Rant: the solution is to learn how to read a recipe and cook without a paint by numbers erector set that has an unreasonable packaging:food ratio.
I’m fine with these services as a ‘gateway drug’ to independently cooking for yourself, but they’re insane as a long term thing.
(Not to mention that I have no idea how they stay viable in the long term, given their customer acquisition costs. If anyone makes it work in the long term it will be Amazon/Whole Foods.)
> OK with paying a non-trivial premium to have a lot of menu planning and shopping be handled by someone else
This is the one I've never been able to get past. For what these services cost, I can have someone else prepare my meal that will taste just as good or better. Why would I not do that?
I get if you're trying to learn to cook or something like that, but that only sounds like a temporary problem.
> I wish it was possible to buy decent home cooked food for a reasonable fee :(
I mean that’s pretty much what supermarkets sell right? Ready meals that can be heated, which are effectively cooked the same way as at the home but just on an industrial scale. Or pasta that’s pre-made and pre-filled and you just have to heat and add some sauce that’s already pre-made.
Im in the UK where we have services like Cook that are good quality meals you can heat up.
> The problem is that such a service has no real hope of taking the place of someone with actual cooking skill who knows you well and will tweak the recipe to your preferences, possibly without you even having to explicitly ask or remind her.
My wife and I have used meal-in-a-box services. We both tweak the recipes without reminders. They don't aim to replace a cook, because they still need a cook.
They mostly replace some of the effort of shopping, portioning, and some part of prepping, plus recipe discovery.
> If you can afford a meal-in-a-box service, why would you not just go to a restaurant
Because with a restaurant, I don't have a cook that will tweak to my tastes without detailed prompting.
> where the wait staff will do a decent job as a substitute for your own live-in cook
You are confusing front-of-house with back-of-house staff.
> Someone else decides what you will be eating and you have to do the cooking.
The ability to select from a menu of options prior to delivery would be an improvement for many of these services.
> People keep trying to deliver these experiences to your home, and having spent 5 years cooking in a restaurant and my entire childhood growing up on a farm I've reached the conclusion that it can't be done.
I think you (and I) might be in the minority here and not their intended market. I don't know anyone with experience cooking who would prefer any meal or grocery delivery services over just doing it themselves. They're probably only focused on the market whose only previous alternative is instant/frozen meals or takeout.
To us: Shitty delivery + mediocre quality = Net negative
To their intended market: Delivery on par with take out + quality that's better than take out = Net positive
> It takes out the entire creativity process of cooking, and for people who actually like cooking on a higher level also the process of selecting the right ingredients.
Did you ever try one of these services? Because that's the opposite of our experience. My wife is the cook in our family, and she loved it. She learned by example...seeing the quantities, getting an understanding of how to handle ingredients, practicing different cooking techniques, different variations, different flavors, etc., etc., etc...
Not only that, but we didn't get every meal from the service...she used what she learned to really branch out and make all kinds of things she never would have attempted in the past.
We always knew we were paying a premium for the convenience and variety, but it's a trade-off a lot of busy families are willing to make. It allowed us to prepare something at home instead of getting fast food or going to a restaurant, which would have been even more expensive.
> Maybe they make new recipes on a regular basis, so they're doing it once per recipe but still fairly often.
Then memorize the conversions. It’s not that hard. Or you know, plan ahead and convert before cooking. Or simply just own up to the fact that the only reason an Alexa is a “insane QOL improvement” for this use case is SOLELY because you’ve rationalized it as such. This horse is now more than sufficiently beaten, so I’m backing away.
> If you can afford Blue Apron, you can afford to buy 3x as much food and have control over your ingredient choice by just going to your goddamn supermarket.
If you ignore time costs, sure; pre-measured ingredients in the quantity necessary for the recipe provided is a huge time saver.
Yes, it creates waste, but it's not without utility.
> they already have most of these ingredients sitting in their fridge
That's exactly the issue - I don't have ingredients sitting in my fridge. I don't conveniently live near a large supermarket. I don't own a car. I cook mostly for myself, and very occasionally a few friends. When I come home from work late, the last thing I want to think about is spending almost an hour going to the store, browsing and buying stuff, coming back.
To do that, first I also have to decide what exactly to cook, which is a big enough ordeal. I don't want to cook something fancy, because that means I have to get many ingredients that I'll half-use and never touch again until they go bad. Usually the simple stuff is OK but gets repetitive after a while, and leftover ingredients are still a problem.
Meal delivery fixes all that - healthy, fresh and tasty meals by default, no thought or effort required.
I guess if there was an app that decided on a meal schedule and pre-filled an instacart order, I'd do that, but again it's hard to optimize leftover ingredients and costs per meal.
> Who doesn't like the sound of buying a home cooked meal from a neighbor?
It'd take a lot for me to consider it, because it creates all kinds of awkwardness if the quality is poor, and I'd have little reason to trust that they'd deliver consistent quality.
It'd need to be far cheaper than any alternative, and I'd need to not afford the alternatives, before I'd consider something like that.
> What I meant in my comment was that Blue Apron seems pitched toward people who don't normally cook (i.e. they eat out/get takeout) and are relatively insensitive to price but would consider doing so if they could push a button and have all the ingredients and instructions delivered.
Yeah, but those people are gonna realize this is still a lot of work and then end up wasting some of them, probably.
> Also, cooking at home doesn’t really make sense from an economic standpoint when you think about it.[1] Like everything else, cooking has economies of scale and specialization, so it’s cheaper to cook for many families at once.
Cheaper for the restaurant, yes. In don't see why it's cheaper for me if you add the restaurant's margin to the price.
Not even talking about taxes, labor, equipment, housing and food safety costs the restaurant has (and will pass on to me) that I don't have when I cook myself.
(The quality control I have is another point, though not a purely economic one)
>I've been cooking for 30 years, I've made a living out of it, and no it's not that simple. You talk like someone who has never cooked anything outside of a microwave.
Okay come on here, you know I did not post this to attack cooking as a profession. I have no doubt that you can make a tastier dish then I can.
My point was only that the basics of cooking is incredibly easy. One pot meals for example are exactly that, dump things in a pot and cook them. Even screwing up the order in something like Chili will still give you an eatable, tasty meal.
>You talk like someone who has never cooked anything outside of a microwave.
I have, and generally they act like it's a hard undertaking, so I give them easy recipes. Chili, Bratwurst, Curry, these are all meals that can be made in a limited number of dishes on the cheap. Serve with rice, and you can drastically cut your food cost.
EDIT: Honestly, I thought you were saying I hadn't talked to people who haven't cooked outside a microwave. I didn't realize you were actually attacking me. I've cooked quite a bit outside of a microwave, thank you.
> It’s not merely a matter of expense; when you consider the value of your friend’s time, plus the amortized cost of cookware, appliances, furniture, and housing—the home meal could be more expensive than the restaurant meal.
No it couldn't, this is complete bullshit. The amortization from a one time on something that you use every day for many years use is nothing.
This person sounds like he never actually cooks. That's all I'm saying.
> How the fuck have we gotten to the point where chopping up vegetables is a task too onerous for the "I'm too busy in my hustle to bother with this shit" types?
Most meal kits (definitely Blue Apron) still have you chopping up vegetables; they are taking care of portioning and grouping (shopping and household inventory management), not prepping. So your complaint here is a bit of a non-sequitur.
> Not everybody has 5 hours a day or a stay-at-home wife to cook their Whole Foods organic produce into a masterpiece of nutrition.
I'm guessing from this that you've never cooked in your life?
(Hint: Pretty much nobody cooks five hours a day unless it is their job. I mostly cook for myself, and I don't think I've ever really spent more than 30 minutes of active work on it).
> If you can afford a meal-in-a-box service, why would you not just go to a restaurant where the wait staff will do a decent job as a substitute for your own live-in cook previously known as The Wife?
I always say that these are for people with more money than time.
The reason they don't go to a restaurant is because you like cooking - or at least, you like the idea of being someone who cooks. But the ad copy is right - shopping sucks, finding recipes sucks, throwing away food because you bought too much kale sucks. (Not to mention, cooking a meal and eating it takes 45 minutes - depending on the restaurant, you might be in there for an hour, plus travel time. And remember, time is what they're short on.)
Even if you find four interesting recipes and buy all the ingredients, and cook them - this takes 3x the time than just using Blue Apron, at minimum - on Friday you've got a bunch of assorted ingredients and no idea what to do with them. (Because you're not a wifemom, and you don't know how to combine those things into a meal.)
But the person they're targeting doesn't want to learn to do that. They just want to buy a pre-configured lego set, and build a spaceship they can eat.
You are not their target audience. Neither am I. But it definitely, definitely exists.
> I didn't want to be indebted always to food delivery
I'd also suggest to actually calculate how much food delivery costs. I live in a relatively cheap European country, but even here getting two good meals delivered (i.e. not pizza or McD's) is close to 25€. Over a month that adds up to a not insignificant amount of my take home pay. Plus I find cooking is a really good way to forget about work and de-stress.
Some of the sister comments say you need a Dutch oven, knife sharpener, etc. This is honestly nonsense (see other comment threads about American culture over complicating recipes). The main tools I use are a knife and non-stick pan I got from a supermarket a few years ago (probably 15€ each) and they are perfectly fine. You don't need anything fancy to get started.
> asking professional cooks to switch to electric is ridiculous.
I agree with this specific point, but I do not agree with the justifications presented. The notion that gas somehow enables food to magically taste better does not sit well with me.
I do agree that there are certain cuisines that are more ideally prepared with an indirect heat source, but any skilled chef should be able to produce excellent outcomes regardless of pedantic concerns around their tools. The cooktop is just a source of heat energy at the end of the day. The way you manage that energy is part of the artform. Blaming tools for bad food would be like blaming visual studio because production went down.
Rant: the solution is to learn how to read a recipe and cook without a paint by numbers erector set that has an unreasonable packaging:food ratio.
I’m fine with these services as a ‘gateway drug’ to independently cooking for yourself, but they’re insane as a long term thing.
(Not to mention that I have no idea how they stay viable in the long term, given their customer acquisition costs. If anyone makes it work in the long term it will be Amazon/Whole Foods.)
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