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Comment by nocsi | Hacker News Reader

Next are those subscription meal plan companies like HelloFresh. There’s no way they can keep sustaining their model of handing out free boxes

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Exactly. And almost everyone I knew who got discount boxes simply decided what recipes they liked and then bought the ingredients from the supermarket for half the price.

Especially when they post their recipes on their website.

https://www.hellofresh.com/recipes

There were a load of these companies but the market has really shrunk. Blue Apron was the big one that basically disappeared. Hello Fresh is the one that I think "made it". They've IPO'd, and I suspect they've found a format that is sustainable given their longevity compared to the other companies.

HelloFresh have outlived many others but they aren’t long for this world either. They’re still spending huge amounts of money on marketing which isn’t converting to long term customers.

There’s definitely a market for these type of food boxes but it’s a much smaller market than HelloFresh etc. require to sustain the size of company they’ve built.

https://ir.hellofreshgroup.com/websites/hellofresh/English/3...

The all have the same issue: you tied up with what ever meal you are given (regardless if you've chosen them or not). Those are perishable goods. It means that you cannot just drop one meal without incurring waste. Their recipe are not very varied either, which can lead to some less than desirable meal (some are even borderline terrible).

I have tried pretty much all the major offering in the UK in the last 3 years. There need to be something more flexible than that. The big store could easily already make meal kits from their stock for specific recipes that would compete with Hello Fresh and the like.

Blue Apron also IPO'd, but may or may not be delisted soon.

Rising cost of goods (food) of course. But the logistics are harder too for fresh products.

HelloFresh could only offer me 'whole of day' delivery slots, not even choice of AM or PM so I dropped that subscription before I ever saw a box.

Were there markets where they weren’t using UPS/FedEx for delivery? I’m in a semi-major metro and every time we’ve used HelloFresh it’s always been delivered by UPS at my standard delivery time (1-2pm).

They (and BlueApron) were using Lasership in some markets.

I'm in London. Not sure what delivery they were using. I think the tracker was under their own branding.

That model is more sustainable than aggregators of (say) dog walkers. Everyone found a dog walker they liked through the app, then hired them directly.

Was looking for a teacher through one of those aggregator websites. Found someone near my location, but the website needed my card details to get the teacher's contact info. Ended up googling their name and contacted them directly.

same thing I do with elance - find a freelancer that you like, pay them once thru the app, hire them directly going forward (In my case at the same cost, but the freelancer gets to keep 100%) - everybody is happy, except the middleman. - I pay the same, freelancer gets to keep the fruits of their labor and now I have a happy vendor.

The aggregator business model can actually work if you're not greedy. The costs of operating the platform should be near zero once it's built, so even the revenue of first-time bookings, at scale, should be enough to sustain a small but profitable business.

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