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

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

#91
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because they chose to live somewhere stupid that doesn't have one of life's necessities, food, nearby? Wow, so judgmental. I live a ~20 minute bike ride from the grocery store but for a family it's not always feasible to get everything to fit on bikes. It's totally reasonable to drive somewhere once every two weeks for that. It's actually funny, you don't know anything about me or where I live. It's actually very c…

Actions, meet consequences.

Exactly :)

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

#92

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…

Even worse, sometimes it would be slower than doing things myself. One time we got a delivery kit that took 1 hour to prepare, while it takes us about 30 minutes to prepare a dinner.

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

#93
post #53

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…

I like leftovers, get to skip one round if cooking. The shopping list is always the same over time, it doesn't take effort. Just write down when something runs out.

Deciding what to cook at time is challenging.

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

#95
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local networks might be the only way to make this cheap enough to drive enough customers to use it. The programs are too expensive for me to justify, and a big part of that is the packaging and shipping costs. Local networks doing daily delivery don't need dry ice, can use minimal packaging, can batch orders and send out with their own delivery drivers/routes. They could even pick up the packaging for reuse upon deli…

I have been considering this idea for some time now. Local food networks which flip the paradigm from "on-demand" to strictly in advance. Right now, if I want to order food from a restaurant, I can only do this "on-demand". If you want to join this on-demand food preparation world as a chef, maybe start with a food truck. However, operating "on-demand" is difficult. Why not only in advance? (of course, on-demand food…

Sure, shoot me an email at jhugh5000@gmail.com

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

#96
post #9

Anyone know of a pantry and fridge management system that supports recipes and new ordering? Seems complicated until it’s done.

AnyList for iOS supports recipes and adding ingredients from recipes to your shopping list. No ordering or anything, but it might do part of what you're looking for. The vexing thing is that it doesn't deduplicated ingredients from multiple recipes onto your grocery list. You'll end up with onions on the list 3 times if you have 3 recipes that take onions :-/ If anybody has a better alternative, I'm all ears.

AnyList does combine ingredients from multiple recipes, but the ingredient names and units have to match. For example, if one recipe calls for "2 onions" and another recipe calls for "3 onions", you'll see a single item in your shopping list for "5 onions". But if one recipe calls for "2 large onions" and another recipe calls for "1/2 cup yellow onion, chopped", then they won't be combined.

I'm not sure exactly what the grandparent comment means by "new ordering", but AnyList supports ordering for pickup or delivery from Walmart, Instacart, Kroger, Safeway, Albertsons, and other stores: https://help.anylist.com/articles/feature-overview-online-sh...

(Disclosure: I am the co-founder of AnyList.)

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

#97
post #50
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freshly does that

Freshly did full meals, ready to microwave. That said, they shut down this year.

That's wild that they full stock shut down. They were acquired for over a billion just a few years ago.
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