I find the author's dismissiveness towards kitchen space interesting. Granted I cook a lot, but are there really so many people that cook so little that they would have no problem not having a stove at all?
They take about 20 minutes to heat up on 120v, but they're big enough to bake a cake or a sheet of cookies.
The fridge is half-full most of the time. I rarely use more than 1 burner at a time, 2 if it's the holidays and I'm cooking for family. I could easily replace the main oven with a slightly larger toaster oven or convection microwave.
Yes, doing so would prevent me from cooking a turkey. I do that once every 3-4 years.
When we visit Europe, we usually Airbnb in a small cottage or flat. Kitchens are always "tiny" by US standards. We never feel like it's a problem.
For renting the US, I'd gladly forgo a full kitchen to save $200+/month on rent.
In fact, it is possible to keep kosher with just one oven and separate racks, but it is a bit of a hassle.
@ all
Anyone know a brand of air fryer that lasts through lots of use with a reasonable price? I might try one if they don't break quickly.
Imagine some sort of central, industrial-scale kitchen that makes dirt-cheap prepared meals and uses the aforementioned services delivers them to your house, hot, at meal time.
Could economies of scale drive the cost below $5/meal? $2?
If we can obviate server rooms in office buildings around the world, what would it do to make the kitchen an extravagance rather than a necessity?
Or maybe the laundry room is the right target for obsolescence. Most cities already have industrial scale laundries for hotels. Could Uber and Lyft partner with them to eliminate those two giant appliances in our homes, and let us have the space back for our ham radios and stamp collections?
Likewise, the overwhelming cost of food delivery services is in the "service" part. Even if you could make the meal for $2, I would still end up paying $10 for a $2 meal, and while it definitely possible to make a nutritious and reasonably palatable meal for $2, it's never going to compare to the $10 meal I can get just by walking down the block to my local taqueria, much less what I can make myself.
Doing a load of laundry coin-op would cost me about $2/$3 a load. Plus the cost of detergent, fabric softener, and dryer sheets. And the aggravation of going to a grungy, depressing laundromat, waiting around for the washer to run, running the dryer several times because things wouldn't get dry, and then folding it all and lugging my baskets home.
When I was in an apartment that did have hookups, but no laundry machines, buying a basic washer and dryer ran about $1000, unless I found some ticking time bomb of a used set on Craigslist. And then there is the water and electricity costs. Not to mention the hassle of either abandoning them or having to drag them off somewhere else when I moved.
In contrast, I could drop off a huge barracks bag full of laundry at the laundromat once every two weeks, and they would weigh it up, charge me a dollar a pound, then I'd go off to work and pick it up at the end of the day, perfectly washed and expertly folded. Just in the amount of time saved at drudgery, it was worth it, besides the fact that they did a far, far better job than I would do myself.
I think what you were really doing here is finding a way to justify your choice of relying on a laundry service :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13909365
Then the detergent and stuff at Costco so it's cheap. From there, you might also consider your time going to, waiting in, and leaving the laundromat. With your own machines, that pretty much reduces to minutes of walking around in the house. During the wait time, you just do whatever you'd normally do in the house. Saves a trip out.
Even if you have minimum wage employees, you're still paying people $15/hour to make the food, and $15/hour to deliver it. How many servings can a cook make in an hour? How many deliveries can a driver do in an hour?
Ten deliveries an hour gets you down to $1.50 per delivery. In some areas and times of day where deliveries line up just right, they can maybe do more, but if it's hot food, there's a limit as to how much the driver can carry at once. If it's all point-to-point back and forth between the kitchen and destinations, forget it.
Let's say the cook can make 30 servings in an hour. So that's $2 just to pay for labor already. That doesn't factor in costs for ingredients, kitchen space, cooking equipment, and maintenance for that. It doesn't account for marketing. It doesn't account for the R&D required to build and maintain the ordering app/website, or for server costs.
Speaking of space requirements, this is actually really problematic from a cost perspective. You need the kitchen to be within a reasonable delivery time from your customers. For a dense city, you're probably good for volume of orders, but you'll probably need to locate your kitchen inside the city limits, where real estate can be expensive. For a suburb, no matter where you put your kitchen you run the risk of not having enough delivery orders within a reasonable distance.
A company with other revenue could certainly sell this as a sort of loss leader, but I can't imagine a way to do this for $2 per meal, and probably not even $5 per meal. Hell, if I walk to my local grocery and buy ingredients for a basic meal, I'd be hard pressed to walk out of there spending less than $5. Economies of scale could reduce the cost of materials, but the labor and infra costs would surpass the savings.
The main obstacles seem to be delivery and people's desire for choice. You might be able to get the price of a fried rice down to $2-4 if you make it on industrial scale. But time customizing it (choice of meats, removing ingredients for allergies, providing extra sauce, etc) and getting it to the customer is more costly because it requires individualized service.
Meal pal is currently trying to do something like this by partnering with restaurants to create on cheap dish per day. It works to some extent but the customer has to pick up the food and only gets on option per restaurant.
One of my favourite food bloggers has a fairly small kitchen. Not tiny by any standards, but smaller than typical suburban Instagram food blogger types.
She seems to do a lot of her cooking and prep on a hot place and ikea cart. Fairly impressive and what I strive for in my own kitchen
https://smittenkitchen.com/2008/11/how-to-max-out-your-tiny-...
This just means that the mini-bar needs good wiring. Assuming there's an attic, crawl space, basement, ect, this is trivial.
(I still prefer my real kitchen, but that doesn't mean I need it to cook for a family of four, or even to cook for myself if I was still single.)
I'm in the process planning a small cabin, and probably will go with the same thing. Ikea has an inexpensive "mini-kitchen" that I'll probably just add an induction cooker to.
Food trucks and takeout get the job done.
I still enjoy doing Thanksgiving and cooking for parties, but that's usually at someone else's place.