Eatsa: Quinoa-based fast food | Hacker News Reader

Eatsa: Quinoa-based fast food

newyorker.com

109 pointsjseliger77 comments

I actually went to their new midtown Manhattan branch a couple days ago.

All in all, I liked it. I got a very generously sized falafel quinoa bowl for ~$7 with an iced tea for an additional $0.95. For midtown, that's actually an incredible value. The food itself was good, nothing to rave about though. Concerningly though, when I went in around 2:30pm on Friday, I was one of the two customers there. The rest of the store was deserted.

There's no cashiers, just a bunch of self serve iPad stands with an clerk walking around looking to see if I needed help. The app on the iPad used for ordering was fast and fluid. My food was ready 2 minutes after I ordered.

Eh that experience sounds way too lonely.

Very much so. I was originally planning on eating there, but when I saw the emptiness, I picked the 'to go' option.

Why would it make a difference? If I'm eating alone, an empty dining area is infinitely less awkward than a packed one.

Lonely was the wrong term. It sounds too sterile and empty to ever pull in the revenue they're hoping to capture. If you want people to be going there in large volumes then it probably needs to not be empty, duh. But it sounds like they missed some sort of key factor.

Most fast food experience is lonely when you're by yourself. The idea seems like it would work well as a drive through service.

These concepts should eventually compete with McDonalds drive thru to correct American health woes, not act as a coffee shop.

McDonalds isn't as bad as it used to be tbh, it's reputation is somewhat undeserved these days

Would you mind elaborating a little? Last time i grabbed a cheese burger at MCD (2 months ago), the menu looked the same except for the addition of a few salads.

The biggest change imho is not on the menu. They don't market aggressively to children anymore, nothing like when I was a kid.

There's heaps of unhealthy fast food joints, the difference is the marketing. A Chipotle burrito has over 1000 calories but is perceived as healthy. That's twice the calories in a Big Mac.

I don't think Chipotle is just perceived as healthier, you're eating real food rather than meat mix from McDonalds.

Real food that's so calorically dense and heavily salted that a single burrito contains as many calories and as much sodium as a person is supposed to eat over an entire day.

Organic is good, responsibly sourced is good, but neither one automatically equals healthiness all by themselves.

I'm not so worried about the calories. It's the insane amounts of salt in everything. No one even seems concerned about it.

> No one even seems concerned about it.

Sure people are. Not enough according to you perhaps.

Sugar (not slow carbohydrates), and salts are the two main concerns.

I have never considered running out for fast food an "experience".

> around 2:30pm [last] Friday

That's fairly late for lunch in midtown (other midtown counter-serve locations like Dig Inn and Chipotle seem sparsely trafficked when I show up at 3 PM), plus it was the Friday before Christmas. I wouldn't call low traffic under those circumstances "concerning" -- I'd say wait and see what things are like on a more regular date.

Willing to bet this is another case of VC money subsidizing low unsustainable prices for consumers.

After reading the entire article, what I still don't get is: why quinoa? Especially as regards this quote from owner David Friedberg:

"We've got to do two things: get healthy products down to a price point that McDonald’s and Taco Bell are winning on, and offer products tasty enough to disrupt the meat-focussed fast-food business ... We think the way to do it is quinoa."

Is quinoa really the best choice for those criteria? This feels more like trying to go a bit more upmarket and tie in to the quinoa hype than really looking for something that can produce McDonald's-level prices and appeal. I mean, the first two things that come to mind when I think of quinoa are "fairly expensive" and "doesn't taste great", so if I were looking for a low-cost-and-tasty staple ingredient, it's not what I'd pick.

It really makes no sense. Quinoa has no upsides here, it is just fashionable with a small number of faux health nuts.

> "fairly expensive"

The higher consumption becomes the more economies of scale are available, leading to cheaper product.

> "doesn't taste great"

Barely tastes of anything (or mild nutty flavour) are the usual descriptions. But it does absorb flavours during the cooking process so to a certain extent you can make the final dish taste of virtually anything!

Plus you get a cute little tail when it is done cooking.

Quinoa has about twice the protein content of white rice, which is why some people like it, nevermind the fact that putting a few beans in your rice gets you the same nutrients for less money. Some people also like the taste (I do). However, just because a meal has one healthy ingredient doesn't mean it's healthy.

"The lunch bowls contain as much as thirty-two grams of fat and fourteen hundred milligrams of sodium—on par with a Big Mac-and-large-fries combo, which has twelve hundred milligrams of sodium and fifty-three grams of fat. (Most Eatsa bowls have single-digit levels of saturated fats, however, considerably lower than the levels in the combo meal.)"

Why is this stuff basically a deep fried salt-lick? Taste, probably. Like McDonalds, it's not going to kill you if you indulge once in a while, but don't kid yourself that this is something you can eat everyday without there being some repercussions. Marketing this as "healthy" is highly deceptive.

"High sodium and fat content, which are associated with heart disease, may counteract some of the health benefits of the vegetable-rich quinoa bowls. But Friedberg is more interested in the grain’s planetary benefits. Animal feed, he noted, supplies the calories for growing the entire animal, not just the meat that’s sold as the end product..."

Justifying deceptive marketing of fast-food junk as health-food in order to save precious planetary resources smacks of sophistry. This guy could try to produce cheap, healthy, environmentally friendly food if he wanted to, but he wanted to be profitable instead. That's fine, but convincing people your junk is healthy is a damned scummy way to go about it. It's killing humans to save cows.

Quinoa is low in protein but it is a complete protein. Handy for vegetarians.

So is white rice and beans. It's a complementary pair.

You don't need complete protein, only the 8 amino acids that our bodies can't synthesize. Any plant food contains more than enough of those amino acids.

Rice often has arsenic in it.

Wow. Source?

Just do a web search for "rice" and "arsenic". There are tons of sources.

A few examples:

http://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm352569.ht...

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/01/how-much...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9936507

Quinoa has thousands of years of history as a staple crop with no known health issues. Its protein content is considered optimal by contemporary medical advice on vegetarian dietary needs. I recall reports of it being able to sustain health in extremely limited diets better than other cereals can - make of what you will, I don't expect those reports were fabricated by alternative food fad scammers.

At the very least Quinoa seems a fine (and tasty) staple grain to increase variety with - an aspect of diet which is very widely advised as a positive thing.

I live literally above their first location, spoke to staff before they opened and even peaked into their backroom.

On the outside it's gorgeous, pretty, white, but in the back it doesn't look pretty. They've got almost a dozen staff in the back. All hispanic. Seems cramped and not comfortable.

It feels bad, feels like we're just hiding the working class behind this facade.

The back of the house is like that in every regular restaurant. Prep and most cooking is done by low-paid (usually brown) workers, plus it's hot and cramped all the time.

I worked in two PizzaHut locations in the UK and it wasn't cramped, not was the ethnic makeup of the kitchen substantially different from the rest of the city.

This is what worries me about Eatsa :-/

You're so naive. That is every restaurant. Whether it's burgers, Chinese food, Indian food... It's cooked by immigrants, usually Hispanic folks. Kitchens aren't comfortable and spacious.

It's difficult work. I have a lot of respect for restaurant workers.

If only there was a spacious kitchen employing a bevy of white, twenty-something hipsters to prepare our foods. It'd be so much better that way.

Success will depend on the quality of the seasoning. Most people think plain quinoa tastes worse than common grains like oats or wheat. Quinoa is still fashionable with some health-conscious groups, but I don't think this can sustain mass market appeal.

And if you do like the taste of quinoa and don't care about being fashionable, try amaranth instead. It tastes very similar and has similar nutritional qualities, but here in the UK it's about half the price.

Didn't know amaranth was so similar to Quinoa - I'll be getting some as I am also in the UK. Pret a manager do a good multi-grain porridge if you're in London or one of the major airports.

there's also millet, a staple of ancient china. It's the small round seed commonly found in bird food.

Also a staple of the British diet , at least a few hundred years ago it was.

TBH well-prepared plain quinua should have a very neutral taste. But if you don't wash it enough, you won't remove the soap-ish outer layer so it ends up tasting bitter:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/JdBFm-697eM/hqdefault.jpg

Good point. Amaranth is used in Mexican cuisine, such as tortillas, so it's well established already.

I think mass market appeal needs to be based off of dishes people already know, vs. a blow of random ingredients with whimsical names. Another poster mentioned impossible burger, which seems more realistic.

Popped amaranth is a nice snack, too.

Tried it once, I was excited about the idea of a quick take out meal.

They've eliminated waitstaff, cashiers, meat and tables yet their prices are on par with all the other take out joints. The meal was small and I was still hungry afterwards.

Felt like I was paying too much for too little. I still like the idea of their quick take out but I get a better take out meal at the local thai joint.

Too small? I'm a fat person and the three times I've eaten there I felt like if I tried to finish the bowl my stomach would hurt.

Overall I was underwhelmed for other reasons (taste, creepy staff lingering while I ordered, remembering my last order).

>The meal was small and I was still hungry afterwards.

Or, what in any other part of the world, they'd call "plenty".

For any reader interested in some menu facts:

The Eatsa App lists the calorie content of each bowl. They range between 400-700 calories, and cost $6.95.

Eatsa also offers side items for $2.25. They range between 100-300 calories.

> High [...] fat content [...] associated with heart disease

Isn't this disputed nowadays and pretty much agreed upon to not be true for some kinds of fat like unsaturated fats?

Fat must be present combined in conjunction with inflammation to produce heart disease in one specific way

There was a short-lived place in Manhattan called Zen Burger. They replicated McDonald's down to the heat lamped burgers and reconstituted fries except it was 100% vegetarian. Tasted pretty crummy but was really no better or worse than a typical fast food burger.

I'm waiting for Impossible Burgers to take over.

https://impossiblefoods.com/burger/

Just had one at Jardiniere (SF), it was perfectly decent, stunning only in its banality. A little softer, and a bit less chewy. Still good with all the usual toppings. Not as runny as I was told, but on the whole it was very easy to forget you're eating plant matter. I could eat it everyday.

I went to their DC location on Friday.

It's really not THAT different than any other fast food place in terms of the speed of service or the number of staff. Even the price ($6.95) was about the same as what a typical fast food meal costs.

So I think the "disruptiveness" has been a bit exaggerated.

The quinoa portion was reasonably generous and tasted pretty good, but I don't know that I would eat quinoa every day. I didn't realize that they had no meat options before I got there.

As far as whether this model will become more pervasive, I'm not sure. But even if it does, I don't see the big deal since they are not really that different from what's already there.

Now, if they somehow got the costs to be MUCH CHEAPER than existing fast food options (let's say $2.50 for a big bowl of quinoa), THAT would be a game changer.

If they can beat all the other lunch spots on price they wouldn't be so empty. Especially in college towns.

I hope this isn't a preview of the food industry's 'disruptive automation' Everything cheaper for the restaurant, but the price is still the same for the consumer.

Eatsa has done a great job marketing itself as the automatic restaurant, so much so that many people believe robots prepare their food (their kitchen is just as labor intensive as any other restaurant). I actually spoke to their engineering director a while ago and I think they are going to have a hard time building any real robots (they are working on this and hired several engineers to do so). For starters, they had to outsource building their automatic cubbies - they couldn't build a moving door by themselves. But they are hoping to build an autonomous food preparation system more sophisticated and an order of magnitude cheaper than anything that exists today.

Something I see a lot is for someone with a lot of experience in pure software engineering to delve into hardware or robotics, and think he'll be able to just breeze through it (if it were so easy, there would be a lot more awesome consumer robots everywhere). What I found particularly amusing was the way he viewed it though. When I said robots are limited by the laws of physics, his counterpoint was that software was limited by the speed of light. He was dead serious, and to him that made the challenges comparable.

I look forward to seeing all the crazy food robots people concoct in the coming years. I suspect most people will realize it's a lot harder than they thought, and by the time the robot is useful it's too expensive to be profitable. Most people are unaware of the many companies in past decades that have tried and failed, including some that actually launched a product. This is definitely my favorite - an automatic hamburger restaurant from the 60's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXLqImT1wE

They have a huge uphill battle against going national sticking with a vegetarian menu. If their target is McDonald's something huge would have to change to make that possible in the US. Chipotle was able to grow because they have meat. Vegetarianism just isn't common enough here right now.

I went to Eatsa a few weeks ago (after finding it listed on HappyCow, a vegetarian restaurant directory). I noticed at the time that Eatsa itself never used the word "vegetarian" in its marketing materials, and indeed, it doesn't seem to appear on their site (e.g. in https://www.eatsa.com/ or https://www.eatsa.com/story).

Elsewhere in the vegetarian world I've seen people refer to "plant-based food" as an alternative to calling things vegetarian, presumably to avoid potential negative reactions from some audiences.

Perhaps many non-vegetarian customers won't notice the absence of meat options in context when ordering from the Eatsa interactive menu, because they're being invited to choose from a set of presented options. (I know that situation has been studied quite a bit in psychology, but I forget the relevant key words.)

I'm not a vegetarian but eating meat at every meal shouldn't be normal. That people identify with eating meat to the point vegetarianism offends them speaks how well marketing works. Everything in moderation. I treat meat as a luxury, eaten on occasion.

As a lacto-vegetarian I'm always confused by how personally offended some people can become when I simply pass over the meat at the dinner table. Even today I heard the "boy, where do you get your protein you're going to starve to death" schtick while my styrofoam plate was cracking under the weight of vegan baked beans, steamed broccoli, and mashed potatoes with way more butter than necessary.

Eh, it's cultural.

> Perhaps many non-vegetarian customers won't notice the absence of meat options

In some areas that might be possible, but not where I live in the midwest. The first question most people will have about each offering is "What kind of meat is in it?"

Right or wrong that's america today, and for that to change something major has to shift.

If Eatsa wants to be the driver of that change their meal offerings have to be delicious and significantly cheaper than fast food that has meat in it (which should be possible right since meat is so wasteful?)

> ...their meal offerings have to be delicious and significantly cheaper than fast food that has meat in it (which should be possible right since meat is so wasteful?)

This would be the case if externalities were priced into meat production. But meat producers don't pay for draining the water table, creating antibiotic-resistant strains or the massive waste problems that usually accompany large-scale meat production. I'm not among the militantly-anti-meat and even consume some on occasion, so I'm not going to tell people how to live their lives or what to eat, but we shouldn't be under the delusion that meat isn't more expensive just because most of the costs will be paid by future generations. If meat producers had to run sustainably, the cost of meat would be too high for most people to afford on a regular basis.

I haven't tried Eatsa, but from the photos, the bowls look exactly like Inday [1] (Broadway/E. 26th near Madison Square Park), which is superb.

Like Chipotle, you pick your own combination of ingredients, and it's heavily skewed towards vegetarian options. Inday offers qinoa (actually a great mix of qinoa, amaranth and teff), but I also love their "Not Rice" (shredded cauliflower with a similar consistency to rice).

[1] http://indaynyc.com

There's a national chain out of Denver (which is to fast casual restaurants what Silicone Valley is to tech) called Garbanzo which looks very very similar.

http://www.eatgarbanzo.com/

If you like Inday and are willing to venture farther south consider Cava Grill [1] - their bowls are quite good. Mediterranean, not Indian however.

[1] http://cavagrill.com/locations

Nice, I will have to try that one out.

I work very close to the one in San Francisco and have been there a few times. I didn't realize this the first time, but you can completely customize your bowl down to the garnish. This can be useful as some ingredients are much better than others, but is time consuming. For the price it's not bad! but it hasn't become my go-to lunch spot as it's lacking in the taste factor. I also wish it had a different option for the base, in addition to quinoa (perhaps brown rice), for someone who is not a fan of the quinoa texture.

I live in Hong Kong and some McDonalds here sell gourmet burgers and quinoa. If they really perceive it to be a threat I can see them rolling this out worldwide.

Reminds me of the Bolivian public health issues of forgoing native consumption for cash crop export. https://intercontinentalcry.org/the-mother-grain/

And, also how many pounds of Costco quinoa I still have stockpiled that needs to be eaten.

“The big issues are sourcing, labor, and price points,” Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University, ... David Friedberg, a former Google programmer with a degree in astrophysics, hopes to overcome these challenges with a new vegetarian chain called Eatsa. ... “We think the way to do it is quinoa.”

Underwhelmed.

Though I can see this might be a good example of creating cheaper high quality food, I wonder if the google ^wonderlic^ [0] has thought out the economic implications of trying to monetise a regional specific grain from a third world region?

   "Bolivian government nutrition programs 
    have begun to incorporate quinoa into 
    school breakfast and new mothers' 
    subsidies."

A quick check online yields an assortment of the impact, some positive [1], some negative. [2] The fact the founder worked for Monsanto isn't promising.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderlic_test#History

[1] "Quinoa brings riches to the Andes"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/14/quinoa-andes-b...

[2] "It’s OK To Eat Quinoa"

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2013/01/quinoa_bad_f...

Actually he didn't exactly 'work for Monsanto', he founded WeatherBill/The Climate Corporation, which was acquired by Monsanto in 2013 (for 1.1Bn!). Presumably he was 'resting and vesting' until his exit in 2015.

thx @Tinyyy, that throws this article [0] in a totally different light. Wonder if any of that technology is going to be x-ferred to Eatsa?

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/14/founders-fund-leads-the-cl...

There's no relevant technology to transfer. Besides, I believe Monsanto are quietly winding down their acquisition. Does Climate even sell insurance anymore? Last I heard, they're just a glorified app development studio for Monsanto. $1.1B didn't buy them much West Coast street cred after all.

"There's no relevant technology to transfer."

Did you read the article? The grain is grown in one of the harshest environments known a long way from markets. Any technology that allows farmers insight into their crops would benefit them, the supply chain and customers.

I worked there. I'll reiterate: there's no relevant technology to transfer. Monsanto quietly shut down Climate's product line.

"I worked there."

Hard to verify, but I'll take your word for it. Thanks for the inside comments.

Not quite resting. He's something of a militant vegetarian, so he bought a huge chunk of the North American quinoa production and then launched this thing.

I've been to their Spear street location in San Francisco. It's excellent for a quick and healthy (yet hearty) breakfast. It's novel to go inside and not see people cooking the food you're enjoying.

Not seeing people cooking the food you're enjoying is not unique to Eatsa.

I have tried to order food there three times in SF and was so creeped out I had to walk away.

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