A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry

Isn't this sort of issue faced by 99% of any new business that sells a service or a product? Unless your idea is something patentable, or you have a trade secret that's locked up tight, or you control your product vertically (e.g., you own the only Unobtainium mine on the planet) - can't your business be copied fairly trivially?

(Quick edit: who else remembers everyone and their nephew offering website hosting/colocation at ludicrously low prices in the early-to-mid 2000's?)

> If you can afford a meal-in-a-box service, why would you not just go to a restaurant where the wait staff will do a decent job as a substitute for your own live-in cook previously known as The Wife?

I always say that these are for people with more money than time.

The reason they don't go to a restaurant is because you like cooking - or at least, you like the idea of being someone who cooks. But the ad copy is right - shopping sucks, finding recipes sucks, throwing away food because you bought too much kale sucks. (Not to mention, cooking a meal and eating it takes 45 minutes - depending on the restaurant, you might be in there for an hour, plus travel time. And remember, time is what they're short on.)

Even if you find four interesting recipes and buy all the ingredients, and cook them - this takes 3x the time than just using Blue Apron, at minimum - on Friday you've got a bunch of assorted ingredients and no idea what to do with them. (Because you're not a wifemom, and you don't know how to combine those things into a meal.)

But the person they're targeting doesn't want to learn to do that. They just want to buy a pre-configured lego set, and build a spaceship they can eat.

You are not their target audience. Neither am I. But it definitely, definitely exists.

The kits have a value beyond the food, they teach you how to be more confident about your cooking. Americans are terrible cooks on average, they don't learn good cooking skills at home because their parents are not very good cooks either (gross generalization but accurate if you compare the US with for example Italy).

My wife now can cook a much wider variety of meals after a few months of meal kits. It also has reduced dramatically the thinking it required to plan meals in advance. If grocery stores want to compete they will have to work with their providers to create smaller packages of items to assemble and a team to design and forecast demand for different types of meals. Not impossible but definitely not easy, I see acquisitions happening in this space.

The main benefit I get out of it is that without it I would never cook anything because I wouldn't be able to get the motivation over the long term (I've tried, and it works for a short time, but fades).

So basically it gives me reasonable portions that I can cart to work, gets me to cook by force-feeding me recipes (which seems to reliably motivate me, and they taste good enough when done), and at least seem more healthy (and at $9 a serving substantially cheaper than) a restaurant.

Not saying that the same thing would work for anyone other than me, but has worked out better than the prior "stuffing whatever food I can reach into mouth" method.

I've tried BlueApron and HelloFresh. I enjoy cooking, and the quality of the recipes is great, but damn, it takes too long to make their recipes. Often, they promise it only takes 15-30 minutes for an entire meal, but apparently I'm not a professional chef who can wash vegetables, dice them, prepare marinades, chop garlic, and do all of this in just a few minutes. I end up usually spending between 60-90 minutes just to cook a recipe, which is way too much labor for a meal that is already priced about the same as a restaurant meal.

Granted, the food is much healthier than restaurant food, but my time is too valuable to spend that much. I suspect that other families where both parents work full time (like mine) are the same. Who has the time to spend an hour or two cooking every night? And pay a premium price for it?

I'm cautiously optimistic about Tovala. They are the first one of these that has a fairly unique system where the food just needs to be popped into their combi-oven (bake, broil, and steam) and you just wait until it cooks.

Eventually, we will have fully automated cooking appliances where drones deliver fresh food staples to your house and you get hot meals prepared automatically, but in the meantime, Tovala looks the closest to creating that experience.