I love the family story on the site, and the design is beautiful. I agree with others that suggest the nutrition info should be a little easier to find.
We just subscribed to the Buttermilk Suite. Looking forward to trying it.
Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes
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Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes
#82Why is the sodium level so high? The dal pack has 1220 milligrams of sodium per serving? It seems rather unethical for you to be marketing high sodium products to a group of people that should not be eating a daily amount of sodium in one sitting.
We don't alter our recipes at all, so the sodium amount is unfortunately what's in our products to begin with. We are actively working on a low-sodium option to be released in the Fall!
Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes
#83I checked just a few items and saw 910mg, 1220mg, 1430mg, and 1760mg of sodium per serving!
That's an incredibly high amount of sodium. It would probably be unhealthy for most people to eat one per day, let alone 2-3. Maybe you can do something about lowering the sodium levels, but until then I don't think "healthy" is a fair word to use.
Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes
#84This seems like you are working off of TastyBite's playbook: http://tastybite.com/products/ > The options were expensive, time-consuming, or tasted horrible. Tasty bite tastes decent, takes 60-90 seconds to heat up, and costs about $3/package with no need for refrigeration. --- This seems like a YC to clone TastyBite without any differentiation beyond the nebulous "quality food". So.... Are you telling me your qualit…
tasty bites are super cheap at costco, 12 pack for like $16
I think they're even cheaper this month. Picked up a box the other day.
Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes
#85I have to say I’m impressed at the price at which you’re able to deliver these meals - I would have expected them to cost 25-50% more a la Blue Apron (which I don’t use due to the price). I’ll have to try these! Have you thought about trying to sell your products, or similar products, to people who camp/hike/etc? I think the fact that the meals are dehydrated and easy to cook would appeal to them One point of constru…
Thank you! Definitely -- we are a Seattle-based company so we have a huge community of campers and hikers eating our meals! Our products are not actually dehydrated, so they are great for 1-day hiking and camping excursions but not for much longer unless you're able to keep them cool. That is a great point, and we will definitely update our website to make the nutritional information more readable.
Mentioning on the packaging and/or site, how you make the product dry (after assembling and cooking it), may be of interest to readers (unless you cannot because it is some proprietary technique). I know I would be. Just a thought.
Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1) I don't get your branding, especially the company name, and especially as all of your meals are vegan. As I mentioned downthread, I was planning to skip this completely because of the name until one of the founders happened to mention in a comment that the meals are vegan. I don't normally associate "buttermilk" with anything that I eat as a vegan. This might be a tricky marketing issue, because a huge amount of…
That's a great point about the branding. Why we're called Buttermilk: Buttermilk is eaten at the end of almost every South Indian meal to "cool down" the stomach. As a South Indian myself, this is one of my go-to comfort foods. The aim with the company is to provide authentic, comfort foods which is how we came about to using it for the name! Plus, it's a known and easy-to-say word. We didn't actually launch with the…
I may as well chime in here to provide another data point. I'm also vegan and I was definitely turned off by the name. I wouldn't have read further if it wasn't clearly a service for Indian food, which I am particularly interested in. I'm glad that your first line of meals is vegan, and as another South Indian I can sympathize with the reasoning behind the name, but I'm sure many others would be confused by the name as well.
Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes
#87This seems like you are working off of TastyBite's playbook: http://tastybite.com/products/ > The options were expensive, time-consuming, or tasted horrible. Tasty bite tastes decent, takes 60-90 seconds to heat up, and costs about $3/package with no need for refrigeration. --- This seems like a YC to clone TastyBite without any differentiation beyond the nebulous "quality food". So.... Are you telling me your qualit…
TastyBite is definitely a similar product/company. The key differentiators are:
- Our products are fresh and don't have any preservatives, meaning they must be refrigerated or frozen whereas TastyBite is shelf-stable for 9+ months. Our food is inherently fresher and tastes more homemade because of this.
- Our recipes are crowdsourced instead of developed in our kitchen. This ensures that the food is actually authentic with a homemade taste and we are able to expand into a much larger variety of products much quicker. For instance, we have a few recipes in our pipeline that you would be hard-pressed to find in TastyBite or even regular Indian restaurants because they are authentic to smaller regions of India.
- I can't say that you'll definitely like our product's taste better than TastyBite, but I do believe so :)
Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes
#88Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes
#89This seems like you are working off of TastyBite's playbook: http://tastybite.com/products/ > The options were expensive, time-consuming, or tasted horrible. Tasty bite tastes decent, takes 60-90 seconds to heat up, and costs about $3/package with no need for refrigeration. --- This seems like a YC to clone TastyBite without any differentiation beyond the nebulous "quality food". So.... Are you telling me your qualit…
Except Tasty Bite tastes terrible. There's another competitor making the same thing (sealed cooked food, no water needed) Maya Kaimal that is _much_ better. It actually tastes good.
Re: Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Glad you asked! We have a few key differences: - MTR provides just the spices, you have to bring everything else. This includes vegetables/meat, seasoning, additional spices, oil/salt, etc. Our products include all of this so that the only ingredient you add is water which makes it much more convenient. - Our packets are 100% fresh and don't have any preservatives, whereas existing packaged Indian foods are packed wi…
> MTR provides just the spices, you have to bring everything else. This includes vegetables/meat, seasoning, additional spices, oil/salt, etc. Our products include all of this so that the only ingredient you add is water which makes it much more convenient. Sorry, this is not accurate. If I buy an MTR Sambhar rice, or Paneer masala, everything is included. I just need to heat it and eat it. > Our packets are 100% fre…
Appreciate the responses!
- The microwaveable complete meals are definitely more similar to our products, but those are once again shelf-stable and lack in taste and nutrition. We will be doing a live comparison of our Chana Masala vs. the MTR Chana Masala to show how different it is in amount of product, look, smell, taste and nutrition.
- The oil that they include is definitely a type of preservative, and they use packaging engineering called retort packaging. This is very similar to vacuum sealing where you are drying up the product to remove the nutritional value. I think we could agree that there's a pretty big difference between MTR paneer masala and a homemade paneer masala. I would say that our products are similar if not the same as if you made it from scratch.
- We are e-commerce delivery, not on-demand. The difference between ordering from us vs. an Indian restaurant would be price-point (most dishes start at $7-10).
- Taste is definitely subjective!