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Miami-based Reef Technology, which operates a number of ”ghost kitchen” trailers across the city that prepare fast food for delivery, currently owes Multnomah County $3,895 for consulting services and inspection and permit fees.
The unpaid invoices date back to the spring of 2021.
The county’s consulting services focused on health and sanitary requirements for the company’s food cart pods and ghost kitchen trailers. Despite multiple emails from county officials to Reef employees and managers, the company has yet to pay the county for those consultations, records obtained by WW show.
“Our front office supervisor asked me to pass along past due invoices to your organization concerning consultation work we provided to you; invoices were initially sent to you Feb. 1, 2021,” a county health inspector wrote to a Reef manager on Aug. 9, 2022. “Please provide delinquent payment to Multnomah County ASAP.”
Jeffrey Martin, environmental health manager for the Multnomah County Health Department, says that “all of those invoices still appear to be unpaid”—as do the inspection and permit fees.
Reef’s corporate office did not respond to WW’s request for comment.
Perhaps a handful of delinquent fees to the county seem unimportant. But Reef is no mom-and-pop restaurant: It’s a company that was swollen with cash in 2020 with the infusion of $1 billion from overseas investors like SoftBank and an investment arm of the government of Abu Dhabi. Reef’s grand plan: transform urban parking lots in major cities into micro-communities with retail, food, electrical vehicle charging stations, and fulfillment centers.
Reef also manages most of the parking lots in downtown Portland (it bought out three of the biggest national parking companies in 2019 and took over all of their management contracts), though WW reported earlier this month that it’s losing some of its most meaningful contracts with property owners. That includes parking contracts with Metro for the Expo Center and Oregon Convention Center, as well as contracts to manage parking at Moda Center and for the Downtown Development Group.
And about half of Reef’s 22 permitted ghost kitchen trailers, most of which sell between five and 10 fast food brands each for delivery only, are shuttered or missing entirely from the company’s list of trailer addresses.
Earlier this month, Reef declined to answer questions specific to Portland’s operations.
In addition, none of the Reef-managed food cart pods in Reef-managed parking lots in downtown Portland ever obtained a food pod license as required by the county—despite a half-dozen emails from health inspectors since the beginning of the year telling Reef managers to apply.