6 ms·

Gobble (YC W14) Automates Your Dinner With A Subscription Meal Delivery Service

58 points by ooshma 13y ago

borski 13y ago
Munchery?
- joelrunyon 13y ago
  FWIW - from a brand perspective - Gobble > Munchery
  - mschaecher 13y ago
    How so?
kjackson2012 13y ago
I use munchery 2-3 times per week. I love it, it's restaurant quality meals at similar price point. The difference is that I don't like the subscription idea, since I want a meal to be opt-in rather that opt-out. I don't want to have to change my plans and then be forced to cancel with this service.
- JeffL 13y ago
  Do you tip the delivery guy with these kinds of services?
svetha 13y ago
Love this new direction!
cloudify 13y ago
This is very sad actually, people should be educated to buy the ingredients and cook their own meals, unless they they plan to die young :) The average quality of restaurant (and delivery) food in the US is very very very very low :(
- scotth 13y ago
  That's a lot of verys. Have anything to back that up?
  - cloudify 13y ago
    Mostly personal experience of me, my wife and a few friends of mine. All people coming from countries with cultures based on quality food and food education. After a few years in the US, and after having embraced the US food lifestyle, most of us developed different sorts of diseases caused by the quality of the food we were ingesting. Worth nothing to say that as soon as we got back to our home country, almost every disease went away.
    - carsonreinke 13y ago
      Wow, its magic!
    - nobodysfool 13y ago
      Well, I'm sure people from Brescia will not appreciate american restaurant food, but that's not the point. You specifically mention foodborne illnesses. The most common are: Botulism Campylobacteriosis E. coli Hepatitis A Norovirus Infection Salmonellosis Shigellosis Normally this is because the food itself was contaminated at some point in the restaurant. That's not because the food itself causes illness, but the different bacteria, viruses, and parasites due to the environment. It's entirely possible that your regional friends are not used to the same pathogens as americans, so you had to suffer. Yet chances are if americans were to go to Brescia and eat out a lot, they would come down with the same foodborne illnesses because they also are not exposed to the same microflora as you have been exposed your whole life.
  - jjoonathan 13y ago
    Non-falsifiable claims of superior nutritional value and anecdotal evidence about taste from friends who could not have voiced any other opinion under the constraints of social acceptability. For some reason when you have to scientifically measure the nutritional value and compete on taste, the intersection of "healthy" and "tasty" seems to shrink dramatically. A coincidence, I'm sure.
throwaway887766 13y ago
Throwaway account, these things have been shared with me by someone with firsthand knowledge of the business: Gobble completely disregards food safety. Many of the "local chefs" are just local restaurants from which Gobble orders in bulk and then repackages into individual portions. While primary food preparation happens in a real commercial kitchen, the repackaging happens without food safety oversight ("In our old office, we would just repackage all the food in the office"). Food is often handled with bare hands, and sanitation/washing is not a significant concern. The vague language regarding food safety on their FAQ doesn't increase one's confidence in the service. There is no mention of any certification of their facility, or of their own staff. https://www.gobble.com/faq https://www.gobble.com/faq I wouldn't eat their food if you paid me.
btrautsc 13y ago
I've used Gobble a few times between traveling (hate to go grocery shopping then be out of town) and I've had legitimately excellent meals. I was really pleased with the simplicity and the ability to schedule or unschedule based on my travels/plans.
pg 13y ago
We've been using Gobble lately and I would recommend it to any family with small children. This is one of those things you don't realize till you have kids, but 4 year olds don't want to eat the same things you do. Eventually your kids' tastes may converge sufficiently with yours, but till then you either have to (a) not eat together, (b) cook two different dinners simultaneously, (c) eat hot dogs yourself, or (d) have endless fights. Gobble has given us a fifth and better option, and I think that will be the cornerstone of its appeal to customers.
- timjahn 13y ago
  "This is one of those things you don't realize till you have kids, but 4 year olds don't want to eat the same things you do." So true.
- avalaunch 13y ago
  Yeah, but aren't most families more cost conscious precisely because they have kids? I might recommend the service to any affluent family with small children but definitely not to most families.
noir_lord 13y ago
I'd happily pay this to have a meal delivered to me at 6pm every day. The only options near me are a pizza place and a chinese and while both are excellent...not every night. Personally I just wish there was a pill I could take every day that would take care of all dietary needs and hunger occasionally I eat for pleasure the rest of the time it's just fuel and gets in the way. I'm aware of Soylent but I'll give it a few years before I consider it (there are some things where been a beta tester may not be a good idea..).
devd 13y ago
I tried this service out - Was in a bit of crunch mode recently, and I liked the fact that I don't have to worry about dinner anymore. However, I recently decided to move to a low sodium diet, and I now have a system of cooking/prepping over the weekend
diminoten 13y ago
I'm very excited about these companies trying to solve a very significant problem in my life - what to eat. I don't have the time or the interest in health to figure out what I should be eating or when - I would prefer to merely supply the mouth. However, currently the competition is pretty stiff - fast food and current delivery services have huge flaws in their lack of nutrition and the daily time cost of obtaining them, but they're dirt cheap. $10/meal is nice, but it doesn't scale all that well. If I go grocery shopping (the worst possible solution, time-wise), I'll probably spend ~$300 or so for a month's (30 days) amount of food for myself. That comes out to a meal cost of ~$3.50 (let's round up, it makes sense in a moment). Fast food and delivery are more expensive. If I used fast food every day for 30 days, I would estimate that cost around ~$7 per meal (see?), or double the cost of grocery shopping. At this point, costs are already soaring, as we're in the neighborhood of ~$600/month for food! Now throw on an additional $3 per meal, plus delivery charges, and you're sitting somewhere around ~$900 I'd have to spend every month to make sure I won't die. That's a lot of cash, especially compared to the ~$300 I could spend just buying groceries. I want a way to spend closer to $300 than $900 to get this time waster solved for me. Am I asking too much?
- blueblob 13y ago
  That was my initial thought too, but I suspect that most people would get only once or twice a week from this on days that they are busy. 20$ per week for 2 dinners wouldn't be that bad to have them delivered. BTW I am not in the Bay Area and can't sign up for this anyway.
- d23 13y ago
  How much is your time worth though? Let's say you make $50 / hour (which I'm assuming is on the low end, given the audience). Even if you only grocery shop twice a month and spend about an hour getting there and back and putting away the groceries, you've already dropped $100 for your time. Then consider the much bigger time-sink: cooking the stuff! Even if you consider a mere 30 minutes a night for cooking and cleaning dishes, you're talking another 15 hours a month (or $750 given our aforementioned rate). Just a thought.
  - 13y ago
vivekpreddy 13y ago
Love the direction these companies are taking. Food delivery as a whole tends to be unhealthy, expensive and takes a ton of time to get delivered. Couple other options for those of you in SF/East Bay: -Sprig (eatsprig.com) -SpoonRocket Personally, I haven't had SpoonRocket before, but I've loved Sprig's service and the food. Having Google's former Head Chef doesn't hurt :)
codezero 13y ago
I've been using both Gobble and Munchery for the past three weeks. Munchery by far has superior meals and service. The portions are consistent and large, the only catch is that it's more expensive than Gobble. Gobble has a higher variance on arrival time and portion size, and once couldn't find my apartment. Gobble food is more like a well put together take out, and it's cheaper. So far it has tasted fine but a 2 hour window on arrival is kind of meh. The range in portion size means that sometimes I wish I had ordered a side or appetizer but there's no way to tell in advance whether I should. Munchery meals are like restaurant meals at a nice place. They offer a cheese plate, and I think the meal quality is similar to that of good meals you'd get at a place that had a cheese plate :) Gobble apparently has better vegetarian options according to my wife so that combined with the price will probably mean we keep Gobble.
weixiyen 13y ago
How much are we supposed to tip for delivery?
themoonbus 13y ago
It's posts like this that remind me I'm out of step with the hacker news majority. My first thought when seeing this was "why would anyone want that". It just makes eating seem so... mechanical? In my house, so much family time was structured around food – grocery shopping, cooking, eating, choosing a restaurant to go out to, driving to grab take out, etc. I guess it just depends on the food culture you're used to. I do appreciate that this is helpful for a certain subset of the population who don't have any interest in food (if you have interest but are too busy, maybe you should make yourself less busy), but I guess I was just surprised to see unanimous support in the comments.

58 points by ooshma 13y ago

borski 13y ago

Munchery?

joelrunyon 13y ago
FWIW - from a brand perspective - Gobble > Munchery
- mschaecher 13y ago
  How so?

kjackson2012 13y ago

I use munchery 2-3 times per week. I love it, it's restaurant quality meals at similar price point. The difference is that I don't like the subscription idea, since I want a meal to be opt-in rather that opt-out. I don't want to have to change my plans and then be forced to cancel with this service.

JeffL 13y ago
Do you tip the delivery guy with these kinds of services?

svetha 13y ago

Love this new direction!

cloudify 13y ago

This is very sad actually, people should be educated to buy the ingredients and cook their own meals, unless they they plan to die young :) The average quality of restaurant (and delivery) food in the US is very very very very low :(

scotth 13y ago
That's a lot of verys. Have anything to back that up?
- cloudify 13y ago
  Mostly personal experience of me, my wife and a few friends of mine. All people coming from countries with cultures based on quality food and food education. After a few years in the US, and after having embraced the US food lifestyle, most of us developed different sorts of diseases caused by the quality of the food we were ingesting. Worth nothing to say that as soon as we got back to our home country, almost every disease went away.
  - carsonreinke 13y ago
    Wow, its magic!
  - nobodysfool 13y ago
    Well, I'm sure people from Brescia will not appreciate american restaurant food, but that's not the point. You specifically mention foodborne illnesses. The most common are: Botulism Campylobacteriosis E. coli Hepatitis A Norovirus Infection Salmonellosis Shigellosis Normally this is because the food itself was contaminated at some point in the restaurant. That's not because the food itself causes illness, but the different bacteria, viruses, and parasites due to the environment. It's entirely possible that your regional friends are not used to the same pathogens as americans, so you had to suffer. Yet chances are if americans were to go to Brescia and eat out a lot, they would come down with the same foodborne illnesses because they also are not exposed to the same microflora as you have been exposed your whole life.
- jjoonathan 13y ago
  Non-falsifiable claims of superior nutritional value and anecdotal evidence about taste from friends who could not have voiced any other opinion under the constraints of social acceptability. For some reason when you have to scientifically measure the nutritional value and compete on taste, the intersection of "healthy" and "tasty" seems to shrink dramatically. A coincidence, I'm sure.

throwaway887766 13y ago

Throwaway account, these things have been shared with me by someone with firsthand knowledge of the business: Gobble completely disregards food safety. Many of the "local chefs" are just local restaurants from which Gobble orders in bulk and then repackages into individual portions. While primary food preparation happens in a real commercial kitchen, the repackaging happens without food safety oversight ("In our old office, we would just repackage all the food in the office"). Food is often handled with bare hands, and sanitation/washing is not a significant concern. The vague language regarding food safety on their FAQ doesn't increase one's confidence in the service. There is no mention of any certification of their facility, or of their own staff. https://www.gobble.com/faq https://www.gobble.com/faq I wouldn't eat their food if you paid me.

btrautsc 13y ago

I've used Gobble a few times between traveling (hate to go grocery shopping then be out of town) and I've had legitimately excellent meals. I was really pleased with the simplicity and the ability to schedule or unschedule based on my travels/plans.

pg 13y ago

We've been using Gobble lately and I would recommend it to any family with small children. This is one of those things you don't realize till you have kids, but 4 year olds don't want to eat the same things you do. Eventually your kids' tastes may converge sufficiently with yours, but till then you either have to (a) not eat together, (b) cook two different dinners simultaneously, (c) eat hot dogs yourself, or (d) have endless fights. Gobble has given us a fifth and better option, and I think that will be the cornerstone of its appeal to customers.

timjahn 13y ago
"This is one of those things you don't realize till you have kids, but 4 year olds don't want to eat the same things you do." So true.
avalaunch 13y ago
Yeah, but aren't most families more cost conscious precisely because they have kids? I might recommend the service to any affluent family with small children but definitely not to most families.

noir_lord 13y ago

I'd happily pay this to have a meal delivered to me at 6pm every day. The only options near me are a pizza place and a chinese and while both are excellent...not every night. Personally I just wish there was a pill I could take every day that would take care of all dietary needs and hunger occasionally I eat for pleasure the rest of the time it's just fuel and gets in the way. I'm aware of Soylent but I'll give it a few years before I consider it (there are some things where been a beta tester may not be a good idea..).

devd 13y ago

I tried this service out - Was in a bit of crunch mode recently, and I liked the fact that I don't have to worry about dinner anymore. However, I recently decided to move to a low sodium diet, and I now have a system of cooking/prepping over the weekend

diminoten 13y ago

I'm very excited about these companies trying to solve a very significant problem in my life - what to eat. I don't have the time or the interest in health to figure out what I should be eating or when - I would prefer to merely supply the mouth. However, currently the competition is pretty stiff - fast food and current delivery services have huge flaws in their lack of nutrition and the daily time cost of obtaining them, but they're dirt cheap. $10/meal is nice, but it doesn't scale all that well. If I go grocery shopping (the worst possible solution, time-wise), I'll probably spend ~$300 or so for a month's (30 days) amount of food for myself. That comes out to a meal cost of ~$3.50 (let's round up, it makes sense in a moment). Fast food and delivery are more expensive. If I used fast food every day for 30 days, I would estimate that cost around ~$7 per meal (see?), or double the cost of grocery shopping. At this point, costs are already soaring, as we're in the neighborhood of ~$600/month for food! Now throw on an additional $3 per meal, plus delivery charges, and you're sitting somewhere around ~$900 I'd have to spend every month to make sure I won't die. That's a lot of cash, especially compared to the ~$300 I could spend just buying groceries. I want a way to spend closer to $300 than $900 to get this time waster solved for me. Am I asking too much?

blueblob 13y ago
That was my initial thought too, but I suspect that most people would get only once or twice a week from this on days that they are busy. 20$ per week for 2 dinners wouldn't be that bad to have them delivered. BTW I am not in the Bay Area and can't sign up for this anyway.
d23 13y ago
How much is your time worth though? Let's say you make $50 / hour (which I'm assuming is on the low end, given the audience). Even if you only grocery shop twice a month and spend about an hour getting there and back and putting away the groceries, you've already dropped $100 for your time. Then consider the much bigger time-sink: cooking the stuff! Even if you consider a mere 30 minutes a night for cooking and cleaning dishes, you're talking another 15 hours a month (or $750 given our aforementioned rate). Just a thought.
- 13y ago

vivekpreddy 13y ago

Love the direction these companies are taking. Food delivery as a whole tends to be unhealthy, expensive and takes a ton of time to get delivered. Couple other options for those of you in SF/East Bay: -Sprig (eatsprig.com) -SpoonRocket Personally, I haven't had SpoonRocket before, but I've loved Sprig's service and the food. Having Google's former Head Chef doesn't hurt :)

codezero 13y ago

I've been using both Gobble and Munchery for the past three weeks. Munchery by far has superior meals and service. The portions are consistent and large, the only catch is that it's more expensive than Gobble. Gobble has a higher variance on arrival time and portion size, and once couldn't find my apartment. Gobble food is more like a well put together take out, and it's cheaper. So far it has tasted fine but a 2 hour window on arrival is kind of meh. The range in portion size means that sometimes I wish I had ordered a side or appetizer but there's no way to tell in advance whether I should. Munchery meals are like restaurant meals at a nice place. They offer a cheese plate, and I think the meal quality is similar to that of good meals you'd get at a place that had a cheese plate :) Gobble apparently has better vegetarian options according to my wife so that combined with the price will probably mean we keep Gobble.

weixiyen 13y ago

How much are we supposed to tip for delivery?

themoonbus 13y ago

It's posts like this that remind me I'm out of step with the hacker news majority. My first thought when seeing this was "why would anyone want that". It just makes eating seem so... mechanical? In my house, so much family time was structured around food – grocery shopping, cooking, eating, choosing a restaurant to go out to, driving to grab take out, etc. I guess it just depends on the food culture you're used to. I do appreciate that this is helpful for a certain subset of the population who don't have any interest in food (if you have interest but are too busy, maybe you should make yourself less busy), but I guess I was just surprised to see unanimous support in the comments.