mitraraman

Thanks for bringing this up -- food safety is super important! We work out of a licensed commercial kitchen with all the proper permits and licenses in place. All of our cooks have gone through extensive food safety training and we have quarterly FDA inspections (we just passed our last one with flying colors)! Our ingredients come from local distributors who are extremely trusted and vetted to provide the best quality ingredients. We also double inspect all of the ingredients to make sure they are up to our standards.

You can find a full ingredient list on each product's page under 'Benefits'.

Thank you! We agree that quality is a lot more than in the ingredients and makes a huge difference.

That's a great suggestion about the community. We are experimenting with community building through our recipe curators, who send in their recipes to be turned into Buttermilk products. They receive 5% of the proceeds of their product sales, too. There are tons of great opportunities for this!

Thank you for your suggestions, and appreciate your concerns.

- Sodium comes directly from the spices of the recipes. We don't add any for preservation or any other reasons, but we are currently working on low-sodium options for all of our meals! - Our pricing is based on the cost it takes to produce each dish. We make everything from scratch just as the home recipe calls for and include fresh vegetables, seasoning, spices, etc. Our products are more comparable to restaurant meals ($7-10) than instant meals ($2-4), although we fall closer to the instant/microwaveable meals range ($4-6). - Bulk options is a great idea and something we will definitely consider!

Thank you for your feedback!

Don't mean to sound hung up on the preservatives, just stating a fact of their processes and what sets us apart. Added preservatives of any kind alter the food and taste at the benefit of having a longer shelf-life.

The sodium content from our products comes from the spices in the recipes themselves. Indian spices especially have a large amount of salt (which makes them so flavorful and spicy!), but we do not add any additional salt for preservation. We are also currently working on low-sodium options!

Super interesting, thank you!

Hey! Thanks for the message. Our products are all priced at $4.50-6, which is quite reasonable for a full meal that includes vegetables, protein, spices, etc.

We're working on a few things that will help us automate a lot of the repeated processes but still ensure the same homemade recipes are being followed correctly. It's definitely a hard problem but one we're working hard to solve!

I believe there are similar services in some larger cities, but those usually have higher prices ($10-14 per meal) and aren't able to scale with the demand as necessary.

We hope to be the go-to for authentic food when the existing options don't cut it and you don't have the time or energy to make it yourself!

Thank you! Happy to hear it.

It's definitely a subjective thing! It's hard to find authentic Indian food that tastes good, is easy to make, and affordable. That's where we come in :)

Your use case for TastyBit makes total sense. We're hoping to be a go-to option for a normal meal at home when you don't want to spend the time/money/energy on making a meal from scratch.

We are starting with Indian food but will hopefully be expanding to different cuisines, too!

Thank you so much for pointing that out! We will fix it ASAP.

Thank you! Looking forward to your feedback + will definitely update the nutrition info soon!

Thank you!! Everyone needs good Indian food :) Hope you try it out!

Yes! - Our packets are made from 4"x6" aluminum, FDA-approved packaging. - We ship in thermal bubble mailers (also aluminum) inside of recyclable boxes with compostable liners. - We include ice packs in each order that are reusable. You can also send those back to us if you don't want to keep them!

Yes definitely. We are actively working on creating low-sodium options of these dishes. Unfortunately, the sodium comes from the traditional Indian spices used in each dish so it's an intricate process to adjust the levels and keep the same quality and taste.

Yes! Most of our starting dishes are South Indian and we are expanding into other regions soon! Our goal is to make authentic dishes more accessible so happy to do so :)

We don't actually dry or dehydrate our products in any way, but can definitely include more information on how we create and package our products.

Thank you, happy to make the shopping experience easier for you!

Very sorry to hear about that issue and thank you for the debugging instructions. We will look into it immediately!

Appreciate the responses!

- The microwaveable complete meals are definitely more similar to our products, but those are once again shelf-stable and lack in taste and nutrition. We will be doing a live comparison of our Chana Masala vs. the MTR Chana Masala to show how different it is in amount of product, look, smell, taste and nutrition.

- The oil that they include is definitely a type of preservative, and they use packaging engineering called retort packaging. This is very similar to vacuum sealing where you are drying up the product to remove the nutritional value. I think we could agree that there's a pretty big difference between MTR paneer masala and a homemade paneer masala. I would say that our products are similar if not the same as if you made it from scratch.

- We are e-commerce delivery, not on-demand. The difference between ordering from us vs. an Indian restaurant would be price-point (most dishes start at $7-10).

- Taste is definitely subjective!

TastyBite is definitely a similar product/company. The key differentiators are:

- Our products are fresh and don't have any preservatives, meaning they must be refrigerated or frozen whereas TastyBite is shelf-stable for 9+ months. Our food is inherently fresher and tastes more homemade because of this.

- Our recipes are crowdsourced instead of developed in our kitchen. This ensures that the food is actually authentic with a homemade taste and we are able to expand into a much larger variety of products much quicker. For instance, we have a few recipes in our pipeline that you would be hard-pressed to find in TastyBite or even regular Indian restaurants because they are authentic to smaller regions of India.

- I can't say that you'll definitely like our product's taste better than TastyBite, but I do believe so :)

We don't alter our recipes at all, so the sodium amount is unfortunately what's in our products to begin with. We are actively working on a low-sodium option to be released in the Fall!

Noted. Will definitely update the website accordingly. Thank you!!

HPP = High Pressure Processing or Pasturization. It's essentially doing the same thing to the product as dehydration would, but maintaining the freshness and quality of the food. While dehydration makes a product shelf-stable for an extended period of time, HPP food still requires refrigeration but can stay fresh for up to 90 days (sometimes more)!

No, definitely not! It just so happens that our first dishes ended up being vegan. We have a few recipes in our pipeline that are not strictly vegan but have the same convenience factor as all our current dishes.

Yes, that is true. Our products are completely fresh and don't include preservatives so you get the same convenience as Tasty Bite, but the quality and freshness of a meal kit or making it from scratch. We'd argue that the taste is better, too ;)

Thank you! Definitely -- we are a Seattle-based company so we have a huge community of campers and hikers eating our meals! Our products are not actually dehydrated, so they are great for 1-day hiking and camping excursions but not for much longer unless you're able to keep them cool.

That is a great point, and we will definitely update our website to make the nutritional information more readable.

Our packaging is 100% recyclable and compostable! We take eco-friendly packaging very seriously. We use a single 4"x6" aluminum packet for each product, and ship all orders in thermal bubble mailers with compostable liners in recyclable boxes. Orders come with 2-4 gel packs that are all reusable and can be sent back to us if you don't need them.

Thank you, really happy you like our website and product! There's a few key differences between our products and the existing Indian-based products which I've called out in a different response.

That's a good point about the target market. There's definitely a sizable portion of immigrants who continue to cook from scratch. There's also an emerging part of the market who are first/second-generation and don't cook at home as often -- either because they don't know how, don't have all the ingredients on hand, or don't have the time/patience. We are aiming to serve this population, and also be a nice-to-have for the former group of people!

That is a great call out on the Upma and a mistake on our end (that we accidentally added last night!). We will fix this immediately. I also really like your feedback about putting all the ingredients and nutritional information on a single page. Thank you!

Great feedback. We will update our website accordingly!

Thank you for your feedback! Note about why we're called Buttermilk below.

Re: meat-based options, we have added suggestions for meat to mix in with each dish under 'How to eat'! We plan on adding more in-depth recipes in the near future.