11 ms·

I think a bigger problem which these services don't get is that if you live in a reasonably sized city then you will have a huge range of takeaway/delivery food

I think a bigger problem which these services don't get is that if you live in a reasonably sized city then you will have a huge range of takeaway/delivery food options. The amount of people who want to cook and prepare a nice meal is probably a lot less than the amount of people who just want to buy, eat and enjoy a nice meal. I live in Dublin, not exactly the biggest of cities, but I can't think of a single type of food that I can't order through one of the various home delivery apps available to me. No need to cook food or be constrained by a predetermined set of menus. It's hard to make the case for a meal in a box service when you can order just about any food imaginable from your phone and it will be delivered within 30 minutes.

anongraddebt 8y ago
It's bordering on out-of-control in some U.S. cities. About six months ago, I briefly stopped while in the middle of cleaning our apartment and realized the majority of our 'trash' was food delivery detritus. We've been spending $500-$700 a month on food delivery this year, and I only see that increasing in the future. I can regularly obtain a $1 (sometimes less) delivery fee by selecting among Uber Eats/GrubHub/DoorDash/etc. The pricing blood-bath between restaurants (and delivery companies) combined with convenience-induced laziness has me doing nutty things like order a $6 froyo from a place ~100 meters away. Speaking of Blue Apron, I recently threw out half of an unopened meal kit of theirs that convenience-induced laziness had caused to rot away in the fridge. The delivery trend is strong. Not sure it's a net positive society-wide habit.
- zanny 8y ago
  Cooking is hard, requires a lot of hardware to do, and is an acquired skill that takes a lot of blunt learning of a lot of minute details about how certain ingredients interact. In the same way you don't ask everyone to learn to repair car engines or diagnose medical issues modern society puts a lot of pressure on specialization of hard work like cooking. That being said the true optimization would be that most people be content to eat in cafeteria style settings where there are limited options and the chefs are using whatever is freshest and most affordable and availability is fixed (even if you just grab and go with the food). There is a trade off between menu diversity, the prices you pay for it, and how good it can actually be where 16+ hour open restaurants with several page menus (including fast food) are making concessions on freshness / shortcuts in preparation to provide their diversity and availability. I think a lot of this relates to how we are in a transnational period for density. In the coming decades I am almost certain we will trend globally towards packing people into apartment / condo style living in city cores because the trends of sprawl and mcmansion single families that are going to be inherited by unmarried or childless descendants without the incomes to support them falls apart. Right now trying to build up a "local" kitchen you can go to three times a day for regular, good, healthy and diverse meals isn't feasible because the density isn't there to get them to walkable convenience, but I hope rising density makes them a possibility. At those kinds of scales it becomes a technical probability we might just get short range delivery drones where the kitchens advertise via app or notification whats on the menu and you just select what you want and a lil bot brings it to you a la room service but optimized in the aforementioned ways to make it more sustainable.
  - michaelmior 8y ago
    > Cooking is hard, requires a lot of hardware to do I think this is completely false and it's unfortunate that people have this perception of cooking. Yes, it's true that if you want to be able to cook all the sorts of food you're used to having delivered, a lot of skill and hardware is probably required. However, you can cook a lot of great, tasty meals with a single pot and pan and a few inexpensive utensils and limited skill required. I think some of the biggest challenges to more people cooking at home is that it will always take more time than ordering.
    - mszkoda 8y ago
      Agreed on the hardware requirements. I love to cook and have an extensive range of very expensive pots/pans/utensils with very specific uses, but in the beginning I had very few. I also still only use a few of them most of the time. You can do almost everything with a 12" skillet/frying pan, a large sauce pan (4 qt maybe since you probably want to cook pasta in it), and one of those sets of 3-6 utensils (you don't even need that many) if you are cooking for 1-4.
      - namdnay 8y ago
        And a kitchen/kitchen corner. I think what the parent is suggesting is that apartments wouldn't have kitchens at all, and you would eat at communal cafeteria. I believe this is what the vast majority of city dwellers in imperial rome would do?
        bunderbunder 8y ago
        Or in places like the USA, not that long ago. Y'know how, in old movies, single people would live in single-room apartments, often with a Murphy bed that played a part in some amount of slapstick humor? They weren't cooking in there - dinner was served downstairs.
        jhbadger 8y ago
michaelt 8y ago
The case for a meal-in-a-box service is "It's home cooking, but easier for only a modest increase in cost" The case for home cooking over delivery food most people know already :)
- cardamomo 8y ago
  And what is the case for home cooking over delivery food, in your opinion? (I may agree with you, but I don't think everyone is on the same page here.)
  - radiorental 8y ago
    The case is that you know what is your food. Too often we'd order Indian and realise they had added extra salt to preserve some 'overstock' Also, invariably the content in takeaway food is the lowest cost produce. If you care about where your food comes from and what goes into it you cut out the middleman.
    - michaelmior 8y ago
      Forget adding extra salt because of poor quality ingredients, restaurants almost always add significantly more salt and fat than you would be comfortable doing yourself at home.
  - c0nducktr 8y ago
    It being far less expensive, seems to be the standout reason. Normal people can't afford $700/month for food delivery services.
    - Agathos 8y ago
      It's a little less expensive, but I wouldn't call it "far" less expensive unless you're prepared to stick to the lowest-cost ingredients like rice and beans.
      - 8y ago
ryanmercer 8y ago
I think a bigger problem which these services is that you're paying outrageous amounts. Blue Apron is like 9.99$ a meal, you're paying more than a dollar per 100 kcals which is insanity and then you have to spend 15-30 minutes preparing it, I can throw 8$ of chicken in the instant pot with some dry seasoning and 25 minutes later I've got pulled chicken for a week I can then rinse it out and throw in 3$ of black beans and have black beans for a week. Most Americans can't afford 10$ per person per meal. Hell, the minimum wage here in Indiana is 7.25$, if you're lucky at retail you might be making 9$, average household income is $45,943 in Indiana, even just one person earning that you're taking home 35,482$ a year which is about 97$ a day which makes just 1 of these meals a day 10.2% of your net income. The problem is, people try and apply Bay Area lifestyle to the rest of the country.
- matwood 8y ago
  Not only that, but for $10/serving I can usually find a good cut (filet or ribeye) of steak on sale and a fresh veggie like asparagus. If I want to save money, chicken breast are on a permanent sale of 1.99/pound at my local grocery. I tried BA, and while it was convenient I never felt I was getting the best quality or enough food for the price. I do have a lot of recipe cards that I still use though.
  - dagw 8y ago
    Not only that, but for $10/serving I can usually find a good cut (filet or ribeye) of steak on sale and a fresh veggie like asparagus. If I want to save money, chicken breast are on a permanent sale of 1.99/pound at my local grocery. Totally off topic, but I can never quite get over how ridiculously cheap food is in the US.
    - lunchables 8y ago
      Food, gas, you name it -- it is all incredibly cheap. Plus comparatively low tax rates and high salaries, especially for tech workers.
    - ryanmercer 8y ago
noer 8y ago
>if you live in a reasonably sized city then you will have a huge range of takeaway/delivery food options. Delivery food and meal kit services aren't really competing for the same customers. Meal kits require prior planning, time and storage space, while delivery food isn't something a lot of people necessarily plan for (or at the very least, don't need to plan for).
mattnewport 8y ago
The amount of people who want to cook and prepare a nice meal rather than get one delivered but then want to do it from a kit rather than the traditional way seems even smaller. I like to cook but the reasons why are mostly also reasons I have no interest in these meal kit services. I'm sure there is some market but it's unclear to me who it is since it sort of looks like the subset of people who want to cook but don't like to cook.
- magneticnorth 8y ago
  I used Blue Apron for a while fairly happily, and for me the reasoning was that I like to cook - I find it a really nice way to unwind after a workday - but I hate shopping and often don't feel like planning. So for a slightly higher cost per meal, I got to skip straight to the "fun" part.
mschaef 8y ago
..The amount of people who want to cook and prepare a nice meal is probably a lot less than the amount of people who think they want to cook and prepare a nice meal... ftfy. We did Blue Apron and Sunbasket both for a while. Both are generally good products, but they both take time we don't really have. (So my wife periodically logs into the app and opts out of everything they'd have otherwise sent automatically.)

anongraddebt 8y ago

It's bordering on out-of-control in some U.S. cities. About six months ago, I briefly stopped while in the middle of cleaning our apartment and realized the majority of our 'trash' was food delivery detritus. We've been spending $500-$700 a month on food delivery this year, and I only see that increasing in the future. I can regularly obtain a $1 (sometimes less) delivery fee by selecting among Uber Eats/GrubHub/DoorDash/etc. The pricing blood-bath between restaurants (and delivery companies) combined with convenience-induced laziness has me doing nutty things like order a $6 froyo from a place ~100 meters away. Speaking of Blue Apron, I recently threw out half of an unopened meal kit of theirs that convenience-induced laziness had caused to rot away in the fridge. The delivery trend is strong. Not sure it's a net positive society-wide habit.

zanny 8y ago
Cooking is hard, requires a lot of hardware to do, and is an acquired skill that takes a lot of blunt learning of a lot of minute details about how certain ingredients interact. In the same way you don't ask everyone to learn to repair car engines or diagnose medical issues modern society puts a lot of pressure on specialization of hard work like cooking. That being said the true optimization would be that most people be content to eat in cafeteria style settings where there are limited options and the chefs are using whatever is freshest and most affordable and availability is fixed (even if you just grab and go with the food). There is a trade off between menu diversity, the prices you pay for it, and how good it can actually be where 16+ hour open restaurants with several page menus (including fast food) are making concessions on freshness / shortcuts in preparation to provide their diversity and availability. I think a lot of this relates to how we are in a transnational period for density. In the coming decades I am almost certain we will trend globally towards packing people into apartment / condo style living in city cores because the trends of sprawl and mcmansion single families that are going to be inherited by unmarried or childless descendants without the incomes to support them falls apart. Right now trying to build up a "local" kitchen you can go to three times a day for regular, good, healthy and diverse meals isn't feasible because the density isn't there to get them to walkable convenience, but I hope rising density makes them a possibility. At those kinds of scales it becomes a technical probability we might just get short range delivery drones where the kitchens advertise via app or notification whats on the menu and you just select what you want and a lil bot brings it to you a la room service but optimized in the aforementioned ways to make it more sustainable.
- michaelmior 8y ago
  > Cooking is hard, requires a lot of hardware to do I think this is completely false and it's unfortunate that people have this perception of cooking. Yes, it's true that if you want to be able to cook all the sorts of food you're used to having delivered, a lot of skill and hardware is probably required. However, you can cook a lot of great, tasty meals with a single pot and pan and a few inexpensive utensils and limited skill required. I think some of the biggest challenges to more people cooking at home is that it will always take more time than ordering.
  - mszkoda 8y ago
    Agreed on the hardware requirements. I love to cook and have an extensive range of very expensive pots/pans/utensils with very specific uses, but in the beginning I had very few. I also still only use a few of them most of the time. You can do almost everything with a 12" skillet/frying pan, a large sauce pan (4 qt maybe since you probably want to cook pasta in it), and one of those sets of 3-6 utensils (you don't even need that many) if you are cooking for 1-4.
    - namdnay 8y ago
      And a kitchen/kitchen corner. I think what the parent is suggesting is that apartments wouldn't have kitchens at all, and you would eat at communal cafeteria. I believe this is what the vast majority of city dwellers in imperial rome would do?
      - bunderbunder 8y ago
        Or in places like the USA, not that long ago. Y'know how, in old movies, single people would live in single-room apartments, often with a Murphy bed that played a part in some amount of slapstick humor? They weren't cooking in there - dinner was served downstairs.
        jhbadger 8y ago

michaelt 8y ago

The case for a meal-in-a-box service is "It's home cooking, but easier for only a modest increase in cost" The case for home cooking over delivery food most people know already :)

cardamomo 8y ago
And what is the case for home cooking over delivery food, in your opinion? (I may agree with you, but I don't think everyone is on the same page here.)
- radiorental 8y ago
  The case is that you know what is your food. Too often we'd order Indian and realise they had added extra salt to preserve some 'overstock' Also, invariably the content in takeaway food is the lowest cost produce. If you care about where your food comes from and what goes into it you cut out the middleman.
  - michaelmior 8y ago
    Forget adding extra salt because of poor quality ingredients, restaurants almost always add significantly more salt and fat than you would be comfortable doing yourself at home.
- c0nducktr 8y ago
  It being far less expensive, seems to be the standout reason. Normal people can't afford $700/month for food delivery services.
  - Agathos 8y ago
    It's a little less expensive, but I wouldn't call it "far" less expensive unless you're prepared to stick to the lowest-cost ingredients like rice and beans.
    - 8y ago

ryanmercer 8y ago

I think a bigger problem which these services is that you're paying outrageous amounts. Blue Apron is like 9.99$ a meal, you're paying more than a dollar per 100 kcals which is insanity and then you have to spend 15-30 minutes preparing it, I can throw 8$ of chicken in the instant pot with some dry seasoning and 25 minutes later I've got pulled chicken for a week I can then rinse it out and throw in 3$ of black beans and have black beans for a week. Most Americans can't afford 10$ per person per meal. Hell, the minimum wage here in Indiana is 7.25$, if you're lucky at retail you might be making 9$, average household income is $45,943 in Indiana, even just one person earning that you're taking home 35,482$ a year which is about 97$ a day which makes just 1 of these meals a day 10.2% of your net income. The problem is, people try and apply Bay Area lifestyle to the rest of the country.

matwood 8y ago
Not only that, but for $10/serving I can usually find a good cut (filet or ribeye) of steak on sale and a fresh veggie like asparagus. If I want to save money, chicken breast are on a permanent sale of 1.99/pound at my local grocery. I tried BA, and while it was convenient I never felt I was getting the best quality or enough food for the price. I do have a lot of recipe cards that I still use though.
- dagw 8y ago
  Not only that, but for $10/serving I can usually find a good cut (filet or ribeye) of steak on sale and a fresh veggie like asparagus. If I want to save money, chicken breast are on a permanent sale of 1.99/pound at my local grocery. Totally off topic, but I can never quite get over how ridiculously cheap food is in the US.
  - lunchables 8y ago
    Food, gas, you name it -- it is all incredibly cheap. Plus comparatively low tax rates and high salaries, especially for tech workers.
  - ryanmercer 8y ago

noer 8y ago

>if you live in a reasonably sized city then you will have a huge range of takeaway/delivery food options. Delivery food and meal kit services aren't really competing for the same customers. Meal kits require prior planning, time and storage space, while delivery food isn't something a lot of people necessarily plan for (or at the very least, don't need to plan for).

mattnewport 8y ago

The amount of people who want to cook and prepare a nice meal rather than get one delivered but then want to do it from a kit rather than the traditional way seems even smaller. I like to cook but the reasons why are mostly also reasons I have no interest in these meal kit services. I'm sure there is some market but it's unclear to me who it is since it sort of looks like the subset of people who want to cook but don't like to cook.

magneticnorth 8y ago
I used Blue Apron for a while fairly happily, and for me the reasoning was that I like to cook - I find it a really nice way to unwind after a workday - but I hate shopping and often don't feel like planning. So for a slightly higher cost per meal, I got to skip straight to the "fun" part.

mschaef 8y ago

..The amount of people who want to cook and prepare a nice meal is probably a lot less than the amount of people who think they want to cook and prepare a nice meal... ftfy. We did Blue Apron and Sunbasket both for a while. Both are generally good products, but they both take time we don't really have. (So my wife periodically logs into the app and opts out of everything they'd have otherwise sent automatically.)