Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

There's definitely a use case for these services. It's just a fairly narrow one.

- Willing and able to cook for, ideally, more than one person

- Able to plan a week ahead for the most part

- OK with paying a non-trivial premium to have a lot of menu planning and shopping be handled by someone else

I tried Blue Apron and thought it was "OK" but I could never really make these meal kit services work out for me. t obviously works for some people though.

View on HN

It's targeting a narrow intersection of people who are rich enough to pay $10 per serving for a meal, have the time to cook every night, and are okay with the lack of customizability in ingredients.[1]

We considered it but it made no sense for us. It would save us a little money versus eating out all the time, but it doesn't solve the time problem (my wife and I both get home around 7:30 or 8:00 and need to get the family fed immediately). It reduces grocery shopping time, but we do that on the weekend where we actually have a couple of hours to spare, unlike after work.

I would rather see a high-end TV dinner service.

[1] And also apparently don't have any kids--paying $10 for an adult is one thing, paying $10 for a full meal for a child is another.

And that is a very narrow intersection, hence the penny stock status. I knew Blue Apron was going to fail when my Mom kept trying to give me hers that were going to go rotten soon.

> I would rather see a high-end TV dinner service.

This is interesting. If I understand your point, I think Kettlebell Kitchen[0] qualifies. I have friends that use that and love it.

But I'm sure there must be others out there. Does anyone else use a service like this? I've been thinking about using something like it for myself.

[0] https://www.kettlebellkitchen.com/

Lots of people at my gym love it! It's so easy to use since they deliver to the gym.

> I would rather see a high-end TV dinner service.

Am exploring that market at the minute, the model would be order on your morning commute, pick up freshly prepped ready meals from your transport hub on the way home.

Interested in talking to anyone who's looking for something in that space.

Not sure if you saw this recently but there might be some relevant lessons to drawn on from Chowdy? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18312602

Your business model description sounds a bit similar.

Thanks for the link - seems like a lot of their issues are based on playing it as a "startup" (although in the UK you can use a home kitchen for commercial food, you just still need to register with the FSA).

Am planning it as "just a regular" food business, so not looking for the rocket-style growth it seems they were banking on. Interesting story of failure in the space though!

We have a few of those in LA. They're called My Fit Foods and other similar names. They prep the food that day and offer breakfast, lunch, and deener options. Each meal runs 8 - 12 bucks. They're pretty wholesome usually, but they have a decent selection.

My fit foods went bankrupt not too long ago, but most have been transformed to local versions of the same company.

Looks like a very similar model - am interested in the local versions (for my interests in food, looking for something more sustainable than "startupy").

Sounds similar to munchery but without the delivery. Question is if the hubs are located in convienent locations or not. If you make me sit in rush hour traffic to pick up dinner not already on the way, that’s a no go.

My London-centric nature essentially has it as being train/metro/tube only, not sure it'd be worthwhile scaling to locations without intense public transport density.

Freshly does packaged prepared meals, which is presumably what you're talking about. There's another one I can't remember now.

My two working parent family used it for a while. While it didn't save any time vs. cooking something from scratch, it really helped us broaden the food horizons of our family. We (including a formerly finicky child) ate a lot of things that we normally wouldn't, and fewer trips to the local market meant fewer impulse buys of random other food. That meant dinner was all we had and it was a great tool to get our child to try new things and to start to enjoy eating new things (catfish tacos, squid ink pasta, etc).

We eventually stopped due to many delivery issues we encountered. Our deliveries would frequently come one or even two days late and sometimes not at all. My favorite was when a weeks worth of deliveries all arrived on the same day.

How would you define "rich enough"? My SO and I collectively make $80k per year and we can afford 4 meals a week. Granted, it's a little more expensive than planning our own meals. But it saves shopping and planning time, so the overall time commitment is at most an hour per day (the time it takes to cook the meal).

Amy's kitchen is the leader for high-end frozen foods. There is a lot of competition in this space too.

Been a while since I’ve had it but recall liking one of their burritos.

I cook because it's cheaper than eating out. But the trade-off is the time I spend researching and preparing healthy and diverse meals. I'm only feeding myself and fresh food goes bad quickly, so I also don't have the benefits of scale. The problem is, currently you can only pick two out of cheap, good and quick.

So a better product which solves a real problem needs to nail all three. It needs to be cheap, good (fresh, healthy and diverse) and quick.

Being quick involves subsidizing not only the meal prep but also the research involved in making good choices. Properly educating consumers on basic nutrition and using graphic labels to encode nutritional information at a glance.

Being good means sourcing fresh meat and vegetables. Properly flash freezing, separating, storing and shipping meals to maximize longevity and the area covered by each commissary kitchen.

Being cheap is the hard part. First, you and your shareholders have to be willing to put the consumer first. as Bezos did with Amazon. Profits are a side-effect of maximum efficiency, but the baseline is whether the customer is happy with the product.

You also have to reduce waste as much as possible by streamlining recipes and ingredients and measuring portions precisely. Reduce plastic use. If you ship meals with special packaging like refrigerants, encourage monthly rebates for customers who ship them back out in bulk.

It's not a hard problem, the issue is that of funding. Shareholders expect a certain margin or eventual buyout whereas the food industry has notoriously low margins to begin with. Existing convenience meal businesses tackle the higher end market as a result. But the convenience meal lifestyle is slowly becoming a necessity across demographics, and a company which tackles this issue smartly and aims for sub-$5 meals, and offers great bulk prices for monthly memberships, and is willing to not be raking in billions, will come out on top.

It's $5-$7 for a standard meal at McDonald's - $10 for a healthier and more interesting alternative seems like a small premium.

You can cook a healthy meal for the McDonald’s price.

>I would rather see a high-end TV dinner service.

Yeah. Much as I like cooking, there are many evenings when I just want to pop something in the oven. I have a few options. (Have a great local turkey farm and there are a few traditional comfort food staples in the grocery store that I like.) But it would be nice to be able to just buy a frozen lasagna as good as the ones I sometimes make and freeze.

> OK with paying a non-trivial premium to have a lot of menu planning and shopping be handled by someone else

This is the one I've never been able to get past. For what these services cost, I can have someone else prepare my meal that will taste just as good or better. Why would I not do that?

I get if you're trying to learn to cook or something like that, but that only sounds like a temporary problem.

$10 per serving is essentially fast food prices in the bay area - you can't really get a healthy meal with meat and vegetables.

My family used Blue Apron for a while when we first had kids, and it was great for our lifestyle. We did move on to a service that optimizes grocery shopping so we can buy ingredients for a week's worth of meals in one shopping trip.

Edit: for those who asked, I am using thefresh20 now. It's pretty low-tech (just a weekly pdf). Besides being straightforward to shop for, it tells you how to prep stuff ahead of time. For example, bake 8 potatoes the first day and use half in a recipe today, half in a few days. Cook some pork chops today and save some for fried rice in a few days. Cook a pot of quinoa today and use it throughout the week.

There are a number of other services out there that allow you to customize things like servings/calories per meal and diet types but I am dubious about how well they could possibly optimize shopping and prep to use up a whole quanta of an ingredient over multiple recipes in the course of a week to be near the manually curated efficiency of fresh 20. If anyone has experience with those please let me know!

I cook meals in SF most nights for way less than $20 for 2 people without trying, meat or seafood and veggies.

What service is that?

What service did you move on to? I'd be interested a better curated grocery delivery system than Amazon Fresh (which is already saving us a ton of time as a busy family).

And that makes sense for those living there, but not everyone lives in the Bay Area or pays anything near what people pay there for things. I would think for a service like this to succeed, it needs to be applicable to places where you can go to a real restaurant for ~$10-15 a person. Which is most of the US where the other 315million Americans live.

Eh what? I can eat out at a restaurant for like $15 with tax and tip, and the packed food usually lasts me an additional meal. I avoid pricey restaurants though.

Implying that $10 and $15 are approximately the same is telling. I'm talking about 6 to 40 person-meals per week for a family. (FWIW $10 per person-meal from blue apron is at the high end of home cooking, unless you are cooking high end ingredients like fancy fish or steak or including wine)

Especially when you start really planning meals around whatever is on sale that week and carrying ingredients from one meal to another, $10 per person per meal is definitely a lot. Also, pantry items where that $10 can get you a 5# bag of rice that lasts for many meals.

One of my favorite personal discoveries is to buy the whole broccoli, use the florets as a vegetable side, and the stems in a soup. The sturdier stems hold up better with the same flavor.

You said $10 per serving. I average $7.50 per serving from eating out ($15 per eat-out which lasts me two meals, since I go for restaurants which provide generously sized dishes).

What do you eat at a restaurant that costs that much?

Huh? Go to a random Asian restaurant in SF and get a stir fry whatever and you're going to be in the $10-$15 range with tax and tip pretty easily.

I'm unaware of any common restaurant (i.e. not fast food) where you can get a full meal for much below $10. Factor in the additional cost of a non-water beverage (soda or beer, for instance) as well as a tip, and it's likely you're spending $15 or more.

This article from BusinessInsider (2015) indicates that the average cost per meal at common "chain restaurants" starts at $12.17. Over half of the restaurants on the list have average meal prices in excess of $15. [1]

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-it-costs-to-eat-at-...

Dishes are usually $10-$12. Slightly less for some restaurants, but usually at those restaurants I need to order something else as well (e.g. $2 naan at an Indian restaurant or fries at a burger place). Add in tax and 20% tip and it comes out to ~$15.

$10 per serving is egregious. Take a blue apron recipe with you to a grocery store, and I bet you can buy all the ingredients for $2.5 a meal.

Not in the same quantities you can't. If something calls for, say, eggs, you aren't going to buy a single egg, you're buying six at a minimum. If something calls for fresh cilantro, you're buying a whole bunch.

If you're cooking for a family, fine, but cooking for one or two? The food waste problem sucks, and you can't really get around it unless you like eating the same thing for days in a row.

Eggs last for quite some time. Yeah, herbs are an issue if you don't grow them. But not all recipes that call for them really need them. And you can also freeze leftovers that are useful for some purposes. I cook for one during the week. I do eat leftovers but I also repurpose ingredients, freeze things, and definitely don't eat the same thing for days in a row.

Please, you do what we have been doing for the last 100 years. Freeze the extra. So you get 1 meal that is fresh and two that are frozen you can eat in a couple weeks. Do you honestly think that when you go to applebee's (or similar) the food didn't come out of a freezer?

But maybe the real problem here is lack of "cooking" knowledge. Grinding that cilantro up and mixing it with some garlic and olive oil will extend its life in the fridge for weeks. Or just freeze it, or dry it. Yes, food waste sucks, but that is because a lot of traditional skills have been lost. My wife thinks I'm weird for taking chicken/turkey bones/necks/etc and making stock, but it turns a pile of bones meat scraps into a nice soup.

This is also how to (apparently) run a profitable restaurant. Food rolls down from the fresh vegetables/meat, through the casserole stages until it ends up in a soup somewhere.

Really it doesn't take much effort, but really after a day of work + driving/etc I'm lucky if I have the motivation to tear open a frozen bag of stir fry.

>My wife thinks I'm weird for taking chicken/turkey bones/necks/etc and making stock, but it turns a pile of bones meat scraps into a nice soup.

I was at my dad's over Thanksgiving and we had a pretty good-size turkey. Saved some leftover meat for sandwiches. And then I made turkey soup and stock out of the carcass and some more of the leftover meat. Maybe this is considered weird by SV standards but I'm by no means a pioneer homesteader and this seems absolutely normal to me.

> Take a blue apron recipe with you to a grocery store, and I bet you can buy all the ingredients for $2.5 a meal

Where the hell are you shopping that you can self-construct a blue apron meal for $2.50?

$2.50 will get you the basil to use in the recipe and that is about it. Then you need the chicken ($7 minimum) and produce ($5-$7). The starches ($2-$5). Any one-off spices (could be $1 or $15 depending).

Sorry, but people who brag about eating for $2.50/meal either live in places with a dirt cheap cost of living or don't know how to add.

To me, your prices seem unrealistic. You can get chicken for like $2 a pound, and you're not using a pound of chicken for a single serving of any meal, so it's something like a dollar or less per person. Starches are dirt cheap, $5 buys you enough pasta or rice or potatoes for at least a dozen servings. E.g. a five pound bag of rice is $3 in Walmart, and if it's a side to some chicken&produce dish, then that comes out to something like $0.20 for starches per person - an order of magnitude difference.

> I can have someone else prepare my meal that will taste just as good or better

Maybe. For one thing, it depends on where you live. I guarantee you that I can cook better than pretty much anyplace within a 15 minute drive of my house. Secondly--and this is perhaps at least partly a reflection of how much I eat out when traveling on business--but, when I'm home, I mostly don't want to go out to a restaurant.

When I get home, there’s a 60 min window for socializing and meals before bedtime routines begin. Going out to eat requires picking a location, getting everyone into the car, picking your order at the restaurant, waiting for food, waiting for check, piling in and going home. That just doesn’t fit in 60 min.

On the other hand, grocery shopping requires advance collaborative choice. Sometimes the choosing can take over an hour. Delegating one decider comes with its own hazards, and effectively binds the decider to also be the grocery shopper in order to execute appropriately.

Services like BlueApron solve for that by reducing the number of choices and removing the need to leave the house. If you don’t mind cooking / enjoy picking up new cooking skills, you optimize for stress-free time with your family.

Blue aprons should seek to have some subsidies from states or insurance where they can provide healthy meals to SnAP users, or elderly, or offer it to apartment complexes where they know how many units just want "blue apron sunday dinner" or something

The average SNAP benefit is $126 a month. According to Blue Apron, their price per serving is $10 plus shipping. At their lowest tier, Blue Apron costs $50 a week for 4 servings.

Neither Blue Apron nor SNAP recipients could survive off of one another.

I meant to have a portion of that in some sort of subsidized manner...

Not a replacement. I also think snap is bullshit. For example, you cant buy toiletries with it and you cant buy things which are cooked.

The best cooked deal of anything is a $5 rotisserie chicken at costco.

And snap users can never get those.

But it would be interesting if blue apron were to cater to larger groups, such as retirment homes, or elderly communities...

> But it would be interesting if blue apron were to cater to larger groups, such as retirment homes, or elderly communities...

SNAP recipients, retirement homes and elderly communities discriminate on cost.

It's almost always more efficient to deal directly with a food distributor or wholesaler at that scale.

Why can't they sell for cheaper than $50/4?

Sounds like they have a lot of high-tech labor costs for a fundamentally low-tech, low-margin business. They were all over my LinkedIn a year or two ago.

Because it was started by people who are not subject matter experts and funded by people who are not subject matter experts.

It may have a place at $5 per person per meal, all inclusive and even that it is questionable for the majority of the market.

This begs the question,

Who are the most moon-shot long-term visionaries of the investment market, where their actual investments will exponentially benefit a large group of humans positively over time, aside rom bill gates

Reply on news.ycombinator.com