This reminds me of how business types have somehow convinced themselves that the success of franchises like Chipotle is due to "choice", that people really care about choice in fast food nowadays. As if being able to pick from different types of beans was the key differentiator, and not making a popular type of food (not otherwise available at a national chain) and doing it pretty well.
A more interesting, much smaller risk would've been something like a sketch comedy show where every clip is under a minute (Tiktok style). Yeah a ton of amateurs are already doing stuff like that, but - hire them!
I find Chipotle really interesting as a company, because they are sort of the most mass market expression of these foodie ideas. Watching them struggle with ingredient quality as they've gone to massive scale is really interesting. They still retain their most important characteristics and their ability to train thousands of people to properly cook food the way they do is amazing. As an entrepreneur I'm just consistently impressed.
As a "foodie" (god I hate that word tho), I very often make it my lunch.
Or perhaps re-engineer a food that is already popular in the marketplace with high amounts of good fats in it. Re-market it and you've got a new business.
Food is not a startup company, people's tastes are shaped by their culture/religion, childhood favorites and decades in between. Expecting exponential growth is unrealistic how good the product is, and financial considerations quickly come into play once you run out of early adopters. Whoever is up to the challenge must prepare for a lot of patience, optimizing production on thin margins, tweaking product for different recipes and demographics and lots of advertisement and community outreach. Having the product on average grocery shelves is already amazing success for this category, now the hard work begins.
Right after I read this, my immediate reaction was to feel kind of annoyed at the author. A little superficially, no tech or design talent in house, no food industry experience, and not much marketing and sales expertise, so what exactly does he bring to the table here, besides really wanting a startup?
Also, this idea hits on one of those things that lots of people really want to believe that they would do - cook their own healthy, organic, gourmet, etc food - but very few will actually take much initiative to do on their own. That doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't viable, but it does mean that your big challenge is going to be marketing and conversions - getting people to go beyond saying things that basically mean "I really want to believe that I am the kind of person who would use something like this, even though I'm not", and actually buy the product regularly.
After thinking about it some more and reading some of the posts on here, this might be a viable idea, but it's going to need a lot better marketing to go anywhere. A few ideas, some stolen from other posts, mostly in an attempt to exercise my own marketing-think muscles:
Make the product stickier - try to sell a recurring plan of a meal a week that has to be explicitly cancelled. Or at least email people who have ordered regularly to suggest new meals for them. You do have new, promoted meals, right?
Have a spread of products, from things that just require heating, barely a step above microwavable, though mild prep, up to things that may require an hour or 2 in the kitchen to make. See which ones sell the best, and emphasize those.
Try to partner with anybody involved in cooking or recipes with an audience in the area. If they're on the web, make it super easy for them to submit ingredient lists for their recipes to you, then an easy way for them to put a link on their site for "Get the ingredients for my [whatever] delivered to your door today with Dinnr!", with affiliate payments for orders. Now you're helping them monetize their sites too, so they have a good incentive to work with you.
In person, too. There's probably some cooking classes in the area. Get those classes to plug your site for their students to get ingredients for an affiliate fee.
Get some cooking experts on staff, and start producing your own youtube videos and blog content on how to cook things, with an emphasis on explaining the basics for newbie cooks. It would probably help you make sure you're actually getting good quality ingredients too.
Make social connections. Make a way for people to tell their friends on FaceTwitInstaPint that they just cooked X, and it was awesome! It might even be good to make it so that they can only order basic things at first, and they get points or something from cooking them, which will eventually make them eligible to order the more advanced things. They can brag about how many Dinnr points they have. They can see that they're either getting more than the other guy, so they can think they're better than them, or they aren't getting as much as somebody else, so they need to order more stuff. Then you can suggest new meals, too, based on their skill level and their preferences.
The real pain point isn't shopping, getting ingredients, or throwing away unused ingredients. It's wanting to be seen to their social circle as the kind of person who cooks awesome stuff. Figure out how to hit that, and you'll probably sell.
Well, you know what they say about making omelettes. We might have to break a few GoodEggs before discovering the secret formula to make this work. I wonder how the UK's GoodEggs, Farmdrop (http://www.farmdrop.co.uk/) will do.
GoodEggs clearly attempted to scale too quickly - perhaps more like a normal tech startup would. Logistics is a killer though and scale doesn't quite work the same way. It sounds like they didn't do too much prototyping and testing of real world systems and processes even if they did build fantastic software.
Specialist food marketplaces focusing less on fresh food and more on "artisan" food are another breed of food startups that I think have more milage (I should hope so, I work for one). Not working with shot shelf-life products or purely local producers could make all the difference. Without the nightmare of logistics with perishable stock I wonder if the likes of Yumbles (https://www.yumbles.com) and Caprera (https://caprera.com - the startup I work for) will be able to avoid the pitfalls of GoodEggs.
I hope there is room for startups like these to succeed; with them, there's real potential to give independent producers a wider audience and really transform the kinds of foods we all have access to.
I got to that part and felt like the article had become an allegory about our field; I was simultaneously saddened at the idea of being a professional cook in a kitchen where goat cheese was too "niche" and enthralled at the idea of problem-solving food in an setting where the decision to use guacamole might exhaust the global supply of avocados. It made me think about the choice between working at, say, Google and a startup.
I think this burger restaurant metaphor is... really not great.
Imagine instead that you've spent two years in a kitchen, working nonstop on a completely new type of food. You've discovered how to make something unprecedented, but it took endless rounds of tweaking ingredients and taste-testing. You open a restaurant to sell your food, and it succeeds massively.
... unfortunately for you, the main ingredients are just flour, eggs, sugar and milk, and for whatever reason, it's pretty easy to reverse-engineer your recipe. Within half a year, a dozen copycat restaurants are all making the same thing, except maybe they sprinkle some powdered sugar or salsa on top.
Now, I don't know what you'd do in the restaurant industry to litigate against that. There's probably some viable path, though, because it's obvious that you created something entirely new, and it can't exist without a specific recipe and method.
In the video game industry, though, it's pretty difficult. Patents don't work very well. The legal system hasn't been kind to people trying to claim ownership of gameplay types, even if it's blatantly obvious that the described gameplay wouldn't exist without that person. Platforms also really don't give a shit (see the recent thread about Apple allowing through dozens of Wordle clones, but that's only the latest in a very long history of App Store clones).
I think it's just a narrow and pretty uncharitable view of game dev that would lead to the thought that it's like opening a restaurant, much less one making some food type that has existed for a century. Creating a new gameplay mechanic is not at all like tossing a new type of pickle on a sandwich.
Having a pain point and validating it with a set of other users is a good vector for success. While that is true I have seen/heard/read many ideas that are brainstormed in a room and selected at random becoming widely successful.
Anyway, regarding food you could have thought about a machine/robot based solution, at least to begin with :)
While this product clearly doesn't meet the risk-reward profile for you (or me), do you not enjoy the idea that a few thousand people are about start an interesting experiment?
One though I had was, if Ben and Jerry are adored for making a product that is delightful but contributes to the obesity epidemic, why can we not also praise people trying to do the opposite?
I like that you can customize the food to your body type, nutritional needs, etc. But don’t you think your customers would get bored eating the same thing (even with minor variations) every day?
What if it all ends up as chic commercial fusion food artisanally and algorithmically optimized for flavor and appeal to the popular taste of the moment?
Munchery tried this but, at least IMO, the food quality was not great. They had to use a lot of salt and preservatives to make the food hold and transport from their central kitchen. Also they did a lot of things to improve efficiency and cut costs which made the food taste unnatural...
A more interesting, much smaller risk would've been something like a sketch comedy show where every clip is under a minute (Tiktok style). Yeah a ton of amateurs are already doing stuff like that, but - hire them!
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