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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 th

by Mz 9y ago

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 preferences, possibly without you even having to explicitly ask or remind her. 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 mean, this seems like the worst of all worlds. Someone else decides what you will be eating and you have to do the cooking. I can't imagine buying this.

123e1daAdfafsdf 9y ago
These services allow you to pick the meals you want, and you can tweak the recipes as you cook them. I have tried a few to get my sweet sweet VC subsidized healthy meals, but in the end, I agree with you: I'd rather go to a restaurant.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
> 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 right - shopping sucks, finding recipes sucks, throwing away food because you bought too much kale sucks. (Not to mention, cooking a meal and eating it takes 45 minutes - depending on the restaurant, you might be in there for an hour, plus travel time. And remember, time is what they're short on.) Even if you find four interesting recipes and buy all the ingredients, and cook them - this takes 3x the time than just using Blue Apron, at minimum - on Friday you've got a bunch of assorted ingredients and no idea what to do with them. (Because you're not a wifemom, and you don't know how to combine those things into a meal.) But the person they're targeting doesn't want to learn to do that. They just want to buy a pre-configured lego set, and build a spaceship they can eat. You are not their target audience. Neither am I. But it definitely, definitely exists.
- illumin8 9y ago
  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 to cook a recipe, which is way too much labor for a meal that is already priced about the same as a restaurant meal. Granted, the food is much healthier than restaurant food, but my time is too valuable to spend that much. I suspect that other families where both parents work full time (like mine) are the same. Who has the time to spend an hour or two cooking every night? And pay a premium price for it? I'm cautiously optimistic about Tovala. They are the first one of these that has a fairly unique system where the food just needs to be popped into their combi-oven (bake, broil, and steam) and you just wait until it cooks. Eventually, we will have fully automated cooking appliances where drones deliver fresh food staples to your house and you get hot meals prepared automatically, but in the meantime, Tovala looks the closest to creating that experience.
  - lostlogin 9y ago
    The difference between your drone future and delivered takeaways is the time between the cooking and the serving. As long as takeaways are kept hot (and haven't tuned to a soggy mess) surely better takeaways are easier to engineer?
    - illumin8 9y ago
      Take-out is definitely easier to engineer - we know that, but the food quality is never as good when food has been sitting for 30 minutes before you eat it. Hot food becomes lukewarm; cold food becomes warm. Leafy vegetables turn into mush. I look forward to our robotic, food cooking overlords.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Yours is a pretty common complaint though some of the services seem to focus more on reducing prep time than others. I imagine there's some tradeoff between freshness and the amount of pre-processing. The cynic in me also wonders if the nature of the product doesn't create incentives for fussy recipes with a lot of ingredients, including uncommon ones. If your recipe is just a filet of trout sauteed in butter with some sliced almonds and a simple vegetable side, your customers may start wondering what they're paying you for exactly.
harryh 9y ago
If you can afford a meal-in-a-box service, why would you not just go to a restaurant Because I'd rather eat at home. Especially if I have kids. It's easier. Because it's a lot cheaper. Because it's better for me from a health perspective.
- Naritai 9y ago
  But the point has been made several times in this thread, it's not much cheaper. Unless you're referring to some Michelin-starred restaurant, it's quite possible to eat fast-casual for the same price of many of these kits (especially if you live in a suburb where restaurants tend to be much cheaper than in e.g. SF)
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > But the point has been made several times in this thread, it's not much cheaper. Yes, it is. > Unless you're referring to some Michelin-starred restaurant, it's quite possible to eat fast-casual for the same price of many of these kits (especially if you live in a suburb where restaurants tend to be much cheaper than in e.g. SF) Blue Apron is $8.74 (family plan) or $9.99 (couples plan) per plate for complete dinners. I live in the suburbs in the Central Valley (not the Bay Area) and it's well below fast-casual prices for comparable composition meals (also, better quality than most fast-casual places.) Now, if you are talking about fast-food rather than fast-casual, that still is cheaper.
    - inZGBl 9y ago
      This doesn't hold true for the rest of America. Go build a chipotle meal at some other zip code. South East: 1 chipotle burrito bowl, chicken, black beans, brown rice, guac, hot salsa, cheese 1 22oz drink Total - $10.20
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        > Go build a chipotle meal at some other zip code. Chipotle is much lower quality than anything I've had from Blue Apron (this is typical of low-price national chain fast-casual restaurants; the fast-casual restaurants that are worth comparing are independent or local-chain places). So, yeah, if that's the kind of food you want, it's price comparable to BA (but you wouldn't be looking at BA if you were satisfied with that kind of food I the first place.)
idealhavoc 9y ago
The main benefit I get out of it is that without it I would never cook anything because I wouldn't be able to get the motivation over the long term (I've tried, and it works for a short time, but fades). So basically it gives me reasonable portions that I can cart to work, gets me to cook by force-feeding me recipes (which seems to reliably motivate me, and they taste good enough when done), and at least seem more healthy (and at $9 a serving substantially cheaper than) a restaurant. Not saying that the same thing would work for anyone other than me, but has worked out better than the prior "stuffing whatever food I can reach into mouth" method.
ghaff 9y ago
I tried Blue Apron just to see what the deal was. It was "OK" but not really a fit for me. I do know people who like it though. There's a category of (especially) couples with disposable income who really want to cook at home a few nights a week but appreciate some structure to make it happen.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Hmmm... what other activities would "couples with disposable income" like to have "at home a few nights a week", but which could improved with "some structure"?
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Now there's a good bit of harmless innuendo getting downvoted because HN doesn't get jokes :(
    - jessaustin 9y ago
      Thanks! I figure I'm ahead on the submission, I might as well burn some valuable internet points on entertaining those of discerning tastes such as yourself. Normally the only time I get downvoted that much is when I complain about WaPo's obvious-but-never-mentioned conflicts of interest.
      - pjc50 9y ago
        :) I think they've started being explicit about the conflict of interest: https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/06/27/the-washington-post-social-media-policy/ https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/06/27/the-washington-post...
        jessaustin 9y ago
        I don't see any mention of big (e.g. $60M/yr for 10 yrs) AWS customers... b^)
dragonwriter 9y ago
> 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 replace some of the effort of shopping, portioning, and some part of prepping, plus recipe discovery. > If you can afford a meal-in-a-box service, why would you not just go to a restaurant Because with a restaurant, I don't have a cook that will tweak to my tastes without detailed prompting. > 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. > Someone else decides what you will be eating and you have to do the cooking. The ability to select from a menu of options prior to delivery would be an improvement for many of these services.
- Mz 9y ago
  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.
- vec 9y ago
  > The ability to select from a menu of options prior to delivery would be an improvement for many of these services. Hello Fresh, at least, has 8 or so available recipes per week. They'll pick 3 for me, but if I choose I can log in to their site and pick for myself.
  - prawn 9y ago
opportune 9y ago
I think you're right, and that people are downvoting you because they are confusing your references to pre-feminism gender roles as you supporting them. As delivery services become faster and more perfected, specifically when we can start using drones to deliver almost anything (which isn't heavy) to anyone in an urban/suburban area in an hour or less, I think we will see the rise of food being ordered and delivered at will. However, the technology isn't there yet. So instead, we get all these food delivery services that either deliver restaurant food (ubereats, orderup), their own food but without choice / at high cost relative to quality like with Freshly, or these meal-kits. At best they are awkward solutions to a problem that we can't fix with normal pricing and distribution models. 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. All of the existing companies in this space make tradeoffs in one way or another, which leave people dissatisfied and prevent adoption except by those who place a high premium on convenience.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  > 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?
  - opportune 9y ago
    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.
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
garrettdc 9y ago
We use Hello Fresh and like it quite a bit. Even being a full time wife and mom and a good cook, she still likes to use this as it adds variation to our dinners, and we try some foods that we wouldn't ordinarily try. As for affordability: $60 / 3 meals = $20 / meal. In general, getting similar meals elsewhere would run us $40+. They normally give you a few different options for the week and project out multiple weeks in advance so you have plenty of time to decide what you want. If you don't want anything they have to offer that week, then you can always just skip the box altogether too. I'm certainly not trying to diminish the benefits of having someone at home full time to care for the family (and all that entails), but saying that the meal-in-a-box service industry is in existence solely because of more two-income families is a rather narrow view.
saturdaysaint 9y ago
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.
- throwaway91111 9y ago
  I mean, most food doesn't take too long to cook, and the bulk of the work is just prep, which is amortized by the kitchen.
  - Smaug123 9y ago
    As a specific example: at a place which only does burritos, they batch up a big pot of rice, a big pot of beans, lots of lettuce, big pots of various different meats, and so on. Then it takes you about a minute from walking in to paying, as they just semi-toast a wrap and then fill it with all the pre-made ingredients. The ingredient preparation can be done in parallel with service, too.
wrsh07 9y ago
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-how-much-youre-actually-paying-for-free-shipping-on-blue-apron/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/21/heres...
- wrsh07 9y ago
  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 what to look for in stores - making you better at that aspect, too [without having to practice the "standing in line" bit] It's a little tidbit I've always liked about Blue Apron. [2]: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magenta-automation-paradox-pt-1/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magent... -- it's two parts.
komali2 9y ago
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 the odd, mildly sexist suggestion that "lack of wives" is a problem that needs disruption. Or, you know, there's another person that "knows you well and will tweak the recipe to your preferences," namely, yourself.
- FussyZeus 9y ago
  I mean, I get what he's saying. I do most of the cooking around our house, and do tweak recipes to suit my woman's tastes. Yes, could've been phrased better but I think he's onto something in terms of the dedicated homemaker in general of either sex becoming a bit of a reach for most households to have.
- Mz 9y ago
  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 somehow magically taken care of by some other means. Everyone needs to eat. It is a requirement to remain alive. But most people don't want to spend all their time on this vital activity. They want a good meal, but hassle-free or low hassle. That isn't a criticism. I don't really like cooking either. It is just an observation about reality.
  - ABCLAW 9y ago
    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.
stcredzero 9y ago
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 wouldn't have it. So the next step would be polygamy, but she didn't want that either. (Nor did I ask for that!) I had the same discussion with my fiancee just last night. (The "wife" part, but not the polygamy.) She doesn't want me to be her wife either.
- Mz 9y ago
  Yeah, "I need a wife" is a common refrain of working women, as previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14354026 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.
  - prawn 9y ago
    In my teenage years, I was heavily encouraged to cook for the family, especially when I was between school/uni and work years. It was a great opportunity to learn, and also relieve pressure on working parents. It should be more common than I bet it is.
fusiongyro 9y ago
Well, there are a few other reasons: - $20/meal for a couple or small family is still cheaper than eating out, especially for the kind of meal you're getting from BlueApron - People like knowing what goes into their food - Using your cool kitchen gadgets is fun, even if you don't have great recipe ideas - In some places, to make a specific dish may require a trip to two or three or more grocery stores Growing up in the 80s with two parents that worked, there was a wife/mom who knew our preferences, but we ate a lot of hamburger helper anyway. Meal planning is the least fun part of cooking for me and my wife. Executing the plan is easier and funner than than coming up with the plan or getting the ingredients. Maybe we're outliers. On your subtext, it's true that society has changed a lot since we have two career professionals, but knowing several families that are trying the stay-at-home mom thing, I can't say it's working well for them, largely because there was a lot more institutional support for it in the 50s and earlier. The ones I know certainly don't spend their entire day coming up with luxury meals for their pampered families. But that's a topic for another day.
- Mz 9y ago
  On your subtext What subtext are you imagining my comment as having? Because I strongly suspect you are inferring things that simply are not there.
  - fusiongyro 9y ago
    I thought you were suggesting that life was better when we had a sole breadwinner and a stay-at-home wife. I don't agree with that and read your comment uncharitably that way. On rereading it, I think you're saying there are two optimal points on this curve: having a live-in cook ("the wife") and going to a restaurant, and most of the stuff in the middle is pointless. I don't agree with that either but it's less of a charged topic.
    - Mz 9y ago
      All I'm saying is that it is a hard problem to solve. Our previous solution was full time wives. This had its good points and bad points. We do not appear to have found The Solution since moving away from that earlier model for the most part. In my experience, when people are reading "subtext" into my comments, they are typically projecting something that is simply not there at all. I do my best to be a straight shooter. I am not big on implying anything. The internet is not a good environment for trying to imply things. It lacks voice tone, context, facial expression etc and it puts people in contact from around the globe who come from very different cultures even when they are both, say, upper class for their country. It is just a terrible place in which to try to be subtle.
mrfusion 9y ago
Most restaurants are just microwaving frozen meals these days. I actually found a plastic wrapper in my homemade brownie sundae once. (Won't name the place)
- pjc50 9y ago
  This is a good point, especially at the lower end - and even when they aren't, the amount of stuff that comes in a bigger "kit" pre-prepared off site may surprise you.
RangerScience 9y ago
I 100% disagree with you. If you just want food, you can go with the cooked meal delivery (freshly, I think?) - but those are basically just fancy microwave dinners. I love to cook, and I hate both deciding what to cook, and then going and getting all the stuff to make whatever I (finally) decide to make. Meal boxes are the best of both worlds. Someone else decides what I'll be eating, and does all the shopping, and I get to do the cooking. I can't imagine life without it anymore.
pnathan 9y ago
> 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. This can be true when one person is the breadwinner and the other is practically/partially disabled, too. I don't know if you've read this book, but it is fascinating. https://www.amazon.com/Way-We-Never-Were-Nostalgia/dp/0465098835/ https://www.amazon.com/Way-We-Never-Were-Nostalgia/dp/046509... Of course, this book isn't the be-all answer to how things really were. I would suggest what we're really grappling with here is a breakdown in social order where kids are adequately taken care of, houses are adequately cleaned, meals prepared. To do so today is really quite hard: all sorts of traditional support structures have vanished in the wind. The big bugbear in this from a century ago was "Modernity", and you can find a number of writings from that era wishing for a prior time. I'm reluctant to blame modernity that much, but it's a worthy starting point in my opinion.
- Mz 9y ago
  I am not familiar with that book, but I am well aware that our mental models about the nuclear family are basically rooted in a very brief window of time when "The Boys" came home from WW2 and women went home en masse to be homemakers etc. I actually blog some about the truly terrible effect this has had on our housing situation because we are still basically being haunted by the ghost of this brief anomalous time that we think is normal or something. I think it gets romanticized because it was a step up generally speaking over the terrible poverty that was the norm before that. People seem to not recognize that fact, so it usually isn't worth trying to comment on.
  - pnathan 9y ago
    I'd be interested in links to your blog. I have been persuaded for a number of years now that the 35-year World War broke Western civilization thoroughly and deeply, with an interregnum to ensure a whole generation and its children got the hit, and only in the past, say, 20 years have scholars been able to get enough distance from it to look critically enough to remark with equanimity on the matter. To me, it is sufficient to look at the evolution of fine art to demonstrate the point. But one can also look at complexity of language usage by educated individuals over time, social cohesion, pride in civilization, historical knowledge by educated individuals, etc.
pfooti 9y ago
I subscribe to sunbasket. Here's some reasons. I like cooking I don't have time to shop frequently I like meal planning, but I don't like meal-planning 7 days a week I don't care to go out to eat and spend a bunch of time dealing with ordering, waiting for the check, transportation, and so on. Sunbasket costs me about $22 per meal for two people. That is _significantly less_ money than a restaurant meal of similar quality. I could go to KFC and get crap for less than $20, but the value proposition is still quite good for me. My wife and I typically eat out once a week (or order delivery), I take care of meal-planning three other meals a week, and sunbasket handles the mid-week meals where I have enough time to cook but don't want to mess around with shopping. It's all organic and mostly sourced locally to me (although they deliver all over, I live in SF). Personally? I'd probably pay more for it. It is already a good value proposition. The only complicating factor is that when I shop and prep a meal from the store, I usually make 3-4 servings and thus have leftovers, which doesn't happen. So, with sunbasket I tend to buy more lunches. It is definitely more money than if I just went to the grocery store, but it saves me a trip a week, so there's that.
CamperBob2 9y ago
Hmm. Cooking a nice meal is a lot of work but it does scale to a certain extent, once you're over the initial hump. It's not that much harder to cook for 6 people than for 3. So, that makes me wonder if a Craigslist/Uber hybrid service would be viable. Basically a way to allow those full-time neighborhood housewives to pick up a few extra bucks by offering to cook 2x - 3x as much as required to feed their own families. The surplus homecooked meals would be picked up and delivered to someone else in the neighborhood who doesn't have the time, the talent, or the wife. It might not make much money, and it would probably draw the ire of local health authorities in much the same way that Uber and Lyft crossed swords with the taxi cartels. But I'd probably use a service like that, or at least try it. And it's not every day I get to bust out a zeugma.
gambiting 9y ago
>>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? Oh god - because it would be vastly more expensive than the meal kit service? I've been with Hello Fresh for a very long time now(85 boxes and counting) and the price per meal per person is £5 - you can't eat that cheaply at a restaurant, it's just not possible, especially if you factor in the cost of driving there and parking plus time, it's just a lot more hassle. Even takeaway can't really be had for that cheap, unless you are happy with some really crappy pizza, but then no one will deliver food below the threshold. And then you have the priceless benefit of actually learning how to cook - when I started I was positively mediocre in the kitchen, now I feel very confident and rarely make something that tastes bad, I would say I definitely know how to cook now. Even ignoring the price effectiveness of this solution, the benefit of cooking 5 different recopies every week and trying out new things and getting better at cooking is in my opinion absolutely 100% worth the admission cost.
just4themoney 9y ago
It's tastes and expectations that have changed. When I was growing up and when my parents were growing up dinner was best described as "edible." Nothing fancy, nothing artisanal, not bland but also not usually very exciting. Simple meals with simple ingredients. Now people want (and expect) fresh and "fancy" artisanal food all the time - you can see it in here with people complaining about the quality of Chipotle. I always think of these services as more used by young higher earning childless people, not so much families.

by Mz 9y ago

123e1daAdfafsdf 9y ago

These services allow you to pick the meals you want, and you can tweak the recipes as you cook them. I have tried a few to get my sweet sweet VC subsidized healthy meals, but in the end, I agree with you: I'd rather go to a restaurant.

pavel_lishin 9y ago

> 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 right - shopping sucks, finding recipes sucks, throwing away food because you bought too much kale sucks. (Not to mention, cooking a meal and eating it takes 45 minutes - depending on the restaurant, you might be in there for an hour, plus travel time. And remember, time is what they're short on.) Even if you find four interesting recipes and buy all the ingredients, and cook them - this takes 3x the time than just using Blue Apron, at minimum - on Friday you've got a bunch of assorted ingredients and no idea what to do with them. (Because you're not a wifemom, and you don't know how to combine those things into a meal.) But the person they're targeting doesn't want to learn to do that. They just want to buy a pre-configured lego set, and build a spaceship they can eat. You are not their target audience. Neither am I. But it definitely, definitely exists.

illumin8 9y ago
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 to cook a recipe, which is way too much labor for a meal that is already priced about the same as a restaurant meal. Granted, the food is much healthier than restaurant food, but my time is too valuable to spend that much. I suspect that other families where both parents work full time (like mine) are the same. Who has the time to spend an hour or two cooking every night? And pay a premium price for it? I'm cautiously optimistic about Tovala. They are the first one of these that has a fairly unique system where the food just needs to be popped into their combi-oven (bake, broil, and steam) and you just wait until it cooks. Eventually, we will have fully automated cooking appliances where drones deliver fresh food staples to your house and you get hot meals prepared automatically, but in the meantime, Tovala looks the closest to creating that experience.
- lostlogin 9y ago
  The difference between your drone future and delivered takeaways is the time between the cooking and the serving. As long as takeaways are kept hot (and haven't tuned to a soggy mess) surely better takeaways are easier to engineer?
  - illumin8 9y ago
    Take-out is definitely easier to engineer - we know that, but the food quality is never as good when food has been sitting for 30 minutes before you eat it. Hot food becomes lukewarm; cold food becomes warm. Leafy vegetables turn into mush. I look forward to our robotic, food cooking overlords.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Yours is a pretty common complaint though some of the services seem to focus more on reducing prep time than others. I imagine there's some tradeoff between freshness and the amount of pre-processing. The cynic in me also wonders if the nature of the product doesn't create incentives for fussy recipes with a lot of ingredients, including uncommon ones. If your recipe is just a filet of trout sauteed in butter with some sliced almonds and a simple vegetable side, your customers may start wondering what they're paying you for exactly.

harryh 9y ago

If you can afford a meal-in-a-box service, why would you not just go to a restaurant Because I'd rather eat at home. Especially if I have kids. It's easier. Because it's a lot cheaper. Because it's better for me from a health perspective.

Naritai 9y ago
But the point has been made several times in this thread, it's not much cheaper. Unless you're referring to some Michelin-starred restaurant, it's quite possible to eat fast-casual for the same price of many of these kits (especially if you live in a suburb where restaurants tend to be much cheaper than in e.g. SF)
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > But the point has been made several times in this thread, it's not much cheaper. Yes, it is. > Unless you're referring to some Michelin-starred restaurant, it's quite possible to eat fast-casual for the same price of many of these kits (especially if you live in a suburb where restaurants tend to be much cheaper than in e.g. SF) Blue Apron is $8.74 (family plan) or $9.99 (couples plan) per plate for complete dinners. I live in the suburbs in the Central Valley (not the Bay Area) and it's well below fast-casual prices for comparable composition meals (also, better quality than most fast-casual places.) Now, if you are talking about fast-food rather than fast-casual, that still is cheaper.
  - inZGBl 9y ago
    This doesn't hold true for the rest of America. Go build a chipotle meal at some other zip code. South East: 1 chipotle burrito bowl, chicken, black beans, brown rice, guac, hot salsa, cheese 1 22oz drink Total - $10.20
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > Go build a chipotle meal at some other zip code. Chipotle is much lower quality than anything I've had from Blue Apron (this is typical of low-price national chain fast-casual restaurants; the fast-casual restaurants that are worth comparing are independent or local-chain places). So, yeah, if that's the kind of food you want, it's price comparable to BA (but you wouldn't be looking at BA if you were satisfied with that kind of food I the first place.)

idealhavoc 9y ago

The main benefit I get out of it is that without it I would never cook anything because I wouldn't be able to get the motivation over the long term (I've tried, and it works for a short time, but fades). So basically it gives me reasonable portions that I can cart to work, gets me to cook by force-feeding me recipes (which seems to reliably motivate me, and they taste good enough when done), and at least seem more healthy (and at $9 a serving substantially cheaper than) a restaurant. Not saying that the same thing would work for anyone other than me, but has worked out better than the prior "stuffing whatever food I can reach into mouth" method.

ghaff 9y ago

I tried Blue Apron just to see what the deal was. It was "OK" but not really a fit for me. I do know people who like it though. There's a category of (especially) couples with disposable income who really want to cook at home a few nights a week but appreciate some structure to make it happen.

jessaustin 9y ago
Hmmm... what other activities would "couples with disposable income" like to have "at home a few nights a week", but which could improved with "some structure"?
- pjc50 9y ago
  Now there's a good bit of harmless innuendo getting downvoted because HN doesn't get jokes :(
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    Thanks! I figure I'm ahead on the submission, I might as well burn some valuable internet points on entertaining those of discerning tastes such as yourself. Normally the only time I get downvoted that much is when I complain about WaPo's obvious-but-never-mentioned conflicts of interest.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      :) I think they've started being explicit about the conflict of interest: https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/06/27/the-washington-post-social-media-policy/ https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/06/27/the-washington-post...
      - jessaustin 9y ago
        I don't see any mention of big (e.g. $60M/yr for 10 yrs) AWS customers... b^)

dragonwriter 9y ago

> 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 replace some of the effort of shopping, portioning, and some part of prepping, plus recipe discovery. > If you can afford a meal-in-a-box service, why would you not just go to a restaurant Because with a restaurant, I don't have a cook that will tweak to my tastes without detailed prompting. > 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. > Someone else decides what you will be eating and you have to do the cooking. The ability to select from a menu of options prior to delivery would be an improvement for many of these services.

Mz 9y ago
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.
vec 9y ago
> The ability to select from a menu of options prior to delivery would be an improvement for many of these services. Hello Fresh, at least, has 8 or so available recipes per week. They'll pick 3 for me, but if I choose I can log in to their site and pick for myself.
- prawn 9y ago

opportune 9y ago

I think you're right, and that people are downvoting you because they are confusing your references to pre-feminism gender roles as you supporting them. As delivery services become faster and more perfected, specifically when we can start using drones to deliver almost anything (which isn't heavy) to anyone in an urban/suburban area in an hour or less, I think we will see the rise of food being ordered and delivered at will. However, the technology isn't there yet. So instead, we get all these food delivery services that either deliver restaurant food (ubereats, orderup), their own food but without choice / at high cost relative to quality like with Freshly, or these meal-kits. At best they are awkward solutions to a problem that we can't fix with normal pricing and distribution models. 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. All of the existing companies in this space make tradeoffs in one way or another, which leave people dissatisfied and prevent adoption except by those who place a high premium on convenience.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pavel_lishin 9y ago
> 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?
- opportune 9y ago
  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.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago

garrettdc 9y ago

We use Hello Fresh and like it quite a bit. Even being a full time wife and mom and a good cook, she still likes to use this as it adds variation to our dinners, and we try some foods that we wouldn't ordinarily try. As for affordability: $60 / 3 meals = $20 / meal. In general, getting similar meals elsewhere would run us $40+. They normally give you a few different options for the week and project out multiple weeks in advance so you have plenty of time to decide what you want. If you don't want anything they have to offer that week, then you can always just skip the box altogether too. I'm certainly not trying to diminish the benefits of having someone at home full time to care for the family (and all that entails), but saying that the meal-in-a-box service industry is in existence solely because of more two-income families is a rather narrow view.

saturdaysaint 9y ago

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.

throwaway91111 9y ago
I mean, most food doesn't take too long to cook, and the bulk of the work is just prep, which is amortized by the kitchen.
- Smaug123 9y ago
  As a specific example: at a place which only does burritos, they batch up a big pot of rice, a big pot of beans, lots of lettuce, big pots of various different meats, and so on. Then it takes you about a minute from walking in to paying, as they just semi-toast a wrap and then fill it with all the pre-made ingredients. The ingredient preparation can be done in parallel with service, too.

wrsh07 9y ago

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-how-much-youre-actually-paying-for-free-shipping-on-blue-apron/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/21/heres...

wrsh07 9y ago
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 what to look for in stores - making you better at that aspect, too [without having to practice the "standing in line" bit] It's a little tidbit I've always liked about Blue Apron. [2]: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magenta-automation-paradox-pt-1/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magent... -- it's two parts.

komali2 9y ago

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 the odd, mildly sexist suggestion that "lack of wives" is a problem that needs disruption. Or, you know, there's another person that "knows you well and will tweak the recipe to your preferences," namely, yourself.

FussyZeus 9y ago
I mean, I get what he's saying. I do most of the cooking around our house, and do tweak recipes to suit my woman's tastes. Yes, could've been phrased better but I think he's onto something in terms of the dedicated homemaker in general of either sex becoming a bit of a reach for most households to have.
Mz 9y ago
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 somehow magically taken care of by some other means. Everyone needs to eat. It is a requirement to remain alive. But most people don't want to spend all their time on this vital activity. They want a good meal, but hassle-free or low hassle. That isn't a criticism. I don't really like cooking either. It is just an observation about reality.
- ABCLAW 9y ago
  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.

stcredzero 9y ago

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 wouldn't have it. So the next step would be polygamy, but she didn't want that either. (Nor did I ask for that!) I had the same discussion with my fiancee just last night. (The "wife" part, but not the polygamy.) She doesn't want me to be her wife either.

Mz 9y ago
Yeah, "I need a wife" is a common refrain of working women, as previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14354026 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.
- prawn 9y ago
  In my teenage years, I was heavily encouraged to cook for the family, especially when I was between school/uni and work years. It was a great opportunity to learn, and also relieve pressure on working parents. It should be more common than I bet it is.

fusiongyro 9y ago

Well, there are a few other reasons: - $20/meal for a couple or small family is still cheaper than eating out, especially for the kind of meal you're getting from BlueApron - People like knowing what goes into their food - Using your cool kitchen gadgets is fun, even if you don't have great recipe ideas - In some places, to make a specific dish may require a trip to two or three or more grocery stores Growing up in the 80s with two parents that worked, there was a wife/mom who knew our preferences, but we ate a lot of hamburger helper anyway. Meal planning is the least fun part of cooking for me and my wife. Executing the plan is easier and funner than than coming up with the plan or getting the ingredients. Maybe we're outliers. On your subtext, it's true that society has changed a lot since we have two career professionals, but knowing several families that are trying the stay-at-home mom thing, I can't say it's working well for them, largely because there was a lot more institutional support for it in the 50s and earlier. The ones I know certainly don't spend their entire day coming up with luxury meals for their pampered families. But that's a topic for another day.

Mz 9y ago
On your subtext What subtext are you imagining my comment as having? Because I strongly suspect you are inferring things that simply are not there.
- fusiongyro 9y ago
  I thought you were suggesting that life was better when we had a sole breadwinner and a stay-at-home wife. I don't agree with that and read your comment uncharitably that way. On rereading it, I think you're saying there are two optimal points on this curve: having a live-in cook ("the wife") and going to a restaurant, and most of the stuff in the middle is pointless. I don't agree with that either but it's less of a charged topic.
  - Mz 9y ago
    All I'm saying is that it is a hard problem to solve. Our previous solution was full time wives. This had its good points and bad points. We do not appear to have found The Solution since moving away from that earlier model for the most part. In my experience, when people are reading "subtext" into my comments, they are typically projecting something that is simply not there at all. I do my best to be a straight shooter. I am not big on implying anything. The internet is not a good environment for trying to imply things. It lacks voice tone, context, facial expression etc and it puts people in contact from around the globe who come from very different cultures even when they are both, say, upper class for their country. It is just a terrible place in which to try to be subtle.

mrfusion 9y ago

Most restaurants are just microwaving frozen meals these days. I actually found a plastic wrapper in my homemade brownie sundae once. (Won't name the place)

pjc50 9y ago
This is a good point, especially at the lower end - and even when they aren't, the amount of stuff that comes in a bigger "kit" pre-prepared off site may surprise you.

RangerScience 9y ago

I 100% disagree with you. If you just want food, you can go with the cooked meal delivery (freshly, I think?) - but those are basically just fancy microwave dinners. I love to cook, and I hate both deciding what to cook, and then going and getting all the stuff to make whatever I (finally) decide to make. Meal boxes are the best of both worlds. Someone else decides what I'll be eating, and does all the shopping, and I get to do the cooking. I can't imagine life without it anymore.

pnathan 9y ago

> 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. This can be true when one person is the breadwinner and the other is practically/partially disabled, too. I don't know if you've read this book, but it is fascinating. https://www.amazon.com/Way-We-Never-Were-Nostalgia/dp/0465098835/ https://www.amazon.com/Way-We-Never-Were-Nostalgia/dp/046509... Of course, this book isn't the be-all answer to how things really were. I would suggest what we're really grappling with here is a breakdown in social order where kids are adequately taken care of, houses are adequately cleaned, meals prepared. To do so today is really quite hard: all sorts of traditional support structures have vanished in the wind. The big bugbear in this from a century ago was "Modernity", and you can find a number of writings from that era wishing for a prior time. I'm reluctant to blame modernity that much, but it's a worthy starting point in my opinion.

Mz 9y ago
I am not familiar with that book, but I am well aware that our mental models about the nuclear family are basically rooted in a very brief window of time when "The Boys" came home from WW2 and women went home en masse to be homemakers etc. I actually blog some about the truly terrible effect this has had on our housing situation because we are still basically being haunted by the ghost of this brief anomalous time that we think is normal or something. I think it gets romanticized because it was a step up generally speaking over the terrible poverty that was the norm before that. People seem to not recognize that fact, so it usually isn't worth trying to comment on.
- pnathan 9y ago
  I'd be interested in links to your blog. I have been persuaded for a number of years now that the 35-year World War broke Western civilization thoroughly and deeply, with an interregnum to ensure a whole generation and its children got the hit, and only in the past, say, 20 years have scholars been able to get enough distance from it to look critically enough to remark with equanimity on the matter. To me, it is sufficient to look at the evolution of fine art to demonstrate the point. But one can also look at complexity of language usage by educated individuals over time, social cohesion, pride in civilization, historical knowledge by educated individuals, etc.

pfooti 9y ago

I subscribe to sunbasket. Here's some reasons. I like cooking I don't have time to shop frequently I like meal planning, but I don't like meal-planning 7 days a week I don't care to go out to eat and spend a bunch of time dealing with ordering, waiting for the check, transportation, and so on. Sunbasket costs me about $22 per meal for two people. That is _significantly less_ money than a restaurant meal of similar quality. I could go to KFC and get crap for less than $20, but the value proposition is still quite good for me. My wife and I typically eat out once a week (or order delivery), I take care of meal-planning three other meals a week, and sunbasket handles the mid-week meals where I have enough time to cook but don't want to mess around with shopping. It's all organic and mostly sourced locally to me (although they deliver all over, I live in SF). Personally? I'd probably pay more for it. It is already a good value proposition. The only complicating factor is that when I shop and prep a meal from the store, I usually make 3-4 servings and thus have leftovers, which doesn't happen. So, with sunbasket I tend to buy more lunches. It is definitely more money than if I just went to the grocery store, but it saves me a trip a week, so there's that.

CamperBob2 9y ago

Hmm. Cooking a nice meal is a lot of work but it does scale to a certain extent, once you're over the initial hump. It's not that much harder to cook for 6 people than for 3. So, that makes me wonder if a Craigslist/Uber hybrid service would be viable. Basically a way to allow those full-time neighborhood housewives to pick up a few extra bucks by offering to cook 2x - 3x as much as required to feed their own families. The surplus homecooked meals would be picked up and delivered to someone else in the neighborhood who doesn't have the time, the talent, or the wife. It might not make much money, and it would probably draw the ire of local health authorities in much the same way that Uber and Lyft crossed swords with the taxi cartels. But I'd probably use a service like that, or at least try it. And it's not every day I get to bust out a zeugma.

gambiting 9y ago

>>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? Oh god - because it would be vastly more expensive than the meal kit service? I've been with Hello Fresh for a very long time now(85 boxes and counting) and the price per meal per person is £5 - you can't eat that cheaply at a restaurant, it's just not possible, especially if you factor in the cost of driving there and parking plus time, it's just a lot more hassle. Even takeaway can't really be had for that cheap, unless you are happy with some really crappy pizza, but then no one will deliver food below the threshold. And then you have the priceless benefit of actually learning how to cook - when I started I was positively mediocre in the kitchen, now I feel very confident and rarely make something that tastes bad, I would say I definitely know how to cook now. Even ignoring the price effectiveness of this solution, the benefit of cooking 5 different recopies every week and trying out new things and getting better at cooking is in my opinion absolutely 100% worth the admission cost.

just4themoney 9y ago

It's tastes and expectations that have changed. When I was growing up and when my parents were growing up dinner was best described as "edible." Nothing fancy, nothing artisanal, not bland but also not usually very exciting. Simple meals with simple ingredients. Now people want (and expect) fresh and "fancy" artisanal food all the time - you can see it in here with people complaining about the quality of Chipotle. I always think of these services as more used by young higher earning childless people, not so much families.