6 ms·

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

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.

marssaxman 9y ago
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 that's not the point - the point is that you've paid the meal service to deal with all the boring parts of the process, which often includes the decision-making, so you can just enjoy the cooking and eating.
- ashark 9y ago
  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 without trying to prepare meals from every continent. (this goes out the window if it's a major hobby, obviously, but in that case so should complaints about its difficulty/inconvenience, which are entirely self-imposed)
  - ghaff 9y ago
    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.
- digikata 9y ago
  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.
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    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.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  >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.
luckydata 9y ago
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 reduced dramatically the thinking it required to plan meals in advance. If grocery stores want to compete they will have to work with their providers to create smaller packages of items to assemble and a team to design and forecast demand for different types of meals. Not impossible but definitely not easy, I see acquisitions happening in this space.
- Symbiote 9y ago
  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_Sharwoods_Chicken-Tikka.jpg http://laurenmclean.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/01_Sharwo... [2] https://recipes.sainsburys.co.uk/recipes/main-courses/easy-chicken-tikka-with-zesty-rice https://recipes.sainsburys.co.uk/recipes/main-courses/easy-c...
  - jpindar 9y ago
    There's cooking and there's cooking. Most Americans, including students, cook standard American food such as hamburgers, hot dogs, eggs, spaghetti, roast chicken, ramen, steak etc., as well as a lot of canned soups, frozen vegetables, and boxed casserole mixes. But these kits are for people who want to eat something novel every meal, and certainly not mundane working class food. I mean, you don't need a recipe for a hamburger.
    - ghaff 9y ago
wrsh07 9y ago
What if they become automated grocery delivery? It's an interesting leverage point, since there's obviously a [possibly smaller-than-they-want] market. But the expansion into automated grocery will be a matter of luck & timing. Unless you're Amazon [in which case it's persistence]
sgs1370 9y ago
This. Amazon Fresh already lets local markets sell their raw ingredients, cooked foods, half-cooked, or just prepped stuff. Those markets could (might already) just include some instructions on the package. The familiar search/browse UI and "no subscription" factor will be a huge AF advantage IMO. (I have used AF about 5 times, all good experiences so far, but just for ingredients, not prepared foods)

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.

marssaxman 9y ago

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 that's not the point - the point is that you've paid the meal service to deal with all the boring parts of the process, which often includes the decision-making, so you can just enjoy the cooking and eating.

ashark 9y ago
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 without trying to prepare meals from every continent. (this goes out the window if it's a major hobby, obviously, but in that case so should complaints about its difficulty/inconvenience, which are entirely self-imposed)
- ghaff 9y ago
  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.
digikata 9y ago
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.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  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.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
>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.

luckydata 9y ago

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 reduced dramatically the thinking it required to plan meals in advance. If grocery stores want to compete they will have to work with their providers to create smaller packages of items to assemble and a team to design and forecast demand for different types of meals. Not impossible but definitely not easy, I see acquisitions happening in this space.

Symbiote 9y ago
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_Sharwoods_Chicken-Tikka.jpg http://laurenmclean.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/01_Sharwo... [2] https://recipes.sainsburys.co.uk/recipes/main-courses/easy-chicken-tikka-with-zesty-rice https://recipes.sainsburys.co.uk/recipes/main-courses/easy-c...
- jpindar 9y ago
  There's cooking and there's cooking. Most Americans, including students, cook standard American food such as hamburgers, hot dogs, eggs, spaghetti, roast chicken, ramen, steak etc., as well as a lot of canned soups, frozen vegetables, and boxed casserole mixes. But these kits are for people who want to eat something novel every meal, and certainly not mundane working class food. I mean, you don't need a recipe for a hamburger.
  - ghaff 9y ago

wrsh07 9y ago

What if they become automated grocery delivery? It's an interesting leverage point, since there's obviously a [possibly smaller-than-they-want] market. But the expansion into automated grocery will be a matter of luck & timing. Unless you're Amazon [in which case it's persistence]

sgs1370 9y ago

This. Amazon Fresh already lets local markets sell their raw ingredients, cooked foods, half-cooked, or just prepped stuff. Those markets could (might already) just include some instructions on the package. The familiar search/browse UI and "no subscription" factor will be a huge AF advantage IMO. (I have used AF about 5 times, all good experiences so far, but just for ingredients, not prepared foods)