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That sounds overdue. Restaurant food is massively overpriced compared to raw materials (despite basic dishes like pasta and sous vide steak taking basically no

• tnolet 7y ago
  A price of an item is rarely if ever based on its raw material cost. With restaurant food even more. You pay for location, rent, heating, staffing etc etc etc
  • draw_down 7y ago
    Not really rebutting GP’s point.
  • ravenstine 7y ago
    More importantly, the price of an item comes down to how much people are _willing to pay for it_. Price does have to cover overhead(unless you're WeWork and care more about revenue than profit), but a comparable competing product can have the same overhead and charge way more if its audience is willing to pay more or it.
• ghaff 7y ago
  If it takes no time or effort why not just do it at home? The results will be better. It most certainly takes time and effort to have kitchen infrastructure, inventory, cook to order, and delivery.
  • randomdata 7y ago
    Cooking at home has many of the same costs beyond raw materials that a restaurant has, like kitchen infrastructure, inventory, and labour costs, driving the cost of cooking at home well beyond the raw material cost. The parent is suggesting that a business producing food at massive scale could bring the cost of preparing food much closer to the raw material cost. It is not exactly a wild idea. The model has already proven itself to a limited extent. What we have really struggled with is maintaining quality at scale across a variety of foods. To be more specific, the parent is suggesting that there is room in the market for quality prepared food produced at scale.
    • ghaff 7y ago
      Except you probably already have some semblance of a kitchen in your apartment. Preparing some simple meals--stir fries, steak, fish filet, etc.--has very little incremental infrastructure or skill associated with it.
      • randomdata 7y ago
        That a portion of the cost of operating a kitchen at home is a sunk cost is the only thing that keeps cooking at home cost-competitive with eating out at restaurants. The price of eating at a restaurant that is well above the cost of materials is already operating at an efficiency that is above what one can achieve eating at home, all things considered. If the hypothetical prepared meal service could deliver food for near-material cost, it would quickly start to be difficult to justify cooking at home. At least on a cost basis; there are certainly other reasons why one might want to cook at home, even if it costs substantially more money to do so.
        • ghaff 7y ago
          Outside of a dormitory situation (and sometimes even then), how many people are seriously willing to dispense with even the most minimal kitchen (say, refrigerator, burner, toaster oven, kitchen sink, maybe microwave)? To a first approximation, no one wants to order out for an egg and a couple slides of toast in the morning. So most probably can't/don't want to eliminate the kitchen entirely and that minimal kitchen is probably not that different from a lot of urban kitchens in areas like Manhattan.
          • randomdata 7y ago
            > no one wants to order out for an egg and a couple slides of toast in the morning. Why do you think that is? To me, having eggs and toast 'magically' appear in front of me when I get up in the morning sounds wonderful and I am really not sure why everyone wouldn't want that if the infrastructure to provide it was there. While the actual act of making an egg and some toast is not terribly difficult, everything else that goes along with it, like having to plan the meal ahead of time such that you have the supplies on hand, starts to add up into a big job. A big job that I cannot imagine why someone who doesn't love cooking would want to take on unnecessarily. I can see how it may be necessary under the status quo as we lack the technology to really deliver on the vision, but our discussion is not about the status quo, but rather a hypothetical future where industry has figured out to produce quality prepared food at scale such that the costs start to approach that of the raw materials.
• ravenstine 7y ago
  Off topic, I just videos on cooking sous vide steak and I'm totally sold on the technique. Where has this been all my life???
• zrobotics 7y ago
  Raw materials aren't the reason restaurant food is expensive, the biggest cost of running a commercial kitchen is labor. And that is even after considering that kitchen staff are often low-wage positions. How, exactly, will this save money? Sure, you don't have to pay waitstaff the ludicrously low rate of ~1.25/hour, but the delivery drivers need paid and the app will take its middleman cut of the profits. And have you ever eaten hospital food or other cafeteria e? That is the quality to expect from a industrial scale kitchen. Delivery is convenient, but nothing about this business is very revolutionary, and I certainly don't see the restaurant industry being 'disrupted' anytime soon.