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Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

I have had all kinds of food delivered but the quality really suffers. Pho, BBQ, burgers, teriyaki, burritos, none of it really works for delivery. I have never had great delivery food. It’s always inferior to the restaurant, even from take-out places. Delivery pizza and Chinese places offer dishes specifically suited to survive the rigors of delivery. That’s why their food is mediocre in person. It’s optimized for delivery.

Big food delivery is a fundamentally doomed business because the existing companies are treating this like a logistics problem to be solved by technology when really it’s a product problem. To make this business work you need to sell cheap, simple food that’s still satisfying. That means delivery-specific dishes.

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I still don't understand though why people do delivery pizza when decent-quality frozen pizza is often far cheaper than delivery, and it comes out of one's oven piping hot. Unless we're considering folks without ovens.

It’s an immediate convenience when you don’t already have something easy. Something comes up and spoils your plans, you have a bad day, you order some pizza. It’s not something you do all the time.

Delivery pizza is a sustainable business when it’s the only place around that will deliver you hot and ready food right now. Everyone else wins on quality.

Perhaps I've been buying the wrong brands (though I've certainly tried several expensive ones. Frozen and fresh), but I've never been able to cook pizza in my own oven that's as good as even Domino's, let alone somewhere better

I don't think I've ever gotten delivery pizza that also wasn't piping hot, and it didn't require me to pre-buy pizzas ahead of time and the quality is much better from delivery than frozen. I have a local brand of frozen that I really like but they are essentially $10+ now and still aren't actually as good as fresh.

Do you often have enough frozens to feed a party of 10?

Pizza delivery is rarely done for one or two eaters. Only makes sense at >5

I've not had a frozen pizza that was as good as a mid-quality pizza place.

Even the better ones cheap out on toppings, size and you don't get as much choice in what you have.

I like frozen pizza well enough, and I'll get it from time-to-time, but if I'm going to get pizza, it's more likely to be takeout, because it just tends to be better and take a similar amount of time. It really is expensive though, so it's not something I have often.

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