Chowdy: Shutting Down a +$110,000/Month Food Startup | Hacker News Reader

Chowdy: Shutting Down a +$110,000/Month Food Startup

failory.com

37 pointsnicoserdeir30 comments

> we learned that it’s illegal to use home kitchen for commercially sold food

aka "we didn't do any research at all"

> we were inspired by Uber and Airbnb to just ignore the regulators.

Those pesky food safety regulations. These guys were extremely negligent and should be glad they got out before anybody got sick.

Yes. Keeping food in a fridge for 48 hours. What a crime.

Take a look at one of their hubs: https://imgur.com/a/PQJB09X. Maybe around 300+ meals stuffed in there? Back-of-the-enveloping the amount of time people are opening and closing those doors, I'm a little dubious they're staying at refrigerator temperature the whole time. I'm not surprised someone looked at this and thought, "That's an e. coli outbreak waiting to happen."

The more full the refrigerator the longer it will maintain temperature.

That's only true assuming there's enough time for the contents to reach the target temperature.

I wouldn't cling to the narrative that it was those bureaucrats and their food safety regulations that killed Chowdy. Long listed three reasons they failed before he got to, "the Toronto health department did not approve of our distribution model."

That refrigerator isn't even designed to hold food, it's supposed to be for beverages

Units with stainless doors and /or heavy duty glass frame construction have higher HP rating on the compressor with better insulation.

Are you making 5hat assessment simply because of the glass doors?

Because grocers use glass door freezers that are opened and closed all day long and it doesn't seem to be a problem.

No I am not making a 5hat assessment, I have worked in this industry and visited the production floor at the largest refrigeration factory in USA

Most reputable manufacturers have a logo at the topleft corner of the unit. Many offbrand Chinese manufacturers don't have a visible logo here.

Most front of the house refrigerators were designed to be (1) cheaper and therefore lesser quality components, (2) less insulation and therefore more packing. Because it was designed to hold drinks. You can tell this, namely in that it has a sliding door mechanism, which is standard across these units. Heavy duty glass kitchen refrigerators are always hinge based, namely because you need to load / unload quickly and have extra space accomodation

What you see in the grocery store is a whole different level. Whereas most standalone glassdoor units like this are self-contained refrigeration, the ones at the grocery store are generally remote-based compressors. They operate at a much higher efficiency, HP rating, and run at a higher voltage.

Could have been solved with temperature logging, then they would have a paper trail they could show to the regulators. Of course that paper trail may well show deficiencies but they could fix that. An employee would have to visit daily along with remote data logging.

I think their hub model is pretty sound provided you can satisfy the regulators.

If a supermarket freezer can keep things frozen while being opened and closed all day long, I can't see why this wouldn't be able to keep up.

It might not be rated high enough, but you can't tell from this picture.

There's a lot of food safety issues they ignored though

- 3rd party hubs means you get a wide range of manufacturers for refrigerated. Not all are rated equally. Sometimes the compressor goes bad, or insulation gaskets need to be replaced

- Food rotation. Because there is no staff at each location, there's a higher chance that you'll find meals 1+ weeks old. Its up to the consumer to see the date stamped

- If you rotate food often, unit will not be up to temperature (34-38*F) generally.

- If you don't have a designated employee at site to move food into refrigerator, it might spoil before it gets there. This deals with logistics

- Using 3rd party has a huge oversight in potentially tampering with food + legal implications.

- Inspections / legal is complicated

1: what if they were providing refrigerators?

2: This is daily delivery, so just have a driver remove all day-old food and bring new food

4: what if driver is responsible for that?

1,2,4 - These are all good points, I could not say either way. I would have to see more pictures of Chowdy's operations to know

When I lived in New Caledonia growing up, we had a similar service which used reusable food "boxes" that would get delivered to your front door or to your work every lunch. It would be left on your door step and it was up to you to grab it quickly and refrigerate it. This was in a tropical country. No one ever got sick. Seems like regulatory overkill, especially in a place where half the year the outside temperature is colder than most fridges.

(Link in French for those curious, it's called "la gamelle" and it's still going strong today, albeit with throwaway plastic containers.http://lafamilletortue.com/gamelle-nouvelle-caledonie/ )

"with almost half quitting after the first week"...to me this sounds super critical...no amount of funding or a partnership with even god him/herself, can't make it work unless this is fixed.

Yeah he didn’t really talk about food and menu. 6 to 7 dollar per meal isn’t anything to scoff at. It’d better be tasty on consistent basis.

I'm wondering if they would have been able to convince the food regulators if the fridges themselves had sensors and such.

Concept would be to create an audit trail of the fridge itself from the sensors.

"The average lifetime of a subscriber was 9 weeks, with almost half quitting after the first week.". I wonder if someone tried to find their reasons to do so. He also notes that "consumers have no loyalty to food brands; they will happily try a bunch and switch to another service if they can get a better deal.", but knowing which criteria they use may be vital(?) The "lower price" can't be their sole criterion when it comes to food they consume.

> The "lower price" can't be their sole criterion when it comes to food they consume.

Yeah, their analysis of the situation seems very shallow

If people are only concerned about price they can just go to McDonald's

Or buy a bunch of frozen crap from the store.

I'm quite loyal with prepared food, not loyal with ingredients.

Having tried multiple food services, I've frequently tried because of an intro price, discovered the quality was meh, and immediately quit after the first week.

Many test this way. Chowdy's food quality may have been not as high as expected by (most/a too high fraction) of their customers.

My experiance with food companies is that this is just a way for the company to excuse their own shitty practices which drive customers off. Of cause I’m going to be “loyal” if price quality and reliability are all on point. But almost every food related service I’ve tried have a great pitch but suck on at least two of those three points. If people where dumping them after just one week they had mayor issues that where not related to regulations.

These people built a business that provided a lot of value and a bunch of bureaucrats killed it because they didn’t like the thought of something being in a fridge for less than 48 hours.

This is the message of these regulations: don’t try to do anything in the real world. Solve only ephemeral, virtual problems.

This guy is working on a travel information app now. He has gotten the message.

I hear you but it sounds like the concern was that no one onsite with the refrigerators could be considered responsible for monitoring for possible tampering with the food.

That's what tamper proof seals are for aren't they?

Cameras in fridge + CCTV could also have worked.

Fridge/unattended issue is a solved one. Japan has vending machines for food.

I think their biggest mistake was turning down the dragon funding. They would have avoided most issues especially the one that led to their shutdown.

With food vending machines, better pricing, and new location deals, this might work out. E.g. A vending machine in an office building.

I bet they would do well in silicon valley or any other location with high startup density.

So anyone should be allowed to open a business and experiment with possibly dangerous practices, some of which we know injured or killed people in the past, because then more people would want to start businesses? Seems like the exact pattern we want to discourage.

I bet these founders opened this business as a corporation rather than in their individual capacities — meaning they were shield personally from the liability and consequences of their actions. Limited liability is a privilege extended to encourage risk taking, but it comes with a set of responsibilities to limit risky behavior to within norms we have, as a society, learned are beyond what we are willing to tolerate let alone encourage; these limits or responsibilities are called regulations.

By all means question the necessity of the specific regulation; their efficacy in avoiding the harm of food poisoning, but do so with fact based scientific methods. Don’t merely throw out any regulation unless you want to go back to a state of nature where anything goes.

> Our pricing was way too low. So low that we basically made no profit over the 2 and half years we ran Chowdy. So low that we didn’t have any resources in reserve to help us deal with unexpected emergencies.

Yeah, absolutely nothing about the business model had anything to do with it going under...

I think this would work extremely well in most developing countries.

In fact, I have read about some system in India or Japan where a lot of people get home make food, distributed in stacked containers.

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