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Comment by culturestate | Hacker News Reader

My biggest gripe with HelloFresh, et al is that I still need to do the prep, so they don't actually save me much time. It's nothing more than curated grocery delivery.

Years ago, there was a service in Hong Kong (I wish I could remember the name) that did daily delivery of already prepped meal kits - onions pre-chopped, avocados cubed, oil portioned for each step, etc. It was basically cooking by numbers, and extraordinarily convenient in the cramped kitchen that I had at the time.

That's the only kind of meal kit service that I'd ever consider using again. I think larger supermarkets are well-positioned here because a lot of them already sell this kind of stuff to begin with.

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I usually buy groceries once a week. We typically buy 5 meals worth of food and eat left overs for two days. Thinking of those 5 meals takes about half the time buying groceries does. Personally, I like cooking and I like choosing what to eat. But every once in a while I wish someone would make a menu for me.

> Personally, I like cooking and I like choosing what to eat.

So do I. I actually shop for fresh stuff almost daily now, because I mostly work from home and it's a great excuse to get out and wander around the city for a while.

That said, the nature of my work is such that I'll often have intense 2-3 week periods of long days that really sap my desire to do anything beyond, like, throwing some sausage and peppers into a skillet.

It's those times when I'd love to have a meal kit service like this, because if I don't have anything quick in the house then I end up with a frozen pizza or a Deliveroo order instead. I've tried doing meal prep a few times, but I tend to get sick of it by the middle of the week.

One thing that's crazy about having kids is that you absolutely need a plan for every single meal. 3 meals a day, 7 days a weeks. Having ice cream for dinner is no longer an option, unfortunately.

Yea you can really optimize it with some thought.

Make the same stir fry but with a different sauce.

Refried beans can make burritos, tacos or bowls.

Chicken is endlessly versatile in stews, curry, schnitzel, etc.

I too would like a menu made for me, but it would be a luxury, curated for me to explore more meals. My standards are strong, nutritious and go down well with the lady.

Hello Fresh has a rotating list of recipes on their website that do not require a membership to access.

https://www.hellofresh.com/recipes

ChatGPT can do this very well.

Local networks might be the only way to make this cheap enough to drive enough customers to use it. The programs are too expensive for me to justify, and a big part of that is the packaging and shipping costs.

Local networks doing daily delivery don't need dry ice, can use minimal packaging, can batch orders and send out with their own delivery drivers/routes. They could even pick up the packaging for reuse upon delivery of the next order. This only works at scale though, and is going to be nearly impossible to build a business on, unless in high density living areas.

I have been considering this idea for some time now. Local food networks which flip the paradigm from "on-demand" to strictly in advance. Right now, if I want to order food from a restaurant, I can only do this "on-demand". If you want to join this on-demand food preparation world as a chef, maybe start with a food truck. However, operating "on-demand" is difficult. Why not only in advance? (of course, on-demand food will always be here to stay...)

In advance enables batch orders, predictable quantities of ingredients & labor, no need for insane packaging and ice, etc. These "meal-kit" services do this, but as many other comments say... you still need to do your own prep and cook it.

Some people are already doing this model (i.e. there's a couple in my city offering a bulk meal paid for and prepared once a week), but they built it their self from the ground up. Can we not build a network to enable this? The door would then be opened to an individual chef to contribute to providing people with food. Existing restaurants could of course offer their best seller or most easily prepared bulk meal. Yes, as you say: nearly impossible to build. There are many obstacles. But the benefits are numerous.

Sounds like you've thought about this a bit already? Mind if I pick your brain?

Sure, shoot me an email at jhugh5000@gmail.com

I make use of a few different meal services... and I completely agree with the prep issue. While the "get fresh food for X meals" is a nice idea, I invariably hit issues with portions - most companies only provide portions for 2 or 4 people. This works poorly for the odd sized household (especially the 1 sized).

So... I have factor. They're single sized microwave items. Very convenient for lunches with a 2 minutes in the microwave and you're good.

I also have tovala. They've got a special (but inexpensive) toaster oven or air fryer. With them, you get raw protein and a side and do 1 min of prep for it and then cook it in the oven for 13 to 20 min depending on the food. The portion sizes there are 1. The longer prep and the "need that toaster oven" make it not as useful for the "on the go". This is cooked in single use aluminum trays and so cleanup is minimal.

And I also splurged for a suvie (. That's in the 30 min and longer category with more cleaning (of the trays - they're not single use), but you can cook for a time (have this ready at 12:15 pm) and it does it. It's got a much more expensive (and larger) kitchen device... but the prep is typically in the less than 5 minutes and has the advantage of frozen to cooked rather than refrigerated to cooked meaning that the meal kits can be stored in the chest freezer in the basement for longer durations rather than needing to be done by the end of the week.

Personally, I'm not trying to save time in the cooking process; I'm trying to save time and hassle in the ingredient-buying phase: deciding what to cook, figuring out what ingredients I need to buy to cook that, finding them in the shop, working out what to do if it turns out that the supermarket is out of spinach, etc. Plus my closest supermarket doesn't have much in the way of stock, so I'd have to go further to get the kind of stuff meal kits tend to want.

Chopped onions change smell after they've been sitting exposed to air for a while, and not for the better. I'll happily prep my own onions, even if it brings tears to my eyes.

Sweet potatoes turn brown exposed to air, sometimes even in the span of time from prepping the first to prepping the last before they go into the pot all together.

I would venture that most things do not improve with exposure to air once cut up. I would also tend to agree that just sending unprepped ingredients doesn't save any time, but I think I'm willing to take more time to get a better meal.

>I think I'm willing to take more time to get a better meal.

Then these services aren't for you.

Tovala somehow avoids this with sweet potatoes in their meals, though they do require cutting of bell peppers and some other things.

I don't know if it's what they do, but a mild acid can prevent oxidation. As an example, the lime in guacamole is why it doesn't look utterly disgusting.

Vacuum-packed pre-cut potatoes are stable too (but it uses plastic then)

There is a fantastic meal kit service of this sort in Boston, Littleburg [1]. The steps involved are usually limited to baking/roasting/sautéing and assembling, and the resulting meals are very high quality, far better than anything I can make on my own or most anything else you can get delivered. (All vegan too, which is important to me.)

[1] https://littleburgmenu.com/

> My biggest gripe with HelloFresh, et al is that I still need to do the prep, so they don't actually save me much time. It's nothing more than curated grocery delivery.

For me the biggest value add of Hello Fresh is the meal planning aspect. I don't have to spend time every week figuring out what I want to cook for 3-5 different meals, or track down the ingredients to make them, or add up calories to make sure they're health conscious.

not trying to be snarky, genuinely curious: What benefit does that have over ordering delivery from a restaurant?

Preparing food at home allows for making things "as I like them". I'm VERY picky about certain textures and tastes. I also have a very restricted diet and suffer (biologically) from some ingredients that like to sneak into foods.

Ordering a known meal from a known restaurant is definitely easier than home prep. Ordering a "probably fine" meal from a "probably fine" restaurant requires extra cognitive load over cooking at home. (Some days I struggle with simply selecting a new meal from a restaurant. On those same days, I can happily spend an hour cooking a new-to-me recipe without any problems.)

> What benefit does that have over ordering delivery from a restaurant?

For me, there were two keys:

1. I love cooking and find it to be a nice meditative experience, but back then I was working 16-18 hour days and I simply didn't have the energy to deal with all of the other stuff you gotta do before and after you cook. This was a good middle ground.

2. I could adjust the ingredients to my liking - don't put in the cilantro, for example, or add some extra chili to make the sauce spicier.

If somebody manages to get the scale right, it should be a bit less expensive, you get to eat freshly cooked food and you know most of what you put in it. Also if people don't already know their way around a kitchen this is a pretty effective way to learn I would think.

IKEA effect. A meal that would otherwise be fairly good seems very good when you've done it yourself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect

> It's nothing more than curated grocery delivery.

It also create much more garbage so they got that going for them, too.

Even worse, sometimes it would be slower than doing things myself. One time we got a delivery kit that took 1 hour to prepare, while it takes us about 30 minutes to prepare a dinner.

Wait, does your local supermarket not already do this? Mine has these pre-made meals, chopped and everything, near the front by the produce section. Peeled bananas even.

Freshly does that

Freshly is prepared meals, not prepped ingredients. And IMO Freshly is kinda gross. If you want prepped meals you can just heat-and-eat, CookUnity is a good bit better. Although some of the meals CU sells are pushing 20 bucks. That's quite a lot for what amounts to a microwave meal.

Freshly did full meals, ready to microwave. That said, they shut down this year.

That's wild that they full stock shut down. They were acquired for over a billion just a few years ago.

https://www.factor75.com/ makes meals that you basically only have to reheat. They're pretty tasty and never frozen.

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