Cooking as a Service
alexdanco.com
alexdanco.com
In other countries (e.g., Mediterranean region), it is perfectly normal to linger for a couple of hours after finishing your dinner. The social experience is the point of the restaurant visit, the food and drinks are just a catalyst.
Waiters are judged by the promptness of their service and it’s less risky to bring you the check than make a wrong call and annoy a table that’s waiting. The better ones tend to leave you alone.
I'm very conscious about leaving a full restaurant as soon as I'm done with my meal but that's maybe only 10% of my dining experiences ever. I'm perfectly happy to linger at a half full restaurant for as long as I want.
If we came at 5 and stayed the whole night I would imagine we'd be shooed off at some point.
Of course, this doesn't apply when the restaurant is totally empty. Then, they'd rather you stay and keep ordering things to bump up their tips.
Where in the US is this? In every place I've been to, and I've traveled across a good deal of the country, I often have to flag down a waiter/waitress to get the bill!
I loved all the "pay in advance" restaurants in Japan, or the ones where there is a call button I could press to ask for the bill.
I've spent plenty of time lingering at American restaurants, on a few memorable occasions I've stayed from 6 right up until closing time. Try to avoid doing that, and give an extra tip if I do!
In San Francisco, rent will be the dominant term in that equation, followed closely by the need to pay employees enough to themselves be able to rent nearby.
In sleepier parts of the world, the food itself is the expensive bit, so it matters less if you have people hanging around for longer.
Even in expensive Eurocities they don't rush you out the door. In the center of Amsterdam it's sometimes difficult to get a waiter's attention for the check - if you don't take the initiative you'll be there for an hour.
And in cheap American cities they also try to push you out the door.
It's also quite interesting seeing cooking as a service phrased as "is this exactly what I want, yes or no?" Because that's not wrong, but part of the reason I cook is to get exactly what I want. I like to eat healthier, spicier food with certain restrictions (no dairy, less wheat, etc). But that just makes me an outlier.
I've noticed a trend towards going to a restaurant, picking up food, and eating it somewhere else, which frustrates me endlessly. Not only is there more waste from the extra bag, the extra containers, etc., but also the food gets cold, soggy, i.e. worse. I don't think there's the necessary financial incentives for this, but a delivery service that used something more sustainable (dabbas?) and optimized the food for delivery would be fantastic.
I don't see it working in the U.S. though, since people would probably be stealing them and other horrific stuff. Just a very different culture...
It seems to work just fine, nothing "horrific" about it.
The horrific part, is an imputed risk the dishes in america become stolen, used as weapons, frisbees..
I think the primary schools in east asia, excluding China for obvious reasons, are the birthplace [0] of a form of civic cohesion that the U.S. and Canada (virtually the same culture, despite what people say) lack. We have the rule of law and consequences, and that's a good start, but there's a missing piece.
[0] in addition to the home, I guess, but good luck improving that first.
Nowadays, it seems like trying to enforce good/proper behavior in the U.S. would be taken as an affront to personal freedom or "forcing one's culture onto others", so perhaps we need a different way to incentivize good behavior in this multicultural society where it's almost a sin to want and expect others to do something for the good of anyone but themselves.
Through my entire dating life, I have found it rare for a woman to know how to cook, let along enjoy it, like I do. It’s been a big sticking point for me.
However this didn’t translate as much to having children. Despite feminism and higher education and financial independence, women continue to have children at the same rate or higher than before. If anything, impoverished women choose to have lesser children due to the financial burden they’d create for them.
This is confounding to me. Maybe it’s the influence of religion or the biological imperative is stronger because mundane and menial tasks like cooking and even child rearing can be outsourced to cooks, day care and schools.
On a different note, cooking is a communal activity. In societies where work isn’t all consuming, communal bonding occurs through cooking. And so it’s a prized skill to learn. Cooking as a service is brilliant for any economy that places work culture over communal culture. So it will succeed here in the US.
This is false. Birth rates are way down.
Most of the people I know who can cook anything are men; and I think, like me (and like you, it seems), they just wanted to eat something and weren't satisfied with what they could get prepared, and within their budget (including travel). For example, I just decided to make 20L of kimchi one day. I've variously known guys who have built computerized meat smokers, spent considerable time perfecting hummus, bread rolls, that preparation of pork belly they put in the bánh mì...
I think this is a matter of culture, but I can't help but agree that the women and girls I know, for the most part, actively avoid cooking, or are so used to being treated to prepared meals that it's unnecessary.
Sadly I think this comment will just turn grey, and nobody will say anything about why. Gotta love HN.
> For example, I just decided to make 20L of kimchi one day.
Nice! I've been getting into fermentation. I made kimchi a few weeks ago and I'm thinking of doing another batch soon. Also have some sauerkraut that I just made.
Maybe it's all because we as a nation have been through some tough times. It's hard to get used to cooking elaborate meals when you're happy to have anything edible on the table.
That being said I've noticed men usually pick a few dishes and become really good at cooking them, whereas women will generalise.
Perhaps someone will successfully target that demographic, but I expect the social minefield of early parenting will be way harder to penetrate than the easy consumption of young professionals.
I think it is one of the reasons to take out trend is so high. Of the people under 50 that I work with exactly 1 of them have children, and 1 of them wants children one day (but not now) the rest of us, including myself, have no children and have zero desire to have children. Looking at population data we are not alone in that.
They are young (not yet 40 years of age), have above-average incomes, and live in urban areas. If you cross-reference this population with desire to have kids, you will find them dragging the reproduction rate in this country massively downwards. The opposite is true about... every facet of what I just said.
EDIT: Many people have pointed out why this is a terrible trend, for reasons that are obvious.
Are they? I am not sure I see the obvious reasons. Considering the future, maybe its a better idea to not have children.
The world is improving by many, many metrics. Absolute poverty isn't just going down, it's accelerating towards zero. We're also hitting a point where everyone who can be, is connected. Online education is better than ever (for those who seek it). I could go on.
I think 100% irreversible processes like microplastics in oceans is something that much more urgently needs dealing with. Repairing the climate is easy compared to filtering trillions of molecules back out the ocean.
how am I "very far from the norm", you must not be looking at the same stats that I am.
Birth Rates are plummeting in the US, we have the lowest birth rates in all of recorded history right now, and if you remove immigration and 2nd generation children (children born to immigrants to the US) we have a massively negative population growth.
No my friend, my generations is not, and does not want to have children
People are having fewer children but the change is not quite as stark as you are painting it. The US fertility rate is near or at an all time low, but it's not like it's half what it was in the 80s. It's just a few percent lower than it was forty years ago.
You can certainly define demographics that will remain childless, but a substantial majority of households will eventually raise a child. Worth considering in a model of how food will be prepared (or any other business it might impact).
We did indeed establish a lot of new routines for cooking as new parents.
Check out the markets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi6f41Tq_J8
Unfortunately, there's no such thing in the big cities in US yet (New York, SF). Anthony Bourdain was trying to start a night market up in NY though....
I love Chinese street food, but I’m not holding my breath to see it in the USA. I cook more nowadays in order to save money since eating out is so insanely expensive in USA cities compared to Asia.
I lived in the North of England for a while (one of the cheaper places in the UK), and to go out for lunch would pretty much cost £6-£10 for a 'street-food sized' meal. One day, a street food stall parked up in the middle of a high traffic area and started selling massive burrito sized spring rolls for about £3 a pop with meat and £2 without. Pre-chopped veg, meat fried in massive woks, pancakes rolled fresh. 10 or so staff meant they were basically handing them out as fast as the card machine could take contactless payments (no cash). It was like the whole city damn near shut down. 1000's seemed to congregate to that one spot. People would queue for an hours (thankfully the English are good a queuing); any other alternative for lunch simply didn't make sense. They were open for about 6 months, queues hundreds deep, then all of a sudden they shut up shop overnight just like that.
Coincidentally it turns out the owner was actually a guy a played rugby with. I interrogated him Spanish inquisition style. Basically he saved up enough money to buy 2 commercial fat-fryers, 2 burners and woks, a chest refrigerator and a generator to run them all; all second-hand, all super inexpensive. Lighting, marque, prep stations and the like were all sourced on things like freecycle and gumtree. He bought a permit from the local council to set up shop on the high-street, found a team of part-timers, gave them all course in food safety and he was good to go. No marketing, no branding - just a chalk board that said "Spring Rolls £2 - add meat for £3". All in all it cost him just shy of £8k to start, with which he got a loan for half of that. Apparently a month in and he was turning over £5k gross in a DAY.
He told me he stopped because he had saved up enough money to call himself a millionaire, and didn't want the stress of standing behind a searing hot burner with a 300 deep queue in front of him anymore. He paid off his loans, his kids loans, got an extension on his house and put the rest of his money into some real estate.
I think the demand is there. It's just a case of vendors actually attempting to take the risk and breaking that mould when it comes to price.
Street food vendors then become a substantially vital and integral part of sustaining the population, but as that documentary would suggest a lot of vendors do not want their children to have to toil as they have and so there might be a void in the work force as that generation retire or become too old to work.
Big note from the deck though:
> No DSP has been able to prove consistent profitability with their existing business model
Also not mentioned in the slides - a ton of delivery jobs from small neighborhood joints (in the US) are paid under-the-table. This is a cost differentiator that DSPs can't legally compete with.
Not everything fits that mold, but I'm sure a few other categories of cooking will end up in that state. But not all things. For instance, rice/beans are just so cheap when dry. I can't see how a prepared version is going to bee cheaper than preparing your own.
Your apartment is so small that you do everything outside and you mostly replenish things almost daily.
Amusingly, there's a book that talks about this specific example [0]. Bread is super cheap to make, but it's also a nuanced thing to do well vs a local bakery.
Oddly, in my experience I've had trouble finding very good sandwich baguettes and similar in a bakery setting (even in NYC - hit me with recommendations). Restaurants that can pull in fresh baked breads daily have much better access to good product it feels like.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Make-Bread-Buy-Butter-Shouldnt-ebook/...
Point is this trend has been the case in Asia for a long time, and the only reason why I don't think it's really the case in the West is because the cost of operating a restaurant or even food truck is high enough that the cost of eating out isn't as economical as it is in Asia.
1 - https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_popul...
While TFA compares cooking to sewing or gardening, in terms of a declining in both popularity and personal imperative, beyond the arguable claim that food trumps both those, is the social component.
Not so much that eating can be - let alone is necessarily - more social than pastimes such as gardening, but it's one of the few remaining opportunities to be social, both in the cooking and the partaking.
Of course, the erosion of shared meal times and the likely impacts are already well studied.
In his 1994 book 'The Doubter's Companion', John Ralston Saul observed:
"Restaurants, until recently, were places of refuge for people excluded from the mainstream or seeking to escape it — poor students, aging unmarried men not rich enough to have themselves fed at home, richer men seeking sex not wives, and the proverbial artists leading their irresponsible lives. Over the last half-century, restaurants have risen in importance to fill the void left by the decline of the old public celebrations. They now provide the leading forums of public participation."
It'd be interesting to see the same graph with ready meals either broken out as a third category, or included with takeaways.
In the past they had problems with quality/taste and healthiness.
But new home technology(instant pot,combi-ovens, new microwave tech) combined with better frozen food, or different logistics that would enable chilled meals - could offer healthy, restaurant quality meals.
And there's also a chance that the cost difference between ready meals and cooking at home will become very low.
I particularly thought of it because the graph shows the same change across income groups, except that it's time-shifted so that it really got big in the top bracket earliest, in the '70s, then the middle income group in the '80s, and finally the bottom bracket in the '90s.
If ready meals were included, I suspect it would look more level, or at least bring up the lowest income group.
We can see egregious examples of displacing any form of accountability in the gig economy to the point that they are already immediately met with distrust and disdain when they encroach on another market.
The question is irrelevant. "Uber but for food" isn't going to be randos making meals on demand in their home kitchens, it's going to be increasingly massive (but regulated) commercial kitchens providing meals much like restaurant does. Food preparation benefits from economies of scale.
I think other models are much more likely. In Brooklyn, the pizza joint Roberta’s opened up a delivery only kitchen after building a successful restaurant. Others in nyc have opened restaurants after a successful ghost kitchen. In the food truck craze, often the successful trucks leveraged their brands to open physical restaurants.
I think industrial kitchens initially allow restaurants that already have a brand to send chefs to the industrial kitchen to handle the delivery load, saving the cost of restaurant space and making delivery logistics easier. I think industrial kitchens will also make it easier for a young chef to start building a brand with less capital.
I don’t ever see the model working where you go to apartment 301 to grab your takeout order.
Particularly in the case of families, the notion that food delivery will ever become cheap enough to be a default relies on negating delivery costs. It may be so cheap to prepare food in bulk as to offset the cost of labor to prepare it; however, that says nothing as to the cost of labor (and energy) to deliver it.
If we ever do develop some kind of solar-powered delivery drone whose cost amortizes out to practically nothing over the life of all of its deliveries, then maybe yes.
I live in Italy and delivery cost is like 2,50€. And it's the same if I order food just for myself or for 4 people. So I would say that the delivery cost is cheaper per person for families than for a single person.
If you are interested in starting your own cloud kitchen, these folks have written up step by step instructions (disclaimer: I was involved with the company as CTO for a couple of years): https://www.thefoodcorridor.com/2019/04/30/how-to-start-your...
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rates-of-vat-on-different-goods-...
There are four major delivery companies that dominates the market here in this city: iFood, James Delivery, Rappi and lastly Uber Eats. A couple of these companies also do supermarket shopping for you - no Amazon in Brazil for everything shopping.
When you cook yourself you optimize for YOUR health, YOUR taste, YOUR budget, etc.
Restaurants and personal chiefs exist for those who would rather trade some of these benefits for convenience.
This is one of the dumbest things I've read in a long, long time.
Most families simply do not have the money for prepared food to feed their family regularly, and there's no evidence that this is changing at all. Grocery store ingredients are vastly cheaper than anything prepared, and food prep is fundamentally labor-intensive no matter what. The limits of cost advantages from scaling have already been reached: it's called the freezer section, but at most it's a moderate convenience for some.
Further, the graphs show for all income levels that "away" food increased substantially from 1965-1994... and then has stayed mainly the same, actually decreasing from 2004-2007 across all income levels, so there's zero evidence for any trend between now and 2040.
So... a third of meals are "away" and that's been stable over the past 25 years? Sounds to me like people eat lunch out... and that's it.
Some meals are generally not regarded as cooking, putting cereal and milk in a bowl, making toast, slapping a few ingredients on a sandwich, those will always be cheaper and easier to just do yourself. Apart from that there are many meals you can easily make yourself and have last for 2-3 meals or amortize the time over the number of people eating it.
Tonight I'll be making spaghetti bolognese for under $10AU and it will last a huge dinner and two lunches, it takes under 10 minutes to shop for and half an hour to make, the majority of which will be spent on entertainment while I stir the pots every couple of minutes, the "damn good at packaging" is putting it in microwavable containers. If I was having this delivered I'd by looking at $20AU+ for a single meal, if it was eat-in I'd blow which of the time saving travelling and waiting to be served anyway. Other meals can be even less effort, like when you've got a rice cooker doing the heavy lifting.
Outsourcing food production saves little time, costs a lot more and will often deliver worse results, especially if you factor dietary factors into "worse results".
Do we need to revisit the definition of a company town?