Hacker News Reader

Comment by lorenzobr | Hacker News Reader

What really kills meal-kit companies is just one thing: churn.

If you look at some published data from a while ago, Blue Apron has 15% user retention after one year, Hello Fresh 11%.

As a consumer, at first might sound a good idea and convenient to order pre-made food you don't have to cook but soon you realise it gets quite expensive compared to just get your groceries delivered and cook.

I don't know in the US, but in Europe for an average family of 3/4 members using meal kit companies is bloody expensive in the long run and you can't even get meals for the entire week.

Also if you get 2/3 meals a week, then you have to shop for the remaining days and you inevitably end up wasting food.

Personally, I don't event think you can compare meal-kit companies with the likes of UberEats or Deliveroo. The latter can reach economies of scale far more easier than the former.

View on HN

I have tried many of the meal box companies and the real problem is quality. The food quality is usually not high and the recipes are basic. I imagine that even novice, unskilled cooks will realize after a couple of months that they don't need the box.

> after a couple of months that they don't need the box.

Maybe that's a good thing and something that these companies should push for? Maybe they already do? Sell it as a service for three months, one up front price, one'ish meal a day that you prepare and cook with the idea that this is a learning activity rather than following strict directions or assembly. As you move further through your cooking education the meals become more complex. I would think you could charge more for this while having better/more ingredients and having a smaller customer base.

They can't. They have a native local competitor that stocks everything they do and is located within a few blocks ( or a few exits on a road ). The competitor is called "a grocery store". There's typically more than one of them in the area.

The total possible market that meal kit companies can extract value from is very small - it is not only people who have more money than they have time and people who do not know how to leverage money to get others to do the entire process for them.

> I don't know in the US, but in Europe for an average family of 3/4 members using meal kit companies is bloody expensive in the long run and you can't even get meals for the entire week.

This is definitely true in the US as well, even in areas with slightly higher prices for groceries in which meal-kit companies still charge their normal prices. You could eat out and get a main dish in one of a variety of restaurants in any city in the US for the price of the meal-kits I found.

There is a difference between meal kit companies like Hello Fresh, Blue Apron, and Plated and fully-prepared companies like Thistle or Freshly. The value-prop of not grocery shopping is there for both but one doesn't require cooking, which is important to some people and one takes the guesswork out of cooking to hopefully make you a better cook, which is important to some other group of people. There is also a difference between those companies and delivery services. Even though UberEats will deliver you freshly made food, you have to order it every day and need to wait for it to be delivered. With these other services, the packages are just delivered to your door in a box and you only need to place the order once a week.

Delivery is expensive, so these services are out of reach for your average consumer. However, when you think about it, the people most likely to get a ton of value from prepared foods are people most likely to have a busy job where they make a higher wage than the average consumer.

Additionally, user-retention metrics in weekly subscription services can be misleading. If you're still ordering 52 cycles after signing up, you're likely a whale for the service.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com