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Josephine is closing its doors

blog.josephine.com

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Re: Josephine is closing its doors

#13

Post by meritt »

gambiting wrote: post #12

What was Josephine? I've looked at their homepage but I still have no idea what they did. Was it a restaurant? That served home made food?

It facilitated the ability for people to sell (or simply share, I believe you could set $0 prices) meals from their home kitchen to their neighbors. It'd be like putting up a flier saying "We're making a ton of chili, come by 435 Birch tonight if you'd like a bowl!"

Re: Josephine is closing its doors

#14

Post by crsv »

Two sided market business are burn barrels for cash until you hit crazy scale. The ambition and idea was great, but actually pulling this off at some sustainable model would be incredibly difficult with all the moving pieces. Loved what they did around the brand, but the idea is so high on the difficulty of execution scale, how this played out is unsurprising.

Re: Josephine is closing its doors

#15

Post by aidenn0 »

I don't know what the final outcome was, but there was a charity that would provide food for the homeless by having volunteers bring home-cooked casseroles. After operating for over a decade, the county health board shut it down because publicly serving food not made in a certified kitchen was illegal.

I moved away from there, so never found out if they were able to resolve it, but that wasn't that long ago and was a push in the opposite direction of what Josephine would need.

Re: Josephine is closing its doors

#16

Post by anitorosyan »

Equally sad for this.. but Josephine is doing a great job handling the transition. My company just launched in this space (DishDivvy) and are truly appreciative of the work they've done on the legislative front, for bringing opportunities to homecooks. We are working with their COOK alliance and making sure AB 626 gets through the senate as successfully as it did the CA Assembly.

Re: Josephine is closing its doors

#17

Post by s0rce »

dawhizkid wrote: post #3

I like the idea but I think the food safety/perishabiliy/logistics challenge is too much. Personally I would like something like a “social buying” restaurant delivery app, where you can vote on what you’d like made in a centralized kitchen and then place an order to be delivered if whatever you voted on was chosen by popular vote. Recipe holders could submit recipes to be voted on and make a commission from sales if…

Don't restaurants already effectively do this? Although voting doesn't happen in the traditional sense people will vote with their purchasing choices. The restaurant will offer certain things on the menu and ones that don't get ordered will likely get eliminated (assuming the restaurant wants to make money). From what I've read most restaurants in America tend to offer many choices compared to countries like Japan where much more specialized places can prosper so your idea could be much more efficient but I'm not sure how practical it is to get people to agree on anything.

Re: Josephine is closing its doors

#18

Post by taneq »

hosh wrote: post #7

Huh, interesting. I wonder what happened, after reading this: https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/why-i-left-google-to-join-gr... (Steve Yegge talking about joining Grab, and the meal-delivery boom)

I wondered why Steve Yegge stopped blogging. I really enjoyed his old blog, hopefully this will see him back at it!

Re: Josephine is closing its doors

#19

Post by dawhizkid »

s0rce wrote: post #17
dawhizkid wrote: post #3

I like the idea but I think the food safety/perishabiliy/logistics challenge is too much. Personally I would like something like a “social buying” restaurant delivery app, where you can vote on what you’d like made in a centralized kitchen and then place an order to be delivered if whatever you voted on was chosen by popular vote. Recipe holders could submit recipes to be voted on and make a commission from sales if…

Don't restaurants already effectively do this? Although voting doesn't happen in the traditional sense people will vote with their purchasing choices. The restaurant will offer certain things on the menu and ones that don't get ordered will likely get eliminated (assuming the restaurant wants to make money). From what I've read most restaurants in America tend to offer many choices compared to countries like Japan wh…

Not really. I mean this would be more like Top Chef on demand with no fixed menu. There's an inventory of non-perishable/perishable ingredients available in a commercial kitchen. If a lot of people want to order some meal then that gets made with some scheduled delivery time.

Surprised no one's attempted the "Uber for whatever meal your heart desires prepped by a personal chef." It'd be expensive, yes, but I could see that being a luxury food delivery option that would be appealing to someone with money but no personal chef.

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