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The failure of Sprig

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Re: The failure of Sprig

#41

Post by parliament32 »

fasteddie wrote: post #2

I loved Sprig. I used to use them as my example of a favorite product when asked in interviewed. Problem: I am hungry right now and can't/don't want to cook. Solution: As the founder notes, once signed in, it was literally three taps to get food to my door really quick. Also the design was beautiful. Doordash, UberEats, et. al have certainly (glactically) widened the variety of food I could order, but I always find m…

>I always find myself suffering from choice anxiety when I open those up

This whole analysis-paralysis trend seems to be a thing not just in food delivery, but Netflix et al as well. I've lost count of the number of times I've kept scrolling through Netflix with a bunch of "okay" options at the back of my head, but searching for something better. Ditto for DoorDash.

I wonder how well an "I'm feeling lucky" button would do on a food delivery platform.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#42

Post by ransom1538 »

Food creation & delivery: A hyper competitive, low margin, inventory rotting, regulated, logistical & insurance nightmare. Sprinkle on a San Francisco Office + 1300 employees: Madness.

What waste: taking $2 worth of food across the city then trying to squeak out $10 -- after paying for the drivers time, the cooking staffs time, marketing, lawyers, the inventory staff, SF Rent -- there is nothing left but nursing home level food and bad reviews. Did anyone at this company know excel? One employee car accident your insurance drops you. One blown industrial food fridge your profits are gone for the month. One bad meal you lost a customer. My mind blows that experienced board members went along with this circus. Uber for cats just didn't cut it?

Re: The failure of Sprig

#43

Post by jpm_sd »

sharkmerry wrote: post #34
notyourday wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who are not in the actual retail restaurant industry do not understand that there's no way to make money with ghost kitchens. Theoretically, to make money with a ghost kitchen one needs it to be churning out a very large number of standard meals at a price that customers want to pay to achieve the economy of scale which at the same time requires an economy of scale in logistics, which has its own overhead. By…

ghost kitchens can absolutely make money. Them being done at scale with VC money, most likely not. But as the below commenter said, if you can use same ingredients across multiple dishes, it reduces waste and can reduce COGS. A small restaurant can do it, the issue there is establishing a brand, but if all your orders are coming via 3rd party apps. not sure how much brand awareness you actually need

"ghost kitchens" that make money are called factories. Factories where they make frozen pizza and lean cuisines.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#44

Post by phkahler »

I saw one more reason for failure in there:

>> We were running a restaurant doing $6M in revenue but paying real estate for a place that needed $20M in revenue to be profitable.

Low interest rates. They drive real estate prices way up. Had they been able to buy vs rent or simply pay less, they would have been in better shape.

IMO low interest rates are actually causing problems for the economy.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#45

Post by ssivark »

muzz wrote: post #33
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #3

> Govt. SF health + planning made our lives hell. They didn't like our innovations. We had to bribe officials ("lobbying"). San Francisco's population leans quite left, but they seem to really hate change over there. I've never lived in a place so hellbent on ensuring that nothing changes. In fact--the entire bay seems to hate change, and the peninsula may arguably be worse. There's that old saying: "you couldn't get…

He never says how the business responded to this. I.e. why didn't it shift to Oakland, San Jose, or even another metro area. Unless the business model only worked in San Francisco.

Population density (of target audience) is one of the most crucial things for a service like 15 minute food delivery, so if restricted to the Bay Area, few places can compete with SF. Further, cost of living in SF is significantly higher, which allows you to charge more... but your costs also increase, unfortunately. So you might be motivated to have a second “back office” in a cheaper neighborhood doing as much of the processing as possible, and then doing the final assembly in the “front office”... but food can lose freshness very quickly; so the game goes. I guess the point is that they “learned” that there doesn’t exist a sustainable market for food delivery in the given situation.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#46

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

kjs3 wrote: post #40
morley wrote: post #12

> Govt. SF health + planning made our lives hell. They didn't like our innovations. What innovations did they make that the health department didn't like?

Exactly...I'd like to understand that as well. I really don't want to eat food where someone is 'innovating' (disrupting?) safety and hygiene regulations without some check and balance. And I don't think this 'attitude' on the part of health inspectors would be unique to SFO...

Probably some skirting of the rules around temperature keeping for pre-made items.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#47

Post by ziftface »

jeffbee wrote: post #30
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #3

> Govt. SF health + planning made our lives hell. They didn't like our innovations. We had to bribe officials ("lobbying"). San Francisco's population leans quite left, but they seem to really hate change over there. I've never lived in a place so hellbent on ensuring that nothing changes. In fact--the entire bay seems to hate change, and the peninsula may arguably be worse. There's that old saying: "you couldn't get…

The people of San Francisco are not "left" on local matters like planning and permitting. In fact they are absurdly conservative or reactionary. And they have plenty of reason to be: the people who own San Francisco property are riding a dynastic money machine. A surprising number of them can trace their family wealth back to literally Mexican land grants, or similar historical accidents. All of them enjoy a state ta…

It's unfortunate that people get a sense of moral superiority for having one political view or another. It reminds me of how certain religious people have a sense of moral superiority and it makes them incapable of introspection. Not to mention that labelling an entire city as "left leaning" is absurd.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#48

Post by renewiltord »

derefr wrote: post #26
renewiltord wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clicks through drop off really fast. I know I almost never do it. The tweet thread format is good for information in small bites. I know that each tweet has got to have more information and I can just stop at the first that is meh because it's written for insiders. Articles on the other hand are written for an audience that usually likes more background etc. because that audience will complain if the background is ab…

But you have to click the tweet to see the thread anyway. What's the difference between clicking through to the thread, and clicking through to open the article in the embedded webview? Either way, you're stuck synchronously looking at the story until you click "Back." If it's just a matter of journalistic style, I assume there are people out there who write articles the same content-dense way people write tweetstorm…

I don't know what to tell you except that tweets are way more information-dense than anything else. The Medium audience demands "modern long-form" style with personal anecdotes and all that. The Twitter audience demands the punchy short stuff. So I know what I'm going to get on Twitter.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#49

Post by idoh »

ziftface wrote: post #47
jeffbee wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people of San Francisco are not "left" on local matters like planning and permitting. In fact they are absurdly conservative or reactionary. And they have plenty of reason to be: the people who own San Francisco property are riding a dynastic money machine. A surprising number of them can trace their family wealth back to literally Mexican land grants, or similar historical accidents. All of them enjoy a state ta…

It's unfortunate that people get a sense of moral superiority for having one political view or another. It reminds me of how certain religious people have a sense of moral superiority and it makes them incapable of introspection. Not to mention that labelling an entire city as "left leaning" is absurd.

In 2016 only 10% of San Francisco voted for Trump. There was not a single neighborhood that had higher than 30% for Trump. So "left leaning" is apt, if you agree that left / right roughly maps to Democrat / Republican.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#50

Post by jayparth »

notyourday wrote: post #38
sharkmerry wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ghost kitchens can absolutely make money. Them being done at scale with VC money, most likely not. But as the below commenter said, if you can use same ingredients across multiple dishes, it reduces waste and can reduce COGS. A small restaurant can do it, the issue there is establishing a brand, but if all your orders are coming via 3rd party apps. not sure how much brand awareness you actually need

> ghost kitchens can absolutely make money. That is as assumption that has been made time and time again and it always failed. The most important part of a successful kitchen is a near zero dwell time. The smallest dwell time is achieved by having a kitchen be colocated with the customer.

As someone who has never worked in the restaurant industry, I don't understand, at all, what you mean by this. Could you elaborate?
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