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Comment by davis_m | Hacker News Reader

I have long thought that there is an opening for local grocery stores to take a lot of this market. Many of my local supermarkets (HyVee, Walmart) allow for online ordering, but they all require the user to input items one-by-one. If they added a feature to add entire recipes in a single click, I think they would do very well for themselves. The additional cost of adding a recipe card would be negligible.

The customer's cost isn't increased over regular online ordering, and there isn't the issue of increased packaging. The food is fresh from the local supermarket and doesn't have to be shipped, beyond at most a local delivery.

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Both of my local grocers, King Soopers and Safeway, have meal kits on gondolas right when you walk into the store, even before the flowers. Since beer just became legal to sell in grocers statewide, they even have suggestions for the beer to drink with your meal kit. They also do delivery now too, online or by phone. I constantly see employees going down isles with those plastic boxes, filling out orders via those globby Amazon-warehouse style scanners. They'll pick out the good stuff too, I've seen a few employees putting produce back on the bins if they find some small defect. Those Safeway employees are also unionized, the pay and benefits are alright for the work.

I've no idea how you could possibly compete with that level of ease, service, and selection. I'd not go long on BlueApron et al. I mean, Munchery just closed out of the blue the other month. They all are on the gallows block.

"I have long thought that there is an opening for local grocery stores to take a lot of this market."

I have talked with a local specialty supermarket owner about this, and basically it's too expensive to do at small scale.

For large supermarkets you would think that it would work, but it turns out it's just not that useful overall. Albert Heijn in the Netherlands has had the beginnings of this for decades: small cards at the entrance of a shop with recipes, a selection of 12-15 that rotates weekly. They have a (monthly or bimonthly?) magazine with recipes. Since a few years you can order online (either for delivery or pickup) and you can put all ingredients for a recipe in your shopping basket with one click (from the website, from the mobile version of the magazine, everywhere you can think of). They have an app that syncs with your account so that you can use it as an in-shop shopping list (i.e. no more printing). They have functionality that shows you the optimal path through the store, given a set of things you want to buy. All things of which I thought 10 years ago 'if only they would add this, I would do all my shopping there!'. But now it's 2019 and it turns out that after the novelty wears off (2 weeks?), all that just doesn't matter as much as you would think it would.

Hy-Vee has Blue Apron-style meal kits in most stores now:

https://www.hy-vee.com/mealtime/

They're also opening up Hy-Vee Fast and Fresh stores, which are smaller locations built around these and other premade heat-and-server dinners (Chinese food, sushi, enchiladas).

Ocado has been doing it for a while, although obviously you have to create the recipe for the first time because they can’t read your mind to know for how many people you’re cooking. Also I’m always baffled reading this kind of discussions and seeing that there are actually many people that use these meal services that for me are the archetype of useless..

This is the way I make my weekly grocery list. Add a recipe for each night from the list of recipes I've previously entered and those ingredients go onto the list. Translating those ingredients to items to be picked up in the store doesn't seem like that far of a leap ("cheese" --> "Daiya Pepperjack, 8oz")

H-E-B does exactly this in Texas. They have packed-daily boxes for $12 - $30 depending on the serving size.

H-E-B is a truly remarkable grocery phenomenon that I can't really quite describe, and I was hoping to see someone mention it here.

But also, yes their packaged dinner meals have saved several of my nights as a night-owl student at Baylor, studying for hours and looking up to realize it's suddenly 1am and everything's closed.

H-E-B: similar quality and better prices than Whole Foods on specialty items, similar prices and better quality than Walmart on commodities. Consistently good groceries, physically and financially accessible by just about everyone in Central Texas.

I Thought it was a statewide story not just localized to Centex?

> If they added a feature to add entire recipes in a single click, I think they would do very well for themselves.

German recipe website Chefkoch.de uses Whisk to do exactly this.

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