6 ms·

"It will soon be just as cheap to have your food prepared and delivered as going to the grocery store and making it yourself." I doubt this very much.

by 0898 6y ago

Ericson2314 6y ago
It is possible, but for bad reasons: food won't become that cheap in isolation, but in conjunction with the marginal cost of taking the time to cook being greater. If you are an anxious overachieving professional, the above is probably already true and you survive off fast casual. If you live in a food desert working 3 part time jobs, the above is probably already true and you survive off convenience store non-perishables and fast food.
- 0898 6y ago
  You mean if you factor in your time? Okay: in that case maybe.
  - rosseloh 6y ago
    I can't comment on the actual subject at hand (I haven't read the article yet nor really done any research on this), but you absolutely have to factor in your time. I like to cook. If my home situation was a little bit different, I'd probably cook full proper meals every night, no questions asked. It would take me at minimum an hour each night, and often more when you include prep and cleaning (which you should, they're integral parts of cooking a meal). Combine that with long hours at work and the fact that I like to at least get some leisure time in my day along with sleep, and those hours add up. I've actually taken to eating mostly frozen food (stuff that still requires a little prep, not TV dinners, mind you), because it's a little faster and the cleanup is easier(stick some frozen chicken on foil in the oven and the cleanup is "throw the foil away"). When I don't do that, I'm meal-prepping on sunday afternoons, which takes four or more hours out of my precious weekend (with the exchange of being able to just microwave whatever I'm eating for lunch and dinner that week, again saving time). Yes, where I live, groceries cost far less than anything you can get at a restaurant. And I'm hesitant to say that this will go anywhere, because it really seems like a long shot. But if it does get somewhere...the dollar cost of groceries is not the only thing to focus on. Time spent making meals absolutely matters.
    - notyourday 6y ago
      Time spent making meals is a dead time. Those that do not consider that to be a dead time simply buy instapots, slow cookers and rice cookers.
    - devchix 6y ago
      I tell my work mates I spend probably 8+ hours in the kitchen during the weekend doing meal prep and they are some combination of aghast and disbelieving. Yes, 8+ if you want to eat decent, we're not being fancy. You can't just get groceries and come home to stuff them in the fridge. They need to be semi-prepped: unwrapped, minor cleaning, portioning out. Herbs and greens need to be washed and stored properly or they'll spoil. Want good soup? Have to break down the chicken to make stock, defat and freeze it. There's also the planning aspect, if you wake up on Saturday and start the grocery list, it's too late. I like to say "I like cooking", but most of cooking is drudgery: peel carrots, potatoes, break down chicken, trim the meat, manage food portion and storage. It's a huge time suck and if I factor in the cost of my time it's exorbitant. Having said all that, there is no reasonable alternative for me, right now. Everything else is garbage or unpalatable or exorbitant, and I still have to do supplemental cooking. I'm resigned to the fact that cooking, eating, cleaning, laundry is all part of living and I can't pay for all of it to go away. I'm trying to be a better planner, and chop and peel faster.
      - rosseloh 6y ago
        > I like to say "I like cooking", but most of cooking is drudgery: peel carrots, potatoes, break down chicken, trim the meat, manage food portion and storage. Totally. I love cooking. But when I say I love cooking, I mean I love standing over a pot or pan, stirring, tasting, seasoning, and sauteing. Prep work is the worst part, and also often the part that takes the longest.
        throw7 6y ago
        I love prep work! Cutting down a whole chicken.... chopping, prepping the mise en place. I find it really relaxing. :) seriously. Love the cooking part also too... what I hate is the dishwashing!
- michaelt 6y ago
  > If you are an anxious overachieving professional, the above is probably already true and you survive off fast casual. Is this the case where you live? In my country, daily restaurant eating is less a sign of success, and more a sign of not knowing how to cook, which is a source of embarrassment for most overachieving professionals.
  - macNchz 6y ago
    In NYC at least there is certainly a subset of ambitious professional types who derive some kind of pride at being incompetent at everything other than their job. I think it's humblebrag type thing where they show off a) how overworked they are all the time, which is a perverse status symbol here b) how they can afford to pay someone to do everything in their lives for them.
    - aqme28 6y ago
      You can even rent an apartment here that doesn't have a kitchen.
idiot900 6y ago
This has already been true for a long time in high cost of living places like Manhattan, where groceries can be expensive and time is at a premium. It was certainly the case for me for years.
- gpapilion 6y ago
  I found this to be true before having kids. The waste was so high it pushed the cost up for groceries. After increasing the number of mouths I find delivery to be much higher.
- notyourday 6y ago
  That's simply not true. Even if one buys all his or her ingredients at bodegas he will still beat the prices of the delivered food, not to mention that the cheap delivery food is basically low quality junk food.
amf12 6y ago
I too doubt it will be as cheap, but scale and other related (but not accounted for) costs could make it similar. For example time spent cooking, grocery shopping, gas (cooking + fuel*), etc. One major expense for a restaurant is rental costs for a dine-in area. These don't apply to cloud kitchens. More so, the cloud kitchens are not in a very popular high-rent area. However, cloud kitchens can increase competition resulting into less profit.
- joosters 6y ago
  One major expense for a restaurant is rental costs for a dine-in area. That is what makes a restaurant a restaurant, rather than a takeaway. Restaurants didn't end up with dine-in areas by accident, nor do they offer in-house dining as some kind of loss-leader, they have it by choice because it makes them more money! (that is, pre-Covid, of course...)
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    Huh? Are you saying the restaurant can suck more rent from dinners than the landlord from them? I think that was true in certain situations, but very hard to pull off in general. We are seeing a shift away from restaurants as a luxury good, and in doing so I think the mythos of white table cloths, domestic labor cos-playing, etc. will go away. That, in turn, was I think a big part how they raised margins, so I think the basic cloud kitchen premise is correct.
    - xnyan 6y ago
      >Huh? Are you saying the restaurant can suck more rent from dinners than the landlord from them? It's hard, but many do it. The biggest advantage sit-down has is "addons", primarily booze. Breaking even on the food and making a profit on beer, wine, and cocktails is very common. Cocktails are intended to be drunk at the time of mix, and I have better quality and cheaper wine and beer already at home. No reason to order it with delivery. Also when you're in the restaurant, you can (and are encouraged to) keep ordering more food vs a one time transaction on your phone.
    - 6y ago
peteretep 6y ago
In Bangkok, this is very true already for me
crazygringo 6y ago
Exactly. Until preparation and delivery become roboticized, it is absolutely not true. I live in New York City, eat meat, and it's easy to spend only ~$300/mo. on groceries for the month if you're paying attention to prices and cooking yourself. That's $3.25 per meal. Please show me how exactly I can get nutritious full prepared meals at this price, let alone delivered...
- m463 6y ago
  I noticed sometimes that frozen dinners in the supermarket are sometimes 10/$10. Maybe this doesn't qualify as "full" (or possibly even "nutritious") but could food preservation figure into it? also, recognize there is a demand. Another thing I think about, is that probably in the 90's (the era of the CD) I remember meeting someone who worked in digital music (this was so long ago I can't recall who). But I remember what he said "in the future, digital music will probably cost like 10 or 20 cents a song or less". I couldn't imagine it at the time. Could the same happen with food? Maybe there's a lot of overhead built into our current model of getting "cheap" groceries and cooking. Could $300/mo on groceries be expensive compared to buying component items like flour or rice or salt? and what if delivery brought a week of meals instead of one-offs?
- wenc 6y ago
  I suspect it is possible, but margins will be very tight and will require volume/scale and velocity. Velocity (in money) is an unintuitive concept (Returns = Margin * Velocity), but it's how many ethnic grocers get returns on relatively low margins. (that, and tremendous cost control, staffing with family members, different supply chains, etc.) $300/mth sounds about right (I checked mine, ~$325 in Chicago, at big box grocery stores, eating healthy, lots of meat and produce). There was a time when I was shopping exclusively at ethnic groceries and my average was ~$200/mth ($50/wk).
- LaserToy 6y ago
  I’m curious - how much do you earn per hour and how many hours do you spend on cooking/shopping/cleaning per month?
  - 6y ago
WC3w6pXxgGd 6y ago
Economies of scale. Same reason a Chipotle is almost the same price as preparing your own burrito.
ponker 6y ago
I don't know how it's going to happen (if I did, I'd be a billionaire) but I am pretty confident for the same reasons that I don't build my own mobile phones or furniture or sew my own clothes, I eventually won't cook my own food, except as a hobby the same way people make their own furniture and clothes today. I can't make a McChicken sandwich for $1.39 so in some ways we're already there.
blackoil 6y ago
It may be possible if you reduce menu choices to 4-5 / day and sell monthly pass i.e. you'll have to buy at least 20 meals a month. This will allow for bulk cooking and bundle delivery to reduce the costs. Fixed demand allows you to predict cost and expenditure.
smoe 6y ago
Think it depends on your living situation. I have been living alone for a long time, but was used to having lunch in cafeterias / restaurants and only cook on weekends mostly. Over the last months of working from home, deciding to cook for myself ~90% of the time, it took me quite a while to figure out a good balance between being cost/time effective, having little waste as well as being reasonably diverse and fresh. E.g. what I have seen some times, that people food prep on Sunday 5x the same lunch to eat during the week, absolutely does not work for me. It is cheaper than having food delivered, but only if I don't count my own time. If I didn't actually like cooking or weren't reasonably good at it, I would order food most of the days.
jkinudsjknds 6y ago
I think a generous VC could make it last for a while.
Nextgrid 6y ago
It will never become cheaper because VC scum needs to eat and pay thousands of developers to constantly rebuild their engineering playground. Let's assume for a second that it is actually cheaper for the company (a very big "if" considering the profitability of current delivery operations), do you really think they'd just pass on the savings to you, as opposed to pocketing them and/or wasting them?

"It will soon be just as cheap to have your food prepared and delivered as going to the grocery store and making it yourself." I doubt this very much.

by 0898 6y ago

"It will soon be just as cheap to have your food prepared and delivered as going to the grocery store and making it yourself." I doubt this very much.

Ericson2314 6y ago

It is possible, but for bad reasons: food won't become that cheap in isolation, but in conjunction with the marginal cost of taking the time to cook being greater. If you are an anxious overachieving professional, the above is probably already true and you survive off fast casual. If you live in a food desert working 3 part time jobs, the above is probably already true and you survive off convenience store non-perishables and fast food.

0898 6y ago
You mean if you factor in your time? Okay: in that case maybe.
- rosseloh 6y ago
  I can't comment on the actual subject at hand (I haven't read the article yet nor really done any research on this), but you absolutely have to factor in your time. I like to cook. If my home situation was a little bit different, I'd probably cook full proper meals every night, no questions asked. It would take me at minimum an hour each night, and often more when you include prep and cleaning (which you should, they're integral parts of cooking a meal). Combine that with long hours at work and the fact that I like to at least get some leisure time in my day along with sleep, and those hours add up. I've actually taken to eating mostly frozen food (stuff that still requires a little prep, not TV dinners, mind you), because it's a little faster and the cleanup is easier(stick some frozen chicken on foil in the oven and the cleanup is "throw the foil away"). When I don't do that, I'm meal-prepping on sunday afternoons, which takes four or more hours out of my precious weekend (with the exchange of being able to just microwave whatever I'm eating for lunch and dinner that week, again saving time). Yes, where I live, groceries cost far less than anything you can get at a restaurant. And I'm hesitant to say that this will go anywhere, because it really seems like a long shot. But if it does get somewhere...the dollar cost of groceries is not the only thing to focus on. Time spent making meals absolutely matters.
  - notyourday 6y ago
    Time spent making meals is a dead time. Those that do not consider that to be a dead time simply buy instapots, slow cookers and rice cookers.
  - devchix 6y ago
    I tell my work mates I spend probably 8+ hours in the kitchen during the weekend doing meal prep and they are some combination of aghast and disbelieving. Yes, 8+ if you want to eat decent, we're not being fancy. You can't just get groceries and come home to stuff them in the fridge. They need to be semi-prepped: unwrapped, minor cleaning, portioning out. Herbs and greens need to be washed and stored properly or they'll spoil. Want good soup? Have to break down the chicken to make stock, defat and freeze it. There's also the planning aspect, if you wake up on Saturday and start the grocery list, it's too late. I like to say "I like cooking", but most of cooking is drudgery: peel carrots, potatoes, break down chicken, trim the meat, manage food portion and storage. It's a huge time suck and if I factor in the cost of my time it's exorbitant. Having said all that, there is no reasonable alternative for me, right now. Everything else is garbage or unpalatable or exorbitant, and I still have to do supplemental cooking. I'm resigned to the fact that cooking, eating, cleaning, laundry is all part of living and I can't pay for all of it to go away. I'm trying to be a better planner, and chop and peel faster.
    - rosseloh 6y ago
      > I like to say "I like cooking", but most of cooking is drudgery: peel carrots, potatoes, break down chicken, trim the meat, manage food portion and storage. Totally. I love cooking. But when I say I love cooking, I mean I love standing over a pot or pan, stirring, tasting, seasoning, and sauteing. Prep work is the worst part, and also often the part that takes the longest.
      - throw7 6y ago
        I love prep work! Cutting down a whole chicken.... chopping, prepping the mise en place. I find it really relaxing. :) seriously. Love the cooking part also too... what I hate is the dishwashing!
michaelt 6y ago
> If you are an anxious overachieving professional, the above is probably already true and you survive off fast casual. Is this the case where you live? In my country, daily restaurant eating is less a sign of success, and more a sign of not knowing how to cook, which is a source of embarrassment for most overachieving professionals.
- macNchz 6y ago
  In NYC at least there is certainly a subset of ambitious professional types who derive some kind of pride at being incompetent at everything other than their job. I think it's humblebrag type thing where they show off a) how overworked they are all the time, which is a perverse status symbol here b) how they can afford to pay someone to do everything in their lives for them.
  - aqme28 6y ago
    You can even rent an apartment here that doesn't have a kitchen.

idiot900 6y ago

This has already been true for a long time in high cost of living places like Manhattan, where groceries can be expensive and time is at a premium. It was certainly the case for me for years.

gpapilion 6y ago
I found this to be true before having kids. The waste was so high it pushed the cost up for groceries. After increasing the number of mouths I find delivery to be much higher.
notyourday 6y ago
That's simply not true. Even if one buys all his or her ingredients at bodegas he will still beat the prices of the delivered food, not to mention that the cheap delivery food is basically low quality junk food.

amf12 6y ago

I too doubt it will be as cheap, but scale and other related (but not accounted for) costs could make it similar. For example time spent cooking, grocery shopping, gas (cooking + fuel*), etc. One major expense for a restaurant is rental costs for a dine-in area. These don't apply to cloud kitchens. More so, the cloud kitchens are not in a very popular high-rent area. However, cloud kitchens can increase competition resulting into less profit.

joosters 6y ago
One major expense for a restaurant is rental costs for a dine-in area. That is what makes a restaurant a restaurant, rather than a takeaway. Restaurants didn't end up with dine-in areas by accident, nor do they offer in-house dining as some kind of loss-leader, they have it by choice because it makes them more money! (that is, pre-Covid, of course...)
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  Huh? Are you saying the restaurant can suck more rent from dinners than the landlord from them? I think that was true in certain situations, but very hard to pull off in general. We are seeing a shift away from restaurants as a luxury good, and in doing so I think the mythos of white table cloths, domestic labor cos-playing, etc. will go away. That, in turn, was I think a big part how they raised margins, so I think the basic cloud kitchen premise is correct.
  - xnyan 6y ago
    >Huh? Are you saying the restaurant can suck more rent from dinners than the landlord from them? It's hard, but many do it. The biggest advantage sit-down has is "addons", primarily booze. Breaking even on the food and making a profit on beer, wine, and cocktails is very common. Cocktails are intended to be drunk at the time of mix, and I have better quality and cheaper wine and beer already at home. No reason to order it with delivery. Also when you're in the restaurant, you can (and are encouraged to) keep ordering more food vs a one time transaction on your phone.
  - 6y ago

peteretep 6y ago

In Bangkok, this is very true already for me

crazygringo 6y ago

Exactly. Until preparation and delivery become roboticized, it is absolutely not true. I live in New York City, eat meat, and it's easy to spend only ~$300/mo. on groceries for the month if you're paying attention to prices and cooking yourself. That's $3.25 per meal. Please show me how exactly I can get nutritious full prepared meals at this price, let alone delivered...

m463 6y ago
I noticed sometimes that frozen dinners in the supermarket are sometimes 10/$10. Maybe this doesn't qualify as "full" (or possibly even "nutritious") but could food preservation figure into it? also, recognize there is a demand. Another thing I think about, is that probably in the 90's (the era of the CD) I remember meeting someone who worked in digital music (this was so long ago I can't recall who). But I remember what he said "in the future, digital music will probably cost like 10 or 20 cents a song or less". I couldn't imagine it at the time. Could the same happen with food? Maybe there's a lot of overhead built into our current model of getting "cheap" groceries and cooking. Could $300/mo on groceries be expensive compared to buying component items like flour or rice or salt? and what if delivery brought a week of meals instead of one-offs?
wenc 6y ago
I suspect it is possible, but margins will be very tight and will require volume/scale and velocity. Velocity (in money) is an unintuitive concept (Returns = Margin * Velocity), but it's how many ethnic grocers get returns on relatively low margins. (that, and tremendous cost control, staffing with family members, different supply chains, etc.) $300/mth sounds about right (I checked mine, ~$325 in Chicago, at big box grocery stores, eating healthy, lots of meat and produce). There was a time when I was shopping exclusively at ethnic groceries and my average was ~$200/mth ($50/wk).
LaserToy 6y ago
I’m curious - how much do you earn per hour and how many hours do you spend on cooking/shopping/cleaning per month?
- 6y ago

WC3w6pXxgGd 6y ago

Economies of scale. Same reason a Chipotle is almost the same price as preparing your own burrito.

ponker 6y ago

I don't know how it's going to happen (if I did, I'd be a billionaire) but I am pretty confident for the same reasons that I don't build my own mobile phones or furniture or sew my own clothes, I eventually won't cook my own food, except as a hobby the same way people make their own furniture and clothes today. I can't make a McChicken sandwich for $1.39 so in some ways we're already there.

blackoil 6y ago

It may be possible if you reduce menu choices to 4-5 / day and sell monthly pass i.e. you'll have to buy at least 20 meals a month. This will allow for bulk cooking and bundle delivery to reduce the costs. Fixed demand allows you to predict cost and expenditure.

smoe 6y ago

Think it depends on your living situation. I have been living alone for a long time, but was used to having lunch in cafeterias / restaurants and only cook on weekends mostly. Over the last months of working from home, deciding to cook for myself ~90% of the time, it took me quite a while to figure out a good balance between being cost/time effective, having little waste as well as being reasonably diverse and fresh. E.g. what I have seen some times, that people food prep on Sunday 5x the same lunch to eat during the week, absolutely does not work for me. It is cheaper than having food delivered, but only if I don't count my own time. If I didn't actually like cooking or weren't reasonably good at it, I would order food most of the days.

jkinudsjknds 6y ago

I think a generous VC could make it last for a while.

Nextgrid 6y ago

It will never become cheaper because VC scum needs to eat and pay thousands of developers to constantly rebuild their engineering playground. Let's assume for a second that it is actually cheaper for the company (a very big "if" considering the profitability of current delivery operations), do you really think they'd just pass on the savings to you, as opposed to pocketing them and/or wasting them?