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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

#51

Post by Mz »

opportune wrote: post #45
pavel_lishin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Did you read what I wrote? Of course I acknowledge that this is not feasible yet. I'm saying that this is the product that the market is actually waiting for, and that the technology isn't there yet (automated drone delivery). So what we have in the meantime are awkward solutions that only meet a few of these requirements.

I don't think what you wrote will ever be feasible. I am a big fan of the Chipotle model where you get to pick what you want as you order it and it is prepared fresh, but, unlike a buffet, only the staff handle the food, not a jillion grubby customers pawing through it. And that tends to be a bit pricier than fast food.

I can get something to eat at Chipotle for $5 or less. You don't actually have to order an $8 burrito. But, generally speaking, fresh, made to order, etc. is simply not going to happen for $5. Though I do kind of like your idea of drone delivery.

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

#52

Post by jonknee »

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.

Technically Whole Foods does not themselves do delivery (it's Instacart), while Amazon actually does (Fresh)... Amazon's also working on grocery pickup, which seems perfect for meal kits.

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

#53

Post by dsfyu404ed »

marssaxman wrote: post #7
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.

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…

>It's not just acquiring the ingredients; there's value in having someone else plan the menu for you.

That's where I see the value. People spend a lot of effort figuring out how to eat a balanced diet while optimizing for low (enough) cost or just close enough. Offloading the work of planning a balanced diet on a weekly level is something many people would pay a small premium for.

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

#54

Post by saturdaysaint »

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…

Granted, you have to spend about 30 - 40 minutes in the kitchen, but I find Hello Fresh meals to be consistently superior on just about every level to most restaurant food anywhere near its price point, and much healthier to boot. This shocked me at first, but when you think about it, even most "pretty good" restaurant food is designed to be thrown together in 5 - 10 minutes using as few ingredients as possible.

Also, we've found preparing the meals to be a great couple activity. Normally, I wouldn't say this about cooking - my wife and I tend to run the kitchen alone when the muse strikes - but having clearcut instructions and not worrying about shopping makes cooperation fun and easy.

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

#55

Post by Mz »

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…

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.

No, I'm not. When I go to a restaurant, I talk to the wait staff and they relay my preferences to whomever is doing the cooking. I don't talk directly to the cook. There may be a better way to say what I said, but I am not confusing anything. The wait staff play a large role in making sure that picky orders turn out right and, in some cases, they do some of the work involved in putting the right meal together, though they don't cook it.

I know in part because I have special dietary needs, so I generally am a picky eater who has to ask for pretty much everything I eat to be tweaked and because I have had close relatives who worked in restaurants.

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

#56

Post by dsfyu404ed »

digikata wrote: post #44
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…

So where's the moat for the meal service vs something like a recipe pick + shopping list service directly linked to the delivering grocery? That seems like something Amazon or some other grocery delivery service could rapidly expand into. On the other hand, perhaps the quality of the curation and customer relationship does count for something here too.

Convienience. Imagine the following smartphone app workflow:

On first use answer some questions that provide information about dietary needs. Drag some sliders around to indicate preferences for simplicity, cost, ,quality, convenience. Some people want beans and rice because they're cheap, some people want fancier meals and care less about price. Some people are cooking for four and want meals that scale well. Some people

Each wee checkbox the meals you want to eat in accordance with your schedule for the upcoming week.

Press go and get a bunch of meals paired with a shopping list

click on the meals to revise as necessary (e.g regenerate on you don't like or mark an item on the list of required items as "I'll source this myself")

Add to cart, press go, wait for brown truck.

Something like that could be a hit with single men and college students.

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

#57

Post by mr_tristan »

The 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 local meal kit business is only going to go down.

In fact, I see a reason local variations will become stronger. A lot of these customers have money and are interested in "farm to table" and "buy local" ideas. So, I'd expect that they could find meal kits that fit whatever diet they want, prepared by a local chef, using ingredients from local farms. This is a great potential avenue for local chefs to promote their brand, in addition to appearances on shows like Top Chef, etc.

So... why would a large company with a national brand matter at all? I could easily see business like Blue Apron just fold overnight, but the meal kit concept shift entirely to, well, small business. Sure seems like the big investment dollars are basically paving the way for local competition, by planting the idea of "meal kits" as a viable option in people's minds.

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

#58

Post by wrsh07 »

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…

As a subscriber, here are some arguments in favor of Blue Apron [or similar services]:

1) It's cheaper / healthier than eating at most restaurants [where I live, in Upper Manhattan]

2) The nearest grocery stores also aren't cheap. If I could save money, it would cost me a significant amount of time. [the lines at Trader Joe's alone, not to mention meal-planning + time to & from store].

3) Some items are hard to buy in the right quantities. [eg red wine vinegar]

4) I don't need to do much normal grocery shopping. Between farmer's markets and Amazon Prime Now, I don't have a necessary weekly trip to the store.

As I mentioned in another comment, I am one of the nearly-perfect early customers. It fills a need that I have, and it clearly doesn't fill any needs for you. This is actually a huge problem for Blue Apron, because it means that to acquire me, they just needed me to know about it [good!].

[But!] To acquire you, they'd probably have to (a) lower costs, (b) do lots of ... marketing?, (c) provide more food options [that's actually been happening], and (d) make cooking trivial.

Delivery is a huge expense [I heard 20-30% [1]] for a service like Blue Apron. I imagine the goal of many of these "delivery" services is to get in on the ground floor before delivery / logistics become a solved problem of self-driving cars. They'll use VC money and low-margins to survive until their delivery fees drop and hope that being dominant in the market helps them keep their spot. ... And then they'll have a few years of reasonable profitability until they're disrupted?

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/21/heres...

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

#59

Post by wrsh07 »

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…

FWIW, after > 2 years on plans like this, either my wife or I can usually cook in the amount of time specified, and together we consistently hit the low-end.

I'm not sure at what point we got this efficient, and our kitchen is also easy-to-work in. [I don't imagine that's the case for lots of apt-dwellers]

I think you're definitely right that there will be a significant amount of automation that will be able to make many cooking chores trivial, though.

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

#60

Post by opportune »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #48
opportune wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read what I wrote? Of course I acknowledge that this is not feasible yet. I'm saying that this is the product that the market is actually waiting for, and that the technology isn't there yet (automated drone delivery). So what we have in the meantime are awkward solutions that only meet a few of these requirements.

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 something like a sandwich, soup, or really anything else needs to be done by a human.

The problem is that to get the kind of economies of scale that an Amazon-style digital cafeteria could offer, you need to concentrate a lot of equipment in one place (and rent/build a huge place capable of processing large amounts of food coming and going). This is where distribution models fail, because the only place you can build places like this is in suburbs, where you can't efficiently deliver to the well-earning young people in the cities that form your target dmeo.

And I highly disagree with saying that "the market isn't waiting for it, people are waiting for it". People, or rather consumers, are the market. Yes, I agree that basically every would of course want a product that is faster, higher quality, and cheaper. But $5 for one meal really is quite a lot when compared to the cost of food, especially when bought in bulk, and automated delivery/preparation could indeed make this food both faster and higher quality (or rather, give near-professional quality at a much lower cost).

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