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A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry

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Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry

#201

Post by criddell »

pm90 wrote: post #185
criddell wrote: post #92

Earlier 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…

> The only place I can see that really escapes from this is the high end restaurants.

Actually, fast food restaurants have some of the best food practices. I'd feel much safer eating at some random McDonald's than some Mom-n-Pop diner.

Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry

#202

Post by s73ver »

vec wrote: post #186
pavel_lishin wrote: post #14

Earlier 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…

What about the services that just sell you the meal plan/recipes, instead of sending you the whole package? Or, now that you have presumably a good set of those recipes, just repeating the order in which you got them?

Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry

#203

Post by s73ver »

munchbunny wrote: post #128
illumin8 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 to cook a recipe, which is way too much labor for a meal that is already priced about the same as a restaurant meal. I think this is one place w…

Maybe these services should add an extra box of about to go bad vegetables, with a card that teaches you knife skills?

Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry

#204

Post by maxander »

eresing wrote: post #191

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 everyo…

I guess I respect having the intestinal fortitude to do the responsible thing, but at least in the U.S., seeing any service position with obvious privilege connotations makes people uncomfortable. The meal-in-a-box industry is another clever way to work around this taboo, by hiding the lower-class service workers behind a clean user interface.

Similarly, what's the value-add of Github? Primarily, it's not having to talk on the phone to some guy with a thick foreign accent with kitchen noise in the background. Dealing with a website, even if it's slow sometimes, is a much less socially complicated experience.

Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry

#205

Post by rhizome »

eresing wrote: post #191

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 everyo…

With a personal chef you don't get the 'zazz and dopamine hit from the process of shopping. Skinner boxes take many forms.

Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry

#206

Post by science4sail »

_delirium wrote: post #187
pjc50 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're not a wifemom, and you don't know how to combine those things into a meal I think people could do this, but for whatever reason don't. Possibly the excessive media-isation of cooking has raised what the expected skill level is; people are no longer content with something edible but unspectacular, or food that's too ugly to Instagram. We've come a long way from Fanny Cradock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9…

Soups are another one of the classic solutions to this problem. A large variety of random leftover ingredients can be mixed-and-matched into a soup, and it solves the stale leftover bread problem too. Plus you can be doing something else while it cooks, as it is not a style of cooking that requires a lot of active attention. And as one more bonus, leftover soup often tastes even better the next day.

Same with stir-fry. A lot of "simpler" cooking methods can be adapted as ways to recycle leftover ingredients.

Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry

#207

Post by neuronexmachina »

maxander wrote: post #204
eresing wrote: post #191

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 everyo…

I guess I respect having the intestinal fortitude to do the responsible thing, but at least in the U.S., seeing any service position with obvious privilege connotations makes people uncomfortable. The meal-in-a-box industry is another clever way to work around this taboo, by hiding the lower-class service workers behind a clean user interface. Similarly, what's the value-add of Github? Primarily, it's not having to t…

I... assume you meant Grubhub instead of Github? ;)

Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry

#208

Post by xhedley »

opportune wrote: post #60
pavel_lishin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think drone delivery is the bottleneck for incredibly cheap, yet personalized food that's delivered to you on the order of ~15 minutes. Ingredients, chef's time, kitchen space, etc. are going to eat that five bucks right up. A six-inch sub from Subway is already nine bucks, and that includes the Sandwich Rembrandt personalizing it for me with an extra slice of provolone for a dollar extra. The market isn't wa…

I'm not thinking of anything like a subway. Having each person's food prepared individually is ridiculously inefficient. I'm envisioning a facility tied to an Amazon warehouse or something similar that might be preparing food for >10000 people every day, not a huge kitchen with hundreds of chefs running around to fill maybe a couple thousand or so individual orders per day. There's no reason the production of somethi…

Freshly made sandwiches? Don't supermarkets sell those?

The UK has shops like Pret A Manger where the selling point is that all the sandwiches are made fresh in the shop every day.

We also have Subway franchises who tweak your sandwich ingredients.

Or independent sandwich shops who do the same thing.

But the cheapest sandwiches are ready made in Tesco or Sainsburys or Coop or Boots or Waitrose or WH Smith's or Marks and Spencer or whatever.

I guess the public transport in UK cities makes distribution easier because you can pick up a sandwich at the station on you way to work.

Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry

#209

Post by vec »

dragonwriter wrote: post #23
Mz wrote: post #10

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…

> 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 replac…

> The ability to select from a menu of options prior to delivery would be an improvement for many of these services.

Hello Fresh, at least, has 8 or so available recipes per week. They'll pick 3 for me, but if I choose I can log in to their site and pick for myself.

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