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Comment by yowlingcat | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious about whether deliverability (and temperature control/container insulation) has any impact on /which/ kind of bowl style meals you'll target. 15 minutes out, there's not too much of an impact. But once you hit 45 minutes - 1hr or beyond, certain meals start to get off limits or sub-par. Mediterranean is nice because because it's tasty, healthy, and keeps well, especially as parts of it make sense cold (pickled veggies, etc). Curries reheat with relatively little flavor lost. But what about soups? And which kinds of grain bowls are more or less amenable to the outer margins of deliverability?

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You're spot on about a lot of things. Most of our customers right now pick up rather than ordering delivery, so the lag time is relatively short. But as we start adding concepts and doing delivery, we'll be thinking a lot about exactly these kinds of questions.

I hear ya. It's definitely a fascinating question, and it's just such a /big/ problem. My dad's a food scientist, and he'd tell me about Norman Borlaug, underscoring that the reason he became a food scientist is because in his opinion, by far, the largest contributors to alleviating human suffering in modern times have been people who help solve the food problem.

On that note, is nutrition accessibility something that's priority on a short-term to medium-term basis on your strategic roadmap? I have no idea how something like this would work and integrate into programs like SNAP et al, but I can only imagine that once this technology matures a bit, it could seriously impact nutrition for at risk populations which are the ones who are most vulnerable to the vicious cycle of malnutrition anyways.

100% – making healthy food accessible to everyone is a big part of why we're doing this.

That's always a problem. Only food which can be reheated can survive Instacart/Doordash/Uber Eats delivery.

Seems like more of a limitation of the container than anything. Certainly in recent times, vaccine supply chain has pushed vacuum flask technology forward significantly to reduce the need for cold chain. What I wonder is if further commodification of this couldn't also be applied to food delivery.

Just a decade ago, I would've scoffed if someone told me my phone could have as powerful a GPU as my desktop. And yet, here we are today!

It's not that it's technically impossible. Or even hard. The US Army has had large vacuum flasks for delivering hot food to troops in the field since Vietnam. It's that gig-type delivery services aren't going to use it. They haven't even reached the insulated bag level yet.

Perhaps not today, but it's a competitive, operationally heavy, low margin business. Doordash is public now. The growth has to come from somewhere, no?

The fundamental problem is that if you deliver in a good container, you have to get the container back. That's an alien concept in modern delivery services.

True, either that or your disposable container technology has to level up to being "good enough" while still maintaining cost parity.

The closest we can probably come to that is styrofoam, which creates another problem.

I wonder if an automated setup like this would benefit from protected atmosphere (eg co2, or nitrogen) in a simple shrinkwrap/sealed container?

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