Hacker News Reader

Comment by mochomocha | Hacker News Reader

Pushing it a bit further and forgetting about regulation for a second... Do you think people will feel comfortable eating food cooked by "strangers"? I can see the efficiency coming from an on demand market for food where anyone can cook anything for anyone and broadcast it in an app (especially in ethnically diverse cities where I'm sure a lot of people know how to cook amazing dishes), I just don't know if our norms and mental barriers will evolve fast enough for us to see that happening in say the next 10 years. It's one thing to enter the car of a "stranger" for an Uber ride, but maybe it's a different thing to eat some food cooked by a stranger?

View on HN

I think that will be niche if it is at all viable. Most of the shared economy type companies flamed out as it turns out specialization and scale offen matters.

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.

The rating system on Uber helps. But if someone is driving like an idiot, that’s obvious to most people. But unwashed hands? You’ll never know.

> Do you think people will feel comfortable eating food cooked by "strangers"?

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.

Restaurants, takeaways, and ready meals would say yes. Its absolutely nothing new.

Almost all of the food that I eat is cooked by strangers.

Sure. I'm talking about changing where we are on the "stranger" spectrum from say the professional cook of the restaurant you order from to... Maybe some guy with 2 5-star reviews living 5 blocks from you who apparently makes great burgers and who has been loosely vetted by the app... Will you feel comfortable enough to order? I'm sure some people will. But it seems to me that the mental threshold is higher than say taxi->Uber.

I think you have a romanticized notion about who the line cooks are at your local restaurants...

That may be partially true, but there is a grounded sense of accountability in any case. I'm sure you can find issues and your occasional booger eater with any restaurant but, in my experience working in such places, typically those jobs are micromanaged in the sense that the entire routine is choreographed from start to finish to save costs and reduce liability.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com