Comment by cbognet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cbognet | Hacker News Reader

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).

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!

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!!

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!

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.

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