And I thought this was going to be about the companies that produce military rations.
A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
21–30 of 320 posts
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#22Isn'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/coloca…
Not really, no. When Dropbox applied to YC, they had to fill in a section that specifically dealt with how hard it would be to enter their space. It was much harder than it looks, and they convinced YC of that.
Groupon always suffered from being easy to copy and having no appreciable network effects.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#23I 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…
> 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 preferences, possibly without you even having to explicitly ask or remind her.
My wife and I have used meal-in-a-box services. We both tweak the recipes without reminders. They don't aim to replace a cook, because they still need a cook.
They mostly replace some of the effort of shopping, portioning, and some part of prepping, plus recipe discovery.
> If you can afford a meal-in-a-box service, why would you not just go to a restaurant
Because with a restaurant, I don't have a cook that will tweak to my tastes without detailed prompting.
> where the wait staff will do a decent job as a substitute for your own live-in cook
You are confusing front-of-house with back-of-house staff.
> Someone else decides what you will be eating and you have to do the cooking.
The ability to select from a menu of options prior to delivery would be an improvement for many of these services.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#24Isn'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/coloca…
I think that's the point of the article (although I doubt it's anyway near 99%). The article is enforcing the importance of building an "economic moat" in business: http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/economicmoat.asp
In the case of the meal-kit industry, the author's suggesting there is no moat, or none has been identified/built yet.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. It seems like these will eventually lose to just normal automated grocery delivery. You will always need other food than just the kits even if they are cost competitive in NYC, etc.
It's not just acquiring the ingredients; there's value in having someone else plan the menu for you. Deciding what to cook can be a challenge! I host an ~8 person dinner party roughly once a week, and it is not unusual for me to spend as much time digging through recipes, trying to decide what to cook, as I put into actually preparing the meal. Yes, of course you need other groceries beyond the meal kit itself, but t…
I think too much ambition to be able to home-cook every kind of food under the sun leads to much of this trouble. Focus on a narrower set of things—say, 2-3 national/regional/ethnic cuisines, and/or cooking techniques—and most of the difficulty, expense, and even planning of home cooking goes away.
The wildly globe-hopping table of the home cook is a recent, and kinda silly, development. You can get plenty of variety without trying to prepare meals from every continent.
(this goes out the window if it's a major hobby, obviously, but in that case so should complaints about its difficulty/inconvenience, which are entirely self-imposed)
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#26It seems that there's more potential for meaningful differentiation than in the case of the Groupon-type services but the rush to be one of the few winners who IPO and damn the customer acquisition costs seem like valid points. These services just seem very niche-y to me. I'm not really the target market but, for any given service, there's a pretty narrow profile of cost-sensitivity, interest in prepping/cooking but…
I agree. It seems like these will eventually lose to just normal automated grocery delivery. You will always need other food than just the kits even if they are cost competitive in NYC, etc.
What if they become automated grocery delivery?
It's an interesting leverage point, since there's obviously a [possibly smaller-than-they-want] market. But the expansion into automated grocery will be a matter of luck & timing. Unless you're Amazon [in which case it's persistence]
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#27I 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 think you're right, and that people are downvoting you because they are confusing your references to pre-feminism gender roles as you supporting them.
As delivery services become faster and more perfected, specifically when we can start using drones to deliver almost anything (which isn't heavy) to anyone in an urban/suburban area in an hour or less, I think we will see the rise of food being ordered and delivered at will. However, the technology isn't there yet. So instead, we get all these food delivery services that either deliver restaurant food (ubereats, orderup), their own food but without choice / at high cost relative to quality like with Freshly, or these meal-kits.
At best they are awkward solutions to a problem that we can't fix with normal pricing and distribution models. What there is really a market for is a service that can deliver fresh or at least reasonably high quality food, which is customizable to individual preferences, for a reasonable cost (~$5 or so), on-demand, and in a timely manner. All of the existing companies in this space make tradeoffs in one way or another, which leave people dissatisfied and prevent adoption except by those who place a high premium on convenience.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#28Whilst I'm not the target market (I enjoy cooking from scratch way too much), I think there are a few things wrong with the analysis:
- Surely this isn't the first business to make a loss on acquisition in expectation of breakeven. That in of itself doesn't make this untenable. I also feel that the Groupon analogy is a bit underbaked: Groupon (and the ilk) were also I suspect totally unsustainable for the end businesses.
- There is substantial scope for curation. This in & of itself may not not be enough of course, but this doesn't seem like total commodity land either. Also it isn't just about getting the ingredients bundled together. It is harder than you'd think making sure standard measures of stuff in the supermarket doesn't go to waste from spoilage when trying to cook whilst keeping repetition low. Optimising for this is probably an interesting and not super simple problem.
I've only been exposed to the UK variants. The above may not hold true for other places though.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#29Earlier 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'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…
The difference between your drone future and delivered takeaways is the time between the cooking and the serving. As long as takeaways are kept hot (and haven't tuned to a soggy mess) surely better takeaways are easier to engineer?
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#30I 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…
We use Hello Fresh and like it quite a bit. Even being a full time wife and mom and a good cook, she still likes to use this as it adds variation to our dinners, and we try some foods that we wouldn't ordinarily try.
As for affordability: $60 / 3 meals = $20 / meal. In general, getting similar meals elsewhere would run us $40+.
They normally give you a few different options for the week and project out multiple weeks in advance so you have plenty of time to decide what you want. If you don't want anything they have to offer that week, then you can always just skip the box altogether too.
I'm certainly not trying to diminish the benefits of having someone at home full time to care for the family (and all that entails), but saying that the meal-in-a-box service industry is in existence solely because of more two-income families is a rather narrow view.