My 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.
I usually buy groceries once a week. We typically buy 5 meals worth of food and eat left overs for two days. Thinking of those 5 meals takes about half the time buying groceries does. Personally, I like cooking and I like choosing what to eat. But every once in a while I wish someone would make a menu for me.
> Personally, I like cooking and I like choosing what to eat.
So do I. I actually shop for fresh stuff almost daily now, because I mostly work from home and it's a great excuse to get out and wander around the city for a while.
That said, the nature of my work is such that I'll often have intense 2-3 week periods of long days that really sap my desire to do anything beyond, like, throwing some sausage and peppers into a skillet.
It's those times when I'd love to have a meal kit service like this, because if I don't have anything quick in the house then I end up with a frozen pizza or a Deliveroo order instead. I've tried doing meal prep a few times, but I tend to get sick of it by the middle of the week.
Make the same stir fry but with a different sauce.
Refried beans can make burritos, tacos or bowls.
Chicken is endlessly versatile in stews, curry, schnitzel, etc.
I too would like a menu made for me, but it would be a luxury, curated for me to explore more meals. My standards are strong, nutritious and go down well with the lady.
Local networks might be the only way to make this cheap enough to drive enough customers to use it. The programs are too expensive for me to justify, and a big part of that is the packaging and shipping costs.
Local networks doing daily delivery don't need dry ice, can use minimal packaging, can batch orders and send out with their own delivery drivers/routes. They could even pick up the packaging for reuse upon delivery of the next order. This only works at scale though, and is going to be nearly impossible to build a business on, unless in high density living areas.
I have been considering this idea for some time now. Local food networks which flip the paradigm from "on-demand" to strictly in advance. Right now, if I want to order food from a restaurant, I can only do this "on-demand". If you want to join this on-demand food preparation world as a chef, maybe start with a food truck. However, operating "on-demand" is difficult. Why not only in advance? (of course, on-demand food will always be here to stay...)
In advance enables batch orders, predictable quantities of ingredients & labor, no need for insane packaging and ice, etc. These "meal-kit" services do this, but as many other comments say... you still need to do your own prep and cook it.
Some people are already doing this model (i.e. there's a couple in my city offering a bulk meal paid for and prepared once a week), but they built it their self from the ground up. Can we not build a network to enable this? The door would then be opened to an individual chef to contribute to providing people with food. Existing restaurants could of course offer their best seller or most easily prepared bulk meal. Yes, as you say: nearly impossible to build. There are many obstacles. But the benefits are numerous.
Sounds like you've thought about this a bit already? Mind if I pick your brain?
I make use of a few different meal services... and I completely agree with the prep issue. While the "get fresh food for X meals" is a nice idea, I invariably hit issues with portions - most companies only provide portions for 2 or 4 people. This works poorly for the odd sized household (especially the 1 sized).
So... I have factor. They're single sized microwave items. Very convenient for lunches with a 2 minutes in the microwave and you're good.
I also have tovala. They've got a special (but inexpensive) toaster oven or air fryer. With them, you get raw protein and a side and do 1 min of prep for it and then cook it in the oven for 13 to 20 min depending on the food. The portion sizes there are 1. The longer prep and the "need that toaster oven" make it not as useful for the "on the go". This is cooked in single use aluminum trays and so cleanup is minimal.
And I also splurged for a suvie (. That's in the 30 min and longer category with more cleaning (of the trays - they're not single use), but you can cook for a time (have this ready at 12:15 pm) and it does it. It's got a much more expensive (and larger) kitchen device... but the prep is typically in the less than 5 minutes and has the advantage of frozen to cooked rather than refrigerated to cooked meaning that the meal kits can be stored in the chest freezer in the basement for longer durations rather than needing to be done by the end of the week.
Personally, I'm not trying to save time in the cooking process; I'm trying to save time and hassle in the ingredient-buying phase: deciding what to cook, figuring out what ingredients I need to buy to cook that, finding them in the shop, working out what to do if it turns out that the supermarket is out of spinach, etc. Plus my closest supermarket doesn't have much in the way of stock, so I'd have to go further to get the kind of stuff meal kits tend to want.
Chopped onions change smell after they've been sitting exposed to air for a while, and not for the better. I'll happily prep my own onions, even if it brings tears to my eyes.
Sweet potatoes turn brown exposed to air, sometimes even in the span of time from prepping the first to prepping the last before they go into the pot all together.
I would venture that most things do not improve with exposure to air once cut up. I would also tend to agree that just sending unprepped ingredients doesn't save any time, but I think I'm willing to take more time to get a better meal.
There is a fantastic meal kit service of this sort in Boston, Littleburg [1]. The steps involved are usually limited to baking/roasting/sautéing and assembling, and the resulting meals are very high quality, far better than anything I can make on my own or most anything else you can get delivered. (All vegan too, which is important to me.)
> My 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.
For me the biggest value add of Hello Fresh is the meal planning aspect. I don't have to spend time every week figuring out what I want to cook for 3-5 different meals, or track down the ingredients to make them, or add up calories to make sure they're health conscious.
Preparing food at home allows for making things "as I like them". I'm VERY picky about certain textures and tastes. I also have a very restricted diet and suffer (biologically) from some ingredients that like to sneak into foods.
Ordering a known meal from a known restaurant is definitely easier than home prep. Ordering a "probably fine" meal from a "probably fine" restaurant requires extra cognitive load over cooking at home. (Some days I struggle with simply selecting a new meal from a restaurant. On those same days, I can happily spend an hour cooking a new-to-me recipe without any problems.)
> What benefit does that have over ordering delivery from a restaurant?
For me, there were two keys:
1. I love cooking and find it to be a nice meditative experience, but back then I was working 16-18 hour days and I simply didn't have the energy to deal with all of the other stuff you gotta do before and after you cook. This was a good middle ground.
2. I could adjust the ingredients to my liking - don't put in the cilantro, for example, or add some extra chili to make the sauce spicier.
If somebody manages to get the scale right, it should be a bit less expensive, you get to eat freshly cooked food and you know most of what you put in it.
Also if people don't already know their way around a kitchen this is a pretty effective way to learn I would think.
Even 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.
Wait, 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.
Freshly 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.
There 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.
My 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).
Are the quantities you get grocery store quantities or are they portioned out like the meal kit services? One thing I liked about the meal kit services was not having a bunch of leftover stuff that I wouldn’t end up using before it went bad.
And even the stuff that doesn't go bad easily seems to pile up, multiple types of rice, shapes of pasta, cous cous, noodles. I know it is a bit of a luxury problem, but it is one nevertheless.
That 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.
There'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?
You 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.
> 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.
If you don't want your food to be driven to you, then live in a city. This is what I do, I haven't used my car when grocery shopping for years. If you choose to live in a suburb or rural area, then a car lifestyle is something you've chosen for yourself.
> Employees pack what looks like dozens of orders at the same time and drive them to the neigborhoods.
This isn't the way it was done with the service I describe. There generally would not be enough demand so most orders would be 1-to-1, no more efficient than somebody driving to the store themself.
Want to add, with walkable cities and less car centricism you absolutely don't have to drive.
Not meaning to be insensitive to less healthy people who enter into that condition through no fault of their own, but also, perhaps fewer people would be in a position that they are physically unable to shop for groceries if they didn't "have to drive", and got in the exercise of a daily walk to the grocer.
>Why should people have to drive and spend their time at the grocery store
Because they chose to live somewhere stupid that doesn't have one of life's necessities, food, nearby? Or maybe they haven't figured out how to bundle trips, like going grocery shopping while little Ryder is at soccer practice?
Yeah, 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.
We 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.
This 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.
Everyone 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.
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.
I 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.
At 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.
Exactly, 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Meal 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.
Many 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.
Not 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.
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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.
So do I. I actually shop for fresh stuff almost daily now, because I mostly work from home and it's a great excuse to get out and wander around the city for a while.
That said, the nature of my work is such that I'll often have intense 2-3 week periods of long days that really sap my desire to do anything beyond, like, throwing some sausage and peppers into a skillet.
It's those times when I'd love to have a meal kit service like this, because if I don't have anything quick in the house then I end up with a frozen pizza or a Deliveroo order instead. I've tried doing meal prep a few times, but I tend to get sick of it by the middle of the week.
Make the same stir fry but with a different sauce.
Refried beans can make burritos, tacos or bowls.
Chicken is endlessly versatile in stews, curry, schnitzel, etc.
I too would like a menu made for me, but it would be a luxury, curated for me to explore more meals. My standards are strong, nutritious and go down well with the lady.
https://www.hellofresh.com/recipes
Local networks doing daily delivery don't need dry ice, can use minimal packaging, can batch orders and send out with their own delivery drivers/routes. They could even pick up the packaging for reuse upon delivery of the next order. This only works at scale though, and is going to be nearly impossible to build a business on, unless in high density living areas.
In advance enables batch orders, predictable quantities of ingredients & labor, no need for insane packaging and ice, etc. These "meal-kit" services do this, but as many other comments say... you still need to do your own prep and cook it.
Some people are already doing this model (i.e. there's a couple in my city offering a bulk meal paid for and prepared once a week), but they built it their self from the ground up. Can we not build a network to enable this? The door would then be opened to an individual chef to contribute to providing people with food. Existing restaurants could of course offer their best seller or most easily prepared bulk meal. Yes, as you say: nearly impossible to build. There are many obstacles. But the benefits are numerous.
Sounds like you've thought about this a bit already? Mind if I pick your brain?
So... I have factor. They're single sized microwave items. Very convenient for lunches with a 2 minutes in the microwave and you're good.
I also have tovala. They've got a special (but inexpensive) toaster oven or air fryer. With them, you get raw protein and a side and do 1 min of prep for it and then cook it in the oven for 13 to 20 min depending on the food. The portion sizes there are 1. The longer prep and the "need that toaster oven" make it not as useful for the "on the go". This is cooked in single use aluminum trays and so cleanup is minimal.
And I also splurged for a suvie (. That's in the 30 min and longer category with more cleaning (of the trays - they're not single use), but you can cook for a time (have this ready at 12:15 pm) and it does it. It's got a much more expensive (and larger) kitchen device... but the prep is typically in the less than 5 minutes and has the advantage of frozen to cooked rather than refrigerated to cooked meaning that the meal kits can be stored in the chest freezer in the basement for longer durations rather than needing to be done by the end of the week.
Sweet potatoes turn brown exposed to air, sometimes even in the span of time from prepping the first to prepping the last before they go into the pot all together.
I would venture that most things do not improve with exposure to air once cut up. I would also tend to agree that just sending unprepped ingredients doesn't save any time, but I think I'm willing to take more time to get a better meal.
Then these services aren't for you.
[1] https://littleburgmenu.com/
For me the biggest value add of Hello Fresh is the meal planning aspect. I don't have to spend time every week figuring out what I want to cook for 3-5 different meals, or track down the ingredients to make them, or add up calories to make sure they're health conscious.
Ordering a known meal from a known restaurant is definitely easier than home prep. Ordering a "probably fine" meal from a "probably fine" restaurant requires extra cognitive load over cooking at home. (Some days I struggle with simply selecting a new meal from a restaurant. On those same days, I can happily spend an hour cooking a new-to-me recipe without any problems.)
For me, there were two keys:
1. I love cooking and find it to be a nice meditative experience, but back then I was working 16-18 hour days and I simply didn't have the energy to deal with all of the other stuff you gotta do before and after you cook. This was a good middle ground.
2. I could adjust the ingredients to my liking - don't put in the cilantro, for example, or add some extra chili to make the sauce spicier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
It also create much more garbage so they got that going for them, too.
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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/
[1]: https://www.publix.com/recipes-planning/aprons-meal-kits
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?
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.
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.
> Employees pack what looks like dozens of orders at the same time and drive them to the neigborhoods.
This isn't the way it was done with the service I describe. There generally would not be enough demand so most orders would be 1-to-1, no more efficient than somebody driving to the store themself.
Want to add, with walkable cities and less car centricism you absolutely don't have to drive.
Not meaning to be insensitive to less healthy people who enter into that condition through no fault of their own, but also, perhaps fewer people would be in a position that they are physically unable to shop for groceries if they didn't "have to drive", and got in the exercise of a daily walk to the grocer.
Because they chose to live somewhere stupid that doesn't have one of life's necessities, food, nearby? Or maybe they haven't figured out how to bundle trips, like going grocery shopping while little Ryder is at soccer practice?
I don't know anyone who is a loyal customer to any meal kit service and is paying full price.
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.
Deciding what to cook at time is challenging.
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.
I'm sure I'm the reason every speaker at Microconf says don't do B2C.
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.
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.
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.
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