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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

#31

Post by ghaff »

illumin8 wrote: post #20
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'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…

Yours is a pretty common complaint though some of the services seem to focus more on reducing prep time than others. I imagine there's some tradeoff between freshness and the amount of pre-processing.

The cynic in me also wonders if the nature of the product doesn't create incentives for fussy recipes with a lot of ingredients, including uncommon ones. If your recipe is just a filet of trout sauteed in butter with some sliced almonds and a simple vegetable side, your customers may start wondering what they're paying you for exactly.

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

#32

Post by wrsh07 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #12

Isn'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. Ben Thompson [Stratechery] talks about this in his update regarding Blue Apron's IPO [1].

Now to quote him:

> ... the first customers a company gains are those for whom the product has the best possible fit; by definition they cost less to acquire. Growing beyond that initial base, though, costs more and more.

> This is why network effects are so important. What differentiates services that are actually sustainable businesses is that the larger they grow the more their utility increases, and it is this increased utility that drives new customer acquisition (as opposed to simply spending more marketing dollars).

> Ride-sharing services are a perfect example...

So patents and vertical integration aren't the only type of moat. Network effects shouldn't be overlooked. However, it's hard to see what network effects [besides just economies of scale] Blue Apron will be able to leverage.

[In their ads they try to talk up their relationships, eg with farmers. If Blue Apron were trying to be a farm-goods marketplace, ie the Uber of produce, then that would be an effective moat. In the current case, I'm not sure I buy it]

[1]: Subscription needed :( https://stratechery.com/2017/blue-apron-files-for-ipo-networ...

Edit:

- I am, however, a happy subscriber of Blue Apron.

[fixed the above bullet]

- Thompson also gives Netflix as an example. The bigger it gets, the larger its backlog of [hopefully timeless] shows -- increasing its value for late subscribers.

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

#33

Post by dragonwriter »

ghaff wrote: post #2

It 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…

> Finally, if there were a real clamor for meal kits, what's to keep Whole Foods or whoever from just assembling their own meal kits?

Pre-portioned, pre-prepped,low-cooking-effort packaged food products are already a big item in various forms for supermarkets. As are fully cooked meals. No doubt meal packs will be too, of they are popular.

OTOH, Grocery stores selling fully-cooked meals haven't killed restaurants (not even takeout-focussed restaurants).

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

#34

Post by Symbiote »

luckydata wrote: post #16
snarf21 wrote: post #3

Earlier 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.

The kits have a value beyond the food, they teach you how to be more confident about your cooking. Americans are terrible cooks on average, they don't learn good cooking skills at home because their parents are not very good cooks either (gross generalization but accurate if you compare the US with for example Italy). My wife now can cook a much wider variety of meals after a few months of meal kits. It also has redu…

When I was a student, the local Sainsbury's supermarket had a selection of recipe cards by the entrance. Here's the front of a newer version [1], the back is presumably something like this [2].

I wouldn't say they taught me to cook, I didn't learn any new techniques. But, I did get a lot of ideas from them, and it led us to eating a wider variety of food.

I'm now curious -- what do typical American university students eat? Do they cook, or are all meals provided? (Surely not at weekends?)

[1] http://laurenmclean.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/01_Sharwo...

[2] https://recipes.sainsburys.co.uk/recipes/main-courses/easy-c...

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

#35

Post by urethrafranklin »

jonknee wrote: post #5
kentosi wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finally, if there were a real clamor for meal kits, what's to keep Whole Foods or whoever from just assembling their own meal kits? Home delivery seems to be one of the key factors, so as long as Whole Foods/etc can offer home delivery, then yeah there's nothing stopping them.

> so as long as Whole Foods/etc can offer home delivery, then yeah there's nothing stopping them If only a company with a battle tested home delivery network would acquire them...

Whole Foods themselves do home delivery. Amazon do not.

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

#36

Post by pavel_lishin »

illumin8 wrote: post #20
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'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…

Weird; the thing I liked best about whichever service I used was that the meal prep and cook times were pretty snappy - definitely faster than doing it myself from scratch.

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

#37

Post by dragonwriter »

urethrafranklin wrote: post #35
jonknee wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so as long as Whole Foods/etc can offer home delivery, then yeah there's nothing stopping them If only a company with a battle tested home delivery network would acquire them...

Whole Foods themselves do home delivery. Amazon do not.

Amazon Prime Fresh is a thing; they absolutely do home delivery.

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

#38

Post by [deleted] »

opportune wrote: post #27
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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#39

Post by ghaff »

ashark wrote: post #25
marssaxman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For me it's a hobby and I do like to try new recipes/styles (while recognizing that there are some things I don't do enough to get good at or that just take more work than I'm willing to put in). But I mostly agree with you. I keep an admittedly fairly thick binder of recipes that I probably use a good 75% of the time I even need a recipe. And there are lots of simple things I can throw together in 15 minutes given the ingredients.

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

#40

Post by pavel_lishin »

opportune wrote: post #27
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…

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…

> 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.

Does that also come with a free pony?

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