I feel like they should have Meal-Kits at grocery stores.
They could make them with all the extra food they have.
That way you can go pick up 3 of them and then grab more groceries if need be.
It would be way better than all the frozen meals they have.
A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
91–100 of 320 posts
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#92Earlier 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…
> 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.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#93It 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…
Kroger is trialing meal kits. CEO sounded positive on the quarterly phone call. http://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/hamilton-county/cincinna... Edit: Disclosure -- I own a small amount of Kroger stock.
Publix has had them for a while, too, which means that in the Publix/Kroger borderlands of Atlanta (where I live) there are two supermarket meal kit choices.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#94Earlier 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…
You might want to try Gobble. We tried Blue Apron followed by Sun Basket, and in both cases the prep time was too long for us. Gobble has consistently been much better in terms of both flavor and prep time.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#95I feel like they should have Meal-Kits at grocery stores. They could make them with all the extra food they have. That way you can go pick up 3 of them and then grab more groceries if need be. It would be way better than all the frozen meals they have.
Isn't the grocery store already basically one large meal kit?
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#96I feel like they should have Meal-Kits at grocery stores. They could make them with all the extra food they have. That way you can go pick up 3 of them and then grab more groceries if need be. It would be way better than all the frozen meals they have.
It's not like grocery stores keep a bunch of extra food on hand that they don't expect to sell. But, to your main point, a number of chains and other stores have started doing this. I'm a little surprised it's not more common though, of course, there's a lot of pre-chopped vegetables etc. so once you're in the store, gathering up the ingredients for a quick meal is pretty straightforward.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had to catch myself from saying "what the fuck" out loud. I don't want to be rude to you, but I find this to be hilarious: >Such a service has no real hope of taking the place of someone with actual cooking skills who knows you well and will tweak the recipe to your preferences, possibly without you even having to explicitly ask or remind her. Sounds like a job for a... maid! Which really puts a delicious spin on t…
I'm a former homemaker and full time mom. You have failed in your stated goal of not being rude to me. I am merely describing the problem space. If people wanted to, you know, tweak it themselves, then there would be no food services of any kind, not restaurants and not take out food and not meal-in-a-box delivery services. We would just all cook for ourselves if everyone just loved doing that and didn't want this so…
I don't think your reasoning in the second paragraph is accurate. People aren't a uniform congealed mass of preferences that match your own.
You don't like cooking. I do. It is really fun for me. I enjoy cooking new things and learning new techniques. I enjoy learning new ingredients and new dishes. I, however, hate going grocery shopping and looking up new recipes. This service deals with the issues I have.
What's even better? It's quality shared time between me and my girlfriend. She'll deal with some of the steps. I'll deal with others. In total, we put in maybe 15 minutes of work, and wait another 15 minutes before the dish is done. Generally this is faster and less effort than going out to eat for the quality of food received. At the end of it all, we have a delicious meal we both put together, and more knowledge about how to cook in general, which we both enjoy.
Hence why these food services are great in my household, and terrible in yours. We're attempting to solve different problems. I want to cook in a hassle free manner. You want to eat in a hassle free manner. They aren't the same thing.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#98I 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 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. One of my girlfriends used to say, "I need a wife!" She used to specifically mean what you're talking about above. Then I used to raise my hand to volunteer, but she woul…
Yeah, "I need a wife" is a common refrain of working women, as previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14354026
I got my oldest son to take over the "women's work" when I had a corporate job. He was willing to meet the incredibly high standards of freshness and quality necessary to keep us healthy and out of the ER (due to our genetic disorder) but he was absolutely not willing to cook a traditional meal with meat, potatoes, two veggies, fresh bread etc. He made a lot of one dish meals.
I sometimes think if I can ever get off the street again, we have found a solution to the problem of keeping people well fed without having a de facto live in servant and it has to do with the kind of cooking we do and maybe I could turn that into a blog or app or something. I think a lot about the fact that there are some serious problems surrounding having everyone get paid jobs and somehow also have quality of life stuff adequately addressed.
And it is a conversation that is mostly not happening in earnest. What happens is people with upper class two career type situations just hire servants and pay for take out and for machines to do some of the work for them and so forth. And no one wants to really talk about the fact that this doesn't really work on a global scale. This model of two career upper class coupledom assumes some kind of servant class supporting it, in much the same way that the traditional male breadwinner assumed a full time wife. This does not create a world of real equals.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
Also, something I've thought about a lot since listening to this 99pi episode [2] is that technology is best when it enhances useful skills. [or at least doesn't atrophy them] I think that services like Blue Apron are actually kind of ingenious in that they trivialize an annoying part of cooking [the shopping] while developing the "skill" part. On top of that, I think just using good ingredients helps you identify wh…
As an aside to readers: I can't recommend this 99% Invisible episode enough. Children of the Magenta has to be one of my top-3 favorites.
Re: A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
Also, something I've thought about a lot since listening to this 99pi episode [2] is that technology is best when it enhances useful skills. [or at least doesn't atrophy them] I think that services like Blue Apron are actually kind of ingenious in that they trivialize an annoying part of cooking [the shopping] while developing the "skill" part. On top of that, I think just using good ingredients helps you identify wh…
I'm not sure shopping is necessarily an annoying part though it depends on the circumstances and it does add to the total time commitment. I'd have said it was more about reducing the cognitive load. You're pretty much handed a bunch of ingredients and told what to do.