8 ms·

Cooking as a Service

160 points by GuiA 7y ago

bpicolo 7y ago
This really assumes the only point of cooking is sustenance. I think reality is much more complicated. I'd argue that the tradition, culture and craft of cooking is equally important. Having people prepare food on your behalf isn't exactly a new concept.
- falcor84 7y ago
  I think you're tacitly agreeing with the original statement. Cooking (outside a professional seeing) may become one of those things that only some of us do, for tradition, culture and craft, as has become of gardening or sewing.
  - bpicolo 7y ago
    More that I think (or hope) that it will continue to be widespread because of these things. It may be right, but I like to think it's not the case. That said, I do care much more about the culture of cooking than your average joe.
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  everybody talks about cooking being fungible with services and services only being held back by tradition, meanwhile just looking at some average prepared meal label should give a stark warning to commoditizing food
vishaalk 7y ago
Nice article, and good data find. I think a point missed at the end about how we can potentially avoid "healthiness" as a premium/luxury option is by setting a base-line, with canteen style food. Here is an HN discussion about "canteen-style dining": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19792674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19792674. India also instituted a similar program at their Aganwadis: https://www.akshayapatra.org/anganwadi-feeding https://www.akshayapatra.org/anganwadi-feeding. In addition, there was no coverage about the environmental impact of "Cooking-as-a-Service". It could be worse because of having to transport the goods (and keep them warm or cold), including the packaging that may be disposed, or it could be better if the packaging was re-usable (sent back somehow? everyone uses identical swappable packaging?) or it turns out that scheduled deliveries is more optimizable than N houses all driving to the same restaurant.
sara7262 7y ago
Now you can judge who is lying or who is telling the truth Just watch this and save yourself from others https://howto105.blogspot.com/2019/03/detect-lie1.html https://howto105.blogspot.com/2019/03/detect-lie1.html Love between lion and man See in video how much they are taking care of each others http://bit.ly/2Yh5oBe http://bit.ly/2Yh5oBe Very funny pets video of 2019 Just watch I am sure you can't control your laugh http://bit.ly/2E1UsQs http://bit.ly/2E1UsQs
alexkavon 7y ago
How about Cooking-As-A-Service but you have to use my tiny NY kitchen and it’s barely sufficient utensils/ware.
_hardwaregeek 7y ago
I'm interested in how the data splits across demographics other than class. One anecdotal observation I've made is that men often do not even consider cooking or learning to cook, while women actively decide not to cook or not to learn. Quite a lot of my female friends either cook or have actively rebelled against any attempts to teach them how to cook. While my guy friends do not cook by default. It's also quite interesting seeing cooking as a service phrased as "is this exactly what I want, yes or no?" Because that's not wrong, but part of the reason I cook is to get exactly what I want. I like to eat healthier, spicier food with certain restrictions (no dairy, less wheat, etc). But that just makes me an outlier. I've noticed a trend towards going to a restaurant, picking up food, and eating it somewhere else, which frustrates me endlessly. Not only is there more waste from the extra bag, the extra containers, etc., but also the food gets cold, soggy, i.e. worse. I don't think there's the necessary financial incentives for this, but a delivery service that used something more sustainable (dabbas?) and optimized the food for delivery would be fantastic.
- siedes 7y ago
  In South Korea, when you order from certain places for certain types of food, they come in actual containers/tupperwares that you just leave outside your door and someone from the restaurant will come pick it up at some point. I don't see it working in the U.S. though, since people would probably be stealing them and other horrific stuff. Just a very different culture...
  - standardUser 7y ago
    Green Tiffin is US a meal delivery service that uses reusable containers that you rinse out and then return at the next delivery. It seems to work just fine, nothing "horrific" about it.
    - ggm 7y ago
      The key word here is "return" because the Korean model is not to return the dishes, its to leave them to be collected. The horrific part, is an imputed risk the dishes in america become stolen, used as weapons, frisbees..
2819b 7y ago
The author of the tweet that inspired the post lives in Japan, and as a first generation Taiwanese American and occasional traveler to Asia one consistent observation is that it's much more common to eat out than cook than here in the US. Kitchens are tiny in most stereotypical "big Asian cities" and eating out is cheap and options plentiful. Point is this trend has been the case in Asia for a long time, and the only reason why I don't think it's really the case in the West is because the cost of operating a restaurant or even food truck is high enough that the cost of eating out isn't as economical as it is in Asia.
- max76 7y ago
  Why is it cheaper to operate a restaurant in a big Asian city than in the US?
  - michaelbuckbee 7y ago
    This is just guessing, but I'd think population density plays a major factor. I'm just eyeballing this list here [1], but Japan is roughly 10x as dense population wise as the US. 1 - https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_popul...
    - OJFord 7y ago
      Surely that makes the fixed costs of opening a restaurant significantly higher, not lower?
jacknews 7y ago
+1 for "cooking healthily" rather than "cooking healthy"
jger15 7y ago
Great deck from a former Uber Eats employee on food delivery: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1v9ifaW1Sxy_oVUtzn63BrqXKGcpMJ_eKrqb59BXjjXA/edit#slide=id.gd5b15f0a3_5_26 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1v9ifaW1Sxy_oVUtzn63B...
- bpicolo 7y ago
  I'm pretty shocked how open consumers are to paying more money for a worse product via delivery. Foods travel poorly when steaming in boxes. Hot sandwiches (like burgers) and anything fried are especially notable examples (though most foods become worse in some capacity). Something this deck doesn't mention is that online ordering of pickup is a tiny, no-profit market in comparison. The convenience factor of delivery outweighs the rest for some set of people, for sure. Big note from the deck though: > No DSP has been able to prove consistent profitability with their existing business model Also not mentioned in the slides - a ton of delivery jobs from small neighborhood joints (in the US) are paid under-the-table. This is a cost differentiator that DSPs can't legally compete with.
emersonrsantos 7y ago
Is this new? Food courts and beer gardens that I go complement their sales by using lots of delivery services, and in some days you will see more delivery than local consumption. There are four major delivery companies that dominates the market here in this city: iFood, James Delivery, Rappi and lastly Uber Eats. A couple of these companies also do supermarket shopping for you - no Amazon in Brazil for everything shopping.
evrydayhustling 7y ago
This is a great analysis. One giant missing factor: households with children. It's both difficult to match dietary needs and extremely expensive to feed a bunch of dependents with takeout! A lot of folks I know establish entirely new habits as parents. Perhaps someone will successfully target that demographic, but I expect the social minefield of early parenting will be way harder to penetrate than the easy consumption of young professionals.
- syshum 7y ago
  It is not really missing. People are not having children and the ones that do are having a single child on average. I think it is one of the reasons to take out trend is so high. Of the people under 50 that I work with exactly 1 of them have children, and 1 of them wants children one day (but not now) the rest of us, including myself, have no children and have zero desire to have children. Looking at population data we are not alone in that.
  - SonOfLilit 7y ago
    Perhaps not alone, but very very far from the norm. If I may ask, How old are you all? What else about your demographics/work environment could set you so far apart from the average stats?
    - icelancer 7y ago
      > How old are you all? What else about your demographics/work environment could set you so far apart from the average stats? They are young (not yet 40 years of age), have above-average incomes, and live in urban areas. If you cross-reference this population with desire to have kids, you will find them dragging the reproduction rate in this country massively downwards. The opposite is true about... every facet of what I just said. EDIT: Many people have pointed out why this is a terrible trend, for reasons that are obvious.
      - erklik 7y ago
        > Many people have pointed out why this is a terrible trend, for reasons that are obvious Are they? I am not sure I see the obvious reasons. Considering the future, maybe its a better idea to not have children.
MeltySmelty 7y ago
techies who live in city bubbles, very cute
purplezooey 7y ago
Just think about all the dust bunnies and body hair that gets in your meal when somebody else cooks it, though.
Jedd 7y ago
I believe the social implications are way more complex. While TFA compares cooking to sewing or gardening, in terms of a declining in both popularity and personal imperative, beyond the arguable claim that food trumps both those, is the social component. Not so much that eating can be - let alone is necessarily - more social than pastimes such as gardening, but it's one of the few remaining opportunities to be social, both in the cooking and the partaking. Of course, the erosion of shared meal times and the likely impacts are already well studied. In his 1994 book 'The Doubter's Companion', John Ralston Saul observed: "Restaurants, until recently, were places of refuge for people excluded from the mainstream or seeking to escape it — poor students, aging unmarried men not rich enough to have themselves fed at home, richer men seeking sex not wives, and the proverbial artists leading their irresponsible lives. Over the last half-century, restaurants have risen in importance to fill the void left by the decline of the old public celebrations. They now provide the leading forums of public participation."
taiwanboy 7y ago
If you want to see the future of cooking as a service, no place better than to check out the night markets of Taiwan. Every kinds of cuisine, from Taiwanese to Japanese, Italian to Mexican. Every kind of meat from oyster to crab to lamb. Every dish is bite sized, and can be had for $0.50 to $2. You can try out 20 different dishes in a trip! Young people rarely cook at home (they usually live in a small apt as well), instead buying quick dinners at these night markets or 7-eleven. Check out the markets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi6f41Tq_J8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi6f41Tq_J8 Unfortunately, there's no such thing in the big cities in US yet (New York, SF). Anthony Bourdain was trying to start a night market up in NY though....
- OkGoDoIt 7y ago
  I imagine between stricter heath codes and higher wages and taxes and all the other costs involved, there’s no way to realistically get Asian style street food in the USA. Seems like the closest I’ve seen if food trucks, but those are often more expensive than traditional restaurants in my experience (San Francisco and Atlanta). I love Chinese street food, but I’m not holding my breath to see it in the USA. I cook more nowadays in order to save money since eating out is so insanely expensive in USA cities compared to Asia.
  - Aromasin 7y ago
    I believe it is entirely possible, but the food trade culture in the West is the issue. There's an attitude of "my competitors' price their food at this point - they likely know better as they were here first so I should price my food at this point too". My father works in the trade and he's said that food could be price at a fraction of what it's currently priced at - and they'd like make even more money - but it would mean a lot more physical labour; something most food vendors aren't willing to do, as it's a hard enough job already. I lived in the North of England for a while (one of the cheaper places in the UK), and to go out for lunch would pretty much cost £6-£10 for a 'street-food sized' meal. One day, a street food stall parked up in the middle of a high traffic area and started selling massive burrito sized spring rolls for about £3 a pop with meat and £2 without. Pre-chopped veg, meat fried in massive woks, pancakes rolled fresh. 10 or so staff meant they were basically handing them out as fast as the card machine could take contactless payments (no cash). It was like the whole city damn near shut down. 1000's seemed to congregate to that one spot. People would queue for an hours (thankfully the English are good a queuing); any other alternative for lunch simply didn't make sense. They were open for about 6 months, queues hundreds deep, then all of a sudden they shut up shop overnight just like that. Coincidentally it turns out the owner was actually a guy a played rugby with. I interrogated him Spanish inquisition style. Basically he saved up enough money to buy 2 commercial fat-fryers, 2 burners and woks, a chest refrigerator and a generator to run them all; all second-hand, all super inexpensive. Lighting, marque, prep stations and the like were all sourced on things like freecycle and gumtree. He bought a permit from the local council to set up shop on the high-street, found a team of part-timers, gave them all course in food safety and he was good to go. No marketing, no branding - just a chalk board that said "Spring Rolls £2 - add meat for £3". All in all it cost him just shy of £8k to start, with which he got a loan for half of that. Apparently a month in and he was turning over £5k gross in a DAY. He told me he stopped because he had saved up enough money to call himself a millionaire, and didn't want the stress of standing behind a searing hot burner with a 300 deep queue in front of him anymore. He paid off his loans, his kids loans, got an extension on his house and put the rest of his money into some real estate. I think the demand is there. It's just a case of vendors actually attempting to take the risk and breaking that mould when it comes to price.
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rebuilder 7y ago
This whole service economy model just seems to me like a way to concentrate wealth (and, therefore, power) even further. It's like we've decided it's really inefficient to have the working population's wages tied up in houses, cars, cookware etc. when we could just have them funnel that money directly back into the coffers of the corporations that own more and more of everything. Do we need to revisit the definition of a company town?
- ciconia 7y ago
  The whole service economy model is premised on wide availability of cheap fossil energy. Once that is gone [1], collapse is inevitable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
  - SmooL 7y ago
    Why does it matter where the energy comes from? Between natural gas, nuclear, and renewables, I see no reason to believe that energy costs will increase
mochomocha 7y ago
Pushing it a bit further and forgetting about regulation for a second... Do you think people will feel comfortable eating food cooked by "strangers"? I can see the efficiency coming from an on demand market for food where anyone can cook anything for anyone and broadcast it in an app (especially in ethnically diverse cities where I'm sure a lot of people know how to cook amazing dishes), I just don't know if our norms and mental barriers will evolve fast enough for us to see that happening in say the next 10 years. It's one thing to enter the car of a "stranger" for an Uber ride, but maybe it's a different thing to eat some food cooked by a stranger?
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  The rating system on Uber helps. But if someone is driving like an idiot, that’s obvious to most people. But unwashed hands? You’ll never know.
- sneak 7y ago
  Almost all of the food that I eat is cooked by strangers.
  - mochomocha 7y ago
    Sure. I'm talking about changing where we are on the "stranger" spectrum from say the professional cook of the restaurant you order from to... Maybe some guy with 2 5-star reviews living 5 blocks from you who apparently makes great burgers and who has been loosely vetted by the app... Will you feel comfortable enough to order? I'm sure some people will. But it seems to me that the mental threshold is higher than say taxi->Uber.
    - simplecomplex 7y ago
      I think you have a romanticized notion about who the line cooks are at your local restaurants...
      - sl1ck731 7y ago
quickthrower2 7y ago
I wonder. Say in one of these rediculously priced costal cities, you convert kitchen into a sleeping room. Would the saved rent (because it can be split more ways) pay for FaaS?
- bergie 7y ago
  Older apartment buildings in Helsinki didn't have kitchens in the apartments when built. Instead, there was a central kitchen in the building.
andr 7y ago
An interesting aspect of this is the social role of restaurants in the US and abroad. In the US pretty much every restaurant I've been to hands me the check right after I finish my last bite. Lingering in restaurants to socialize is not so much the norm. If you go to a very popular place, you and your party may end up spending more time in the line to get in than on your table. So the tradeoff between going to a restaurant just to eat and getting food delivered is fairly small. In other countries (e.g., Mediterranean region), it is perfectly normal to linger for a couple of hours after finishing your dinner. The social experience is the point of the restaurant visit, the food and drinks are just a catalyst.
- jdsully 7y ago
  As a counter point I frequently linger and chat at restaurants. They do often bring the check but don’t force you to leave immediately. None of my friends have ever been in a rush to leave either. Waiters are judged by the promptness of their service and it’s less risky to bring you the check than make a wrong call and annoy a table that’s waiting. The better ones tend to leave you alone.
  - orev 7y ago
    Believe me, they are dying to get you to leave. Restaurants and servers make their money by doing as many turnovers as they can in a night. If you’re blocking a table the whole night, that’s money they are losing, and they desperately want you to leave. They’re just trying to be polite and/or don’t want a bad Yelp review. When they give you the bill and say “no rush”, they’re lying.
    - shalmanese 7y ago
      Only once the restaurant is at capacity. If there's at least one other of your type of table open, then the restaurant loses zero marginal dollars by you being there (and arguably gains slightly by looking busy and more attractive). I'm very conscious about leaving a full restaurant as soon as I'm done with my meal but that's maybe only 10% of my dining experiences ever. I'm perfectly happy to linger at a half full restaurant for as long as I want.
shahbaby 7y ago
Home cooking is too personal to be out sourced as a service. When you cook yourself you optimize for YOUR health, YOUR taste, YOUR budget, etc. Restaurants and personal chiefs exist for those who would rather trade some of these benefits for convenience.
crazygringo 7y ago
> Cooking will, by 2040, be a niche activity like e.g. gardening or sewing This is one of the dumbest things I've read in a long, long time. Most families simply do not have the money for prepared food to feed their family regularly, and there's no evidence that this is changing at all. Grocery store ingredients are vastly cheaper than anything prepared, and food prep is fundamentally labor-intensive no matter what. The limits of cost advantages from scaling have already been reached: it's called the freezer section, but at most it's a moderate convenience for some. Further, the graphs show for all income levels that "away" food increased substantially from 1965-1994... and then has stayed mainly the same, actually decreasing from 2004-2007 across all income levels, so there's zero evidence for any trend between now and 2040. So... a third of meals are "away" and that's been stable over the past 25 years? Sounds to me like people eat lunch out... and that's it.
- namanyayg 7y ago
  Everyone individual needs to cook thrice a day (or at least once a day + be damn good at packaging it) while gardening or sewing are far from essentials. Definitely concur.
  - throes_death 7y ago
    No. Not everyone eats three times a day.
    - batiudrami 7y ago
      This is a silly semantic point and you know it.
  - flukus 7y ago
    > Everyone individual needs to cook thrice a day (or at least once a day + be damn good at packaging it) Some meals are generally not regarded as cooking, putting cereal and milk in a bowl, making toast, slapping a few ingredients on a sandwich, those will always be cheaper and easier to just do yourself. Apart from that there are many meals you can easily make yourself and have last for 2-3 meals or amortize the time over the number of people eating it. Tonight I'll be making spaghetti bolognese for under $10AU and it will last a huge dinner and two lunches, it takes under 10 minutes to shop for and half an hour to make, the majority of which will be spent on entertainment while I stir the pots every couple of minutes, the "damn good at packaging" is putting it in microwavable containers. If I was having this delivered I'd by looking at $20AU+ for a single meal, if it was eat-in I'd blow which of the time saving travelling and waiting to be served anyway. Other meals can be even less effort, like when you've got a rice cooker doing the heavy lifting. Outsourcing food production saves little time, costs a lot more and will often deliver worse results, especially if you factor dietary factors into "worse results".
deleted 7y ago
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phamilton 7y ago
I think an interesting comparison is baking. Buying bread from a bakery or supermarket has become standard. It's even gotten to a point where baking your own bread might not be cheaper than buying it. Not everything fits that mold, but I'm sure a few other categories of cooking will end up in that state. But not all things. For instance, rice/beans are just so cheap when dry. I can't see how a prepared version is going to bee cheaper than preparing your own.
- bsder 7y ago
  All of this seems to be merging toward how things work in Paris (for example). Your apartment is so small that you do everything outside and you mostly replenish things almost daily.
- bpicolo 7y ago
  > It's even gotten to a point where baking your own bread might not be cheaper than buying it Amusingly, there's a book that talks about this specific example [0]. Bread is super cheap to make, but it's also a nuanced thing to do well vs a local bakery. Oddly, in my experience I've had trouble finding very good sandwich baguettes and similar in a bakery setting (even in NYC - hit me with recommendations). Restaurants that can pull in fresh baked breads daily have much better access to good product it feels like. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Make-Bread-Buy-Butter-Shouldnt-ebook/dp/B004T4KXMS https://www.amazon.com/Make-Bread-Buy-Butter-Shouldnt-ebook/...
siliconc0w 7y ago
Cooking as a service has been happening for awhile - canned goods, baked goods, boxed goods, frozen or pre-chopped veggies, pre-marinaded meat. At this point the vast majority of products available at grocers have had some sort of prep done to them. It's really just a matter of degrees.
- WilliamEdward 7y ago
  This misses the nuance of the write-up. In fact i think the author even agrees this is well established already. But the nuance here is the ways about which people are optimising for this kind of industry - specifically designing their businesses for delivery, etc.
solatic 7y ago
The older example of FaaS would be communal kitchens and dining rooms, e.g. college dormitories or kibbutz lifestyles. In these cases, people arrive to where food is being prepped for them; there is no delivery cost. Particularly in the case of families, the notion that food delivery will ever become cheap enough to be a default relies on negating delivery costs. It may be so cheap to prepare food in bulk as to offset the cost of labor to prepare it; however, that says nothing as to the cost of labor (and energy) to deliver it. If we ever do develop some kind of solar-powered delivery drone whose cost amortizes out to practically nothing over the life of all of its deliveries, then maybe yes.
- y0ghur7_xxx 7y ago
  > Particularly in the case of families, the notion that food delivery will ever become cheap enough to be a default relies on negating delivery costs. I live in Italy and delivery cost is like 2,50€. And it's the same if I order food just for myself or for 4 people. So I would say that the delivery cost is cheaper per person for families than for a single person.
mooreds 7y ago
Interesting article. Hard to argue that we're going to value convenience more and more. As I heard someone else say, in 1900 it would have been pretty inconceivable athta in 2000 we wouldn't be sewing out clothes. If you are interested in starting your own cloud kitchen, these folks have written up step by step instructions (disclaimer: I was involved with the company as CTO for a couple of years): https://www.thefoodcorridor.com/2019/04/30/how-to-start-your-own-delivery-only-food-venture/ https://www.thefoodcorridor.com/2019/04/30/how-to-start-your...
OJFord 7y ago
Why doesn't the article mention ready meals? It may not be new, but that's 'CaaS'. It'd be interesting to see the same graph with ready meals either broken out as a third category, or included with takeaways.
- scirocco 7y ago
  Careful. CaaS is Containers as a Service :)
  - OJFord 7y ago
    If acronyms meant one thing, a lot of spammy SEO-driven sites would be out of 'business'.
- petra 7y ago
  Ready meals will play a big part, I agree. In the past they had problems with quality/taste and healthiness. But new home technology(instant pot,combi-ovens, new microwave tech) combined with better frozen food, or different logistics that would enable chilled meals - could offer healthy, restaurant quality meals. And there's also a chance that the cost difference between ready meals and cooking at home will become very low.
  - OJFord 7y ago
    Oh I'm not saying they're not awful, and I don't buy them - just that it seems weird to discuss how we're going to not have kitchens and someone else will cook our food, without mentioning that a lot of people already live like that with ready meals. A microwave needn't have it's own room called a 'kitchen'. I particularly thought of it because the graph shows the same change across income groups, except that it's time-shifted so that it really got big in the top bracket earliest, in the '70s, then the middle income group in the '80s, and finally the bottom bracket in the '90s. If ready meals were included, I suspect it would look more level, or at least bring up the lowest income group.
edanm 7y ago
Are there tax implications to explore here? Cooking for yourself is tax-free (in terms of labor, you're paying sales tax or VAT on the ingredients). Cooking for others is taxed.
- jfk13 7y ago
  Here (in the UK) food is generally zero-rated for VAT if you're cooking it yourself, but not if you're eating it at a restaurant or getting (hot) takeout. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rates-of-vat-on-different-goods-and-services#food-and-drink-animals-animal-feed-plants-and-seeds https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rates-of-vat-on-different-goods-...
arichard123 7y ago
On Saturday I fed a family of 4 (2 adults and 2 kids) in a Zizzi Restaurant for £50.70+ tip. On Sunday I bought the weeks groceries for same family for £53.76 from Aldi. Sometimes I spend as much as £90 at Aldi, but then, we didn't have desert at Zizzi either.

160 points by GuiA 7y ago

This really assumes the only point of cooking is sustenance. I think reality is much more complicated. I'd argue that the tradition, culture and craft of cooking is equally important. Having people prepare food on your behalf isn't exactly a new concept.

falcor84 7y ago
I think you're tacitly agreeing with the original statement. Cooking (outside a professional seeing) may become one of those things that only some of us do, for tradition, culture and craft, as has become of gardening or sewing.
- bpicolo 7y ago
  More that I think (or hope) that it will continue to be widespread because of these things. It may be right, but I like to think it's not the case. That said, I do care much more about the culture of cooking than your average joe.
LoSboccacc 7y ago
everybody talks about cooking being fungible with services and services only being held back by tradition, meanwhile just looking at some average prepared meal label should give a stark warning to commoditizing food

vishaalk 7y ago

Nice article, and good data find. I think a point missed at the end about how we can potentially avoid "healthiness" as a premium/luxury option is by setting a base-line, with canteen style food. Here is an HN discussion about "canteen-style dining": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19792674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19792674. India also instituted a similar program at their Aganwadis: https://www.akshayapatra.org/anganwadi-feeding https://www.akshayapatra.org/anganwadi-feeding. In addition, there was no coverage about the environmental impact of "Cooking-as-a-Service". It could be worse because of having to transport the goods (and keep them warm or cold), including the packaging that may be disposed, or it could be better if the packaging was re-usable (sent back somehow? everyone uses identical swappable packaging?) or it turns out that scheduled deliveries is more optimizable than N houses all driving to the same restaurant.

sara7262 7y ago

Now you can judge who is lying or who is telling the truth Just watch this and save yourself from others https://howto105.blogspot.com/2019/03/detect-lie1.html https://howto105.blogspot.com/2019/03/detect-lie1.html Love between lion and man See in video how much they are taking care of each others http://bit.ly/2Yh5oBe http://bit.ly/2Yh5oBe Very funny pets video of 2019 Just watch I am sure you can't control your laugh http://bit.ly/2E1UsQs http://bit.ly/2E1UsQs

alexkavon 7y ago

How about Cooking-As-A-Service but you have to use my tiny NY kitchen and it’s barely sufficient utensils/ware.

_hardwaregeek 7y ago

I'm interested in how the data splits across demographics other than class. One anecdotal observation I've made is that men often do not even consider cooking or learning to cook, while women actively decide not to cook or not to learn. Quite a lot of my female friends either cook or have actively rebelled against any attempts to teach them how to cook. While my guy friends do not cook by default. It's also quite interesting seeing cooking as a service phrased as "is this exactly what I want, yes or no?" Because that's not wrong, but part of the reason I cook is to get exactly what I want. I like to eat healthier, spicier food with certain restrictions (no dairy, less wheat, etc). But that just makes me an outlier. I've noticed a trend towards going to a restaurant, picking up food, and eating it somewhere else, which frustrates me endlessly. Not only is there more waste from the extra bag, the extra containers, etc., but also the food gets cold, soggy, i.e. worse. I don't think there's the necessary financial incentives for this, but a delivery service that used something more sustainable (dabbas?) and optimized the food for delivery would be fantastic.

siedes 7y ago
In South Korea, when you order from certain places for certain types of food, they come in actual containers/tupperwares that you just leave outside your door and someone from the restaurant will come pick it up at some point. I don't see it working in the U.S. though, since people would probably be stealing them and other horrific stuff. Just a very different culture...
- standardUser 7y ago
  Green Tiffin is US a meal delivery service that uses reusable containers that you rinse out and then return at the next delivery. It seems to work just fine, nothing "horrific" about it.
  - ggm 7y ago
    The key word here is "return" because the Korean model is not to return the dishes, its to leave them to be collected. The horrific part, is an imputed risk the dishes in america become stolen, used as weapons, frisbees..

2819b 7y ago

The author of the tweet that inspired the post lives in Japan, and as a first generation Taiwanese American and occasional traveler to Asia one consistent observation is that it's much more common to eat out than cook than here in the US. Kitchens are tiny in most stereotypical "big Asian cities" and eating out is cheap and options plentiful. Point is this trend has been the case in Asia for a long time, and the only reason why I don't think it's really the case in the West is because the cost of operating a restaurant or even food truck is high enough that the cost of eating out isn't as economical as it is in Asia.

max76 7y ago
Why is it cheaper to operate a restaurant in a big Asian city than in the US?
- michaelbuckbee 7y ago
  This is just guessing, but I'd think population density plays a major factor. I'm just eyeballing this list here [1], but Japan is roughly 10x as dense population wise as the US. 1 - https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_popul...
  - OJFord 7y ago
    Surely that makes the fixed costs of opening a restaurant significantly higher, not lower?

jacknews 7y ago

+1 for "cooking healthily" rather than "cooking healthy"

jger15 7y ago

Great deck from a former Uber Eats employee on food delivery: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1v9ifaW1Sxy_oVUtzn63BrqXKGcpMJ_eKrqb59BXjjXA/edit#slide=id.gd5b15f0a3_5_26 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1v9ifaW1Sxy_oVUtzn63B...

bpicolo 7y ago
I'm pretty shocked how open consumers are to paying more money for a worse product via delivery. Foods travel poorly when steaming in boxes. Hot sandwiches (like burgers) and anything fried are especially notable examples (though most foods become worse in some capacity). Something this deck doesn't mention is that online ordering of pickup is a tiny, no-profit market in comparison. The convenience factor of delivery outweighs the rest for some set of people, for sure. Big note from the deck though: > No DSP has been able to prove consistent profitability with their existing business model Also not mentioned in the slides - a ton of delivery jobs from small neighborhood joints (in the US) are paid under-the-table. This is a cost differentiator that DSPs can't legally compete with.

emersonrsantos 7y ago

Is this new? Food courts and beer gardens that I go complement their sales by using lots of delivery services, and in some days you will see more delivery than local consumption. There are four major delivery companies that dominates the market here in this city: iFood, James Delivery, Rappi and lastly Uber Eats. A couple of these companies also do supermarket shopping for you - no Amazon in Brazil for everything shopping.

evrydayhustling 7y ago

This is a great analysis. One giant missing factor: households with children. It's both difficult to match dietary needs and extremely expensive to feed a bunch of dependents with takeout! A lot of folks I know establish entirely new habits as parents. Perhaps someone will successfully target that demographic, but I expect the social minefield of early parenting will be way harder to penetrate than the easy consumption of young professionals.

syshum 7y ago
It is not really missing. People are not having children and the ones that do are having a single child on average. I think it is one of the reasons to take out trend is so high. Of the people under 50 that I work with exactly 1 of them have children, and 1 of them wants children one day (but not now) the rest of us, including myself, have no children and have zero desire to have children. Looking at population data we are not alone in that.
- SonOfLilit 7y ago
  Perhaps not alone, but very very far from the norm. If I may ask, How old are you all? What else about your demographics/work environment could set you so far apart from the average stats?
  - icelancer 7y ago
    > How old are you all? What else about your demographics/work environment could set you so far apart from the average stats? They are young (not yet 40 years of age), have above-average incomes, and live in urban areas. If you cross-reference this population with desire to have kids, you will find them dragging the reproduction rate in this country massively downwards. The opposite is true about... every facet of what I just said. EDIT: Many people have pointed out why this is a terrible trend, for reasons that are obvious.
    - erklik 7y ago
      > Many people have pointed out why this is a terrible trend, for reasons that are obvious Are they? I am not sure I see the obvious reasons. Considering the future, maybe its a better idea to not have children.

MeltySmelty 7y ago

techies who live in city bubbles, very cute

purplezooey 7y ago

Just think about all the dust bunnies and body hair that gets in your meal when somebody else cooks it, though.

Jedd 7y ago

I believe the social implications are way more complex. While TFA compares cooking to sewing or gardening, in terms of a declining in both popularity and personal imperative, beyond the arguable claim that food trumps both those, is the social component. Not so much that eating can be - let alone is necessarily - more social than pastimes such as gardening, but it's one of the few remaining opportunities to be social, both in the cooking and the partaking. Of course, the erosion of shared meal times and the likely impacts are already well studied. In his 1994 book 'The Doubter's Companion', John Ralston Saul observed: "Restaurants, until recently, were places of refuge for people excluded from the mainstream or seeking to escape it — poor students, aging unmarried men not rich enough to have themselves fed at home, richer men seeking sex not wives, and the proverbial artists leading their irresponsible lives. Over the last half-century, restaurants have risen in importance to fill the void left by the decline of the old public celebrations. They now provide the leading forums of public participation."

taiwanboy 7y ago

If you want to see the future of cooking as a service, no place better than to check out the night markets of Taiwan. Every kinds of cuisine, from Taiwanese to Japanese, Italian to Mexican. Every kind of meat from oyster to crab to lamb. Every dish is bite sized, and can be had for $0.50 to $2. You can try out 20 different dishes in a trip! Young people rarely cook at home (they usually live in a small apt as well), instead buying quick dinners at these night markets or 7-eleven. Check out the markets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi6f41Tq_J8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi6f41Tq_J8 Unfortunately, there's no such thing in the big cities in US yet (New York, SF). Anthony Bourdain was trying to start a night market up in NY though....

OkGoDoIt 7y ago
I imagine between stricter heath codes and higher wages and taxes and all the other costs involved, there’s no way to realistically get Asian style street food in the USA. Seems like the closest I’ve seen if food trucks, but those are often more expensive than traditional restaurants in my experience (San Francisco and Atlanta). I love Chinese street food, but I’m not holding my breath to see it in the USA. I cook more nowadays in order to save money since eating out is so insanely expensive in USA cities compared to Asia.
- Aromasin 7y ago
  I believe it is entirely possible, but the food trade culture in the West is the issue. There's an attitude of "my competitors' price their food at this point - they likely know better as they were here first so I should price my food at this point too". My father works in the trade and he's said that food could be price at a fraction of what it's currently priced at - and they'd like make even more money - but it would mean a lot more physical labour; something most food vendors aren't willing to do, as it's a hard enough job already. I lived in the North of England for a while (one of the cheaper places in the UK), and to go out for lunch would pretty much cost £6-£10 for a 'street-food sized' meal. One day, a street food stall parked up in the middle of a high traffic area and started selling massive burrito sized spring rolls for about £3 a pop with meat and £2 without. Pre-chopped veg, meat fried in massive woks, pancakes rolled fresh. 10 or so staff meant they were basically handing them out as fast as the card machine could take contactless payments (no cash). It was like the whole city damn near shut down. 1000's seemed to congregate to that one spot. People would queue for an hours (thankfully the English are good a queuing); any other alternative for lunch simply didn't make sense. They were open for about 6 months, queues hundreds deep, then all of a sudden they shut up shop overnight just like that. Coincidentally it turns out the owner was actually a guy a played rugby with. I interrogated him Spanish inquisition style. Basically he saved up enough money to buy 2 commercial fat-fryers, 2 burners and woks, a chest refrigerator and a generator to run them all; all second-hand, all super inexpensive. Lighting, marque, prep stations and the like were all sourced on things like freecycle and gumtree. He bought a permit from the local council to set up shop on the high-street, found a team of part-timers, gave them all course in food safety and he was good to go. No marketing, no branding - just a chalk board that said "Spring Rolls £2 - add meat for £3". All in all it cost him just shy of £8k to start, with which he got a loan for half of that. Apparently a month in and he was turning over £5k gross in a DAY. He told me he stopped because he had saved up enough money to call himself a millionaire, and didn't want the stress of standing behind a searing hot burner with a 300 deep queue in front of him anymore. He paid off his loans, his kids loans, got an extension on his house and put the rest of his money into some real estate. I think the demand is there. It's just a case of vendors actually attempting to take the risk and breaking that mould when it comes to price.

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rebuilder 7y ago

This whole service economy model just seems to me like a way to concentrate wealth (and, therefore, power) even further. It's like we've decided it's really inefficient to have the working population's wages tied up in houses, cars, cookware etc. when we could just have them funnel that money directly back into the coffers of the corporations that own more and more of everything. Do we need to revisit the definition of a company town?

ciconia 7y ago
The whole service economy model is premised on wide availability of cheap fossil energy. Once that is gone [1], collapse is inevitable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
- SmooL 7y ago
  Why does it matter where the energy comes from? Between natural gas, nuclear, and renewables, I see no reason to believe that energy costs will increase

mochomocha 7y ago

Pushing it a bit further and forgetting about regulation for a second... Do you think people will feel comfortable eating food cooked by "strangers"? I can see the efficiency coming from an on demand market for food where anyone can cook anything for anyone and broadcast it in an app (especially in ethnically diverse cities where I'm sure a lot of people know how to cook amazing dishes), I just don't know if our norms and mental barriers will evolve fast enough for us to see that happening in say the next 10 years. It's one thing to enter the car of a "stranger" for an Uber ride, but maybe it's a different thing to eat some food cooked by a stranger?

quickthrower2 7y ago
The rating system on Uber helps. But if someone is driving like an idiot, that’s obvious to most people. But unwashed hands? You’ll never know.
sneak 7y ago
Almost all of the food that I eat is cooked by strangers.
- mochomocha 7y ago
  Sure. I'm talking about changing where we are on the "stranger" spectrum from say the professional cook of the restaurant you order from to... Maybe some guy with 2 5-star reviews living 5 blocks from you who apparently makes great burgers and who has been loosely vetted by the app... Will you feel comfortable enough to order? I'm sure some people will. But it seems to me that the mental threshold is higher than say taxi->Uber.
  - simplecomplex 7y ago
    I think you have a romanticized notion about who the line cooks are at your local restaurants...
    - sl1ck731 7y ago

quickthrower2 7y ago

I wonder. Say in one of these rediculously priced costal cities, you convert kitchen into a sleeping room. Would the saved rent (because it can be split more ways) pay for FaaS?

bergie 7y ago
Older apartment buildings in Helsinki didn't have kitchens in the apartments when built. Instead, there was a central kitchen in the building.

andr 7y ago

An interesting aspect of this is the social role of restaurants in the US and abroad. In the US pretty much every restaurant I've been to hands me the check right after I finish my last bite. Lingering in restaurants to socialize is not so much the norm. If you go to a very popular place, you and your party may end up spending more time in the line to get in than on your table. So the tradeoff between going to a restaurant just to eat and getting food delivered is fairly small. In other countries (e.g., Mediterranean region), it is perfectly normal to linger for a couple of hours after finishing your dinner. The social experience is the point of the restaurant visit, the food and drinks are just a catalyst.

jdsully 7y ago
As a counter point I frequently linger and chat at restaurants. They do often bring the check but don’t force you to leave immediately. None of my friends have ever been in a rush to leave either. Waiters are judged by the promptness of their service and it’s less risky to bring you the check than make a wrong call and annoy a table that’s waiting. The better ones tend to leave you alone.
- orev 7y ago
  Believe me, they are dying to get you to leave. Restaurants and servers make their money by doing as many turnovers as they can in a night. If you’re blocking a table the whole night, that’s money they are losing, and they desperately want you to leave. They’re just trying to be polite and/or don’t want a bad Yelp review. When they give you the bill and say “no rush”, they’re lying.
  - shalmanese 7y ago
    Only once the restaurant is at capacity. If there's at least one other of your type of table open, then the restaurant loses zero marginal dollars by you being there (and arguably gains slightly by looking busy and more attractive). I'm very conscious about leaving a full restaurant as soon as I'm done with my meal but that's maybe only 10% of my dining experiences ever. I'm perfectly happy to linger at a half full restaurant for as long as I want.

shahbaby 7y ago

Home cooking is too personal to be out sourced as a service. When you cook yourself you optimize for YOUR health, YOUR taste, YOUR budget, etc. Restaurants and personal chiefs exist for those who would rather trade some of these benefits for convenience.

crazygringo 7y ago

> Cooking will, by 2040, be a niche activity like e.g. gardening or sewing This is one of the dumbest things I've read in a long, long time. Most families simply do not have the money for prepared food to feed their family regularly, and there's no evidence that this is changing at all. Grocery store ingredients are vastly cheaper than anything prepared, and food prep is fundamentally labor-intensive no matter what. The limits of cost advantages from scaling have already been reached: it's called the freezer section, but at most it's a moderate convenience for some. Further, the graphs show for all income levels that "away" food increased substantially from 1965-1994... and then has stayed mainly the same, actually decreasing from 2004-2007 across all income levels, so there's zero evidence for any trend between now and 2040. So... a third of meals are "away" and that's been stable over the past 25 years? Sounds to me like people eat lunch out... and that's it.

namanyayg 7y ago
Everyone individual needs to cook thrice a day (or at least once a day + be damn good at packaging it) while gardening or sewing are far from essentials. Definitely concur.
- throes_death 7y ago
  No. Not everyone eats three times a day.
  - batiudrami 7y ago
    This is a silly semantic point and you know it.
- flukus 7y ago
  > Everyone individual needs to cook thrice a day (or at least once a day + be damn good at packaging it) Some meals are generally not regarded as cooking, putting cereal and milk in a bowl, making toast, slapping a few ingredients on a sandwich, those will always be cheaper and easier to just do yourself. Apart from that there are many meals you can easily make yourself and have last for 2-3 meals or amortize the time over the number of people eating it. Tonight I'll be making spaghetti bolognese for under $10AU and it will last a huge dinner and two lunches, it takes under 10 minutes to shop for and half an hour to make, the majority of which will be spent on entertainment while I stir the pots every couple of minutes, the "damn good at packaging" is putting it in microwavable containers. If I was having this delivered I'd by looking at $20AU+ for a single meal, if it was eat-in I'd blow which of the time saving travelling and waiting to be served anyway. Other meals can be even less effort, like when you've got a rice cooker doing the heavy lifting. Outsourcing food production saves little time, costs a lot more and will often deliver worse results, especially if you factor dietary factors into "worse results".

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phamilton 7y ago

I think an interesting comparison is baking. Buying bread from a bakery or supermarket has become standard. It's even gotten to a point where baking your own bread might not be cheaper than buying it. Not everything fits that mold, but I'm sure a few other categories of cooking will end up in that state. But not all things. For instance, rice/beans are just so cheap when dry. I can't see how a prepared version is going to bee cheaper than preparing your own.

bsder 7y ago
All of this seems to be merging toward how things work in Paris (for example). Your apartment is so small that you do everything outside and you mostly replenish things almost daily.
bpicolo 7y ago
> It's even gotten to a point where baking your own bread might not be cheaper than buying it Amusingly, there's a book that talks about this specific example [0]. Bread is super cheap to make, but it's also a nuanced thing to do well vs a local bakery. Oddly, in my experience I've had trouble finding very good sandwich baguettes and similar in a bakery setting (even in NYC - hit me with recommendations). Restaurants that can pull in fresh baked breads daily have much better access to good product it feels like. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Make-Bread-Buy-Butter-Shouldnt-ebook/dp/B004T4KXMS https://www.amazon.com/Make-Bread-Buy-Butter-Shouldnt-ebook/...

siliconc0w 7y ago

Cooking as a service has been happening for awhile - canned goods, baked goods, boxed goods, frozen or pre-chopped veggies, pre-marinaded meat. At this point the vast majority of products available at grocers have had some sort of prep done to them. It's really just a matter of degrees.

WilliamEdward 7y ago
This misses the nuance of the write-up. In fact i think the author even agrees this is well established already. But the nuance here is the ways about which people are optimising for this kind of industry - specifically designing their businesses for delivery, etc.

solatic 7y ago

The older example of FaaS would be communal kitchens and dining rooms, e.g. college dormitories or kibbutz lifestyles. In these cases, people arrive to where food is being prepped for them; there is no delivery cost. Particularly in the case of families, the notion that food delivery will ever become cheap enough to be a default relies on negating delivery costs. It may be so cheap to prepare food in bulk as to offset the cost of labor to prepare it; however, that says nothing as to the cost of labor (and energy) to deliver it. If we ever do develop some kind of solar-powered delivery drone whose cost amortizes out to practically nothing over the life of all of its deliveries, then maybe yes.

y0ghur7_xxx 7y ago
> Particularly in the case of families, the notion that food delivery will ever become cheap enough to be a default relies on negating delivery costs. I live in Italy and delivery cost is like 2,50€. And it's the same if I order food just for myself or for 4 people. So I would say that the delivery cost is cheaper per person for families than for a single person.

mooreds 7y ago

Interesting article. Hard to argue that we're going to value convenience more and more. As I heard someone else say, in 1900 it would have been pretty inconceivable athta in 2000 we wouldn't be sewing out clothes. If you are interested in starting your own cloud kitchen, these folks have written up step by step instructions (disclaimer: I was involved with the company as CTO for a couple of years): https://www.thefoodcorridor.com/2019/04/30/how-to-start-your-own-delivery-only-food-venture/ https://www.thefoodcorridor.com/2019/04/30/how-to-start-your...

OJFord 7y ago

Why doesn't the article mention ready meals? It may not be new, but that's 'CaaS'. It'd be interesting to see the same graph with ready meals either broken out as a third category, or included with takeaways.

scirocco 7y ago
Careful. CaaS is Containers as a Service :)
- OJFord 7y ago
  If acronyms meant one thing, a lot of spammy SEO-driven sites would be out of 'business'.
petra 7y ago
Ready meals will play a big part, I agree. In the past they had problems with quality/taste and healthiness. But new home technology(instant pot,combi-ovens, new microwave tech) combined with better frozen food, or different logistics that would enable chilled meals - could offer healthy, restaurant quality meals. And there's also a chance that the cost difference between ready meals and cooking at home will become very low.
- OJFord 7y ago
  Oh I'm not saying they're not awful, and I don't buy them - just that it seems weird to discuss how we're going to not have kitchens and someone else will cook our food, without mentioning that a lot of people already live like that with ready meals. A microwave needn't have it's own room called a 'kitchen'. I particularly thought of it because the graph shows the same change across income groups, except that it's time-shifted so that it really got big in the top bracket earliest, in the '70s, then the middle income group in the '80s, and finally the bottom bracket in the '90s. If ready meals were included, I suspect it would look more level, or at least bring up the lowest income group.

edanm 7y ago

Are there tax implications to explore here? Cooking for yourself is tax-free (in terms of labor, you're paying sales tax or VAT on the ingredients). Cooking for others is taxed.

jfk13 7y ago
Here (in the UK) food is generally zero-rated for VAT if you're cooking it yourself, but not if you're eating it at a restaurant or getting (hot) takeout. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rates-of-vat-on-different-goods-and-services#food-and-drink-animals-animal-feed-plants-and-seeds https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rates-of-vat-on-different-goods-...

arichard123 7y ago

On Saturday I fed a family of 4 (2 adults and 2 kids) in a Zizzi Restaurant for £50.70+ tip. On Sunday I bought the weeks groceries for same family for £53.76 from Aldi. Sometimes I spend as much as £90 at Aldi, but then, we didn't have desert at Zizzi either.