Here's what my family does:
We hired an older woman (from thumbtack.com) to come to our house once a week for 4 hours and cook whatever is in the fridge. I make sure to have plenty of food in the fridge, spices, canned goods, etc. Then she cooks enough food for my 4 person family for about 5 - 6 days (excluding breakfast). She knows our preferences and takes requests. We pay her $25/hr ($100 week). I feel like everyone interested in these meal services should really just have a personal chef. Way better than these pre-made meal services because you have complete control over ingredients and meal types.
A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
191–200 of 320 posts
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#192I 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…
> 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.
This can be true when one person is the breadwinner and the other is practically/partially disabled, too.
I don't know if you've read this book, but it is fascinating.
https://www.amazon.com/Way-We-Never-Were-Nostalgia/dp/046509...
Of course, this book isn't the be-all answer to how things really were. I would suggest what we're really grappling with here is a breakdown in social order where kids are adequately taken care of, houses are adequately cleaned, meals prepared. To do so today is really quite hard: all sorts of traditional support structures have vanished in the wind. The big bugbear in this from a century ago was "Modernity", and you can find a number of writings from that era wishing for a prior time. I'm reluctant to blame modernity that much, but it's a worthy starting point in my opinion.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#193I 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…
I subscribe to sunbasket. Here's some reasons.
I like cooking
I don't have time to shop frequently
I like meal planning, but I don't like meal-planning 7 days a week
I don't care to go out to eat and spend a bunch of time dealing with ordering, waiting for the check, transportation, and so on.
Sunbasket costs me about $22 per meal for two people. That is _significantly less_ money than a restaurant meal of similar quality. I could go to KFC and get crap for less than $20, but the value proposition is still quite good for me. My wife and I typically eat out once a week (or order delivery), I take care of meal-planning three other meals a week, and sunbasket handles the mid-week meals where I have enough time to cook but don't want to mess around with shopping. It's all organic and mostly sourced locally to me (although they deliver all over, I live in SF). Personally? I'd probably pay more for it. It is already a good value proposition.
The only complicating factor is that when I shop and prep a meal from the store, I usually make 3-4 servings and thus have leftovers, which doesn't happen. So, with sunbasket I tend to buy more lunches. It is definitely more money than if I just went to the grocery store, but it saves me a trip a week, so there's that.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#194I 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…
> 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. This can be true when one person is the breadwinner and the other is practically/partially disabled, too. I don't know if you've read this book, but it is fascinating . https://www.amazon.com/Way-We-Never-Were-Nostalgia/dp/046509... Of course, this book isn't t…
I am not familiar with that book, but I am well aware that our mental models about the nuclear family are basically rooted in a very brief window of time when "The Boys" came home from WW2 and women went home en masse to be homemakers etc.
I actually blog some about the truly terrible effect this has had on our housing situation because we are still basically being haunted by the ghost of this brief anomalous time that we think is normal or something.
I think it gets romanticized because it was a step up generally speaking over the terrible poverty that was the norm before that. People seem to not recognize that fact, so it usually isn't worth trying to comment on.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#195The long term trend for "meal kits" is very likely just going to have massive local and regional competition. I'm already seeing this in Portland with several meal delivery services that cater to different lifestyles: gluten free, whole 30, extra protein, etc. These are successful "complete meal delivery" businesses. I see no reason why there can't be "meal kit" variations in the future. The cost of starting up a loc…
Sure, but Portland is like legendary for that kind of thing.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Granted, the food is much healthier than restaurant food I wouldn't automatically grant that. I cook Blue Apron with my teen-aged kids and it's fantastic. I've become a much better cook while helping them learn how to cook. The recipe cards are a big part of what makes it work for us. I don't always know what medium dice or chop means, but I can pretty much always match what's in the picture.
> I wouldn't automatically grant that. While this deserves qualifications, most of the time restaurant food is simply not as hygienic as meals prepared at home. And its not some deliberate plan to make it so. Despite their best efforts, a somewhat large scale food establishment just allows a lot more opportunities for food contamination. And I say this as a person who eats out everyday (Lunch out, dinner and supper a…
I think your key concern with restaurant food should be nutrition, not hygiene. Hygiene in restaurants is typically good enough to not be much of a problem (and the human body is resilient enough to take a bit of occasional rough treatment).
But you don't know how much sugar, fat, or just empty calories are being put in your food to make it just a little more presentable or appetizing. That is what you have better control over when you cook yourself.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But the point has been made several times in this thread, it's not much cheaper. Yes, it is. > Unless you're referring to some Michelin-starred restaurant, it's quite possible to eat fast-casual for the same price of many of these kits (especially if you live in a suburb where restaurants tend to be much cheaper than in e.g. SF) Blue Apron is $8.74 (family plan) or $9.99 (couples plan) per plate for complete dinner…
This doesn't hold true for the rest of America. Go build a chipotle meal at some other zip code. South East: 1 chipotle burrito bowl, chicken, black beans, brown rice, guac, hot salsa, cheese 1 22oz drink Total - $10.20
Chipotle is nowhere near the quality I can produce in my own kitchen, even setting aside its recent correlation with e coli outbreaks. This price is also precisely the same price point (around $10 per person per meal) that these services provide. And when I cook at home, I don't have to drive anywhere, or accept the enormous amount of extraneous salt and cooking fat that tends to get used in those situations.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#198OT: When did Medium start showing bottom-feeding Taboola ad content? That's a massive disappointment. Update: Oh, that waas content. My error.
That was part of the content of the article, not an ad slot.
Doh! My error.
Thanks. I ... cannot say how absolutely abhorrent I find that stuff. Even when pointed out in articles.
I'm sensitised to it in part because I've taken extreme pains to block as much of that as possible. A harder task than it should be.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 started using these services (originally Blue Apron; more recently Hello Fresh) with the express goal of learning to cook. I originally planned to continue the service until I had a catalog of recipes I knew I liked and enough skill to do for myself. I met my initial goal six months ago, cancelled my subscription, then restarted it a couple of months after that. I found that when I had to choose a recipe to cook, I…
I'm interested by your experience because I've always wondered if using one of these services to learn how to cook doesn't really reflect how most people actually cook in their home which is not to really have strict recipes but improvise based on what you have in the kitchen. I'm always surprised by my partner who can't follow a recipe to save her life. Somehow it always all falls apart. On the other hand, when she's throwing together a dinner she's an improv master balancing flavour, nutrition, against a limited set of ingredients. I'm not sure if practicing recipes will develop that intuition but that's her default.
On the other hand my parents, who aren't good cooks in general, started using hello fresh. While it didn't really change the way they cooked, it broadened the range of ingredients and spices they used while teaching them to actually add salt to things and all of that improved their cooking immeasurably.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, something I've thought about a lot since listening to this 99pi episode [2] is that technology is best when it enhances useful skills. [or at least doesn't atrophy them] I think that services like Blue Apron are actually kind of ingenious in that they trivialize an annoying part of cooking [the shopping] while developing the "skill" part. On top of that, I think just using good ingredients helps you identify wh…
Food shopping definitely sucks, and on top of the time commitment, having to keep a catalogue of typical prices per quantity and freshness/ripeness-determining markers in one's head is fairly burdensome. One of those great things the truly rich don't have any reason to do/learn unless they just feel like it. I'm skeptical of the value of these services overall but the more I think about time savings and not having to…
We get this in the UK - I can order from Tesco or Asda and get it delivered to my door.
"Price promise" price matches lowest price in area for branded goods like Heinz baked beans. It's cheaper in UK to pick supermarket own brand, in which case there is the issue that I like Tesco baked beans but not Asda baked beans.
And Tesco offer a "as you would pick it yourself" on fresh food where they pick the longest shelf life fresh food. But Tesco failed and lost a lot of money in the US market.
I wonder why the UK has good supermarket delivery and the US does not.