Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

It seems that there's more potential for meaningful differentiation than in the case of the Groupon-type services but the rush to be one of the few winners who IPO and damn the customer acquisition costs seem like valid points.

These services just seem very niche-y to me. I'm not really the target market but, for any given service, there's a pretty narrow profile of cost-sensitivity, interest in prepping/cooking but not just buying ingredients, ability to plan a week out, etc.

Finally, if there were a real clamor for meal kits, what's to keep Whole Foods or whoever from just assembling their own meal kits?

View on HN

Kroger is trialing meal kits. CEO sounded positive on the quarterly phone call.

http://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/hamilton-county/cincinna...

Edit: Disclosure -- I own a small amount of Kroger stock.

Giant/Peapod has had them for a year.

Publix has had them for a while, too, which means that in the Publix/Kroger borderlands of Atlanta (where I live) there are two supermarket meal kit choices.

> Finally, if there were a real clamor for meal kits, what's to keep Whole Foods or whoever from just assembling their own meal kits?

Home delivery seems to be one of the key factors, so as long as Whole Foods/etc can offer home delivery, then yeah there's nothing stopping them.

> so as long as Whole Foods/etc can offer home delivery, then yeah there's nothing stopping them

If only a company with a battle tested home delivery network would acquire them...

Whole Foods themselves do home delivery. Amazon do not.

Amazon Prime Fresh is a thing; they absolutely do home delivery.

The delivery is outsourced and not handled directly by Amazon.

Why is it relevant if the delivery is done by contractors of some kind or by the company directly? Amazon probably even has closer control over their network than WF over Instacart, which isn't exclusive to them.

Isn't this is true of (almost) everything else Amazon sells too?

[I'm ignoring AWS and other products or services that don't need to be physically delivered.]

Technically Whole Foods does not themselves do delivery (it's Instacart), while Amazon actually does (Fresh)... Amazon's also working on grocery pickup, which seems perfect for meal kits.

Okay, looks like that is true today, but Whole Foods was doing home delivery before Instacart even existed, at least in NYC.

Amazon Fresh outsources their actual delivery, as well, so no points for that one.

Cambridge as well. Grocers that cater to a lot of customers who walk to the store have been delivering since before there was an Internet.

> Amazon Fresh outsources their actual delivery, as well, so no points for that one.

In my neighborhood there's an Amazon delivery truck that drops off Amazon bags by people who have Amazon uniforms on... Perhaps they're 1099, but for all intents and purposes it is Amazon doing the delivery.

Which even leaving Amazon out of the picture for now, people can often get today either directly or through Instacart. Services like Blue Apron are admittedly somewhat lower friction though.

I do think there's some market for urban stores that people walk to carrying this type of product. And I've seen at least one example.

> Finally, if there were a real clamor for meal kits, what's to keep Whole Foods or whoever from just assembling their own meal kits?

Pre-portioned, pre-prepped,low-cooking-effort packaged food products are already a big item in various forms for supermarkets. As are fully cooked meals. No doubt meal packs will be too, of they are popular.

OTOH, Grocery stores selling fully-cooked meals haven't killed restaurants (not even takeout-focussed restaurants).

I agree. It seems like these will eventually lose to just normal automated grocery delivery. You will always need other food than just the kits even if they are cost competitive in NYC, etc.

It's not just acquiring the ingredients; there's value in having someone else plan the menu for you. Deciding what to cook can be a challenge! I host an ~8 person dinner party roughly once a week, and it is not unusual for me to spend as much time digging through recipes, trying to decide what to cook, as I put into actually preparing the meal.

Yes, of course you need other groceries beyond the meal kit itself, but that's not the point - the point is that you've paid the meal service to deal with all the boring parts of the process, which often includes the decision-making, so you can just enjoy the cooking and eating.

I think too much ambition to be able to home-cook every kind of food under the sun leads to much of this trouble. Focus on a narrower set of things—say, 2-3 national/regional/ethnic cuisines, and/or cooking techniques—and most of the difficulty, expense, and even planning of home cooking goes away.

The wildly globe-hopping table of the home cook is a recent, and kinda silly, development. You can get plenty of variety without trying to prepare meals from every continent.

(this goes out the window if it's a major hobby, obviously, but in that case so should complaints about its difficulty/inconvenience, which are entirely self-imposed)

For me it's a hobby and I do like to try new recipes/styles (while recognizing that there are some things I don't do enough to get good at or that just take more work than I'm willing to put in). But I mostly agree with you. I keep an admittedly fairly thick binder of recipes that I probably use a good 75% of the time I even need a recipe. And there are lots of simple things I can throw together in 15 minutes given the ingredients.

So where's the moat for the meal service vs something like a recipe pick + shopping list service directly linked to the delivering grocery? That seems like something Amazon or some other grocery delivery service could rapidly expand into. On the other hand, perhaps the quality of the curation and customer relationship does count for something here too.

Convienience. Imagine the following smartphone app workflow:

On first use answer some questions that provide information about dietary needs. Drag some sliders around to indicate preferences for simplicity, cost, ,quality, convenience. Some people want beans and rice because they're cheap, some people want fancier meals and care less about price. Some people are cooking for four and want meals that scale well. Some people

Each wee checkbox the meals you want to eat in accordance with your schedule for the upcoming week.

Press go and get a bunch of meals paired with a shopping list

click on the meals to revise as necessary (e.g regenerate on you don't like or mark an item on the list of required items as "I'll source this myself")

Add to cart, press go, wait for brown truck.

Something like that could be a hit with single men and college students.

>It's not just acquiring the ingredients; there's value in having someone else plan the menu for you.

That's where I see the value. People spend a lot of effort figuring out how to eat a balanced diet while optimizing for low (enough) cost or just close enough. Offloading the work of planning a balanced diet on a weekly level is something many people would pay a small premium for.

The kits have a value beyond the food, they teach you how to be more confident about your cooking. Americans are terrible cooks on average, they don't learn good cooking skills at home because their parents are not very good cooks either (gross generalization but accurate if you compare the US with for example Italy).

My wife now can cook a much wider variety of meals after a few months of meal kits. It also has reduced dramatically the thinking it required to plan meals in advance. If grocery stores want to compete they will have to work with their providers to create smaller packages of items to assemble and a team to design and forecast demand for different types of meals. Not impossible but definitely not easy, I see acquisitions happening in this space.

When I was a student, the local Sainsbury's supermarket had a selection of recipe cards by the entrance. Here's the front of a newer version [1], the back is presumably something like this [2].

I wouldn't say they taught me to cook, I didn't learn any new techniques. But, I did get a lot of ideas from them, and it led us to eating a wider variety of food.

I'm now curious -- what do typical American university students eat? Do they cook, or are all meals provided? (Surely not at weekends?)

[1] http://laurenmclean.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/01_Sharwo...

[2] https://recipes.sainsburys.co.uk/recipes/main-courses/easy-c...

There's cooking and there's cooking.

Most Americans, including students, cook standard American food such as hamburgers, hot dogs, eggs, spaghetti, roast chicken, ramen, steak etc., as well as a lot of canned soups, frozen vegetables, and boxed casserole mixes.

But these kits are for people who want to eat something novel every meal, and certainly not mundane working class food. I mean, you don't need a recipe for a hamburger.

The time I tried Blue Apron, one of the dishes was a gourmet hamburger which took some ridiculous amount of time to prep and I didn't even think it was that good. And PeachDish has Grass-fed Beef hot dogs with ketchup and mustard on its menu--which sort of blew my mind.

So you'd be surprised. But, for the most part, these services justify their relatively high prices with recipes that may look a bit intimidating for many people to pull together on their own.

Thanks.

For us, and I think we were probably a bit better cooks than is normal, hamburgers would count as a lazy meal, assuming you mean cooking something like [1] from the fresh meat section.

Hot dogs, eggs alone, or ramen -- no; this is food for when you've arrived home alone drunk at 4:30. Or woken up hungover.

Roast chicken or steak is fine, so long as there's also some vegetables and some kind of sauce.

Average meals would be things like curries or stir-fries made with a pre-prepared sauce or spice mix, chicken/turkey fricassees, risottos, or casseroles. I think we discovered fairly quickly that £3 tetra pak wine improved most dishes, so long as one didn't drink it.

The Blue Apron recipes have fancier ingredients than we would have bought when we were 18-22, and a little more effort in the sauces. Looking at things like [2] and [3], the skill required was well within what we could make, although we'd probably use dried herbs, cheaper vegetables (canned sweetcorn, normal size tomatoes), and normal meat rather than anything special.

In fact, the "Fresh Basil Fettuccine" is almost exactly like our "use up what's left in the fridge" meal.

[1] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=29239931...

[2] https://www.blueapron.com/recipes/seared-chicken-creamy-past...

[3] https://www.blueapron.com/recipes/fresh-basil-fettuccine-pas...

Universities usually have a dining hall that's open 7 days a week. Students that live on campus will eat there for the majority of their meals because dorms usually don't have much in the way of food storage or prep areas beyond a mini fridge and microwave. Off campus students have more options.

Dorms in the UK usually have a decent kitchen. Mine was like this [1] (the adjacent building to the one pictured), which is nicer than the houses affordable to students in London.

Only one dorm offered cooked evening meals, and then only Monday-Friday. It was a fair bit more expensive to take this dorm.

In any case, most universities only offer dorms for the first year.

[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/ImageCropToolT4/imageTool/uploade...

That may be the case in the US and/or other countries. Most of the accommodation in the UK is self catering however, private rooms with a shared kitchen between 5-10 people.

What if they become automated grocery delivery?

It's an interesting leverage point, since there's obviously a [possibly smaller-than-they-want] market. But the expansion into automated grocery will be a matter of luck & timing. Unless you're Amazon [in which case it's persistence]

This. Amazon Fresh already lets local markets sell their raw ingredients, cooked foods, half-cooked, or just prepped stuff. Those markets could (might already) just include some instructions on the package. The familiar search/browse UI and "no subscription" factor will be a huge AF advantage IMO. (I have used AF about 5 times, all good experiences so far, but just for ingredients, not prepared foods)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com