries unless an outsider is dramatically cheaper, which an early-stage Swiss startup almost never can be.

Read the swissinfo coverage of ENSOY, the eastern Swiss tofu startup, or Flow Hummus, the Zurich office bowl delivery service. Both made it past initial customer traction and then hit a wall when they tried to scale through the duopoly. ENSOY is winding down. Flow Hummus is pivoting.

This is the structural reason Swiss food innovation is brilliant in research and slow in retail. You can win a Venture Kick with 150,000 francs and a great pitch deck. You can publish a paper at ETH that gets cited 800 times. Reaching 50,000 households on a Tuesday evening is a different game.

What is changing at once

The Swiss restaurant model is eroding under pressure from real estate, energy, wages and the shift to working from home. A generation of family-run Beizen is disappearing.

A hybrid delivery model is replacing the lost capacity. Future Kitchens and similar operators are putting virtual brands on top of existing restaurant kitchens. Brilliant unit economics. The brand on your delivery app is no longer the place that cooked your meal.

The deep technical layer, cultivated meat, alternative proteins, fermentation-based ingredients, is being built right here in Greater Zurich. Most of that work goes into industrial supply chains and eventually into Migros own-label products you do not associate with biotech.

The pizzeria in Berikon will not come back. Something else will take its place. The question is whether the something is a virtual brand running out of a partner restaurant in Bremgarten, an Aleph Farms steak grown in Kemptthal, or a SmashClub burger licensed to the Italian place around the corner.

Probably all three. The next time a new delivery brand appears on your screen, check the address. The kitchen behind it may tell you more about the future of Swiss food than the logo does.