Show HN: PlateJoy (YC S15) – Algorithmic meal planner with integrated delivery | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: PlateJoy (YC S15) – Algorithmic meal planner with integrated delivery

platejoy.com

65 pointscbognet48 comments

Hi all,

I lost 50 pounds a few years ago and realized that the options for healthy eating are limited to frozen meal delivery services or nutrition apps that never worked for me. So I started PlateJoy, which uses data about your lifestyle, preferences, and goals to help you plan what to buy and cook each week. We send customized shopping lists and recipes that match your preferences with optional grocery delivery of your shopping list through Instacart. Support for lots of eating styles including: paleo, vegan, whole30, weight loss, kid-friendly, ketogenic, quick & easy, etc.

A few things that make us different:

1. We care a lot about personalization. You start off by taking a lifestyle quiz about foods you love, avoid, recipe complexity, time constraints, preferences and more. You can also add a starting weight and goal weight and we'll adjust your portions accordingly.

2. We don’t want you to have to deal with waste, so we've created a Digital Pantry of your kitchen which takes inventory of what you have, only replenishing things like cinnamon or olive oil when you need it. We also pair recipes together that use up the same ingredients to prevent food waste.

3. We plan your leftovers, too.

4. You can shop for yourself or use our integration with Instacart to send your shopping list to them for same day delivery. (No dry ice or breaking down Fed Ex boxes, because ingredients come fresh from your local grocer.) This is a new feature that people have been liking a lot.

Our biggest technical challenges have been taking so many preferences into account when creating a menu (takes a few seconds!), and synergistically pairing meals to reduce food waste while also making sure there's ample variety in plans.

Hope you'll check it out - just set up a free trial for everyone today - feedback and questions welcome!

This looks remarkably awesome. I have been looking for / contemplating building something where I can put in some recipes and have it figure out the most efficient, least wasteful shopping list for me. This seems like a fairly complex problem to solve (in fact, it sounds like a linear programming problem). It would be really nice if I could put in a monthly budget amount as well, so that my meal options are also customized to what I expect to spend. One nice potential side effect of doing this is that I might even be able to reduce my current grocery budget by some amount -- and seeing what that amount is could make the value of the service real obvious.

Is there any way I can customize my plan even further for "meals good for kids" and/or "easy to eat / no unusual textures"? Some of these recipes look delicious, but my 18-month-old will refuse edamame outright. :)

Thank you so much! The waste reduction algorithms we use definitely help cut costs (on the back end, we can see the waste savings in $ over time -- though it's not visible to users yet, it's pretty remarkable.)

There's a question in our personalization quiz that asks about whether you want more familiar family flavors, so definitely check that box. Beyond that, you can hit "remove" on anything in your meal queue that looks like it might be unappetizing for your toddler. If there are specific foods you know are no-gos, you can also add any ingredient as an exclusion ingredient in the quiz (in the "other" field).

This is really insanely awesome. I've been on keto for years and have always wanted a service like this. A "blueapron" type of service would've been perfect for me, but because they pick the meals, it would never work for keto.

Thank you so much for the love! :) :) We have a huge group of paleo and keto users and I personally think low carb is the best way to eat, so double high five!

I wish so much that you guys were located in NY so I could develop software for you guys :(. This is so similar to what my idea has been for 3 years now! I wish you guys the best of luck! No better way to help busy people than through educating them on the importance of what they eat every day and making it easy/affordable to do so.

Thank you so much!!

Cool idea!

Random Feedback:

- Made it through the survey, was expecting to create a password before you asked for money, so upon closing this window, I just realized that I am not sure if I have an account. On a hunch I re-entered my email and you did save my info so all was not lost, but had a moment of 'oh I'm just going to give up then!' Possibly make it obvious that you can return later, and possibly make it obvious you don't actually want a credit card today.

- The survey feels like more work than just browsing instacart. I get that your trying to really understand me, and I do think thats brilliant. I get that this is an investment into me saving time in the future, but after completing the form the meals that were offered to me do seem quite random. So this leaves me with the feeling that this service is going to take some trial and error and work on my part to get into sync with me.

- Possibly since I am not a picky eater with dietary restrictions, then I am leaving you too much wiggle room to read my mind. Therein, possibly this service would just move my innate ability to be indecisive about what I want to eat to you. If this is the case, then I don't know if I want to pay 10 bucks a month to continue to be indecisive.

- In making it all the way through to the "buy on instacart" page, I end up on instacarts site with an empty shopping basket. Not sure if that is intentional, but if that is a limitation then there is no way I am going to pay because that is where the lions share of time savings for me would come from, easily inputting stuff into instacart.

I will probably try to give your service a proper test and order some of the recommended recipes. I think if it really gets to the place where its with-out-a-doubt saving me time, and ultimately managing the food intake of my entire household, I would spend the 10 bucks for it, and if it does that without me even needing to intervene I would spend 15-20.

The product seems extremely sophisticated for an initial product offering. Wonder if there is a way you can focus on making the initial impression accomplish a smaller task first (like, "plan for perfect date night at home!") where the scope would be reduced to helping someone get 1 meal you design, near effortless, from instacart, surrounding dietary restrictions, rather than overwhelming users with wanting to deep dive into trying to digitize their kitchen 20 minutes into the product.

Keep hacking on it, could see this being powerful for busy people.

Thanks so much for the feedback! Our conversion rate through the quiz is really high so we've not had reason to turn the product into more of a quick fix. We've a/b tested all sorts of flows and this one has worked best and customers end up happiest in the end. As you rate recipes and remove ones that don't look interesting to you, the system will get better at suggesting things we think you'll like. When you click "send to Instacart" you should land on a page where we have suggestions for each ingredient you'll need. So while your cart may be empty until you confirm the ingredients, the process should take only take a minute. Let us know how it goes!

This looks great. I need a time-saving solution to the standard food problem and I don't want to take the Soylent plunge. But I'm filling out the questionnaire right now and I'm finding the list of ingredients to exclude is too limited. So when I type into the 'other' box, I can exclude feta cheese, but not cheddar.

What dietary preference do you have checked? Things like "dairy free" and "paleo" already omit cheese, except for those cheeses for which we have substitutes that match the overall dietary preference. If you type in "cheese", that will give you a list of every cheese used by our recipes that is not already excluded by your dietary preferences.

I've only checked 'Clean Eating.' The cheeses in the 'other' drop-down checklist are feta, fontina, goat, ricotta, and shredded parmesan.

I just tried switching from clean to 'no preference' and saw the cheeses in the 'other' list expand to the ones I expected to see. I suppose its reasonable to exclude swiss and mozzarella from 'clean' eating, but ideally for me would be a 'clean-but-not-that-clean' option that restricts refined sugars and flours, but not dairy. That may be idiosyncratic, I know.

Ah, your best bet would be a low carb plan. You'll still have dairy and whole grains in moderation but no refined sugars and flours.

Great idea, especially around optimizing resource usage for items you already have.

I'd like to see more transparency around cost up front - I should not have to dig into the second question of the FAQ page to see that a plan would start at $48+

Thanks for the kind words and feedback. We do have a free trial set up for everyone today (no cc required) if you want to check it out without paying anything.

We tried Platejoy for 6 months. We found it was useful, but found a few caveats:

It was very easy to back ourselves into a corner with food preferences such that you see the same set of 20 or so recipes recycled from week to week. This is probably our fault more than Platejoy's, but we are not especially picky eaters.

Some recipes required ingredients that we just couldn't source. We live in the midwest and the closest major city is 1.5 hours away. Try finding tahini paste at your local midwest walmart or smalltown grocer. In these cases I'd have loved substitution suggestions.

We don't have particular dietary restrictions. We also preferred old fashioned pen and paper tracking of our grocery list/pantry, so that feature wasn't something we used. We didn't really harness Platejoy's unique features. So for our particular situation Platejoy ended up being little more than a recipe suggestion tool.

I'd definitely suggest platejoy for people with dietary restrictions who don't want to think about or go through the hassle of finding recipes.

Hi! Glad you found the service useful. We now have a feature that lets you specify grocery store so that less exotic ingredients are shown if you live somewhere a bit more obscure (grew up in a small town myself, so I get it!) You can also print your shopping lists if you don't want to use the iOS or Android app. We have thousands of recipes in our database and constantly growing, so let me know if you ever want to come back and try it again for a few days.

I order pretty much all of the obscure food/ingredients I use from Amazon - looks like Tahini Paste is widely available there. I'm not sure how much notice PlateJoy gives you to shop before you make the recipe, but it has to be less than Amazon's shipping?

That's a great idea! You can create your new menu whenever you'd like (a few days in advance) so this idea will work fine.

This is the first startup in a while I've been excited to spend money on. It looks great, and it looks like it already has a very mature feature set. The one thing I didn't see was the pricing on the delivery options. Is that live yet? Or is that a future feature?

Thank you! This is Daniel (from PlateJoy). Delivery happens via Instacart. They charge between $4 and $7 per delivery, depending on area. If you sign up for PlateJoy, and you don't see the Instacart button on your shopping list, let us know and we can activate it for you. (They are constantly adding zip codes, so sometimes we don't know that a zip code is available for delivery.)

Awesome! It wasn't readily apparent that delivery is handled by a third party before signing up. I've used Instacart before, so it's cool that it's just an integration, but I wasn't sure if it was an addon I was missing somewhere that had to be added to my subscription before I checked out.

I was all on board for grocery delivery with a customized shopping list, but you lost me at $59 sign up fee... You may want to rethink that.

Thanks for your feedback! It comes out to around $8-$10/month depending on what plan you choose. I hesitate to say this because I don't want to come across as too sales-y, but a customer told us last week that it's "the best money they've spent all year." There's a free trial today if you want to try it.

Same! I was thinking about building this a year back and thought the best monetization model would be to add some overhead for the delivery.

The "What people are saying" section. Those photos have got to be stock or models, right?

Hahaha, they are truly not! But we will tell them you asked :)

@cbognet: I love the concept and have signed up for the trial with the hope of sticking with it going forward.

My question -- I don't know how representative my household is from others, but we've got a few different sets of dietary restrictions to consider.

Do you have any plans to offer a way to set up variations that allow for, say, gluten-free (non-vegetarian) dining for one member of the family, while the rest are vegetarian (no gluten restrictions)?

It's certainly more work on my end to buy, prep, and cook for, but it's work that I'm already doing and would love to benefit from the programmatic menu and shopping list that PlateJoy generates.

Hello + thank you! It’s something we’re working on tackling programmatically, but right now this is really where our nutrition coaching comes into play. You'll get an email from yours in a few days, and they'll make suggestions for ingredients you’d like to substitute, or can find the best plan that can meet everyone’s needs. Personally, I’d recommend going more restrictive (like our gluten-free, vegetarian plan) and supplementing it if necessary with non-GF pasta and simple meat/poultry/fish in place of veg protein - often everyone finds something to like even with the restrictions, and you don’t have to be a short-order cook :)

This is great. It seems that I can't select multiple dietary requirements though (like vegetarian and clean eating). On Firefox mobile. Is that intentional or are some of the dietary requirement s non-compatible?

Also, is there any way to specify I'd like to meal prep more than just sharing a dinner with the next day's leftovers? E.g. Make a weeks worth of meals at once by scaling a particular recipe? I suppose I could do that myself buy having the software advise my grocery list would be awesome.

Hi! Some of the dietary preferences can't be combined because we don't have enough recipes to support the combination (at least not yet!). We're working on batch cooking, so that should help. Currently, it takes hacks to achieve that kind of thing (like adding more family members, e.g., Daniel, Daniel Leftovers, and Daniel Leftovers 2). If you have a slow cooker, you could select that in the appliances section and then just make sure that under time constraints, you select "more than 50 minutes" for dinners. Slow cooker recipes scale up well if you do that multiple family members trick. I hope that helps!

I tried simulating this by checking Clean Eating and either checking off the pre-populated meats or searching for meats I could think of and selecting all results and plenty of recipes came up, so it seems like these two dietary restrictions should be allowed to be chosen at the same time.

Also, I checked off the pre-populated "Beef" option and a recipe came up for breakfast involving sausage and another came up for dinner involving Filet Mignon.

Thanks for the feedback! We like to make sure we have enough new recipes for many months of using the service before allowing two categories to be combined, but you're welcome to hack it that way for now. Filet mignon was a glitch (we just fixed it) but the sausage is made of pork.

Looks awesome so far! I wanted to give a thumbs up for adding the "seasonal" option. It is much appreciated and often overlooked.

Yes! It wasn't something we had initially but came up very often in customer requests. The hard part there is knowing what's seasonal in different geographies but we think we've got a good system.

Wow, this looks really great. It's both bittersweet and exciting when you come across an idea of your own executed very well ;)

I know the feeling ;) Thank you for the kind words!

Isn't this the same as a business described in "The Lean Startup"? Kinda funny.

You can imagine my dismay at reading that book after I started this company, lol. ;) Good thing it's all about execution.

Can the meal planner take into account the capabilities of my kitchen? Say for example that I only have a microwave and George Foreman grill.

How is recipe complexity managed? Can I select recipes that optimize for fewest dirty dishes?

Hi, this is Daniel (Christina's co-founder). You can specify appliances on the personalization page (though stovetop can't currently be unselected because it is necessary for many dinners). Lunches—with the "pack something quick" option—only use a microwave, so that can serve as a sort of work-around for people who don't have a range / hot-plate.

Complexity is handled by time preferences, which can be specified for each course (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks/dessert). Shorter times are less complex recipes.

Sorry, no "fewest dirty dishes" options, but great idea!

I love this. I plan on signing up when I get home.

Awesome, thank you!

Who are the "On-demand advice from our nutrition-focused personal chefs" and how as a user would I gain access to this advice?

Someone from the PlateJoy nutrition team emails new customers during their first week to give tips and to be available as a point of contact. There are also follow-up check-ins if people don't have specific questions right away. Some people really get into it!

Anyway to export meals to myfitnesspal?

You can sync with JawBone & FitBit, but not MFP (they're not accepting API requests this year). We do give you a full breakdown of nutritional info for each meal though, so you can always enter the macros in manually.

Wow, amazing!

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