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Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered within 20 minutes
- vishaldpatel 13y agoIs it a mobile oven? The bread gets baked as you drive to the delivery point? :D
- jerryhuang100 13y agoby glancing the title this comes to my mind first: http://www.nick.com/shows/breadwinners/ http://www.nick.com/shows/breadwinners/
- bornabox 13y agoOh boy. That's nice. Could you deliver to São Paulo, please? Pretty please :) But seriously, that's quite a great idea. If you can deliver in time, it would be supremely convenient. Reminds me of the milk bottles that used to be delivered by the milkman early in the morning.
- trumbitta2 13y agoGiven I'm now hungry as a bat out of hell, I guess you already nailed the website both in content and in pictures. Now if only I wasn't based in Italy...
- selectodude 13y agoI can't imagine it's that much of a struggle to find good bread in Italy.
- jt2190 13y agoIt's refreshing that instead of putting up a fake landing page and pretending to be an established product, they're just coming right out and telling us that this is an experiment. Very cool!
- dangrossman 13y agoStrange business, if that's what it's going to be. I've never had a sudden craving for a loaf of bread and wished I could order just that online. Not that I can't already; the local grocery store has a delivery service, and they bake their own bread every morning. I'm sure there's at least one bakery that delivers in the city, and there's a half dozen restaurants on GrubHub in my area that offer some kind of bread delivered. It'd be a strange thing to pitch to investors too. I don't hear of much VC funding going to low-margin fresh food businesses. Bakeries generally don't make many billionaires; I think the entire Cinnabon company was sold for $30M some years ago. Perhaps they're going to pitch some kind of scheduling / routing / dispatch technology for delivery businesses? Edit: Nope, missed the link to their real site. They want to be a bakery that delivers for free.
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- rgbrgb 13y agoThere's a high end bakery in the mission called Tartine where people queue up every day to buy $13 loaves of bread. I could never justify the expense but from the line outside I'd say there are definitely a lot of people in SF who can. You might have a hard time scaling this outside of really posh areas, but I'd bet that if you can make a profit delivering 5$ loaves in SF that you could do it for cheaper with the same margins in less wealthy areas. Good luck to the OP!
- dangrossman 13y agoI'm skeptical there's any profit selling $5 loaves in SF. How many can one driver really deliver per hour, 3-4 trips? $20 per hour in gross revenue is barely enough to employ the driver and his fuel, let alone the bread, bakers, managers, facilities, taxes, health licenses, marketing, customer service, payment processing, etc. unless people tip very generously.
- jwheeler79 13y agosolution looking for a problem
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- dalek2point3 13y agoit was only this morning that I was thinking, I wish someone could buy me breakfast from the nearby Au Bon Pain while I work on campus. This would work too. Great idea!
- primitivesuave 13y agoWhat a brilliant way to validate an idea. No online payment processing, no fancy dropdown modals asking me to make an account, just pay when you get the bread. I hope it stays this simple.
- Pacabel 13y agoI've ordered pizza from several chains that use exactly the same process for their online orders, and have done so this way for years now. No account is mandatory, although such functionality is offered if you want to save your preferred pizza toppings, your address, and so forth for greater convenience during future orders. You can prepay, if you want, or just pay the delivery driver once the pizzas have been delivered. I'm not really sure what needs to be "validated" here. This approach has been successfully used by many other organizations offering the exact same type of service.
- troels 13y agoWouldn't it be a logistic nightmare when everybody wants their bread delivered at the exact same time (breakfast)?
- Robby2012 13y agoThat is so true. At some hours they'll have no clients at all and at others they'll need tons of people delivering the bread to get on time.
- eternauta3k 13y agoIn an ideal world, they'd adjust the price according to demand. But, realistically, no one's gonna shift their schedule to get cheaper online bread.
- thwarted 13y agoThen there will be complaints that surge pricing for bread is price gouging when people need bread the most.
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- sixQuarks 13y agoI like the picture on the site, it's from one of my favorite wineries - Scribe
- wudf 13y agoOh man... I would love some fresh, warm bread right now. breadbox is going to set a trend with this stunt.
- thwarted 13y agoI wonder where the bread is being baked. SF has some pretty strict laws around the quality/inspection/safety/licensing of kitchens (even home kitchens) used to create food for sale. My girlfriend wanted to sell lamb cakes during Easter season a few years ago (we saw an indication of demand and absolutely no supply from established bakeries) and while figuring out how to do it at minor scale (planning on 25-50 cakes) we became aware of these inspection limits. It seemed like it was going to be a lot of footwork to handle and was discouraging enough to not follow through on at the time. Maybe they most likely won't run afoul or attract any legal attention for this test run for a single day. If it proves to be popular then it wouldn't make sense to do it out of someone's home kitchen, of course.
- stellar678 13y agoThanks to the Cottage Food Act, as of 2013 it's super-easy if you're relatively low volume. It's a self-inspection (as in, "follow this checklist") and a cheap registration so they can track you down if you cause some kind of outbreak. See: https://www.sfdph.org/dph/EH/Food/AB1616.as https://www.sfdph.org/dph/EH/Food/AB1616.as
- kunle 13y agoBravo for doing things that don't scale. Good luck here & I hope this works out. Happy to help read through your YC app as well. ayo at hipmob.
- camillomiller 13y agoThat's very cool, but jeez is that really in line with the price of baked bread in San Francisco? This morning, 3,50€ bought me half a kilo of 5-cereals focaccia, two loaves of cereal breada and half a kilo of white bread. That's bread for a eight people lunch. That's probably one of the few things I'm gonna miss about Italy when I'll leave.
- lifeformed 13y agoI think the 20 minute delivery is a big part of it.
- TillE 13y agoIf you live in a city or near a town center, you can probably walk to a decent bakery in five minutes. You can also buy frozen or vacuum-packed half-baked bread from a supermarket, keep it around, and make some very nice fresh bread by sticking it in the oven for 20 minutes.
- lifeformed 13y agoYeah, but sometimes I'd pay $2 to someone to walk 5 minutes to get me a $3 loaf of bread.
- objclxt 13y agoIt's not outrageous for a decent loaf of sourdough in SF. It seems like a really niche market though...doesn't really feel like a business to me. I don't think SF is short of places to get bread - there's a local bakery and a whole foods ten minutes walk away from me. Seems like a solution in search of a problem, really...
- Ecio78 13y agoI suppose you're located in the south of Italy, as in the north (Milan for example) bread (standard, not multicereal or special ones) is around 4-5€ per kilo. NB I'm Italian now in Luxembourg and one of the thing I miss is the quality of bread (here it is generally not very good, too many "boulangerie" of the same brand, Fischer, with all the same bread / taste). And of course it is even more expensive...
- rkuykendall-com 13y agoDo you tip? or just the $5?
- Jarred 13y agoI love bread. I'd use this if I lived in SF.
- state 13y agoSeems like a good idea to me. I submitted my info but didn't hear back. Did anyone get a response?
- rohan404 13y agoI've been waiting about 10-15 minutes for a response myself; guess it's not automated?
- pwenzel 13y agoBrake Bread in the Twin Cities area has something similar with its subscription service, delivered by bike. http://brakebread.com/ http://brakebread.com/
- petergreen 13y agoFinally. But i'd prefer to get every day a fresh loaf @7am, and then you can really save on delivery costs. And give me a $2-3/per smaller bread (cuz u don't go through it in a day) if I subscribe like yearly. I'll give it a shot though.
- smacktoward 13y agoI guess I'm just at a loss as to what is even remotely "hacker"-ish about this. It's a bakery that delivers. That's great, I guess, but there's nothing particularly technical about it. They're not using tech in some unusual or interesting way to cut down on delivery costs, or make bread in a different way, or anything. It's just... a bakery, that delivers. There's a Web form to order your bread through, but in 2014 that's not really any different than having a phone number to order your bread through used to be. (It looks like there's a mobile app to come, but if all it does is show you a menu and let you order it would fall roughly into the same category. Table stakes.) I was talking with a relative of mine who's been in the grocery business for decades over the holidays last year, and we were joking around about how it wouldn't be long until someone started touting home milk delivery -- something that was commonplace before most homes had TV sets, or even radios, much less computers -- as a "tech startup." This isn't that, of course. But it's close.
- unreal37 13y agoThey're applying for YC though, so they're validating an idea. Gotta appreciate that they're learning what it means to deliver bread on demand. If I lived in SF, I'd have them bring me a loaf of bread today.
- larrys 13y ago"They're applying for YC though, so they're validating an idea." I suspect it's more than that (and I say that positively). A slow news day. They stand a good chance of getting attention which is of benefit in terms of YC most likely. So at the very least anyone investing knows they have a clue about how to play the game. To take this one step further they might want to try matzoh on Passover which is coming up shortly. NYC would be a good city to test if the delivery scaled.
- 27182818284 13y agoWell, that's the problem I think the parent was getting at, but they did not quite get there. A barbershop or a bakery itself, in one city, isn't a startup. So even if they have success here, they've only validated that they are a business, not "in startup territory" (http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html) In other words, it validates an idea, but it validates the wrong idea. For what it is worth, though, they do mention that their actual application idea will be different. So maybe they have a way to scale or do something with bread delivery that isn't already covered by the existing businesses.
- sheetjs 13y agoJust picked it up (two people in a black Prius :) They seemed swamped (they were 10 minutes late and were visibly frazzled) but upbeat. Bread was decent. I suspect that if you go into pastries, you probably can command a higher margin (I really dislike keeping desserts in the apartment, and "dessert on demand" definitely would be appealing)
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- sarah2079 13y agoI clicked through to read about how they plan on running it long term. They will carry a very limited number of products, and every delivery person has all the products stocked in their van. They then route the nearest delivery person to you when you order, so it's kind of like a mobile coffee shop. I don't know if it is possible to make it profitable, but it is definitely a service I would use. It is a pain keeping bread on hand because the good stuff only keeps for a day or two.
- bch 13y ago> It is a pain ...in French speaking regions.
- rohan404 13y agoAnyone else not receiving the text message?
- mfkp 13y agoSame here, check my above comment.
- getbreadbox 13y agoHi everyone! Thank you all so much for your interest in this! The spike in interest from HN has been totally overwhelming, so while we are thrilled with the validation of this concept, we are running out of stock and falling behind on delivery schedule. I'll be sure to reach out individually to everyone who submitted an order. We can't wait to launch this service in a way that can handle demand spikes like this -- thank you all for yor support. Edit: for reference, we've had orders for 150 loaves of bread in 2 hours.
- mfkp 13y agoCool - was wondering why there was no text confirmation in over 30 mins, this explains it. Must not be an automated process.
- johnpowell 13y agoI wouldn't consider this validation of the idea. It is just a bunch of people in SF that don't care about five bucks. We eat a lot of bread in my house. I would love a few loafs delivered every other day for a reasonable rate like how they deliver my newspaper.
- EC1 13y agoThey sell bread. They got 150 orders in 2 hours. Their idea was validated.
- corresation 13y agoWas the idea really validated? Is their business model "get on the front page of HN daily"? If not, absolutely nothing was validated.
- namenotrequired 13y agoThey didn't just get a lot of people to their page. They also got a large chunk of their visitors to pay them. The first part might not be sustainable - and it seems they weren't planning for it to be as this was a one time offer - but it definitely validated something, and also put them in touch with a lot of customers.
- _random_ 13y agoAdd to subj: "only in SF"
- ShadyX 13y agoDat sexy bread tho..
- sgrove 13y agoJust got our delivery now, fantastic service. I hope the unit-economics work out, because I'd certainly use this, yc or not.
- mililani 13y agoI could see this being economical with quad copter (drone) delivery. But, home delivery from a car? Man, the gas expenses (among other car related expenses) would eat the profits to a bare minimum. Especially driving around SF.
- ShaneCurran 13y agoBicycles are your friend in the likes of SF :)
- needacig 13y agoSo, a bakery that delivers? The tech industry sure is expanding its scope.
- christkv 13y agoI might be worth looking at where kozmo.com went wrong with a similar attempt during the dotcom boom. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com
- rkuykendall-com 13y agoWhat makes you assume something went wrong? It sounds like they were doing really well, but the bust hit them extremely hard, like it hit many others.
- ghaff 13y agoAt the risk of being snarky, the bust hit a lot of companies that didn't have a viable business model very hard. Snark off. There is a viable business model for deliveries given correct demographics, population density, etc.--and a willingness to pay for the incremental costs of the delivery. Works widely for some things (e.g. Pizza, Chinese food). Works as a niche for grocery delivery-usually in combination with a physical store presence of some sort. Delivery models work, usually as an adjunct to a physical store, but it's situational. Delivering individual video rentals like Kozmo did (among other things) is probably not one of those situations.
- ben1040 13y agoAccording to the S-1 for the IPO that never happened, they spent nearly as much on delivery as their total revenue. Seems like they weren't doing that well. http://www.secinfo.com/dRqWm.5c8t.htm#1jjz http://www.secinfo.com/dRqWm.5c8t.htm#1jjz
- riffraff 13y agosomewhat OT, but: if you have never tried baking bread at home (not even sourdough, beer yeast is ok) you should definitely try it, it's incredibly satisfying.
- pud 13y agoIn one place on the front page, it says delivery takes 18 minutes. In another place on the same page, it says 20 minutes. Not that 2 minutes makes a difference, but the numbers should be consistent. I like 18 minutes because it sounds precise.
- shanac 13y agoI rather deliver a great "give yourself upworthy's advantages for your content" and break my own sourdough... But this is a startup that jumped the shark of meaning of startups. If they told me they had angel money, I'd be very concerned about investing in startups myself (if only I could) which remind's me, I need to feed my sour starter today!
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- brryant 13y agoWhich bakeries source your breads? The Mill? Tartine? Acme? Would love to know which before I buy! (though I might buy anyways because I think this is awesome). Awesome Webflow site that is simple and to the point.
- stephenhandley 13y agoWhat the world needs now is on demand bread.
- encoderer 13y agoAm I the only one who thinks this might not be about the bread? YC has funded delivery-as-a-service before. If you were going for that, a stunt like this could be brilliant.
- ballard 13y agoIs there anything similar in Paris already?
- pappyo 13y agoI'm disappointed with the comments here about this future YC applicant. Can't we think bigger than a food delivery app? If you read the homepage, you'll see their tag line is "Fresh bread, snacks and coffee beans. Delivered in 18 minutes." Now, let's remove the baked goods accoutrement for a second and focus on the "delivered in 18 minutes or less". Isn't this the very real problem Amazon is trying to solve for themselves? Isn't there tremendous value to dynamic delivery logistics? To be clear, I don't know these people, nor do I know if delivery logistics is their endgame. If they're bakers, then all the previous critique is warranted. But if I lived in SF, I would sign up to see what they're up to.
- enraged_camel 13y ago>>I'm disappointed with the comments here about this future YC applicant. Can't we think bigger than a food delivery app? Yeah, it was incredibly depressing to visit a really nice web page, become interested, and then read the top comment which basically dismisses the entire thing as "not hacker-ish" enough. Mind you, that comment is coming from a guy who blogs about mostly political topics...
- mhluongo 13y agoMaybe the business they're validating is an HN-specific PR firm :)
- songgao 13y agoPlease let there be an API. Home Sensors + ifttt + Bread Box would be a good alternative for morning alarms :-) Or make it integrated with the navigation app on my cell phone. Based on traffic status, it'll schedule bread baking. After I park my car near my office, I can pick some freshly baked bread on my way. Or integrate with a voting system that hooks with GitHub. The person who makes the most awesome PR of the day gets a basket of healthy bread delivered to her/his home next morning.
- nemothekid 13y agoPlaced an order at 4:35 PST, still nothing? Safe to assume they got swamped? EDIT: See the update now, seeing as how they had my phone, it would have been cool if they texted me.
- pistle 13y agoDoes SF not have Jimmy Johns? They'll stick some oats and sesame seeds on a roll if you ask nicely. They are freakishly fast.
- evanb 13y agoDo you guys know about SpoonRocket? It's only in the East Bay, but seems conceptually similar.
- cheshire137 13y agoI need this up in Lexington, KY. It's the San Francisco of Kentucky! ...Or something like that.