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Comment by symplee | Hacker News Reader

Pretty soon there will be a company delivering on regular, reusable plates. There will be a refund given if the plate is returned to the driver on the next delivery. (Thus encouraging a second delivery...) Higher refund if the plate is washed.

I feel like this could be an Onion article today, start-up in a year.

Or they just scoop out food onto your home plate. Like an on-demand food moped that has buffet sized compartments - that stay fresh for a couple of hours so the driver doesn't have to return to the shop as often. Hmm, anyone in the food business need some more ideas?

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I've been thinking about this and it would be good if there was a 3rd party that provided standard sized, good quality re-usable containers to restaurants. If you want to buy food from the restaurant you need an account with this new container company. When you buy food from a restaurant, if you don't have enough credit with the container company, the cost of a container is added to your order (something like $10 so that de-incentivises people to bin it after use). There would need to be a lot of drop off locations for used containers, if they were standard sized they could probably be washed automatically by machines to be returned to restaurants. Each container would be uniquely identifiable and your account would be credited a drop-off.

This would only work if a local government put restrictions in place banning single use plastics at restaurants. I don't think cutlery is necessary in most cases, especially for home delivery.. you can use your own cutlery people.

This sounds great, but I fear that nothing stops China from producing literal mountains of trash. Proof of that is the mountains of abandoned shared bikes.

Ever heard about tiffin services in India, specially Mumbai? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala

That's very similar

Ha ha, yes. Seen them many times when in Mumbai. They are an "institution". IIM Ahmedabad and Harvard Business School have done case studies on them. They are supposed to be very organized and rarely make a mistake in delivery. There's even a Bollywood about them, The Lunchbox:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lunchbox

Asking customers to wash plates for your business sounds like a food safety violation waiting to happen. I'd skip that part.

Also be sure to either make the reusable utensils/plates very visually unappealing or factor their cost into the delivery; if you provide them as any sort of loss-leader you may find yourself as much a provider of inexpensive tableware as you are a provider of food.

Violation in the US, maybe not in China.

No one says the business can't wash the plates themselves as well.

Personally only seen it once during a short trip but apparently this is common in Seoul (maybe someone can confirm if it’s really widespread or not?). Delivery food comes in reusable containers, you leave it outside your door when you’re done and at some point the next day it all gets collected and sent back to the original restaurant for cleaning and reuse.

This used to be universal for Chinese delivery in Korea. With the rise of delivery apps it's not as universal as it used to be but it's still fairly easy to see.

I guess the food-delivery industry could use some disruption. The plates would be cheap bento-boxes for easy stacking, possibly with some kind barcode for keeping track of them. The most benefit would come from groups of restaurants who work together to implement the same system and allow a more dynamic handling of the boxes.

Has anyone's grandparents used Schwan's?

That would only fly in China if there were some hard to fake signifier of cleanliness. You already see old ladies rinsing ceramic dishware in gutter water and shrinkwrapping them for reuse, where shrinkwrap signifies the plate "is" clean

I keep thinking that the next big revolution in food sales will be reusable, washable containers.

Use glass instead of plastic so they're safe for industrial washers, make them in a variety of sizes such as tall narrow ones for sauces and beverages and squat and wide ones for casseroles and soups. Tight lids for safe storage and transportation. Standardized sizes for easy reuse and transferability.

We can call them "mason jars".

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