Ingredient delivery for restaurant recipes | Hacker News Reader

Ingredient delivery for restaurant recipes

forage.co

39 pointsjoshfraser43 comments

Is there any difference between this and blueapron? Do I get to choose which recipe I'd like to have delivered?

Yes, you get to pick the recipes you want each week.

We kept hearing from our early users that they didn't have an hour to spend cooking every night. We knew that restaurants could fire any dish in 20 min, so we really focused on how to use the same techniques they do to make a 20-min dinner possible for home cooks without compromising on flavor. We're the only service that offers delicious, home-cooked meals in 20 mins or less.

Dumb question, but if this is marketed at folks who are short on time for preparing meals then why not just offer delivery of cooked restaurant meals?

I know that my wife enjoys the process of cooking, not merely the meal. I'm sure there are others who are in a relative hurry, and would love the option of being able to play in the kitchen, minus the hassle of procuring small portions of the ingredients for your 4 (or six or whatever) people.

If meals were delivered cooked, then you'd have to arrange for the delivery to occur near the time you wished to eat, unless you are willing to refrigerate them and reheat them. If you do that, you are essentially eating leftovers. Ingredients can be delivered and stored well before it is time to cook.

I think I'm gonna steal this idea and name my company HubGrub.

I'm curious as to what your turnaround time from order to delivery is?

We actually tried something pretty similar last year here in Portland (the site is still alive at www.localplate.com although we have ceased operations), we found it pretty challenging just to get people to plan ahead far enough for our offering to be viable. (We came across some consumer research that something like 70% of households don't have a plan for dinner until sometime the same day.)

We eventually tried distribution through existing retail channels which definitely helped with the traction side but made the economics pretty challenging. :)

Best of luck though, it's an interesting space with a lot of people attacking it from different directions right now.

(E-mail is in my profile if you want to know any more about our experience.)

I appreciate your comment. I just sent you an email and would to chat more.

I wonder what this will actually look like in practice. Will they be sending subscribers restaurant-branded ingredients to make named dishes from their menus, will they be marketed as approximations, or just generic recipes?

We're working directly with the restaurants to create the meals. Often the restaurants make a key ingredient in their own kitchen. Other times they'll share the recipe with our chef and we do it.

What restaurants have mastered is how to prepare delicious meals quickly. Anything you order in a restaurant can be served in 20 mins or less. What we're doing is taking their techniques for making things fast and making them available to home cooks.

I'm surprised they work with you, arn't you basically in direct competition with them?

The restaurants love it. We're free marketing for them. We introduce their brand to a much larger audience and everyone who makes one of their dishes wants to see how their cooking compares to the restaurant experience.

Smart team, who knows the food space well. Agree with Josh that sending all the ingredients is key, as well as finding great unique recipes that can be ordered (I assume) any time.

Seems like a cool mix of Blue Apron & Goldbely.

I'm curious how many of these kinds of services the market will bear - there seem to be quite a few clones now. And do they have staying power?

I think people are curious to see what they are all about, but I suspect this kind of food shopping experience will not change peoples behavior longterm.

I tried Blue Apron and was generally happy with the service, but canceled it because it put too many constraints on my week - I had to stay home and cook Monday - Wednesday or else the ingredients would perish.

The bigger issue for me though was packaging waste. I hate all the plastic crap that was generated out of a meal.

Clearly I'm biased, but I think we're only beginning to reimagine what a grocery store of the future will look like.

I totally feel you with regards to packaging waste. One of the key areas we've been focusing on in our beta is making sure our packaging is minimal. All the packaging we do send is reusable, biodegradable or recyclable.

Pretty much the same concept as these guys who are doing it in London: www.simplycook.com

We're a little different in that we actually send you everything you need to make the dish (minus salt, pepper & olive oil). Forage would be considerably less valuable to me if I still had to make the trek to the grocery store and deal with all the waste that goes along with that.

Totally agree! I'd be really interested to see how pricing between the two services compares.

I can't speak to their pricing, but ours is $15/serving which includes free shipping.

I'd be more excited if this was raw ingredients and not prepped ingredients. Prepping (at least for me) doesn't take all that much time; but running around different stores to get fresh ingredients does.

We'll still send you raw ingredients. This isn't about pre-chopped onions. It's more about the ingredients that take forever to make at home. Think more along the lines of fresh ramen noodles or pre-marinated meats.

> Think more along the lines of fresh ramen noodles or pre-marinated meats.

Ramen noodles may be time consuming (never made them, but most noodles are), but marinated meats tend to be pretty low prep time (not much different than your example of pre-chopped onions; they may have a long passive time, but other than for impulse cooking that's not really a barrier.)

Can I suggest you include a sample recipe like so: http://www.blueapron.com/pages/sample-recipes

Great idea and product! Where do you plan to source your ingredients and how much will the customers know about where the ingredients in their meals are coming from?

We're currently sourcing from some great distributers here in SF that give us really high quality ingredients. We talk a lot about the potential to bring transparency into the food chain, but we're still figuring out the best way to surface that information in our product.

Are the ingredients organic?

Yep. And fresher than the grocery store because ours don't sit around for days like the ones at your local grocery store.

@joshfraser - http://sourcery.us/ can help you with streamlining your sourcing, as well as surfacing the upstream supplier and location information (where available) just give us a shout!

Neat concept - I've tried Plated which is similar.

As a note for Josh, the banner image is unreadable when the window is maximized on my 30" thunderbolt display.

Thanks for the heads up. I'll look into it.

This looks a lot like Tomato Sherpa, a startup in Berkeley. http://tomatosherpa.com/

Nice job following the Harry's model of pre-launch promotion.

We're even using their code! https://github.com/harrystech/prelaunchr

Here's the context for those who missed the story: http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/07/21/harrys-prelaunchr-ema...

Why not just to learn cook from scratch? Cooking for someone at home with restaurant pre-prepped ingredients is like ordering from McD and adding a mayonnaise to fries. If you can't make it, then learn to make it. Or go to restaurant that can make it.

Why don't you learn to program a compiler from scratch? If you can't code from bare metal, then learn to. Or outsource all your code to someone who can.

Can you compare cooking from fresh ingredients with implementing something like GCC in machine code with a straight face?

Shopping and prepping ingredients for cooking is not actually difficult...

A more apt analogy would be: using this service is like installing WordPress and a pre-built theme; prepping your own ingredients is like learning to make an HTML website from scratch.

It may not be difficult, but it's time consuming. This seems targeted at people with long commutes, or kids, who don't have a lot of time in the evenings but want to enjoy the process of cooking neat things.

I think that's an unnecessarily negative viewpoint. There's still skill required to turn raw ingredients into a finished result - in this case, food. If it encourages more people to cook healthier food at home, then this is something that should be supported.

@Submitter: This looks fantastic, thanks for sharing!

Might be. I mean, of course you can be open for every idea and service you encounter in your life. But then we come into personal preferences. For some people it is music, that of course you play the music you enjoy by yourself. And for someone else it is the kayak you build from scratch and use for kayaking. In my case, when I wrote my comment, it just happened to be cooking. Sure, everyone is free to use the service. I won't hunt anyone down because of it :)

One thing that keeps me from cooking a lot of recipes is just not having all the pieces. After that there's the problem that pretty much everything comes in amounts too large so a lot of these pricey or rarely used ingredients just end up in one meal then spoil before they're used again. I'd like it even more if this service had the choice of just getting the ingredients delivered, or some level between ingredients and ready to fry/grill/saute/bake which is what it looks like they're providing.

That's exactly what kept me from cooking too. We're keeping things simple for now, but I'm sure we'll add more customization options over time.

I think the niche is pretty clear. There are obvious benefits to creating meals from scratch, but not everyone has the time, expertise, or even all the equipment. This service cuts down the time significantly, and sells the ingredients for you to assemble/cook yourself at what I would assume to be prices much less than actual restaurants.

It's not about trying to impress someone with your cooking skills or even learning how to cook, it's about getting restaurant quality freshly-made meals at home.

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