7 ms·

Wait, why are all pizza, Indian, Thai, Sushi etc. places in my city doing this and have been for ages if it is so difficult?

by tnolet 8y ago

watwut 8y ago
They specialize on the kind of food that is favorable to this.
inferiorhuman 8y ago
Restaurants typically have a much smaller delivery area. Munchery delivered to a large chunk of the Bay Area from one kitchen. Most restaurants typically have a mostly fixed menu. Munchery varied the menu daily. I can't say what Munchery was paying its drivers, in a traditional restaurant or through the bullshit gig companies, driver typically make at or below minimum wage. Most traditional restaurants farm out their site (e.g. bullshit gig companies will handle the photography and pay the photographers a pittance) or have a minimal online presence. Munchery had the overhead of maintaining much more of their online presence. That said Munchery wasn't real-time delivery when I used it. There was an ordering window that closed by mid-afternoon. If I had to guess the constantly rotating menu created a ton of waste. Or maybe they were simply that bad at it.
- jsemrau 8y ago
  >Munchery delivered to a large chunk of the Bay Area from one kitchen. That's your problem right there. The Bay Area is not dense enough to make this viable.
  - Shivetya 8y ago
    Close, but the real problem is trying to compete with an established business method while claiming an innovative web presence and giving back mean anything. People order food from places they have seen under the idea that being local means they get their food sooner and its fresher and hotter and so on. like the meal kit companies, anything you can do from a centralized site the local companies, home grown or franchise, can do as well. both restaurants and grocery chains co-opted the idea of meal kits and then had the built in neighborhood loyalty.
    - jermaustin1 8y ago
      > both restaurants and grocery chains co-opted the idea of meal kits and then had the built in neighborhood loyalty. This is the big thing. I can walk into a Stop and Shop or an ACME or a Shopright and buy a meal kit on my way home, and they usually have a decent selection. They aren't gormet, but they are fit for human consumption ;). I can just throw it all into a skillet, saucepan/pot, or an instant pot and have it done in 30 minutes without chopping/dicing/slicing.
      - inferiorhuman 8y ago
        That's a very different market. Munchery was targeting the Eatsa crowd.
- copernicusrouge 8y ago
  They were at a point where they had honestly gotten quite good at it and then they decided to put an inexperienced finance bro in charge of pretty much everything (I think he was promoted 4 times in 6 months for no objectively demonstrable reason) and gave the La Boulange guy a blank check to go do whatever the hell he wanted (and what he wanted was to siphon as much money as he could to all his buddies' companies). At that point the quality tanked, retention evaporated and the waste went through the roof because the chefs no longer had any real voice in anything. There was nothing a good marketing executive could possibly do to pull out of that tailspin and they had never gotten anywhere near a good marketing executive at any point, so the investors installed a new CEO who installed a bunch more recently unemployed Yahoo cronies who demanded around $300K/head to sit around writing reports no one ever read or did anything with and it's mostly been shocking that they survived beyond that point.
Lazare 8y ago
At least around here: 1) Pizza is made on demand, quickly, from a small number of relatively non-perishable, cheap ingredients. You won't throw away a significant dollar value of raw materials. Also, pizza is popular, and your delivery drivers can stay busy. Pizza is so suitable for delivery that it's the ur-example. 2) Indian does have long lead times (the sauce cannot be made on demand), but the core food item is rice (which can be made in advance in bulk, and is also very cheap), and sauce, but the way the restaurant works is they make up a small number of sauce bases, cook up some meat, and then combine when the order is made. You don't necessarily know how much butter chicken will be ordered in a night, but you can cook batches during the night to adjust to demand. 3) Thai, around here, is always run out of an existing successful Thai restaurant, so they can piggy-back off the volume of the restaurant. It also tends to be a bit pricier, probably to reflect the higher margins. It also tends to centre around stir-fry, which again is cooked mostly on demand from a small-ish number of prepared ingredients. 4) Sushi...not popular around here (sushi is, but there is ZERO delivery options), but sandwiches, mexican, and turkish kebabs are. Again, you can get a bunch of cheap bread, tortillas, or pitas, a small number of mostly cheap, mostly non-perishable, mostly interchangable ingredients, and churn out chicken quesadillas, beef burritos, etc. Leftover bread is a small cost, and if you're careful you can minimise loss of meat, as you prepare more batches over the night. 5) Fish and chips (very popular around here), made from frozen ingredients and a VERY small selection of fresh ones, deep friend on demand. See a pattern? A lot of "combine cheap starch with some fresh vegetables and/or meat that can be prepared quickly, ideally from frozen", where in many cases on-demand labour (putting the sandwich together, putting toppings on the pizza) will be a major chunk of your inputs, and ingredients will be minimal. In all cases you're looking at cuisines where it's relatively popular, the ingredients are relatively cheap, and critically you have a lot of interchangeability, a small number of ingredients, and low preparation times, etc. The fish and chip shop doesn't care if they sell 80 scoops of chips or 40, they've got tons spare in the deep freezer, and they're being cooked on demand; no wastage. Their main concern is just selling enough of anything to cover the cost of the oil in the deep fryer. What will NOT work is something like a steak, roasts, ribs, fancy fish; stuff that has expensive ingredients and (especially) long lead times. You can't just cook up 40 plates of ribs on spec to see if you'll sell any tonight. (Well, not and stay in business for long.) And if we look at the screenshot of Munchery's menu, item 1 is Corn Husk Roasted Salmon, item 2 is Honey Glazed Pork, item 3 is a side, item 4 is Roasted Chicken. These are the exact sorts of thing that will wreck your economics. No doubt they were popular; people are sick of pizza, indian, thai, mexican, etc as delivery options, especially at $11 a plate! But as the joke goes, if you lose money on every sale, you can't really make it up in volume. :) Edit: Munchery tried to work around this by closing orders early, I think at 2pm, but 1) that's going to lose you some volume and 2) that's still not enough lead time. > why are all pizza, Indian, Thai, Sushi etc. places in my city doing this They're doing something very different.
LoSboccacc 8y ago
> pizza, Indian, Thai, Sushi etc. places this selection contains the answer to your question: all those cuisines's recipes use few ingredients in a lot of variations and have preparations that can easily sit waiting for a customer. it's harder to find restaurants or other places with large or daily menus that can sustain a structured delivery chain as primary income source, maybe they can support the more unstructured uber food aproach but usually that's it. exceptions apply, but parent listed a good deal of causes why this is capital inefficient. these startups are trying to create a "microcatering" market, which is radically different.
- cbzbc 8y ago
  To be clear, you can make a reasonable pastiche of all of those cuisines recipes using a few ingredients with a lot of variations.
notyourday 8y ago
Small area. Small customer base. Selective customer base.
Spooky23 8y ago
Takeout and restaurants that do takeout are either easy on demand foods or complements to the core business. I used to work at a coffee/sandwich shop where catering drove margins -- delivering a box of sandwiches to a business meeting or small event is enormously profitable, but wouldn't keep the lights on. The problem with cooking anything on demand is that scaling up distributed cooking doesn't work well while preserving quality. If you want cheap, you get fast food, and if you want expensive, you have a quality cafeteria.

Wait, why are all pizza, Indian, Thai, Sushi etc. places in my city doing this and have been for ages if it is so difficult?

by tnolet 8y ago

Wait, why are all pizza, Indian, Thai, Sushi etc. places in my city doing this and have been for ages if it is so difficult?

watwut 8y ago

They specialize on the kind of food that is favorable to this.

inferiorhuman 8y ago

Restaurants typically have a much smaller delivery area. Munchery delivered to a large chunk of the Bay Area from one kitchen. Most restaurants typically have a mostly fixed menu. Munchery varied the menu daily. I can't say what Munchery was paying its drivers, in a traditional restaurant or through the bullshit gig companies, driver typically make at or below minimum wage. Most traditional restaurants farm out their site (e.g. bullshit gig companies will handle the photography and pay the photographers a pittance) or have a minimal online presence. Munchery had the overhead of maintaining much more of their online presence. That said Munchery wasn't real-time delivery when I used it. There was an ordering window that closed by mid-afternoon. If I had to guess the constantly rotating menu created a ton of waste. Or maybe they were simply that bad at it.

jsemrau 8y ago
>Munchery delivered to a large chunk of the Bay Area from one kitchen. That's your problem right there. The Bay Area is not dense enough to make this viable.
- Shivetya 8y ago
  Close, but the real problem is trying to compete with an established business method while claiming an innovative web presence and giving back mean anything. People order food from places they have seen under the idea that being local means they get their food sooner and its fresher and hotter and so on. like the meal kit companies, anything you can do from a centralized site the local companies, home grown or franchise, can do as well. both restaurants and grocery chains co-opted the idea of meal kits and then had the built in neighborhood loyalty.
  - jermaustin1 8y ago
    > both restaurants and grocery chains co-opted the idea of meal kits and then had the built in neighborhood loyalty. This is the big thing. I can walk into a Stop and Shop or an ACME or a Shopright and buy a meal kit on my way home, and they usually have a decent selection. They aren't gormet, but they are fit for human consumption ;). I can just throw it all into a skillet, saucepan/pot, or an instant pot and have it done in 30 minutes without chopping/dicing/slicing.
    - inferiorhuman 8y ago
      That's a very different market. Munchery was targeting the Eatsa crowd.
copernicusrouge 8y ago
They were at a point where they had honestly gotten quite good at it and then they decided to put an inexperienced finance bro in charge of pretty much everything (I think he was promoted 4 times in 6 months for no objectively demonstrable reason) and gave the La Boulange guy a blank check to go do whatever the hell he wanted (and what he wanted was to siphon as much money as he could to all his buddies' companies). At that point the quality tanked, retention evaporated and the waste went through the roof because the chefs no longer had any real voice in anything. There was nothing a good marketing executive could possibly do to pull out of that tailspin and they had never gotten anywhere near a good marketing executive at any point, so the investors installed a new CEO who installed a bunch more recently unemployed Yahoo cronies who demanded around $300K/head to sit around writing reports no one ever read or did anything with and it's mostly been shocking that they survived beyond that point.

Lazare 8y ago

At least around here: 1) Pizza is made on demand, quickly, from a small number of relatively non-perishable, cheap ingredients. You won't throw away a significant dollar value of raw materials. Also, pizza is popular, and your delivery drivers can stay busy. Pizza is so suitable for delivery that it's the ur-example. 2) Indian does have long lead times (the sauce cannot be made on demand), but the core food item is rice (which can be made in advance in bulk, and is also very cheap), and sauce, but the way the restaurant works is they make up a small number of sauce bases, cook up some meat, and then combine when the order is made. You don't necessarily know how much butter chicken will be ordered in a night, but you can cook batches during the night to adjust to demand. 3) Thai, around here, is always run out of an existing successful Thai restaurant, so they can piggy-back off the volume of the restaurant. It also tends to be a bit pricier, probably to reflect the higher margins. It also tends to centre around stir-fry, which again is cooked mostly on demand from a small-ish number of prepared ingredients. 4) Sushi...not popular around here (sushi is, but there is ZERO delivery options), but sandwiches, mexican, and turkish kebabs are. Again, you can get a bunch of cheap bread, tortillas, or pitas, a small number of mostly cheap, mostly non-perishable, mostly interchangable ingredients, and churn out chicken quesadillas, beef burritos, etc. Leftover bread is a small cost, and if you're careful you can minimise loss of meat, as you prepare more batches over the night. 5) Fish and chips (very popular around here), made from frozen ingredients and a VERY small selection of fresh ones, deep friend on demand. See a pattern? A lot of "combine cheap starch with some fresh vegetables and/or meat that can be prepared quickly, ideally from frozen", where in many cases on-demand labour (putting the sandwich together, putting toppings on the pizza) will be a major chunk of your inputs, and ingredients will be minimal. In all cases you're looking at cuisines where it's relatively popular, the ingredients are relatively cheap, and critically you have a lot of interchangeability, a small number of ingredients, and low preparation times, etc. The fish and chip shop doesn't care if they sell 80 scoops of chips or 40, they've got tons spare in the deep freezer, and they're being cooked on demand; no wastage. Their main concern is just selling enough of anything to cover the cost of the oil in the deep fryer. What will NOT work is something like a steak, roasts, ribs, fancy fish; stuff that has expensive ingredients and (especially) long lead times. You can't just cook up 40 plates of ribs on spec to see if you'll sell any tonight. (Well, not and stay in business for long.) And if we look at the screenshot of Munchery's menu, item 1 is Corn Husk Roasted Salmon, item 2 is Honey Glazed Pork, item 3 is a side, item 4 is Roasted Chicken. These are the exact sorts of thing that will wreck your economics. No doubt they were popular; people are sick of pizza, indian, thai, mexican, etc as delivery options, especially at $11 a plate! But as the joke goes, if you lose money on every sale, you can't really make it up in volume. :) Edit: Munchery tried to work around this by closing orders early, I think at 2pm, but 1) that's going to lose you some volume and 2) that's still not enough lead time. > why are all pizza, Indian, Thai, Sushi etc. places in my city doing this They're doing something very different.

LoSboccacc 8y ago

> pizza, Indian, Thai, Sushi etc. places this selection contains the answer to your question: all those cuisines's recipes use few ingredients in a lot of variations and have preparations that can easily sit waiting for a customer. it's harder to find restaurants or other places with large or daily menus that can sustain a structured delivery chain as primary income source, maybe they can support the more unstructured uber food aproach but usually that's it. exceptions apply, but parent listed a good deal of causes why this is capital inefficient. these startups are trying to create a "microcatering" market, which is radically different.

cbzbc 8y ago
To be clear, you can make a reasonable pastiche of all of those cuisines recipes using a few ingredients with a lot of variations.

notyourday 8y ago

Small area. Small customer base. Selective customer base.

Spooky23 8y ago

Takeout and restaurants that do takeout are either easy on demand foods or complements to the core business. I used to work at a coffee/sandwich shop where catering drove margins -- delivering a box of sandwiches to a business meeting or small event is enormously profitable, but wouldn't keep the lights on. The problem with cooking anything on demand is that scaling up distributed cooking doesn't work well while preserving quality. If you want cheap, you get fast food, and if you want expensive, you have a quality cafeteria.