Article peing paywalled, I had to google to understand what was that meal-kit concept.
It isn't hard to understand why it fail. This kind of service is only useful in a broken by design neighborhood and urbanism failures.
Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors
21–30 of 97 posts
Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors
#22My biggest gripe with HelloFresh, et al is that I still need to do the prep, so they don't actually save me much time. It's nothing more than curated grocery delivery. Years ago, there was a service in Hong Kong (I wish I could remember the name) that did daily delivery of already prepped meal kits - onions pre-chopped, avocados cubed, oil portioned for each step, etc. It was basically cooking by numbers, and extraor…
> It's nothing more than curated grocery delivery.
It also create much more garbage so they got that going for them, too.
Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors
#23My biggest gripe with HelloFresh, et al is that I still need to do the prep, so they don't actually save me much time. It's nothing more than curated grocery delivery. Years ago, there was a service in Hong Kong (I wish I could remember the name) that did daily delivery of already prepped meal kits - onions pre-chopped, avocados cubed, oil portioned for each step, etc. It was basically cooking by numbers, and extraor…
There is a fantastic meal kit service of this sort in Boston, Littleburg [1]. The steps involved are usually limited to baking/roasting/sautéing and assembling, and the resulting meals are very high quality, far better than anything I can make on my own or most anything else you can get delivered. (All vegan too, which is important to me.)
Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors
#24My biggest gripe with HelloFresh, et al is that I still need to do the prep, so they don't actually save me much time. It's nothing more than curated grocery delivery. Years ago, there was a service in Hong Kong (I wish I could remember the name) that did daily delivery of already prepped meal kits - onions pre-chopped, avocados cubed, oil portioned for each step, etc. It was basically cooking by numbers, and extraor…
Local networks might be the only way to make this cheap enough to drive enough customers to use it. The programs are too expensive for me to justify, and a big part of that is the packaging and shipping costs.
Local networks doing daily delivery don't need dry ice, can use minimal packaging, can batch orders and send out with their own delivery drivers/routes. They could even pick up the packaging for reuse upon delivery of the next order. This only works at scale though, and is going to be nearly impossible to build a business on, unless in high density living areas.
Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors
#25Anyone know of a pantry and fridge management system that supports recipes and new ordering? Seems complicated until it’s done.
AnyList for iOS supports recipes and adding ingredients from recipes to your shopping list. No ordering or anything, but it might do part of what you're looking for.
The vexing thing is that it doesn't deduplicated ingredients from multiple recipes onto your grocery list. You'll end up with onions on the list 3 times if you have 3 recipes that take onions :-/
If anybody has a better alternative, I'm all ears.
Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors
#26I dont like the concept of home food delivery. Personally, I just like to go to grocery stores or markets, buy whatever is on offer and then make meals at home. I am disgusted by the amount of trash generated when receiving your single onion in a package each day instead of buying a large pack of onions once a month and using those.
But even if I wanted to avoid groceries and avoid food prep, I would just order food online. In Amsterdam, there are some places popping up that you can order healthy food from - often its just a single type of meal per day, plant-based, but its cheap and healthy and delivered quickly. I see this as a more reasonable alternative then everyone getting delivered their mini plastic packets of vegetables to cook for themself.
Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors
#27In terms of cost, it never made much sense. I used to treat it as a date night with my wife during the pandemic. Now that the pandemic is “over”, I can’t imagine many of these companies surviving
Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors
#28My biggest gripe with HelloFresh, et al is that I still need to do the prep, so they don't actually save me much time. It's nothing more than curated grocery delivery. Years ago, there was a service in Hong Kong (I wish I could remember the name) that did daily delivery of already prepped meal kits - onions pre-chopped, avocados cubed, oil portioned for each step, etc. It was basically cooking by numbers, and extraor…
I usually buy groceries once a week. We typically buy 5 meals worth of food and eat left overs for two days. Thinking of those 5 meals takes about half the time buying groceries does. Personally, I like cooking and I like choosing what to eat. But every once in a while I wish someone would make a menu for me.
Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors
#29I love blue apron and I will miss it when their company fails. It sucks so bad to love a product you can’t save as a consumer.
I love the results of blue apron but we canceled because we couldn't live with their wasteful packaging.
Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors
#30My biggest gripe with HelloFresh, et al is that I still need to do the prep, so they don't actually save me much time. It's nothing more than curated grocery delivery. Years ago, there was a service in Hong Kong (I wish I could remember the name) that did daily delivery of already prepped meal kits - onions pre-chopped, avocados cubed, oil portioned for each step, etc. It was basically cooking by numbers, and extraor…
Chopped onions change smell after they've been sitting exposed to air for a while, and not for the better. I'll happily prep my own onions, even if it brings tears to my eyes.
Sweet potatoes turn brown exposed to air, sometimes even in the span of time from prepping the first to prepping the last before they go into the pot all together.
I would venture that most things do not improve with exposure to air once cut up. I would also tend to agree that just sending unprepped ingredients doesn't save any time, but I think I'm willing to take more time to get a better meal.