Apply HN: Mealzie – Healthy, affordable meals from local families | Hacker News Reader

Apply HN: Mealzie – Healthy, affordable meals from local families

4 pointsducduong9 comments

Problem: You don't like to cook, don't know how to, can't afford expensive dinners from restaurants everyday.

Solution: Many wives/mums who love to cook and do so for their families daily. It's not too difficult for them to make a couple extra portions. For you: affordable meals from people who cook for themselves and their love ones. For them: some extra cash.

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I thought about this previously. There's the obvious regulatory issues to deal with. I suggest looking into Cottage Food laws, which allow individuals to sell food that was prepared in their kitchens.

Selling food requires government licensing and health inspections in most parts of the world. Many require the use of a commercial kitchen.

What is your plan to overcome this obstacle?

I'm curious if their is a legal loop hole where you can just say a person stopped by and rented your living room for an hour ..or something... and you just happen to decide to make them a meal while they were there.

This is exactly how eatwith.com got started.

In the Netherlands something similar was very popular for a while: 'aanschuifmaaltijden' (as a general term). Not anymore I think because local governments forbid or enforced strong regulation (just like restaurants).

As others are saying, I think you will need to address food safety regulations very strenuously to have any hope of making this fly. Like offering classes and helping get people certified or whatever and standardizing packaging somewhat or something like that.

I have a serious medical condition. I get food poisoning super easily. Even if the government did not shut it down, I would absolutely not partake if you didn't have some system in place to assure me that this is reasonably reliable in terms of food quality, from a food safety point of view. If I am going to get sick eating this, it makes absolutely no sense for me.

I am kind of an extreme outlier in terms of sensitivity, but anyone can get food poisoning. You need to know how you are going to assure quality control wrt food safety.

This is pretty common (albeit unorganized) in India. Would be helpful if a platform like this is used for organization/one stop shop kind of thing. Like others have mentioned, this might come across regulatory issues in the US. Maybe not so much in developing countries.

The health department will kill this so fast, they will win the Breakthrough Starshot prize.

There is an app called Appetite based in Montreal that is taking the same approach but using the students as the beta users.

I was thinking many times how it would be great to have that available.

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