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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

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.

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.