A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
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If you can afford a meal-in-a-box service, why would you not just go to a restaurant where the wait staff will do a decent job as a substitute for your own live-in cook previously known as The Wife?
I mean, this seems like the worst of all worlds. Someone else decides what you will be eating and you have to do the cooking. I can't imagine buying this.
I have tried a few to get my sweet sweet VC subsidized healthy meals, but in the end, I agree with you: I'd rather go to a restaurant.
I always say that these are for people with more money than time.
The reason they don't go to a restaurant is because you like cooking - or at least, you like the idea of being someone who cooks. But the ad copy is right - shopping sucks, finding recipes sucks, throwing away food because you bought too much kale sucks. (Not to mention, cooking a meal and eating it takes 45 minutes - depending on the restaurant, you might be in there for an hour, plus travel time. And remember, time is what they're short on.)
Even if you find four interesting recipes and buy all the ingredients, and cook them - this takes 3x the time than just using Blue Apron, at minimum - on Friday you've got a bunch of assorted ingredients and no idea what to do with them. (Because you're not a wifemom, and you don't know how to combine those things into a meal.)
But the person they're targeting doesn't want to learn to do that. They just want to buy a pre-configured lego set, and build a spaceship they can eat.
You are not their target audience. Neither am I. But it definitely, definitely exists.
Granted, the food is much healthier than restaurant food, but my time is too valuable to spend that much. I suspect that other families where both parents work full time (like mine) are the same. Who has the time to spend an hour or two cooking every night? And pay a premium price for it?
I'm cautiously optimistic about Tovala. They are the first one of these that has a fairly unique system where the food just needs to be popped into their combi-oven (bake, broil, and steam) and you just wait until it cooks.
Eventually, we will have fully automated cooking appliances where drones deliver fresh food staples to your house and you get hot meals prepared automatically, but in the meantime, Tovala looks the closest to creating that experience.
I look forward to our robotic, food cooking overlords.
The cynic in me also wonders if the nature of the product doesn't create incentives for fussy recipes with a lot of ingredients, including uncommon ones. If your recipe is just a filet of trout sauteed in butter with some sliced almonds and a simple vegetable side, your customers may start wondering what they're paying you for exactly.
I wonder if the nature of the product creates incentives for fussy recipes with a lot of ingredients
Personally, that approach would resound well for me, but I'm conscious that I might not be the ideal viable demographic.
E.g. peel, cut and sautée 10 onions, let it cool, divide into 10 bags and freeze. 15 minutes time spent, 10x5 minutes saved on subsequent dinners. Peel, cut and freeze bags of carrot, celery, cabbage, chilies, etc. Another 5 minutes off.
Buy canned lentils, chickpeas and beans rather than dry, and you save 10-15 minutes cooking time on each meal. Always keep cans of peeled plum tomatoes at hand, never buy store-made pasta or pizza sauce - especially the latter, just blitz a can of tomatoes with salt and the herbs and spices of your choice, done!
Keep chicken, beef and fish stock in your pantry, preferrably the liquid stuff. Also keep soy sauce, fish sauce, sesame seed oil, all the vinegars you like (rice, balsamico, apple cider, sherry, etc.), some nice olive oil, green and red curry paste, coconut milk, teriyaki, hot sauce, all the flavors you like! Then you can improvise, which is the best part. Jars of tamarind paste keep well in the fridge, and can replace fresh lemon/lime in most Asian cuisine.
Buy big bags of proper basmati or jasmine rice at Asian stores, put in cold water to soak in the morning, boil for 10 minutes, perfect rice that mops the floor with Uncle Ben's.
Homemade pizza every Friday, just spend four minutes to make the dough before going to work, twenty minutes after we come home to shape and dress the pies while the oven heats up to 750 F (use Heston Blumenthal's cast-iron-plate-under-the-grill trick), perfect Neapolitan style pizzas for all the family that cook in 6-7 minutes.
Making your dinners from scratch in a family with small kids, both parents working full time, is far from impossible. We do it every day, plus bake all the bread we eat.
But no-one is going to sell you this as a solution in a box, it takes a little bit of effort and a little bit of passion for food. Just Say No to frozen pizza and ready-made lasagne, roll up your sleeves and start cooking.
This is like the best advice ever for rice lovers. I made the switch after being underwhelmed by small batch, Indian-named but made in US Basmati rice...it just had no flavor or taste. After using the rice from the bags.... HOLY COW, so much difference in flavor!
Isn't that just the old TV dinner promise dating back to the 1950s and the invention of the microwave?
So it's some sort of programmable combi oven. They're apparently (sorry) hot in modernist etc. cooking circles. I've read that keeping them free from mold etc. can be a problem but I haven't looked into them in any great detail.
I have to say that the example meal shown on their site is really not something most people would find at all challenging or time-consuming to prepare using supermarket ingredients.
It's just like a TV dinner or a microwaveable dinner, but hopefully better because you have more cooking capabilities.
I'm not sure at what point we got this efficient, and our kitchen is also easy-to-work in. [I don't imagine that's the case for lots of apt-dwellers]
I think you're definitely right that there will be a significant amount of automation that will be able to make many cooking chores trivial, though.
But that's two people, so really you just hit double the low end?
The prep is usually highly parallelize; the cooking is usually pretty serial if you follow the instructions, but often parallelize with only mild invention (they often specify reusing the same pan, without any real need other than reducing cleanup and equipment requirements.)
What bothers me a lot down in this whole thread, is that many people seem to forget that spending time feeding oneself is actually spending time taking care of oneself (and one's family if any). And that seems to me a very important part of life.
I wouldn't automatically grant that.
I cook Blue Apron with my teen-aged kids and it's fantastic. I've become a much better cook while helping them learn how to cook. The recipe cards are a big part of what makes it work for us. I don't always know what medium dice or chop means, but I can pretty much always match what's in the picture.
While this deserves qualifications, most of the time restaurant food is simply not as hygienic as meals prepared at home. And its not some deliberate plan to make it so. Despite their best efforts, a somewhat large scale food establishment just allows a lot more opportunities for food contamination. And I say this as a person who eats out everyday (Lunch out, dinner and supper at home).
The only place I can see that really escapes from this is the high end restaurants. Usually they don't have to rely on cost saving measures, and have well developed supply chains for obtaining fresh ingredients and keeping them from contamination. But I don't think most of the people here could afford or want to eat at such a place regularly.
But you don't know how much sugar, fat, or just empty calories are being put in your food to make it just a little more presentable or appetizing. That is what you have better control over when you cook yourself.
At the risk of stating the obvious, when you eat a meal, all of it goes to the same place. So as long as the meal as a whole provides sufficient nutrition (and if you are eating a varied diet then it absolutely will do), no part of it can be described as "empty calories".
Empty calories is not a moral judgment. It is a statement of fact.
Actually, fast food restaurants have some of the best food practices. I'd feel much safer eating at some random McDonald's than some Mom-n-Pop diner.
I mean, even some little diner sort of has a huge incentive not to make people sick, even if they don't have a health inspector watching over them.
This is a massive contamination incident waiting to happen.
[0]Though I think GP and most others in this thread are defining "healthy" as matching their preferred fat/carb/salt/weight-control etc. parameters, and aren't even thinking about food poisoning.
[edit: formatting]
I've become much more conscious of this lately. I called the health inspector to report a restaurant for the first time this month, and did it again just a week ago.
As I've said elsewhere, I'm not really the customer for these services. But I have to believe that, if I were to use them regularly, it would be because I wanted to put a meal on the table quickly on a weekday without a lot of effort or thought. Which implies eliminating as much prep time as possible.
In my experience with around 10 different (vegetarian) dishes from them, I've found that to be somewhat true. Most dishes only required some combination of: an oven (oven heating time not included in the "10 minutes"); a sauce pot for pasta/noodles; a 12-inch or larger saute pan; a mixing bowl.
The instructions use pipelining to achieve the advertised 10 minutes, and if you read the instructions in their entirety and execute accordingly, 10 minutes is very doable.
All ingredients except for salt, pepper and cooking oil are provided (this is probably obvious, but perhaps worth stating for people new to meal kits). The ingredients seemed to be fresh and of good quality.
The meals are reasonably tasty, except for the Indian ones, which I felt were not as good as something you could make from scratch at home or get in a restaurant.
A side-effect is that for lazy people like me, it may reduce the inertia to separate prep from cooking. Although I'd often thought about pre-cutting and freezing ingredients to cook later in the week, I found myself actually doing it after experiencing the 10-minute cook time, because my mind kept getting reminded that it's very doable.
An advantage of meal kits for a non-cook like me, is that certain condiments and sauces that I may not wish to stock, are provided in the required quantities with the meal kit. So I don't have to worry about buying a whole bottle of some sauce just for that one meal that requires it.
I was MUCH happier with Gobble precisely for the prep reason. Blue Apron meals ALWAYS took easily double the time they listed, and that's with two of us working. I often felt that Blue Apron made the meals needlessly complex and dirtied a needless number of pans just to seem "special" or to be harder for someone to try to replicate on their own.
In both cases, though, I found meats cooked in a pan took at LEAST twice as long cook time as they were supposed to -- and it was always oil splatter up front and on the very of splatter the entire cooking time, and it STILL took way too long --- so its not like my pan wasn't hot enough.
Also, at $60/week for a couple, these are vastly cheaper for us than eating out, and frankly I hate eating out by necessity. As a treat, I love it. But when I just want a meal, it pisses me off to have to choose a restaurant, get there, go through the whole ordering process, wait, go through the whole bill pay process, go home, etc.
In fact, I live in a small town in the rural Northeast, and if I want to go to a restaurant and not spend over an hour in the car, let alone the time spent sitting at the table, my choices are nowhere near as interesting and varied as what Blue Apron provides.
Maybe you live in a place where you can get to dozens of different restaurants in a very short time that have a variety of locally-sourced meals changing on a regular basis for less than $10/person, but even if so, I doubt that's the norm in American cities.
Blue Apron certainly isn't for everyone. I love cooking, so I find it a very worthwhile service, but you do need to actually enjoy doing it, because indeed, it invariably takes between 50 and 75 minutes from getting out the ingredients to putting the food on the table, and almost all of that time is active time for the one making the food.
I think this is one place where the focus in lifestyle magazines and meal startups on quick and easy meals has created unrealistic expectations. As you say, unless you have the skills of a professional chef, cooking pretty much anything in 15-30 minutes is unrealistic. More realistically, you would expect cooking from scratch to take 45-60 minutes.
To some extent I feel like people's frustration over the experience comes from under-appreciation of how much time cooking takes. Unless your ingredients come pre-chopped and pre-mixed, one hour from fresh ingredients is normal! Just like the adage "better, faster, cheaper, pick two," cooking has a corresponding dilemma: "quick, easy, delicious, pick two".
Melt butter, add lemon juice, salt and a dash of hot sauce to make a liquid. Rub liquid over chicken. Put chicken in oven at 400 until done. (How much you need and how long you take depends on whether you did this with a whole chicken or pieces of chicken. Let's call it an hour. Use an oven thermometer if you don't know how to tell.)
Put some water in the bottom of a pot, put one artichoke in the pot, cover, and put on low heat around 40 minutes before your meal.
Use a peeler to take the skin of a Daikon radish off. Peel the rest of it into a dish. Put sour cream + salt on, mix. Sprinkle chopped green onion on top.
Shortly before you're ready, melt butter, add salt. This is to dip the artichoke in.
Wall-clock over an hour because food spends time cooking. My time spent is perhaps 20 minutes. Most of which is spent peeling the radish. And now you've got a main dish with 2 side dishes and enough food to feed a family.
Now a lot of things take longer than that. For example making pancakes means spending a lot of time actually cooking the pancakes. When I make a soup from scratch I probably spend a couple of hours.
However, since wall-clock time often does need to go up to an hour, you have to schedule it into your day. You can't put the chicken into the oven if you're not home. I think the allure of 15-30 minute recipes is that 30 minutes is sort of the upper threshold for spontaneity: "I'll just cook whenever I get home." The problem is that if your filter is "recipes that take less than 30 minutes of wall-clock time," you end up with a very restricted book of recipes to work with.
Throw some meat into the sousvide in the morning, come home to a really nice piece of meat that you can take right out of the machine. Save any excess and reheat out the next day.
I intend to get one of those blowtorch attachments to sear afterwards, although I suspect griddle/thick base pan might do just as well.
- low downtime, meaning personal time prep/etc were you are unable to do anything else.
- healthy, obv. (I note the above recipes seem to have quite a bit of salt and fat..)
- easily obtained ingredients. special consideration for those that need to be fresh, or go off quickly (vs pantry), and those that are hard to obtain in meal-size quantities. (as a side-note, Asian markets are treasure troves, if you can figure out what things are, and if they're healthy).
- Not too difficult to wash up after. If it uses 5 different pans, 10 different utensils etc, and I have to spend 30 minutes washing up, then that needs to be considered as part of the "downtime".
- Another possible consideration, other than ingredient price: energy price. Ovens can use a fair bit of electricity. If you use it for 45 min every day for your evening meal, could the costs add up? I say this because I'm currently trying to reduce my monthly energy bill (my last one was 50 EUR), and the immersion heater is the first suspect. Generating heat tends to use a lot of electricity, although the high heat capacity of water probably means water heating is more costly, consider that one you are finished with the oven, all that excess heat is just wasted (unless it happens to be winter).
Plus, it might seem basic, but an app or something that can A) produce possible meals-to-make based on what you have, and present a choice (or even choose at random) B) produce a shopping list in advance for future meals. An "Who's turn is it to cook" tracker would be nice too.
And when you add salt yourself without sugar, you generally don't get to the salt content of most of what you see from packaged foods or a restaurant.
I guess, if you're fat, low-carb is healthier? If you work out a lot, high-protein/high energy etc.
It depends on aim/requirements, but I mean matched to personal metabolic health.
There's another thing too: digestive health - requiring plenty fiber, not too much sugar, and not too much fat either..
But as a person whose family is prone to diabetes, I'm going to go light on sugar.
You're half wrong. Blue Apron gives you two values, "prep time" and "recipe time". They don't include dicing and peeling, but they don't overlook it either.
But let's get straight. I can whip a steak from zero to hero in 15 minutes. Throw some Broccoli in and you have a nice tasty lunch in real 15 minutes ready to eat.
We are two working full time although my wife is currently at home with a newborn. We always prepared a meal one day before and took it to work. There is always time to cook yourself. You just decided to spend it for something else...
https://www.amazon.com/How-Cook-Everything-Fast-Better-ebook...
That generally fits my assumption that the target audience is two career couples, generally speaking.
They just want to buy a pre-configured lego set, and build a spaceship they can eat.
That's an awesome description. Thank you for that.
After a few rotations of the 6 or 8 weeks of menus, swap in some fresh recipes to try. eventually you can add the ones you like to create a longer rotation.
I think people could do this, but for whatever reason don't. Possibly the excessive media-isation of cooking has raised what the expected skill level is; people are no longer content with something edible but unspectacular, or food that's too ugly to Instagram. We've come a long way from Fanny Cradock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O5WDPSpI1A
e.g. the other day I ate what was left in my fridge: pasta with mangetout and Polish ham (+garlic, onion, rosemary). Entirely reasonable but not quite dinner-party quality.
(Bonus piece of extremely 60s period outfits and gas cookers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsdvL6TCX6k )
BTW, a good set of kitchen tools makes meal prep go a lot faster. When I moved in with my now-wife, she had a couple requests for new kitchen goods that were non-negotiable. A good sharp kitchen knife, a mandolin slicer, and a salad spinner. They really make a huge difference - before, it could take me an hour to prep a simple pasta dish, afterwards, it's like 15 minutes. Washing vegetables now basically means dumping all of them into the salad spinner, swishing them around, and turning the crank twice, for a total of 5 minutes. Cutting or dicing an onion can be done in under a minute, regardless of the cut desired.
Together these cost a lot less than a Blue Apron subscription, and you can use them for years. And the quality of fresh farmer's market ingredients really can't be beat.
Blue Apron is cooking a meal from scratch (so, obviously, it doesn't save time in cooking.) The time saving is in shopping and inventory management.
I don't personally get the timesavings of not going to the store, either - my wife or I will go after work, we have a list, it'll take half an hour and then we'll be done for the week. But then I realized that the target market for these services probably doesn't have a car and/or doesn't have a produce market a mile away. It makes a lot more sense if getting groceries is a half-hour trek just to get there and then you need to carry the bags back.
At least when I had BA (and judging by their current recipes, still now) measured, but not cut for the most part. You still prep the ingredients.
> I don't personally get the timesavings of not going to the store, either - my wife or I will go after work, we have a list, it'll take half an hour and then we'll be done for the week.
Meal kits means you aren't planning those meals, aren't making a shopping list for what is needed for those meals, and aren't shopping for those meals.
"doesn't have a produce market a mile away"
Supermarkets do have much longer opening hours that fit with my working patterns, but sadly don't have the quality of produce as my local farmers' market.
I found that when I had to choose a recipe to cook, I just wouldn't end up doing it. I'd forget, or put it off, or make some excuse. I know I'm happier when I cook, I have enough skill now, and I go to the grocery store at least once a week anyway. But it turns out it just didn't happen most weeks. I ordered pizza or microwaved frozen food or ate out and felt like crap for not eating well.
There's something incredibly powerful about defaults. I'm not paying for recipes and ingredients. I'm paying for someone to tell me "cook this tonight". And I do. I cook more often, eat healthier, and end up happier at the end of the week. And maybe that's not true for everyone, but I'm more than happy to pay an extra $20 or so over sticker cost for the nudge.
On the other hand my parents, who aren't good cooks in general, started using hello fresh. While it didn't really change the way they cooked, it broadened the range of ingredients and spices they used while teaching them to actually add salt to things and all of that improved their cooking immeasurably.
I cook for myself almost every day, but since I live in a large city, I am basically a "daily shopper" for groceries. I pass all kinds of markets on the way home from work so I stop and pick up what I need for dinner (with a meal already in mind but not necessarily a recipe in hand), and then cook when I get home.
Obviously I have a lot of staples (spices, oils, etc), and I typically do larger meat runs once a week or so and fill up the freezer, but fruits, veggies and specific ingredients I pick up as needed based on the overall category of meal I want to make.
Now that said, I've been cooking like this for 15 years so I have a rotating set of 15-20 recipes (with variations on each) that I can stop and get ingredients without looking at a list..
It was definitely that repetition and practice that got me to that point, and I'm grateful for it, so if you think meal-kits will get you there too, keep at it!
Disclaimer: I work for a BA competitor, Green Chef.
Because I'd rather eat at home. Especially if I have kids. It's easier.
Because it's a lot cheaper.
Because it's better for me from a health perspective.
Yes, it is.
> Unless you're referring to some Michelin-starred restaurant, it's quite possible to eat fast-casual for the same price of many of these kits (especially if you live in a suburb where restaurants tend to be much cheaper than in e.g. SF)
Blue Apron is $8.74 (family plan) or $9.99 (couples plan) per plate for complete dinners. I live in the suburbs in the Central Valley (not the Bay Area) and it's well below fast-casual prices for comparable composition meals (also, better quality than most fast-casual places.)
Now, if you are talking about fast-food rather than fast-casual, that still is cheaper.
South East: 1 chipotle burrito bowl, chicken, black beans, brown rice, guac, hot salsa, cheese 1 22oz drink Total - $10.20
Chipotle is much lower quality than anything I've had from Blue Apron (this is typical of low-price national chain fast-casual restaurants; the fast-casual restaurants that are worth comparing are independent or local-chain places).
So, yeah, if that's the kind of food you want, it's price comparable to BA (but you wouldn't be looking at BA if you were satisfied with that kind of food I the first place.)
I tend to think of it that way, but it's pretty much, among national chains, the one that is held out as the archetypical fast-casual (IME, it's pretty bottom of the barrel for partial-table service, and no more fast-casual than Carl's Jr., which also has partial table service.)
Sure, but now we're not making an apples-to-apples comparison anymore, given the quality of fast-casual food vs even nominally home-cooked food. I don't like fast-casual food, and I don't think I'm alone in this. I enjoy home-cooked food and I enjoy food from restaurants above a certain quality bar.
What you're saying isn't that far off from saying "why does anyone cook _or_ go to restaurants when they could just have Soylent?". Quality matters to people.
I'd likely never buy a Blue Apron box for the simple fact that I have pretty tight dietary restrictions that I loosen a bit when I eat out (but not a lot). If I cook at home, I'm going to follow those restrictions pretty closely so most regular recipes won't work.
I tend to end up overeating at restaurants because the portions are bigger.
At home, I can only serve as much as I want and keep the rest in the fridge.
In theory, I can - and do - do that at restaurants as well, but somehow, the restaurant environment promotes eating more. If I have four bites left, I might hesitate to ask for a takeaway box. But in the house, I can just throw that into a tupperware and pop it in the fridge
So basically it gives me reasonable portions that I can cart to work, gets me to cook by force-feeding me recipes (which seems to reliably motivate me, and they taste good enough when done), and at least seem more healthy (and at $9 a serving substantially cheaper than) a restaurant.
Not saying that the same thing would work for anyone other than me, but has worked out better than the prior "stuffing whatever food I can reach into mouth" method.
I do know people who like it though. There's a category of (especially) couples with disposable income who really want to cook at home a few nights a week but appreciate some structure to make it happen.
b^)
My wife and I have used meal-in-a-box services. We both tweak the recipes without reminders. They don't aim to replace a cook, because they still need a cook.
They mostly replace some of the effort of shopping, portioning, and some part of prepping, plus recipe discovery.
> If you can afford a meal-in-a-box service, why would you not just go to a restaurant
Because with a restaurant, I don't have a cook that will tweak to my tastes without detailed prompting.
> where the wait staff will do a decent job as a substitute for your own live-in cook
You are confusing front-of-house with back-of-house staff.
> Someone else decides what you will be eating and you have to do the cooking.
The ability to select from a menu of options prior to delivery would be an improvement for many of these services.
You are confusing front-of-house with back-of-house staff.
No, I'm not. When I go to a restaurant, I talk to the wait staff and they relay my preferences to whomever is doing the cooking. I don't talk directly to the cook. There may be a better way to say what I said, but I am not confusing anything. The wait staff play a large role in making sure that picky orders turn out right and, in some cases, they do some of the work involved in putting the right meal together, though they don't cook it.
I know in part because I have special dietary needs, so I generally am a picky eater who has to ask for pretty much everything I eat to be tweaked and because I have had close relatives who worked in restaurants.
Hello Fresh, at least, has 8 or so available recipes per week. They'll pick 3 for me, but if I choose I can log in to their site and pick for myself.
I tried Hello Fresh and thought it was useful. As a capable cook, it still saved time I'd otherwise spend shopping (30 mins easily if you have a kid in tow) or wondering what to make (on nights I want to cook something new, I will spend 30+ minutes looking at cook books or recipe sites). Someone wanting a less hand-holdy experience could easily ignore the recipes and use it as a mystery box to invent from.
As delivery services become faster and more perfected, specifically when we can start using drones to deliver almost anything (which isn't heavy) to anyone in an urban/suburban area in an hour or less, I think we will see the rise of food being ordered and delivered at will. However, the technology isn't there yet. So instead, we get all these food delivery services that either deliver restaurant food (ubereats, orderup), their own food but without choice / at high cost relative to quality like with Freshly, or these meal-kits.
At best they are awkward solutions to a problem that we can't fix with normal pricing and distribution models. What there is really a market for is a service that can deliver fresh or at least reasonably high quality food, which is customizable to individual preferences, for a reasonable cost (~$5 or so), on-demand, and in a timely manner. All of the existing companies in this space make tradeoffs in one way or another, which leave people dissatisfied and prevent adoption except by those who place a high premium on convenience.
Does that also come with a free pony?
A six-inch sub from Subway is already nine bucks, and that includes the Sandwich Rembrandt personalizing it for me with an extra slice of provolone for a dollar extra.
The market isn't waiting for it, people are waiting for it - who doesn't want super cheap, super good food, super fast? But there's a saying about picking two.
The problem is that to get the kind of economies of scale that an Amazon-style digital cafeteria could offer, you need to concentrate a lot of equipment in one place (and rent/build a huge place capable of processing large amounts of food coming and going). This is where distribution models fail, because the only place you can build places like this is in suburbs, where you can't efficiently deliver to the well-earning young people in the cities that form your target dmeo.
And I highly disagree with saying that "the market isn't waiting for it, people are waiting for it". People, or rather consumers, are the market. Yes, I agree that basically every would of course want a product that is faster, higher quality, and cheaper. But $5 for one meal really is quite a lot when compared to the cost of food, especially when bought in bulk, and automated delivery/preparation could indeed make this food both faster and higher quality (or rather, give near-professional quality at a much lower cost).
We don't need impersonal drones delivering your Food Packages so you don't need to see and interact with human beings and maybe generate some flavor of empathy somewhere inside of you. We need the exact opposite of that.
People probably decried the automation of textile manufacturing, that clothing was losing its personal touch. Now we don't seem to have a problem with it. I'm sure food will go a similar route.
Although I do agree that removing the human element in retail/food will be weird at first, I'm sure we'll get used to it. It's more efficient, so I think it's better.
That empathy that develops through knowing and understanding the people around you is what makes society actually work. The idea that "efficient = better" is one of the most profoundly dehumanizing pictures I have ever seen painted of the future and you do nothing to shake that. Monstrosities like the one you posit are what we should be working to avoid because it makes all of us mere grist for the mill.
The other solution is what is, in my opinion, a sort of neo-Luddite reaciton to automation where we either ban hugely efficient economies-of-scale infrastructures as a make-work program, or a regulation requiring sufficient numbers of humans in the loop.
I think you are really over-interpreting the way I see this. Replacing jobs with more efficient services is pretty unequivocally better in my opinion. If it weren't better, people would keep using the less efficient services that give them some form of empathic pleasure. In particular, I find the allegations of classism a little baseless. I have no problems interacting with those of a lower class, and if they do indeed lose their jobs due to mass automation, I definitely think the government will need to implement programs to retrain them or to provide for their needs a la basic income. But it doesn't make sense to pay someone to do a job that could be done better, especially ones like in food service, just so we can pat ourselves and say that "they at least have a job."
It's not about jobs. It's about people. It's about not encouraging the shrinking of individuals into tiny-little-boxes where they don't have to interact with people unlike them. Epistemic and social-stratifying closures are pernicious and dangerous to society in ways "inefficiency" never, not once in human history, has been.
I'm not necessarily an introvert, but I'd be happy to remove the human element from ordering takeaway, or get it from something other than the phone order and delivery components which I find pretty boring.
But at its logical conclusion, does it risk ending with megacorp/state-mandated food plans delivered to the majority of people?
The UK has shops like Pret A Manger where the selling point is that all the sandwiches are made fresh in the shop every day.
We also have Subway franchises who tweak your sandwich ingredients.
Or independent sandwich shops who do the same thing.
But the cheapest sandwiches are ready made in Tesco or Sainsburys or Coop or Boots or Waitrose or WH Smith's or Marks and Spencer or whatever.
I guess the public transport in UK cities makes distribution easier because you can pick up a sandwich at the station on you way to work.
I can get something to eat at Chipotle for $5 or less. You don't actually have to order an $8 burrito. But, generally speaking, fresh, made to order, etc. is simply not going to happen for $5. Though I do kind of like your idea of drone delivery.
a service that can deliver fresh or at least reasonably high quality food, which is customizable to individual preferences
I'm envisioning a facility tied to an Amazon warehouse or something similar that might be preparing food for >10000 people every day
I really don't see these two things being reconcilable. I eat at eateries very regularly and I become a "regular customer" and people know my name and become familiar with the tweaks I am going to make to my order. Over time, preferences of mine get learned by regular staff.
I don't think AI is anywhere near that point. There are a thousand small things going on that you would have to think to program into the AI and probably wouldn't without deploying and iterating.
So, um, yeah, it sounds like your idea of quality food and mine are not at all on the same page. I think there are ways to get quality food at a reasonable price (I think this because of the aforementioned not wealthy status and years of eating well anyway), but I have serious trouble imagining that a meal-in-a-box delivery service would be it and I have difficulty imagining your idea would be it either.
But thank you for clarifying.
What there is really a market for is a service that can deliver fresh or at least reasonably high quality food, which is customizable to individual preferences, for a reasonable cost (~$5 or so), on-demand, and in a timely manner.
If we could eliminate the building, the employees (and all of the overhead that goes along with them), and the expensive location that the buildings are usually in, it seems like the cost of the burger could come down.
That sounds pretty nuts, but I don't think it's completely impossible at scale.
As for affordability: $60 / 3 meals = $20 / meal. In general, getting similar meals elsewhere would run us $40+.
They normally give you a few different options for the week and project out multiple weeks in advance so you have plenty of time to decide what you want. If you don't want anything they have to offer that week, then you can always just skip the box altogether too.
I'm certainly not trying to diminish the benefits of having someone at home full time to care for the family (and all that entails), but saying that the meal-in-a-box service industry is in existence solely because of more two-income families is a rather narrow view.
Also, we've found preparing the meals to be a great couple activity. Normally, I wouldn't say this about cooking - my wife and I tend to run the kitchen alone when the muse strikes - but having clearcut instructions and not worrying about shopping makes cooperation fun and easy.
1) It's cheaper / healthier than eating at most restaurants [where I live, in Upper Manhattan]
2) The nearest grocery stores also aren't cheap. If I could save money, it would cost me a significant amount of time. [the lines at Trader Joe's alone, not to mention meal-planning + time to & from store].
3) Some items are hard to buy in the right quantities. [eg red wine vinegar]
4) I don't need to do much normal grocery shopping. Between farmer's markets and Amazon Prime Now, I don't have a necessary weekly trip to the store.
As I mentioned in another comment, I am one of the nearly-perfect early customers. It fills a need that I have, and it clearly doesn't fill any needs for you. This is actually a huge problem for Blue Apron, because it means that to acquire me, they just needed me to know about it [good!].
[But!] To acquire you, they'd probably have to (a) lower costs, (b) do lots of ... marketing?, (c) provide more food options [that's actually been happening], and (d) make cooking trivial.
Delivery is a huge expense [I heard 20-30% [1]] for a service like Blue Apron. I imagine the goal of many of these "delivery" services is to get in on the ground floor before delivery / logistics become a solved problem of self-driving cars. They'll use VC money and low-margins to survive until their delivery fees drop and hope that being dominant in the market helps them keep their spot. ... And then they'll have a few years of reasonable profitability until they're disrupted?
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/21/heres...
I think that services like Blue Apron are actually kind of ingenious in that they trivialize an annoying part of cooking [the shopping] while developing the "skill" part.
On top of that, I think just using good ingredients helps you identify what to look for in stores - making you better at that aspect, too [without having to practice the "standing in line" bit]
It's a little tidbit I've always liked about Blue Apron.
[2]: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magent... -- it's two parts.
I'm skeptical of the value of these services overall but the more I think about time savings and not having to worry about keeping up my otherwise-useless food-buying skills they could be worth it, though only if they all but completely removed my need to grocery shop. And I think the prices would still have to come down a little more.
What'd be more valuable is a grocery store with online ordering and curbside pickup with some kind of enforceable (like, with real teeth, not "oh yeah, we tried to screw you, here's a voucher for the $1.50 difference, bet you're glad you spent two hours getting us to pay up!") guarantee that they wouldn't sell me anything over the average price for my area. Infeasible now, but imagine if government tweaked the information imbalance to be a bit less out of customers' favor by mandating (or incentivizing) machine-readable posting of prices week to week... then such a service could exist, could be audited, could be more-or-less trusted. And would save huge numbers of hours and lots of fuel for driving around comparison shopping and other useless consumer BS we (those not rich enough to pay others to worry about this useless crap) currently put up with as practically a second job.
I don't want to be rude to you, but I find this to be hilarious:
>Such a service has no real hope of taking the place of someone with actual cooking skills who knows you well and will tweak the recipe to your preferences, possibly without you even having to explicitly ask or remind her.
Sounds like a job for a... maid! Which really puts a delicious spin on the odd, mildly sexist suggestion that "lack of wives" is a problem that needs disruption.
Or, you know, there's another person that "knows you well and will tweak the recipe to your preferences," namely, yourself.
I am merely describing the problem space. If people wanted to, you know, tweak it themselves, then there would be no food services of any kind, not restaurants and not take out food and not meal-in-a-box delivery services. We would just all cook for ourselves if everyone just loved doing that and didn't want this somehow magically taken care of by some other means.
Everyone needs to eat. It is a requirement to remain alive. But most people don't want to spend all their time on this vital activity. They want a good meal, but hassle-free or low hassle.
That isn't a criticism. I don't really like cooking either. It is just an observation about reality.
You don't like cooking. I do. It is really fun for me. I enjoy cooking new things and learning new techniques. I enjoy learning new ingredients and new dishes. I, however, hate going grocery shopping and looking up new recipes. This service deals with the issues I have.
What's even better? It's quality shared time between me and my girlfriend. She'll deal with some of the steps. I'll deal with others. In total, we put in maybe 15 minutes of work, and wait another 15 minutes before the dish is done. Generally this is faster and less effort than going out to eat for the quality of food received. At the end of it all, we have a delicious meal we both put together, and more knowledge about how to cook in general, which we both enjoy.
Hence why these food services are great in my household, and terrible in yours. We're attempting to solve different problems. I want to cook in a hassle free manner. You want to eat in a hassle free manner. They aren't the same thing.
Generally speaking, when people make generalizations, they are not assuming that 100% of the world will exactly fit their statements 100% of the time. Saying that it is generally true does not presume that people like you do not exist. It just presumes that you are probably in the minority.
>If people wanted to, you know, tweak it themselves, then there would be no food services of any kind, not restaurants and not take out food and not meal-in-a-box delivery services.
Turn that statement into one about a minority's preference, and suddenly you discover an underserved market that likes preparing their own food. Kind of like the poster you replied to was stating. Kind of like everyone in the thread that has a different problem than you did that this service is a solid solution for.
Edit: I won't extend this comment chain any further. Please look at the comment I critiqued. I think you've glossed over your own statement.
It is pretty ridiculous for you to act like I think there is zero market because I wouldn't buy it. That amounts to twisting my comments in a way that makes it very hard to engage in good faith.
> If you can afford a meal-in-a-box service, why would you not just go to a restaurant where the wait staff will do a decent job as a substitute for your own live-in cook previously known as The Wife?
Er, no. A desire for customization does not imply that a baseline around which to customize is not a viable product.
> We would just all cook for ourselves if everyone just loved doing that and didn't want this somehow magically taken care of by some other means.
Meal kits are cooking for yourself. They simplify shopping, inventory management, and recipe discovery, but the customer still does all the cooking, and, depending on the kit, most of the prep other than portioning out bulk goods to the quantities needed.
One of my girlfriends used to say, "I need a wife!" She used to specifically mean what you're talking about above. Then I used to raise my hand to volunteer, but she wouldn't have it. So the next step would be polygamy, but she didn't want that either. (Nor did I ask for that!)
I had the same discussion with my fiancee just last night. (The "wife" part, but not the polygamy.) She doesn't want me to be her wife either.
I got my oldest son to take over the "women's work" when I had a corporate job. He was willing to meet the incredibly high standards of freshness and quality necessary to keep us healthy and out of the ER (due to our genetic disorder) but he was absolutely not willing to cook a traditional meal with meat, potatoes, two veggies, fresh bread etc. He made a lot of one dish meals.
I sometimes think if I can ever get off the street again, we have found a solution to the problem of keeping people well fed without having a de facto live in servant and it has to do with the kind of cooking we do and maybe I could turn that into a blog or app or something. I think a lot about the fact that there are some serious problems surrounding having everyone get paid jobs and somehow also have quality of life stuff adequately addressed.
And it is a conversation that is mostly not happening in earnest. What happens is people with upper class two career type situations just hire servants and pay for take out and for machines to do some of the work for them and so forth. And no one wants to really talk about the fact that this doesn't really work on a global scale. This model of two career upper class coupledom assumes some kind of servant class supporting it, in much the same way that the traditional male breadwinner assumed a full time wife. This does not create a world of real equals.
- $20/meal for a couple or small family is still cheaper than eating out, especially for the kind of meal you're getting from BlueApron
- People like knowing what goes into their food
- Using your cool kitchen gadgets is fun, even if you don't have great recipe ideas
- In some places, to make a specific dish may require a trip to two or three or more grocery stores
Growing up in the 80s with two parents that worked, there was a wife/mom who knew our preferences, but we ate a lot of hamburger helper anyway.
Meal planning is the least fun part of cooking for me and my wife. Executing the plan is easier and funner than than coming up with the plan or getting the ingredients. Maybe we're outliers.
On your subtext, it's true that society has changed a lot since we have two career professionals, but knowing several families that are trying the stay-at-home mom thing, I can't say it's working well for them, largely because there was a lot more institutional support for it in the 50s and earlier. The ones I know certainly don't spend their entire day coming up with luxury meals for their pampered families. But that's a topic for another day.
What subtext are you imagining my comment as having? Because I strongly suspect you are inferring things that simply are not there.
In my experience, when people are reading "subtext" into my comments, they are typically projecting something that is simply not there at all. I do my best to be a straight shooter. I am not big on implying anything. The internet is not a good environment for trying to imply things. It lacks voice tone, context, facial expression etc and it puts people in contact from around the globe who come from very different cultures even when they are both, say, upper class for their country. It is just a terrible place in which to try to be subtle.
Or, assuming a couple could choose their roles, or even have the option of a stay-at-home mom, they wouldn't jump at the chance?
Is it that hard to believe that not being required to have to full time wage earners and no-one to handle at home duties vs. having a more complete division of labor, might actually work out well overall for both people's happiness?
But, I think it's easy to romanticize those aspects and ignore what happened to people who had kids out of wedlock, people who did not want that lifestyle but were forced into it, kids who grew up isolated, institutional racism, what happened to mixed couples, etc. During the magical 50s, my grandfather was disowned by his family for marrying a non-Jew, was denied a job at DuPont for being a Jew, my stay-at-home grandmother couldn't work despite having a chemistry degree, and my mother contemplated suicide just from sheer loneliness growing up fairly isolated.
So yeah, it worked out great for some people. And it didn't work out for other people. And that's basically the situation we're in now, except that today, there's a lot less social stigma associated to people living the life they want to live rather than the one their family or their society wants them to live.
I just think compared to what was wrong with the 50s, the situation today is obviously better. Yeah, it sucks figuring out dinner sometimes, but there's really no comparison.
I think this is a big challenge for all these companies. They aren't selling to existing frequent cooks. Those people don't mind going to the grocery store to pickup ingredients (at least most). They are selling to the aspirational people who want to make the habit of cooking at home every night stick, and thats really hard. There are lots of other options.
I love to cook, and I hate both deciding what to cook, and then going and getting all the stuff to make whatever I (finally) decide to make.
Meal boxes are the best of both worlds. Someone else decides what I'll be eating, and does all the shopping, and I get to do the cooking. I can't imagine life without it anymore.
This can be true when one person is the breadwinner and the other is practically/partially disabled, too.
I don't know if you've read this book, but it is fascinating.
https://www.amazon.com/Way-We-Never-Were-Nostalgia/dp/046509...
Of course, this book isn't the be-all answer to how things really were. I would suggest what we're really grappling with here is a breakdown in social order where kids are adequately taken care of, houses are adequately cleaned, meals prepared. To do so today is really quite hard: all sorts of traditional support structures have vanished in the wind. The big bugbear in this from a century ago was "Modernity", and you can find a number of writings from that era wishing for a prior time. I'm reluctant to blame modernity that much, but it's a worthy starting point in my opinion.
I actually blog some about the truly terrible effect this has had on our housing situation because we are still basically being haunted by the ghost of this brief anomalous time that we think is normal or something.
I think it gets romanticized because it was a step up generally speaking over the terrible poverty that was the norm before that. People seem to not recognize that fact, so it usually isn't worth trying to comment on.
I have been persuaded for a number of years now that the 35-year World War broke Western civilization thoroughly and deeply, with an interregnum to ensure a whole generation and its children got the hit, and only in the past, say, 20 years have scholars been able to get enough distance from it to look critically enough to remark with equanimity on the matter.
To me, it is sufficient to look at the evolution of fine art to demonstrate the point. But one can also look at complexity of language usage by educated individuals over time, social cohesion, pride in civilization, historical knowledge by educated individuals, etc.
I like cooking
I don't have time to shop frequently
I like meal planning, but I don't like meal-planning 7 days a week
I don't care to go out to eat and spend a bunch of time dealing with ordering, waiting for the check, transportation, and so on.
Sunbasket costs me about $22 per meal for two people. That is _significantly less_ money than a restaurant meal of similar quality. I could go to KFC and get crap for less than $20, but the value proposition is still quite good for me. My wife and I typically eat out once a week (or order delivery), I take care of meal-planning three other meals a week, and sunbasket handles the mid-week meals where I have enough time to cook but don't want to mess around with shopping. It's all organic and mostly sourced locally to me (although they deliver all over, I live in SF). Personally? I'd probably pay more for it. It is already a good value proposition.
The only complicating factor is that when I shop and prep a meal from the store, I usually make 3-4 servings and thus have leftovers, which doesn't happen. So, with sunbasket I tend to buy more lunches. It is definitely more money than if I just went to the grocery store, but it saves me a trip a week, so there's that.
So, that makes me wonder if a Craigslist/Uber hybrid service would be viable. Basically a way to allow those full-time neighborhood housewives to pick up a few extra bucks by offering to cook 2x - 3x as much as required to feed their own families. The surplus homecooked meals would be picked up and delivered to someone else in the neighborhood who doesn't have the time, the talent, or the wife.
It might not make much money, and it would probably draw the ire of local health authorities in much the same way that Uber and Lyft crossed swords with the taxi cartels. But I'd probably use a service like that, or at least try it. And it's not every day I get to bust out a zeugma.
Oh god - because it would be vastly more expensive than the meal kit service? I've been with Hello Fresh for a very long time now(85 boxes and counting) and the price per meal per person is £5 - you can't eat that cheaply at a restaurant, it's just not possible, especially if you factor in the cost of driving there and parking plus time, it's just a lot more hassle. Even takeaway can't really be had for that cheap, unless you are happy with some really crappy pizza, but then no one will deliver food below the threshold.
And then you have the priceless benefit of actually learning how to cook - when I started I was positively mediocre in the kitchen, now I feel very confident and rarely make something that tastes bad, I would say I definitely know how to cook now.
Even ignoring the price effectiveness of this solution, the benefit of cooking 5 different recopies every week and trying out new things and getting better at cooking is in my opinion absolutely 100% worth the admission cost.
When I was growing up and when my parents were growing up dinner was best described as "edible." Nothing fancy, nothing artisanal, not bland but also not usually very exciting. Simple meals with simple ingredients.
Now people want (and expect) fresh and "fancy" artisanal food all the time - you can see it in here with people complaining about the quality of Chipotle.
I always think of these services as more used by young higher earning childless people, not so much families.
Similarly, what's the value-add of Github? Primarily, it's not having to talk on the phone to some guy with a thick foreign accent with kitchen noise in the background. Dealing with a website, even if it's slow sometimes, is a much less socially complicated experience.
The value of grubhub is that I can send written instructions to the restaurant instead of spoken ones, which will be understood more clearly, so my order is done the way I prefer it. It also helps with discoverability, instead of having to keep an assortment of paper menus in my kitchen up to date, I can just go to the website. It's not about avoiding poor people.
It really doesn't, except for a small subgroup of people who are worried about virtue signalling.
Most people understand that people need jobs, it takes a surprisingly small amount of money to hire real help (and pay appropriately- fair pay for fair work), and everyone wins. I hired a lady to help as a caretaker when my mother was descending through the stages of Alzheimer's, and after my mother passed, she still stops by occasionally to help me with my elderly father. She is a lifesaver, and worth every penny. Neither my father nor myself are rich. My car is old enough to vote and buy beer. But the $150/week or so that I spend on help is completely worth it. And absolutely nobody that I've ever spoken with face-to-face judges. Many folks have asked me how to find similar, because they are in the same boat as me.
I hear some people, women in particular, quite like shopping for shoes. It's possible there are people that dislike shopping for computer parts?
Of course shops can play up to the dopamine hit through promotion, fantasy-encouragement and packaging etc, but if you like a type of product, you'll probably like seeing what's available.
In fact, I see a reason local variations will become stronger. A lot of these customers have money and are interested in "farm to table" and "buy local" ideas. So, I'd expect that they could find meal kits that fit whatever diet they want, prepared by a local chef, using ingredients from local farms. This is a great potential avenue for local chefs to promote their brand, in addition to appearances on shows like Top Chef, etc.
So... why would a large company with a national brand matter at all? I could easily see business like Blue Apron just fold overnight, but the meal kit concept shift entirely to, well, small business. Sure seems like the big investment dollars are basically paving the way for local competition, by planting the idea of "meal kits" as a viable option in people's minds.
Taken one step further with the farm-to-table concept, I can see suburban delivery of local meal kits directly from nearby farms on a subscription basis. It becomes a value-add on the CSA concept.
In my area we have a pretty big concentration of high-income earners in relatively close proximity to small farms. It could probably be made to work in a situation like that.
Now, with WF, Amazon may be able to treat fresh produce in a similar way. Sure, Whole Foods could produce and distribute meal kits. But I'd suspect the components of what goes into the meal kits could also be made available, such that the "local restauranteur" could come up with the creative bit - the recipe - and then have parts like the supply chain of high quality produce, distribution, sales, etc, basically available via Amazon.
It's a little scary thinking about how far ahead Amazon is from it's competition.
The benefits you listed are huge - buy local, decreased packaging, fresher food. That alone is compelling enough for me to choose a local competitor given all else equal. I can see cost savings for local competitors with shipping and packaging. Food costs will be higher, i'm assuming, since volume will be much-much lower than BA.
Devils-advocate: how can a local meal-kit delivery business compete with Blue Apron on user-acquisition and tech? It's very easy to waste ad dollars on FB and taboola, which will drive up your CACs to a point where any cost savings from packaging and shipping will be minor at best. Hiring outside help for user-acq is prohibitively expensive for most small businesses, and fraught with scammers and "local SEO expert" types.
On the tech side, if you've ever used a local CSA, that's what I imagine most small business meal-kit software will look like unless some SaaS steps in and makes a killer, Shopify-like product for managing these businesses. Maybe this exists, I don't know.
The city is flat and dense, 10000+ people per sqmi dense. Every day local food delivery companies jump on their electric scooters and deliver over 2,300,000 meals (2016 data, now probably more). In one city.
I can choose from 2,980 restaurants near me. If I add ¥5 (~$0.8) extra delivery fee, a bit farther, making it 8,600 restaurants. Decision fatigue multiplied by "I'm hungry just get me that deep fried chicken NOW" thing.
The food is very meh. Mid- to high-end restaurants don't do it. Good restaurants have enough business to skip deliveries at all. Meal kits tried and failed here, because people are just too busy and stressed to cook. Average rent is 140% of average salary. Overtime is a norm.
So we figured, why don't we take customer data + preferences, make a feedback loop and build FULL meal plans for them that they will 1) be happy to eat, 2) reach their fitness goals with, 3) be able to afford? By "full" I mean including healthy drinks and snacks. Lots of meal kit companies, food deliveries, and meal plan builders forget this.
We're in stealth mode so far, but I believe this will work in China.
Isn't the most accurate customer preference data the actual real-time decision that the customer makes at the time of order?
We built a system to calculate science-backed meal plans based on customer data. Calories, macronutrients, micronutrients, vitamins, probiotics, fiber. Water.
We have over 5000 cookbooks from all over the World from which we curate our recipes, input them and get full nutritional breakdowns.
It is probably THE most important part of any diet — the ability to actually stick to it and enjoy it. What we want to do is to completely take away the decision fatigue, and provide diverse food that is tailored to your body.
Nutrition is complicated, and things that work for some people may not work for the other. The feedback loop is important. If a customer wants to lose fat or gain muscle, we track the progress and adjust their diets accordingly.
PS: "Real-time decision that the customer makes at the time of order" is fueled by ghrelin and stress, decision fatigue and availability, and is most often poor.
(Quick edit: who else remembers everyone and their nephew offering website hosting/colocation at ludicrously low prices in the early-to-mid 2000's?)
Groupon always suffered from being easy to copy and having no appreciable network effects.
Exactly the same thing is happening with ride-hailing now. It's harder to copy, but there's too much investment subsidizing it so no one knows what the market will be worth once riders have to pay sustainable rates. But they know being 2nd place will suck.
Citation: I worked at Groupon before and after the IPO.
In the case of the meal-kit industry, the author's suggesting there is no moat, or none has been identified/built yet.
Now to quote him:
> ... the first customers a company gains are those for whom the product has the best possible fit; by definition they cost less to acquire. Growing beyond that initial base, though, costs more and more.
> This is why network effects are so important. What differentiates services that are actually sustainable businesses is that the larger they grow the more their utility increases, and it is this increased utility that drives new customer acquisition (as opposed to simply spending more marketing dollars).
> Ride-sharing services are a perfect example...
So patents and vertical integration aren't the only type of moat. Network effects shouldn't be overlooked. However, it's hard to see what network effects [besides just economies of scale] Blue Apron will be able to leverage.
[In their ads they try to talk up their relationships, eg with farmers. If Blue Apron were trying to be a farm-goods marketplace, ie the Uber of produce, then that would be an effective moat. In the current case, I'm not sure I buy it]
[1]: Subscription needed :( https://stratechery.com/2017/blue-apron-files-for-ipo-networ...
Edit:
- I am, however, a happy subscriber of Blue Apron.
[fixed the above bullet]
- Thompson also gives Netflix as an example. The bigger it gets, the larger its backlog of [hopefully timeless] shows -- increasing its value for late subscribers.
- We have toddlers, and the menu was too "fancy". It's difficult to get a 4 year old to eat squid ink pasta.
- I felt bad about all that wasted packing material and giant ice packs.
We switched to Dream Dinners, which is a local place. My wife goes once a month, picks out a bunch of dinners for the month, and we throw them in the freezer. Each of the dinners fits in a gallon ziploc bag. They were generally easier and faster to cook (pre-chopped vegetables, pre-marinated meat, etc) and there is more choice to it and no shipping containers. Highly recommend.
Blue Apron takes care of the first two, which I don't enjoy, and let's me do (3), which I very much enjoy. A grocery store doesn't solve (1) and only partially solves (2) (often has item availability, too much quantity issues, and then I have to measure it, too).
But that's a good way of looking at it. Personally I like selecting (and modifying) recipes. I agree that getting the ingredients is often a pain--especially to the degree they invalidate the first step. My general philosophy is that if any of these services get people cooking rather than eating fast food that's a good thing.
[EDIT] reworded sentence to make it clearer.
These services just seem very niche-y to me. I'm not really the target market but, for any given service, there's a pretty narrow profile of cost-sensitivity, interest in prepping/cooking but not just buying ingredients, ability to plan a week out, etc.
Finally, if there were a real clamor for meal kits, what's to keep Whole Foods or whoever from just assembling their own meal kits?
Yes, of course you need other groceries beyond the meal kit itself, but that's not the point - the point is that you've paid the meal service to deal with all the boring parts of the process, which often includes the decision-making, so you can just enjoy the cooking and eating.
The wildly globe-hopping table of the home cook is a recent, and kinda silly, development. You can get plenty of variety without trying to prepare meals from every continent.
(this goes out the window if it's a major hobby, obviously, but in that case so should complaints about its difficulty/inconvenience, which are entirely self-imposed)
On first use answer some questions that provide information about dietary needs. Drag some sliders around to indicate preferences for simplicity, cost, ,quality, convenience. Some people want beans and rice because they're cheap, some people want fancier meals and care less about price. Some people are cooking for four and want meals that scale well. Some people
Each wee checkbox the meals you want to eat in accordance with your schedule for the upcoming week.
Press go and get a bunch of meals paired with a shopping list
click on the meals to revise as necessary (e.g regenerate on you don't like or mark an item on the list of required items as "I'll source this myself")
Add to cart, press go, wait for brown truck.
Something like that could be a hit with single men and college students.
That's where I see the value. People spend a lot of effort figuring out how to eat a balanced diet while optimizing for low (enough) cost or just close enough. Offloading the work of planning a balanced diet on a weekly level is something many people would pay a small premium for.
My wife now can cook a much wider variety of meals after a few months of meal kits. It also has reduced dramatically the thinking it required to plan meals in advance. If grocery stores want to compete they will have to work with their providers to create smaller packages of items to assemble and a team to design and forecast demand for different types of meals. Not impossible but definitely not easy, I see acquisitions happening in this space.
I wouldn't say they taught me to cook, I didn't learn any new techniques. But, I did get a lot of ideas from them, and it led us to eating a wider variety of food.
I'm now curious -- what do typical American university students eat? Do they cook, or are all meals provided? (Surely not at weekends?)
[1] http://laurenmclean.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/01_Sharwo...
[2] https://recipes.sainsburys.co.uk/recipes/main-courses/easy-c...
Most Americans, including students, cook standard American food such as hamburgers, hot dogs, eggs, spaghetti, roast chicken, ramen, steak etc., as well as a lot of canned soups, frozen vegetables, and boxed casserole mixes.
But these kits are for people who want to eat something novel every meal, and certainly not mundane working class food. I mean, you don't need a recipe for a hamburger.
So you'd be surprised. But, for the most part, these services justify their relatively high prices with recipes that may look a bit intimidating for many people to pull together on their own.
For us, and I think we were probably a bit better cooks than is normal, hamburgers would count as a lazy meal, assuming you mean cooking something like [1] from the fresh meat section.
Hot dogs, eggs alone, or ramen -- no; this is food for when you've arrived home alone drunk at 4:30. Or woken up hungover.
Roast chicken or steak is fine, so long as there's also some vegetables and some kind of sauce.
Average meals would be things like curries or stir-fries made with a pre-prepared sauce or spice mix, chicken/turkey fricassees, risottos, or casseroles. I think we discovered fairly quickly that £3 tetra pak wine improved most dishes, so long as one didn't drink it.
The Blue Apron recipes have fancier ingredients than we would have bought when we were 18-22, and a little more effort in the sauces. Looking at things like [2] and [3], the skill required was well within what we could make, although we'd probably use dried herbs, cheaper vegetables (canned sweetcorn, normal size tomatoes), and normal meat rather than anything special.
In fact, the "Fresh Basil Fettuccine" is almost exactly like our "use up what's left in the fridge" meal.
[1] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=29239931...
[2] https://www.blueapron.com/recipes/seared-chicken-creamy-past...
[3] https://www.blueapron.com/recipes/fresh-basil-fettuccine-pas...
Only one dorm offered cooked evening meals, and then only Monday-Friday. It was a fair bit more expensive to take this dorm.
In any case, most universities only offer dorms for the first year.
[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/ImageCropToolT4/imageTool/uploade...
It's an interesting leverage point, since there's obviously a [possibly smaller-than-they-want] market. But the expansion into automated grocery will be a matter of luck & timing. Unless you're Amazon [in which case it's persistence]
Home delivery seems to be one of the key factors, so as long as Whole Foods/etc can offer home delivery, then yeah there's nothing stopping them.
If only a company with a battle tested home delivery network would acquire them...
[I'm ignoring AWS and other products or services that don't need to be physically delivered.]
Amazon Fresh outsources their actual delivery, as well, so no points for that one.
In my neighborhood there's an Amazon delivery truck that drops off Amazon bags by people who have Amazon uniforms on... Perhaps they're 1099, but for all intents and purposes it is Amazon doing the delivery.
I do think there's some market for urban stores that people walk to carrying this type of product. And I've seen at least one example.
http://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/hamilton-county/cincinna...
Edit: Disclosure -- I own a small amount of Kroger stock.
Pre-portioned, pre-prepped,low-cooking-effort packaged food products are already a big item in various forms for supermarkets. As are fully cooked meals. No doubt meal packs will be too, of they are popular.
OTOH, Grocery stores selling fully-cooked meals haven't killed restaurants (not even takeout-focussed restaurants).
- Surely this isn't the first business to make a loss on acquisition in expectation of breakeven. That in of itself doesn't make this untenable. I also feel that the Groupon analogy is a bit underbaked: Groupon (and the ilk) were also I suspect totally unsustainable for the end businesses.
- There is substantial scope for curation. This in & of itself may not not be enough of course, but this doesn't seem like total commodity land either. Also it isn't just about getting the ingredients bundled together. It is harder than you'd think making sure standard measures of stuff in the supermarket doesn't go to waste from spoilage when trying to cook whilst keeping repetition low. Optimising for this is probably an interesting and not super simple problem.
I've only been exposed to the UK variants. The above may not hold true for other places though.
There are businesses with scale advantages: doing it bigger makes it much cheaper.
There are businesses with required huge capital investments: if you don't have the $25 billion silicon foundry, you don't make CPUs.
There are businesses where a national brand is a big advantage, and businesses where local is a selling point.
The meal-kit industry looks like it's halfway between grocery stores and delivery restaurants, and that means economies of scale aren't hugely important, but a reputation for quality is. Local/national can go either way, but most people are willing to experiment every so often and have strong preferences about what they like -- which means that having a lot of players in the market is to their advantage, and long-term contracts are not.
If I don't use the meal kits, that's fine, but I'm just going elsewhere - restaurants, delivery, take-out, grocery store.
I don't need discount yoga classes or buy one get one froyo coupons every day. You don't need discounts to survive. You can just buy less. Discounts are not a commodity that I wish to purchase often. I have used groupon once, and have been innundated ever since with constant spam about new deals for things which sound like good deals but probably I wouldn't even give them a second look at full price. So I don't bother. I don't need half that stuff anyway.
I hope meal kit services continue to thrive, despite negativity from investors. They are a service that I truly value and will probably keep my subscription to BA going until BA service quality drops or the food stops being as good. So far, they haven't done either.
But for god sakes BA, EASY ON THE GARLIC. You don't need to send me a whole bulb every time when the recipe just needs 2 cloves.
They should also sell knives and other kitchen tools.
Lastly, these meal providers should have an app with a running timer that gives directions while you cook. For instance, 'while onions are sauteing, wipe cutting board and crush garlic' --- just like a GPS but for cooking.
The major hurdle for these services is that there is still a certain level of skill assumed -- but if they aren't teaching these skills, the consumer doesn't really come off any better.
Ever see a family eat the same thing. I mean a family of say five and not DINKs.
Amazon acquiring WFM will just make it worse if instacart wasn't already.
What do you mean by this? When I was growing up the whole family (of 4, plus dog eating leftovers) ate the same meal. Is that not the norm? Is it an American thing?
Yes most likely (American Thing).
I'll give you a rough anecdotal example I have seen:
A 13 year old that is a vegan, A father who is a pseudo body builder (eats lots of meat), a picky 8 year old that will not eat certain colors and of course a gluten, organic mommy.
And of course there is the toddler/infant age where god forbid you don't follow the pediatricians recommendations (despite that humans have survived this far and produce 8 billion people).
Oh and I haven't even got into timing considerations (ie some individuals eat earlier and others later).
Yep its probably an American thing :)
In meal-kit business, you're a subscriber of one service. Switching to a new one means entering all your info again, choosing from the list of options, and waiting for the kits to start shipping to you.
I know someone working on a roll up of refrigerated warehouses. A REIT might be part of their exit plan but I don't think these meal-in-a-box companies even register on their radar.
Each VC is forced to dump in increasing amounts of money due to sunk cost fallacy for a fixed prize at the end of the rainbow. At the end of the day, the prize won isn't worth the collective investment and the entire industry represents a net subsidy to the consumer in the form of discounted services and referral bonuses.
It's one of the few things that make living in San Francisco bearable as it tends to be ground zero for these kind of gigantic customer acquisition battles.
That's a massive disappointment.
Update: Oh, that waas content. My error.
Thanks. I ... cannot say how absolutely abhorrent I find that stuff. Even when pointed out in articles.
I'm sensitised to it in part because I've taken extreme pains to block as much of that as possible. A harder task than it should be.
> the ones responsible for, say, this:
I thought that was the end of the article, and a very cleverly placed transition into the ad content.
I almost wish the sites that run these ads would do this now; it would be more entertaining.
The general consensus here seems to be that, "My time is not well spent preparing and consuming, by my own hand, the life giving meals I will eat."
But, of course, I've misspoken. And, now prepare for the assault of many pedantic, infuriated, hacker news commentators.
tldr: only lazy people with more time than money would be interested in this.
if anyone disagrees go ahead and post your cooking schedule and workflow. i'll point out the glaring inefficiencies (e.g. buying small amounts of food frequently for preparing and then complaining it takes too long to eat; cooking small amounts of food; not preslicing meat upon purchase, etc)
the one thing i'll give meal kits is that you can get a large variety of food.
Opportunity costs are real, people's preferences are heterogeneous, and also I'm pretty sure you're 'lazy' too – using a computer to perform all of those arithmetic calculations it's doing!
this fact, however, is irrelevant from my point.