4 ms·

Strange 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

Strange 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.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
rgbrgb 13y ago
There'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 ago
  I'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 ago
    solution looking for a problem
    - ballard 13y ago
      Yup. Gotta find a problem and a solution and make money at it. Otherwise, it's not survivable.
  - johnpowell 13y ago
    A decent loaf of mass produced bread here (Eugene, Or) is four bucks at Safeway. I do wish them the best of luck. If it was available here I would order a loaf every day. Our household tears through a loaf of bread in a day and sourdough is my favorite.
  - lostlogin 13y ago
    Scooter with a basket front and back would raise delivery rate a fair bit, but I'd be surprised if it was by more than 1 or 2 loafs.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- spartango 13y ago
  While you may be right that there exists a price point at which posh people will pay for this type of delivery service, the example of Tartine is a poor one. Tartine has been regarded as one of the best bakeries in SF for a number of years, having cultivated its reputation and following for over 10 years. It commands high prices not just because of quality, but also by its brand. This is relevant not merely to pick apart your example, but more as a sort of chicken-and-egg challenge that faces many food service businesses. By default, bakeries are a low margin businesses, making it difficult to survive the long years you need to build the reputation that enables higher margins. The businesses that have circumvented this struggle have done so by such means as owner/chef fame. With that said, I'm confident there are other ways of quickly achieving high-margin status. OP's company will have to be clever in doing so. It's unclear to me that delivery is a sufficient vehicle in this respect, except in bulk where ACME dominates.
- 001sky 13y ago
  "if you can make a profit delivering 5$ loaves" Most delivery places require $10/min tickets. A 20 min delivery is a 40 min round-trip. @$9/hour for the delivery guy, that is $6 in costs. In other-words, -$1. This is before you've paid for the actual product. That doesn't even get to the question of "cross-town" traffic in SF. Without some sort of multi-point distribution getting accross town in 20 min would be "interesting". Mission + SOMA of course NBD. Of course the improbability drives the PR value. Somewhere between "too good to be true" and "will it break, in an interesting way?".
  - kalleboo 13y ago
    In Sweden there's a popular food delivery service that simply ties together restaurants and taxi drivers. This eliminates the need for round trips, since the taxi driver can just find some other fare for the return. This works fine in Sweden which has a deregulated taxi market (=no shortage of available taxi drivers), but it wouldn't work in SF which has such an artificially constrained supply.
    - ballard 13y ago
      I like that. That's clever.
  - larrys 13y ago
    You are right of course but there is also the possibility of loss leaders. And many times in business things don't make sense on the surface but play out differently. Perhaps they will have add on items that will generate more profit. Perhaps the amount of people who only order bread alone will be small. If they get funding they have the staying power to test the market and potentially find profitability. That's the big big advantage of using "OPM" when starting a business. Not guaranteed but not a non starter either. One big benefit of starting at a low price below costs (if you can) is that it keeps others out who think "we can't make money doing this".
  - Pacabel 13y ago
    Any moderately busy pizzeria will queue up a few delivery orders that end up being ready at around the same time, and will have one driver deliver them all within a single trip. The trip may take marginally longer than if just one order were being delivered, but it ends up fulfilling five or six orders with one trip. The cost per order ends up being decreased to a reasonable level.
larrys 13y ago
"It'd be a strange thing to pitch to investors too." I think there is something here actually. For example it's a constant annoyance to me that when I get chinese food or sushi from the same places on a regular basis I actually have to make a phone call and talk to someone. At one place where they know me they actually make me give them my phone number which allows them to pull me up in their system. Just having to recite my phone number annoys me to no end. I am sure there are obviously people who have solved the problem of using a smartphone or a simple web interface to help order pickup food (or delivery). But they haven't made any headway in the major city suburb where I am located. For the life of me I don't understand why someone doesn't create a "bingo card creator" [1] type business to serve this market at a reasonable monthly fee. Most ideas on HN are "start by getting funded or incubated" as opposed to things that actually could be sold, proven, and then scaled. Write the app then knock on some doors and sell it (after giving it away to test restaurants for free). [1] http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 Sometimes called on HN "lifestyle" business.
- sib 13y ago
  When I lived in NYC in the '90's, I used to place the same order from the same pizza place often enough that the calls went like this: Me: <dials number> Them: <Answers phone, sees caller ID> "The usual?" Me: "Yup, thanks" Them: <Delivers pizza in 20 minutes> Seems like recently startups are finally starting to get to that level of knowing the customer...
  - larrys 13y ago
    Might be a kickstarter opportunity for a device that does the following: Gets the caller id and when person who answers hits a button prints out an order form with the customers name. Later version could actually store info about the customer in the device. The point of this device is to have as little disruption to the existing work flow as possible. Just plug it in to the incoming phone line. Probably could be prototyped using a small linux box where you get a local restaurant that you know ("you" means person who does this) to validate the idea. Small box isn't the final product or form factor only a way to see if the idea provides value.
loumf 13y ago
Your comment gave me a sudden craving for great sourdough bread. I ran out my door to the local bakery and literally got the last loaf of the day.
ballard 13y ago
Yeah, it's closer to a necessity product but not usually an impulse buy (unless say if a woman were pregnant). This makes it less necessary to have it delivered within X minutes.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

rgbrgb 13y ago

There'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 ago
I'm skeptical there's any profit selling $5 loaves in SF. How many can one driver really deliver per hour, 3-4 trips? $20 per hour in gross revenue is barely enough to employ the driver and his fuel, let alone the bread, bakers, managers, facilities, taxes, health licenses, marketing, customer service, payment processing, etc. unless people tip very generously.
- jwheeler79 13y ago
  solution looking for a problem
  - ballard 13y ago
    Yup. Gotta find a problem and a solution and make money at it. Otherwise, it's not survivable.
- johnpowell 13y ago
  A decent loaf of mass produced bread here (Eugene, Or) is four bucks at Safeway. I do wish them the best of luck. If it was available here I would order a loaf every day. Our household tears through a loaf of bread in a day and sourdough is my favorite.
- lostlogin 13y ago
  Scooter with a basket front and back would raise delivery rate a fair bit, but I'd be surprised if it was by more than 1 or 2 loafs.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
spartango 13y ago
While you may be right that there exists a price point at which posh people will pay for this type of delivery service, the example of Tartine is a poor one. Tartine has been regarded as one of the best bakeries in SF for a number of years, having cultivated its reputation and following for over 10 years. It commands high prices not just because of quality, but also by its brand. This is relevant not merely to pick apart your example, but more as a sort of chicken-and-egg challenge that faces many food service businesses. By default, bakeries are a low margin businesses, making it difficult to survive the long years you need to build the reputation that enables higher margins. The businesses that have circumvented this struggle have done so by such means as owner/chef fame. With that said, I'm confident there are other ways of quickly achieving high-margin status. OP's company will have to be clever in doing so. It's unclear to me that delivery is a sufficient vehicle in this respect, except in bulk where ACME dominates.
001sky 13y ago
"if you can make a profit delivering 5$ loaves" Most delivery places require $10/min tickets. A 20 min delivery is a 40 min round-trip. @$9/hour for the delivery guy, that is $6 in costs. In other-words, -$1. This is before you've paid for the actual product. That doesn't even get to the question of "cross-town" traffic in SF. Without some sort of multi-point distribution getting accross town in 20 min would be "interesting". Mission + SOMA of course NBD. Of course the improbability drives the PR value. Somewhere between "too good to be true" and "will it break, in an interesting way?".
- kalleboo 13y ago
  In Sweden there's a popular food delivery service that simply ties together restaurants and taxi drivers. This eliminates the need for round trips, since the taxi driver can just find some other fare for the return. This works fine in Sweden which has a deregulated taxi market (=no shortage of available taxi drivers), but it wouldn't work in SF which has such an artificially constrained supply.
  - ballard 13y ago
    I like that. That's clever.
- larrys 13y ago
  You are right of course but there is also the possibility of loss leaders. And many times in business things don't make sense on the surface but play out differently. Perhaps they will have add on items that will generate more profit. Perhaps the amount of people who only order bread alone will be small. If they get funding they have the staying power to test the market and potentially find profitability. That's the big big advantage of using "OPM" when starting a business. Not guaranteed but not a non starter either. One big benefit of starting at a low price below costs (if you can) is that it keeps others out who think "we can't make money doing this".
- Pacabel 13y ago
  Any moderately busy pizzeria will queue up a few delivery orders that end up being ready at around the same time, and will have one driver deliver them all within a single trip. The trip may take marginally longer than if just one order were being delivered, but it ends up fulfilling five or six orders with one trip. The cost per order ends up being decreased to a reasonable level.

larrys 13y ago

"It'd be a strange thing to pitch to investors too." I think there is something here actually. For example it's a constant annoyance to me that when I get chinese food or sushi from the same places on a regular basis I actually have to make a phone call and talk to someone. At one place where they know me they actually make me give them my phone number which allows them to pull me up in their system. Just having to recite my phone number annoys me to no end. I am sure there are obviously people who have solved the problem of using a smartphone or a simple web interface to help order pickup food (or delivery). But they haven't made any headway in the major city suburb where I am located. For the life of me I don't understand why someone doesn't create a "bingo card creator" [1] type business to serve this market at a reasonable monthly fee. Most ideas on HN are "start by getting funded or incubated" as opposed to things that actually could be sold, proven, and then scaled. Write the app then knock on some doors and sell it (after giving it away to test restaurants for free). [1] http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 Sometimes called on HN "lifestyle" business.

sib 13y ago
When I lived in NYC in the '90's, I used to place the same order from the same pizza place often enough that the calls went like this: Me: <dials number> Them: <Answers phone, sees caller ID> "The usual?" Me: "Yup, thanks" Them: <Delivers pizza in 20 minutes> Seems like recently startups are finally starting to get to that level of knowing the customer...
- larrys 13y ago
  Might be a kickstarter opportunity for a device that does the following: Gets the caller id and when person who answers hits a button prints out an order form with the customers name. Later version could actually store info about the customer in the device. The point of this device is to have as little disruption to the existing work flow as possible. Just plug it in to the incoming phone line. Probably could be prototyped using a small linux box where you get a local restaurant that you know ("you" means person who does this) to validate the idea. Small box isn't the final product or form factor only a way to see if the idea provides value.

loumf 13y ago

Your comment gave me a sudden craving for great sourdough bread. I ran out my door to the local bakery and literally got the last loaf of the day.

ballard 13y ago

Yeah, it's closer to a necessity product but not usually an impulse buy (unless say if a woman were pregnant). This makes it less necessary to have it delivered within X minutes.