Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben174 | Hacker News Reader

One of the big players should launch a giant warehouse - serving as a giant kitchen. Capable of cooking all kinds of different varieties of cuisine and tons of automation. And a huge staff of well-trained chefs cooking, and delivering to a ~50 mile radius.

I'd imagine they'd open this in - say Fremont - and deliver to the entire bay area.

It would be great, because I could order Mexican food for me, Indian food for the wife, and the kids could have a couple hamburgers.

Seems like something Amazon would be good at.

View on HN

>One of the big players should launch a giant warehouse - serving as a giant kitchen. Capable of cooking all kinds of different varieties of cuisine and tons of automation. And a huge staff of well-trained chefs cooking, and delivering to a ~50 mile radius.

They did, it was called SpoonRocket. I loved it, you could get a decent meal delivered in under 5 minutes. But they failed horribly because the economics just don't work out [0].

https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/15/spoonrocket-shuts-down/ [0]

I miss SpoonRocket. It was super convenient and they had some really good food.

Agreed. Their breakfast options were the best. I could wake up in the morning for work, put in an order, and have a full hot breakfast show up at my door by the time I get out of the shower.

What I really miss is the pulled pork mac 'n cheese. I don't want to know how many calories were in that thing, but it was delicious.

>SpoonRocket had reached a positive contribution margin — it was selling meals for more than it cost to cook, package, and deliver them. But due to other costs and the frosty fundraising climate, it wasn’t able to get the money it needed to continue operating.

I wouldn't describe that as "failing horribly". They just couldn't raise money. I was under the impression that they were turning a profit. Maybe this article isn't accurate, do you have other information? I'm actually quite interested in this story, seems like a cool idea but I imagine the financial side of this needs to be really well managed. So many possible places that costs could get away from you.

Others in this space: Sprig (failed) and Munchery (still around) come to mind.

DC has Galley, which cooks and delivers meals that you finish/reheat in your own oven. The food is good and the prices are fair and the delivery is fast (though now you need to pick a "Delivery Window" and sometimes they sell out). I think it's founded by former LivingSocial folks.

We actually just did something like this, but on a much smaller scale than "a giant warehouse".

We've (https://myaccio.com/) been running as a premium delivery service in Victoria, BC for a few years. Instead of taking a 25-30% discount from restaurants we were marking items up by 20%. We deliver mostly from the "good" restaurants who can't afford to take a 25-30% hit just to provide delivery. While this was turning into a good lifestyle business, delivering food when you don't control all the variables is extremely hard (and not exactly profitable at a small scale).

What we ended up making was "The Kitchen by Accio". It's high end delivery food made by extremely talented chefs. There are four concepts to choose from each with its own head chef. We launched just over 3 weeks ago and things are going pretty well so far. We still deliver from other restaurants but we've noticed that a growing population of our "regulars" are starting to just order from The Kitchen.

That's really cool. I hadn't considered that model before. Seems other's have, my gut tells me there's a successful business to be had just have to keep the financials inline.

There are probably a lot of businesses that work as premium small-scale businesses that explicitly are about convenience for people who don’t mind spending money on them. The problem with almost all of these VC-funded startups is they have to grow, grow, grow which means that they have to also appeal to people who count their pennies or at least dollars. And it’s hard to sell a luxury service without a surcharge.

Honestly? Sounds awful. Industrialized, lowest common denominator fast food. Plus pretty much any time I've eaten at a big restaurant offering options from a bunch of different cuisines, the experience has been somewhere between mediocre and awful.

ADDED: As others have pointed out, you can put together something that's effectively managed like a high-end food court. But it seems as if the economics are tough.

Yep, sounds like one step above Soylent.

My experience has been that the more things on the menu the worse the lower quality the food is, however it can be executed successfully. Wegmans, one of the grocers in the area has a huge variety of prepared food options. Despite the number of dishes, the quality is consistently high. They put a substantial effort into developing an entre before it goes into stores, and also own a few restaurants that probably help with this. Just one example of how it can be executed successfully.

ClusterTruck (https://clustertruck.com/) does this in Indianapolis and I'm a huge fan of it. There strategy is to license recipes from local food trucks then cook them in a kitchen downtown. I A bit pricy but I think the business model is brilliant and the food is always good and delivery is fast and consistent.

I'm surprised they haven't grown or expanded more. I think it's such a great model, but then again who knows what the logistics is like especially in a larger city.

I noticed that Whole Foods is essentially starting to move in that direction, with these options:

* Eat in the store (self-serve "hot bar") * Take home already cooked, heat and eat * Take home meal kit, cook at home

https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/department/prepared-foods

Add in Amazon Fresh for home delivery of most of the above, and they seem to have a covered most of the options.

https://www.amazon.com/AmazonFresh/

> starting to move in that direction

Just want to point out that these things are not new at whole foods. I can recall eating at the hot bar 3+ years ago, and they've always had take home already cooked items as well.

Based on other companies which tried and failed (e.g. Spoonrocket, Sprig) this seems like a risky model to follow. It's possible that the costs of managing such a kitchen plus delivery service is at this point more expensive than brick and mortar, or the margin earned on these deliveries is much less than sit down customers.

Maybe once kitchen automation technology gets there this can be a workable model.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/26/on-demand-food-startup-spr... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/15/spoonrocket-shuts-down/

SpoonRocket (as noted) and Sprig were doing this and neither survived. Great concept, but extremely difficult to pull off.

Deliveroo, the biggest player in the UK does this https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/oct/28/deliveroo-d...

This may have been a byproduct of their acquisition of Maple.

Isn't this basically what Munchery does (although their meals are delivered cold)?

INAL, but I'm fairly certain there are a lot of food safety regulations that would prevent that or make it a hell of a hassle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com