The hidden costs of a self-managed kitchen: what your rent doesn't tell you

Ask most operators what their production space costs and you'll get one number: the rent. It's the figure on the lease, the one that went into the model, the one that got the deal signed off.

It's also, on our modelling, under half of what the space actually costs to occupy.

The rest doesn't disappear. It arrives later, in pieces, from different suppliers, on different renewal dates, long after the decision that committed you to it. And because it never lands as a single line, most operators never see the total. They know their rent to the penny and their true occupancy cost not at all.

Here's what the other half looks like.

The stack

Take a self-managed London production facility: you lease an industrial unit, fit it out, and run it yourself. On our 2026 modelling, the monthly cost per square foot breaks down like this.

Read the two ends of that table against each other. The number you budgeted for is £4.58. The number you pay is £9.19.

Put another way: for every £1 of rent, you spend another £1.01 on everything else. The extras don't add a margin to your occupancy cost. They double it.

None of these lines are unusual. There's no disaster in that table, no overrun, no bad luck. It's just the ordinary, predictable cost of holding a building that makes food, and every one of those lines was always going to arrive. They simply weren't in the number anyone quoted.

Why the rent number is so sticky

Rent is the only figure that's quoted, compared and negotiated. It's what agents lead with, what appears in the heads of terms, and what you benchmark against other units. Everything else is quoted separately, later, by someone else, once the lease is already signed. Rates come from the council. Insurance comes from a broker. Waste, pest and servicing come from whoever you appoint after you've moved in.

So the cost that determines the decision is the one that's visible early, and the costs that dwarf it are the ones that surface after the decision is irreversible. The market is set up to make you compare the wrong number.

Which is also why the cheapest headline rent so often wins the deal and then loses the argument. A lower rent in a lower-grade building frequently means higher servicing, higher insurance, more maintenance and more of your team's time. The line that got smaller pushes up three lines you weren't watching.

The cost that isn't in the table

There's one item the stack above can't show you, and it's the one operators consistently underestimate: the management load.

Those seven non-rent lines are seven suppliers. Seven contracts, seven renewal cycles, seven invoices, seven relationships, seven things to chase when something goes wrong at six in the morning. Someone in your business owns all of that. If you're lucky it's an ops manager, and it's a slice of a salary you're not counting as occupancy cost. If you're unlucky it's a founder, and it's the most expensive hour in the company being spent on grease trap scheduling.

That cost never appears in a model because it doesn't arrive as an invoice. It arrives as attention, taken from the things that grow the business.

And the costs that arrive years later

The table covers what you pay while you're trading. Three more sit outside it entirely, and they're the ones that turn a manageable number into a nasty one.

Dilapidations. A production fit-out is the hardest kind to hand back. Extraction stripped out, finishes reinstated, the shell returned to something like its original state. It's a significant liability, it lands years after the build when it's long out of everyone's forecast, and it's the single most common thing operators tell us they wish they'd modelled at the start rather than the end.

Downtime. When your extraction fails, your cold room goes down or your three-phase supply trips, a self-managed unit means you own the problem and the delay. Production stops while you find an engineer. Every hour of that is lost output plus wasted labour, and none of it is in the rent.

Voids. Space is committed on a lease, not on demand. If volumes dip, a contract ends or the model shifts, you're still paying for square footage you aren't using, at full cost, for as long as the lease runs.

Work out your own number

The point of all this isn't that self-managed space is a mistake. Plenty of operators run it well. The point is that most of them are making decisions against a number that describes roughly half their cost.

So before your next renewal or your next site, do the sums:

1. Start with rent, then keep going. Add rates, insurance, waste, water, servicing, pest, security. That's your real occupancy cost, and it's the only figure worth comparing against anything.
2. Divide by square footage. A per-sq-ft figure is the only way to compare units of different sizes honestly, and it's usually the moment the penny drops.
3. Price the admin. Roughly how much of someone's week goes on managing those suppliers? Cost it. It's real.
4. Model the exit, not just the entry. What's the dilapidations exposure, and what happens to that space if your volumes move?

If your answer to the first question takes more than five minutes to assemble, that's the finding. The costs are spread across so many suppliers and cycles that the total is genuinely hard to see, which is exactly why it goes unexamined.

The alternative worth knowing about

There's a structural fix, and it's the model Karma Kitchen is built on: the entire stack folds into one all-in rate.

Rates, waste, water, servicing, pest, insurance, security, maintenance: one figure, one invoice, one supplier, no renewal cycles to manage and no dilapidations bill waiting at the end. Not because those costs vanish, but because they're carried across six sites rather than by one operator, and they're someone else's job to manage.

The comparison that matters isn't our rate against your rent. It's our rate against your true occupancy cost, which is the number this piece has been trying to help you find. Once you have it, the comparison is usually much closer than operators expect, and often the other way round.

Want to check your figure against a fully serviced unit? Run the numbers with our ROI Calculator →, or talk to us about your space and we'll work through your real cost with you.