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Re:A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry by marssaxman on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @02:11PM (#14647762)
It's not just acquiring the ingredients; there's value in having someone else plan the menu for you. Deciding what to cook can be a challenge! I host an ~8 person dinner party roughly once a week, and it is not unusual for me to spend as much time digging through recipes, trying to decide what to cook, as I put into actually preparing the meal.

Yes, of course you need other groceries beyond the meal kit itself, but that's not the point - the point is that you've paid the meal service to deal with all the boring parts of the process, which often includes the decision-making, so you can just enjoy the cooking and eating.

Re:A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry by ashark on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @02:34PM (#14647986)
I think too much ambition to be able to home-cook every kind of food under the sun leads to much of this trouble. Focus on a narrower set of things—say, 2-3 national/regional/ethnic cuisines, and/or cooking techniques—and most of the difficulty, expense, and even planning of home cooking goes away.

The wildly globe-hopping table of the home cook is a recent, and kinda silly, development. You can get plenty of variety without trying to prepare meals from every continent.

(this goes out the window if it's a major hobby, obviously, but in that case so should complaints about its difficulty/inconvenience, which are entirely self-imposed)

Re:A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry by ghaff on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @02:49PM (#14648120)
For me it's a hobby and I do like to try new recipes/styles (while recognizing that there are some things I don't do enough to get good at or that just take more work than I'm willing to put in). But I mostly agree with you. I keep an admittedly fairly thick binder of recipes that I probably use a good 75% of the time I even need a recipe. And there are lots of simple things I can throw together in 15 minutes given the ingredients.
Re:A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry by digikata on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @02:56PM (#14648167)
So where's the moat for the meal service vs something like a recipe pick + shopping list service directly linked to the delivering grocery? That seems like something Amazon or some other grocery delivery service could rapidly expand into. On the other hand, perhaps the quality of the curation and customer relationship does count for something here too.
Re:A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry by dsfyu404ed on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @03:23PM (#14648459)
Convienience. Imagine the following smartphone app workflow:

On first use answer some questions that provide information about dietary needs. Drag some sliders around to indicate preferences for simplicity, cost, ,quality, convenience. Some people want beans and rice because they're cheap, some people want fancier meals and care less about price. Some people are cooking for four and want meals that scale well. Some people

Each wee checkbox the meals you want to eat in accordance with your schedule for the upcoming week.

Press go and get a bunch of meals paired with a shopping list

click on the meals to revise as necessary (e.g regenerate on you don't like or mark an item on the list of required items as "I'll source this myself")

Add to cart, press go, wait for brown truck.

Something like that could be a hit with single men and college students.

Re:A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry by dsfyu404ed on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @03:14PM (#14648355)
>It's not just acquiring the ingredients; there's value in having someone else plan the menu for you.

That's where I see the value. People spend a lot of effort figuring out how to eat a balanced diet while optimizing for low (enough) cost or just close enough. Offloading the work of planning a balanced diet on a weekly level is something many people would pay a small premium for.