101–110 of 320 posts
I feel like they should have Meal-Kits at grocery stores. They could make them with all the extra food they have. That way you can go pick up 3 of them and then grab more groceries if need be. It would be way better than all the frozen meals they have.
Isn't the grocery store already basically one large meal kit?
- We have toddlers, and the menu was too "fancy". It's difficult to get a 4 year old to eat squid ink pasta.
- I felt bad about all that wasted packing material and giant ice packs.
We switched to Dream Dinners, which is a local place. My wife goes once a month, picks out a bunch of dinners for the month, and we throw them in the freezer. Each of the dinners fits in a gallon ziploc bag. They were generally easier and faster to cook (pre-chopped vegetables, pre-marinated meat, etc) and there is more choice to it and no shipping containers. Highly recommend.
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Amazon Prime Fresh is a thing; they absolutely do home delivery.
The delivery is outsourced and not handled directly by Amazon.
[I'm ignoring AWS and other products or services that don't need to be physically delivered.]
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I'm a former homemaker and full time mom. You have failed in your stated goal of not being rude to me. I am merely describing the problem space. If people wanted to, you know, tweak it themselves, then there would be no food services of any kind, not restaurants and not take out food and not meal-in-a-box delivery services. We would just all cook for ourselves if everyone just loved doing that and didn't want this so…
I don't think your reasoning in the second paragraph is accurate. People aren't a uniform congealed mass of preferences that match your own. You don't like cooking. I do. It is really fun for me. I enjoy cooking new things and learning new techniques. I enjoy learning new ingredients and new dishes. I, however, hate going grocery shopping and looking up new recipes. This service deals with the issues I have. What's e…
Generally speaking, when people make generalizations, they are not assuming that 100% of the world will exactly fit their statements 100% of the time. Saying that it is generally true does not presume that people like you do not exist. It just presumes that you are probably in the minority.
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Technically Whole Foods does not themselves do delivery (it's Instacart), while Amazon actually does (Fresh)... Amazon's also working on grocery pickup, which seems perfect for meal kits.
Okay, looks like that is true today, but Whole Foods was doing home delivery before Instacart even existed, at least in NYC. Amazon Fresh outsources their actual delivery, as well, so no points for that one.
I feel like the real problem with meal-in-a-box delivery services is that they are trying to fill the empty shoes of a missing full-time wife and mom because there are more two career couples and both spouses now "need a wife" and it can't be found. The problem is that such a service has no real hope of taking the place of someone with actual cooking skill who knows you well and will tweak the recipe to your preferen…
- $20/meal for a couple or small family is still cheaper than eating out, especially for the kind of meal you're getting from BlueApron
- People like knowing what goes into their food
- Using your cool kitchen gadgets is fun, even if you don't have great recipe ideas
- In some places, to make a specific dish may require a trip to two or three or more grocery stores
Growing up in the 80s with two parents that worked, there was a wife/mom who knew our preferences, but we ate a lot of hamburger helper anyway.
Meal planning is the least fun part of cooking for me and my wife. Executing the plan is easier and funner than than coming up with the plan or getting the ingredients. Maybe we're outliers.
On your subtext, it's true that society has changed a lot since we have two career professionals, but knowing several families that are trying the stay-at-home mom thing, I can't say it's working well for them, largely because there was a lot more institutional support for it in the 50s and earlier. The ones I know certainly don't spend their entire day coming up with luxury meals for their pampered families. But that's a topic for another day.
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> 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 righ…
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…
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> 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 righ…
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…
In my experience with around 10 different (vegetarian) dishes from them, I've found that to be somewhat true. Most dishes only required some combination of: an oven (oven heating time not included in the "10 minutes"); a sauce pot for pasta/noodles; a 12-inch or larger saute pan; a mixing bowl.
The instructions use pipelining to achieve the advertised 10 minutes, and if you read the instructions in their entirety and execute accordingly, 10 minutes is very doable.
All ingredients except for salt, pepper and cooking oil are provided (this is probably obvious, but perhaps worth stating for people new to meal kits). The ingredients seemed to be fresh and of good quality.
The meals are reasonably tasty, except for the Indian ones, which I felt were not as good as something you could make from scratch at home or get in a restaurant.
A side-effect is that for lazy people like me, it may reduce the inertia to separate prep from cooking. Although I'd often thought about pre-cutting and freezing ingredients to cook later in the week, I found myself actually doing it after experiencing the 10-minute cook time, because my mind kept getting reminded that it's very doable.
An advantage of meal kits for a non-cook like me, is that certain condiments and sauces that I may not wish to stock, are provided in the required quantities with the meal kit. So I don't have to worry about buying a whole bottle of some sauce just for that one meal that requires it.
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> 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 righ…
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…
In fact, I live in a small town in the rural Northeast, and if I want to go to a restaurant and not spend over an hour in the car, let alone the time spent sitting at the table, my choices are nowhere near as interesting and varied as what Blue Apron provides.
Maybe you live in a place where you can get to dozens of different restaurants in a very short time that have a variety of locally-sourced meals changing on a regular basis for less than $10/person, but even if so, I doubt that's the norm in American cities.
Blue Apron certainly isn't for everyone. I love cooking, so I find it a very worthwhile service, but you do need to actually enjoy doing it, because indeed, it invariably takes between 50 and 75 minutes from getting out the ingredients to putting the food on the table, and almost all of that time is active time for the one making the food.
generally people who do meal-kits just aren't good at shopping. it isn't cheaper, healthier or faster to cook than regular food. the only thing it might be better at is faster at preparation , an advantage that is negated if you buy a sufficiently large amount of food each time you purchase and pre-prepare (cutting chicken into slices and freezing them, etc.). tldr: only lazy people with more time than money would be…
Opportunity costs are real, people's preferences are heterogeneous, and also I'm pretty sure you're 'lazy' too – using a computer to perform all of those arithmetic calculations it's doing!