Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 97 posts

Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors

#51

Post by valarauko »

Spivak wrote: post #17
robg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you pay more? Or support the natural evolution of recipe into grocery shopping cart as one click?

It's not like this product is impossible. 1. There are meal planning apps that present a Blue Apron / Hello Fresh type experience but make a grocery list rather than shipping it to you. 2. Instacart has proven that you can with some amount of reliability that you can abstract over different grocery stores so users can pick the ones they prefer or is closest. 3. I can get groceries delivered from my local Kroger by ap…

The Stop & Shop app also has recipes that can add ingredients to the shopping cart. In addition, the app gives you 3 levels of pricing for ingredients: budget, regular, and premium.

Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors

#52

Post by JieJie »

stametseater wrote: post #41

You know most grocery stores offered a delivery service years before SV decided to turn it into a business model. It was a mostly unadvertised service that grocery stores ran (and likely still do run) mostly for the benefit of 'shut ins', people with disabilities or ailments that prevented them from leaving their homes. The way it worked was pretty simple; you'd call in your order, or sometimes use the store's websit…

Yeah, my neighbor is blind and even though she can physically get to the grocery store just fine, she can't exactly pick out items she wants once she gets there. Having a "personal shopper" isn't a luxury for her. All this "disruption" did was make it more expensive for her to be disabled.

Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors

#53

Post by icoder »

thrwy_918 wrote: post #42

Everyone I know (30something urbanites) uses meal kit services when they get an attractive sign up offer, and cancels shortly after the subsidized initial period has finished. Then after a few weeks or months they might sign up with a different meal kit service when a sign up offer becomes attractive enough. They cycle through the services in this way, because the same service seems happy to give the same customer a…

Well, hi, here's one.

Once a week we (my GF and I) quickly pick 5 meals (Netherlands, HelloFresh). If it comes in we spent 5-10 minutes checking and organising and then we have food for most of the week. Since we have a 6-month old baby we pick the meals with a shorter cook time, this week is 'the weak without meat' (is it national or international) so we pick veggie.

NO effort in deciding what to cook, NO effort in making the shopping list (let alone go out for groceries) and (almost) NO leftovers. I agree this is highly personal but all three are a big win for us. The meals are relatively easy to prepare, healthy (it seems, I am not an expert) and varied.

Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors

#54

Post by p0pcult »

mauvehaus wrote: post #30
culturestate wrote: post #16

My 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 think I'm willing to take more time to get a better meal.

Then these services aren't for you.

Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors

#55

Post by yamtaddle »

thrwy_918 wrote: post #42

Everyone I know (30something urbanites) uses meal kit services when they get an attractive sign up offer, and cancels shortly after the subsidized initial period has finished. Then after a few weeks or months they might sign up with a different meal kit service when a sign up offer becomes attractive enough. They cycle through the services in this way, because the same service seems happy to give the same customer a…

At full price it's cheaper to just order takeout. Less healthy, at the places where it's cheaper, but still. Then you don't have to cook or clean up the mess from cooking.

I've also, personally, found these kits to be no less work than cooking normally. Sometimes, more, because the recipe will be more complex than something I'd have cooked on my own. It saves you meal planning and ordering the ingredients from the store (or going shopping), which isn't nothing, but it's not really that convenient—it'd have to also be cheap for me to want to do it very often, and at full price, they're not cheap.

Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors

#56

Post by ccooffee »

andrenotgiant wrote: post #33
culturestate wrote: post #16

My 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…

not trying to be snarky, genuinely curious: What benefit does that have over ordering delivery from a restaurant?

Preparing food at home allows for making things "as I like them". I'm VERY picky about certain textures and tastes. I also have a very restricted diet and suffer (biologically) from some ingredients that like to sneak into foods.

Ordering a known meal from a known restaurant is definitely easier than home prep. Ordering a "probably fine" meal from a "probably fine" restaurant requires extra cognitive load over cooking at home. (Some days I struggle with simply selecting a new meal from a restaurant. On those same days, I can happily spend an hour cooking a new-to-me recipe without any problems.)

Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors

#57

Post by golergka »

stametseater wrote: post #41

You know most grocery stores offered a delivery service years before SV decided to turn it into a business model. It was a mostly unadvertised service that grocery stores ran (and likely still do run) mostly for the benefit of 'shut ins', people with disabilities or ailments that prevented them from leaving their homes. The way it worked was pretty simple; you'd call in your order, or sometimes use the store's websit…

We had widely used grocery delivery service in Moscow (Russia) back in mid-00s, Ostrovok. The only difference with modern services was delivery time of day or two in advance, but for family grocery shopping it wasn't that much of an issue.

Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors

#58

Post by culturestate »

rcme wrote: post #28
culturestate wrote: post #16

My 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.

> Personally, I like cooking and I like choosing what to eat.

So do I. I actually shop for fresh stuff almost daily now, because I mostly work from home and it's a great excuse to get out and wander around the city for a while.

That said, the nature of my work is such that I'll often have intense 2-3 week periods of long days that really sap my desire to do anything beyond, like, throwing some sausage and peppers into a skillet.

It's those times when I'd love to have a meal kit service like this, because if I don't have anything quick in the house then I end up with a frozen pizza or a Deliveroo order instead. I've tried doing meal prep a few times, but I tend to get sick of it by the middle of the week.

Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors

#59

Post by icoder »

gcheong wrote: post #20
sksksk wrote: post #6

There is an app in the UK called Lollipop, which works like Hello Fresh and the likes, except instead of delivering the ingredients to your house, it just adds the ingredients to the basket of your supermarket shop (and takes a commission). To me, that seems like the logical evolution of meal kit services; zero marginal costs by outsourcing the logistics to companies that already do it at scale. https://www.lollipopa…

Are the quantities you get grocery store quantities or are they portioned out like the meal kit services? One thing I liked about the meal kit services was not having a bunch of leftover stuff that I wouldn’t end up using before it went bad.

And even the stuff that doesn't go bad easily seems to pile up, multiple types of rice, shapes of pasta, cous cous, noodles. I know it is a bit of a luxury problem, but it is one nevertheless.

Re: Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors

#60

Post by CadmiumYellow »

c-fe wrote: post #26

I 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…

I love grocery shopping! I don't get why people hate it so much. It's fun to go to the store and see what new produce or interesting ingredients they have on any given day...maybe something catches my eye and I get inspired to cook a new recipe around it. At the very least I like picking out my own produce. When I had covid I had to order groceries on Instacart and they always seemed to pick out the smallest, most bruised, most wilted, least appetizing looking produce.
Post reply on HN