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Home food delivery’s questionable value, for consumers and investors
- JohnFen 4y agoI really only have two issues with HelloFresh. The first is their claim that they're more environmentally friendly than cooking at home is disingenuous at best. The second isn't really a fault with HelloFresh (and similar), but an incompatibility with my own preferences. I prefer to get my food as locally as possible, and these meal services preclude doing that. Also, these services are (IMO) outrageously expensive.
- menotyou 4y agoI used Hello Fresh for a couple of weeks but in the end let it go for the quality of their recipes. I felt the meals were too much designed from the marketing department: Looked nice on the photos, but overly complicated to prepare for a daily dinner, and as my wife put it "Every meal taste somewhat similar". What was missing was simplicity.
- dirtyid 4y agoI want vending machines on every street corner that cut vegetables for you, and spit premeasured sauces / spices into a cup. Upload a recipe ahead of time and pick it up on way home. I also just want more vending machines in general.
- Gunax 4y agoMeal kits ad delivery are actually two innovations that are only joined, it seems, because they make a technology startup (rather than just a business) Meal kits can be sold in stores. And groceries can be delivered. I get the impression that just doing one of those might be a viable business, but it wouldn't be treated as a startup.
- bluGill 4y agoMany startups are just the same old thing but with technology. Most are not innovative, and would be better understanding the problems of their main business model before trying technology to solve everything.
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- birdyrooster 4y agoI love blue apron and I will miss it when their company fails. It sucks so bad to love a product you can’t save as a consumer.
- robg 4y agoWould you pay more? Or support the natural evolution of recipe into grocery shopping cart as one click?
- Spivak 4y agoIt's not like this product is impossible. 1. There are meal planning apps that present a Blue Apron / Hello Fresh type experience but make a grocery list rather than shipping it to you. 2. Instacart has proven that you can with some amount of reliability that you can abstract over different grocery stores so users can pick the ones they prefer or is closest. 3. I can get groceries delivered from my local Kroger by app for less than $5. Now make them all kiss and you get a sustainable Hello Fresh.
- valarauko 4y agoThe Stop & Shop app also has recipes that can add ingredients to the shopping cart. In addition, the app gives you 3 levels of pricing for ingredients: budget, regular, and premium.
- foobarian 4y agoI love the results of blue apron but we canceled because we couldn't live with their wasteful packaging.
- birdyrooster 4y agoIs it really that wasteful? It’s keeping food fresh that would otherwise waste. I used it feel the same way and cancelled a long time ago but the more I was shopping in the store I found myself with a similar amount of non-recyclable waste and much more food waste. It lead to me subscribing again.
- mattmaroon 4y agoThis has been evident for years. Shipping refrigerated items via post was never going to get to a workable cost. Groceries have a supply chain that’s borderline miraculous at lowering costs and they’re already close to most people.
- sksksk 4y agoThere is an app in the UK called Lollipop, which works like Hello Fresh and the likes, except instead of delivering the ingredients to your house, it just adds the ingredients to the basket of your supermarket shop (and takes a commission). To me, that seems like the logical evolution of meal kit services; zero marginal costs by outsourcing the logistics to companies that already do it at scale. https://www.lollipopai.com/ https://www.lollipopai.com/
- Spivak 4y agoNot as fancy as integrating with your grocery store but https://www.mealime.com https://www.mealime.com is another one.
- core-utility 4y agoMy local Publix (South-Eastern US based chain) has their own brand of meal kits [1] that they sell in store. Seems like a win-win in terms of logistics since they've already got all that down. The only thing I could see is that you might spend a small premium for the convenience of having it pre-packaged and right sized for an individual consumer (when compared to buying a 4-pack of chicken breasts for example). [1]: https://www.publix.com/recipes-planning/aprons-meal-kits https://www.publix.com/recipes-planning/aprons-meal-kits
- gruez 4y agoThat sounds like a great service, but terrible business model because you're reliant on supermarkets that can eat your lunch at any moment by launching a competitor. Since they also have a entire grocery supply chain, they'll be able to outcompete you on price as well.
- sksksk 4y agoUnless your business model is to get acquired by one of the supermarkets
- theossuary 4y agoThere's a few of these in the US too, like mealime. But they only integrate with some grocery pickup/delivery services, some of which are regional, and the rest are a race to the bottom in terms of quality and cost like Walmart. The integrations are also not very good, getting quantities wrong or constantly trying to add pantry staples to your cart like salt. I feel like more curation is the answer, hand pick the ingredients in each recipe using each grocery pickup/delivery API. But honestly I see supermarkets adding this as a differentiator that's good enough to keep anyone from buying a 3rd party service for it. Maybe there's space to sell similar functionality to small regional chains to white label?
- karaterobot 4y agohttps://archive.is/jRrnO https://archive.is/jRrnO
- robg 4y agoAnyone know of a pantry and fridge management system that supports recipes and new ordering? Seems complicated until it’s done.
- mauvehaus 4y agoAnyList for iOS supports recipes and adding ingredients from recipes to your shopping list. No ordering or anything, but it might do part of what you're looking for. The vexing thing is that it doesn't deduplicated ingredients from multiple recipes onto your grocery list. You'll end up with onions on the list 3 times if you have 3 recipes that take onions :-/ If anybody has a better alternative, I'm all ears.
- dirtae 4y agoAnyList does combine ingredients from multiple recipes, but the ingredient names and units have to match. For example, if one recipe calls for "2 onions" and another recipe calls for "3 onions", you'll see a single item in your shopping list for "5 onions". But if one recipe calls for "2 large onions" and another recipe calls for "1/2 cup yellow onion, chopped", then they won't be combined. I'm not sure exactly what the grandparent comment means by "new ordering", but AnyList supports ordering for pickup or delivery from Walmart, Instacart, Kroger, Safeway, Albertsons, and other stores: https://help.anylist.com/articles/feature-overview-online-shopping/ https://help.anylist.com/articles/feature-overview-online-sh... (Disclosure: I am the co-founder of AnyList.)
- algoatecorn 4y agoThis is something I'm interested in doing. Computer vision analysis of at-home food stock -> personalized shopping and recipes -> partner with grocery chains to reduce shopping times and optimize inventories. There are many other stakeholder alignments as well
- robg 4y agoWhy not upc codes into recipes and portions into reordering? Yes, end user has to scan stuff, but if reordering handled well, the initial set up isn’t hard. And solves one of the biggest family pain points: what do we have to eat?
- culturestate 4y agoMy biggest gripe with HelloFresh, et al is that I still need to do the prep, so they don't actually save me much time. It's nothing more than curated grocery delivery. Years ago, there was a service in Hong Kong (I wish I could remember the name) that did daily delivery of already prepped meal kits - onions pre-chopped, avocados cubed, oil portioned for each step, etc. It was basically cooking by numbers, and extraordinarily convenient in the cramped kitchen that I had at the time. That's the only kind of meal kit service that I'd ever consider using again. I think larger supermarkets are well-positioned here because a lot of them already sell this kind of stuff to begin with.
- Balgair 4y agoWait, does your local supermarket not already do this? Mine has these pre-made meals, chopped and everything, near the front by the produce section. Peeled bananas even.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y agoEven worse, sometimes it would be slower than doing things myself. One time we got a delivery kit that took 1 hour to prepare, while it takes us about 30 minutes to prepare a dinner.
- 60secs 4y agoFreshly does that
- rootusrootus 4y agoFreshly is prepared meals, not prepped ingredients. And IMO Freshly is kinda gross. If you want prepped meals you can just heat-and-eat, CookUnity is a good bit better. Although some of the meals CU sells are pushing 20 bucks. That's quite a lot for what amounts to a microwave meal.
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- xirdstl 4y ago
- spoonjim 4y agoMailing food to your house is just a dumbfuck idea. Meal kits make sense, but through the existing grocery infrastructure.
- prmoustache 4y agoArticle peing paywalled, I had to google to understand what was that meal-kit concept. It isn't hard to understand why it fail. This kind of service is only useful in a broken by design neighborhood and urbanism failures.
- barbazoo 4y agoI would add lifestyle and education to the list of failures as well.
- c-fe 4y agoI dont like the concept of home food delivery. Personally, I just like to go to grocery stores or markets, buy whatever is on offer and then make meals at home. I am disgusted by the amount of trash generated when receiving your single onion in a package each day instead of buying a large pack of onions once a month and using those. But even if I wanted to avoid groceries and avoid food prep, I would just order food online. In Amsterdam, there are some places popping up that you can order healthy food from - often its just a single type of meal per day, plant-based, but its cheap and healthy and delivered quickly. I see this as a more reasonable alternative then everyone getting delivered their mini plastic packets of vegetables to cook for themself.
- CadmiumYellow 4y agoI love grocery shopping! I don't get why people hate it so much. It's fun to go to the store and see what new produce or interesting ingredients they have on any given day...maybe something catches my eye and I get inspired to cook a new recipe around it. At the very least I like picking out my own produce. When I had covid I had to order groceries on Instacart and they always seemed to pick out the smallest, most bruised, most wilted, least appetizing looking produce.
- JohnFen 4y agoI hate everything about grocery shopping, to be honest. My goal is to get in and out as quickly as humanly possible. But I do it because I haven't found a better option (I don't consider things like HelloFresh a better option). > At the very least I like picking out my own produce. So much this. I want to be able to see it before making a purchasing decision.
- syntaxing 4y agoIn terms of cost, it never made much sense. I used to treat it as a date night with my wife during the pandemic. Now that the pandemic is “over”, I can’t imagine many of these companies surviving
- jakeinspace 4y agoNot ashamed to admit that I’ve signed up for 3 or 4 different meal kit delivery services in the past 2 years just to get the signup promo, and then abruptly canceled (milking venture backed businesses is my passion). The main value add for me is finding new recipes I can buy myself at the grocery store, since the mark up is a bit too high for my budget. Maybe if one of these businesses reached a critical density, they could figure out a more economical delivery system, like the milk man of yore.
- stametseater 4y agoYou know most grocery stores offered a delivery service years before SV decided to turn it into a business model. It was a mostly unadvertised service that grocery stores ran (and likely still do run) mostly for the benefit of 'shut ins', people with disabilities or ailments that prevented them from leaving their homes. The way it worked was pretty simple; you'd call in your order, or sometimes use the store's website or email, and the store would have one of their baggers/etc collect the requested food from the shelves and drive it out to your home. It was a free service paid for by the store, although I believe there was an expectation to tip whichever employee was using their personal car to actually make the delivery. To reiterate, the service was intended for people who couldn't go to the store themselves, not for yuppies.
- JieJie 4y agoYeah, my neighbor is blind and even though she can physically get to the grocery store just fine, she can't exactly pick out items she wants once she gets there. Having a "personal shopper" isn't a luxury for her. All this "disruption" did was make it more expensive for her to be disabled.
- golergka 4y agoWe had widely used grocery delivery service in Moscow (Russia) back in mid-00s, Ostrovok. The only difference with modern services was delivery time of day or two in advance, but for family grocery shopping it wasn't that much of an issue.
- barbazoo 4y ago> To reiterate, the service was intended for people who couldn't go to the store themselves, not for yuppies. What an odd thing to say. Why should people have to drive and spend their time at the grocery store if the grocery store can do that much more efficiently? Employees pack what looks like dozens of orders at the same time and drive them to the neigborhoods. In a densely populated area I can't imagine that being less efficient than going yourself.
- asveikau 4y ago
- thrwy_918 4y agoEveryone I know (30something urbanites) uses meal kit services when they get an attractive sign up offer, and cancels shortly after the subsidized initial period has finished. Then after a few weeks or months they might sign up with a different meal kit service when a sign up offer becomes attractive enough. They cycle through the services in this way, because the same service seems happy to give the same customer a new sign-up offer if enough time has passed since they were a subscriber. I don't know anyone who is a loyal customer to any meal kit service and is paying full price.
- VBprogrammer 4y agoExactly, been bouncing between HelloFresh and Gusto for over a year. I honestly think the services are great, excellent way to have a variety of home cooked meals that I would never have considered. As long as I don't have to pay full price for it. I'm sure I'm the reason every speaker at Microconf says don't do B2C.
- icoder 4y agoWell, hi, here's one. Once a week we (my GF and I) quickly pick 5 meals (Netherlands, HelloFresh). If it comes in we spent 5-10 minutes checking and organising and then we have food for most of the week. Since we have a 6-month old baby we pick the meals with a shorter cook time, this week is 'the weak without meat' (is it national or international) so we pick veggie. NO effort in deciding what to cook, NO effort in making the shopping list (let alone go out for groceries) and (almost) NO leftovers. I agree this is highly personal but all three are a big win for us. The meals are relatively easy to prepare, healthy (it seems, I am not an expert) and varied.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y agoI like leftovers, get to skip one round if cooking. The shopping list is always the same over time, it doesn't take effort. Just write down when something runs out. Deciding what to cook at time is challenging.
- yamtaddle 4y agoAt full price it's cheaper to just order takeout. Less healthy, at the places where it's cheaper, but still. Then you don't have to cook or clean up the mess from cooking. I've also, personally, found these kits to be no less work than cooking normally. Sometimes, more, because the recipe will be more complex than something I'd have cooked on my own. It saves you meal planning and ordering the ingredients from the store (or going shopping), which isn't nothing, but it's not really that convenient—it'd have to also be cheap for me to want to do it very often, and at full price, they're not cheap.
- GlacierFox 4y agoI'm not sure if its because I grew up very poor but I always find people in my apartment block who use Hello Fresh and the like a bit 'snooty'. I can get an entire shop - breakfast, lunch and dinner *and* snacks for the entire week for the price of one of those boxes. I barely have time to myself bit still manage to plan my meals and make my own dinner quickly.