Say that the average "entree" for an Asian restaurant is $12, soup/app is $6. Lets pretend that there are two of you and both order app and entree. This means that the meal for 2 from an Asian restaurant is 2 x (12+6) = 36. We will let the cost be 33% i.e. restaurant barely hanging on which is equivalent of your family not buying anything on sale and every time randomly selecting the most expensive place to buy your ingredients.

This brings the input cost of a meal for two people (app or soup/entree each) to:

~33% of $36 = $12

Lets give a 50% upcharge for convenience of using a meal kit:

$12 + 0.5 * $12 = $18.

Ok, so we are at $18 for two people for the entire meal. Hell, lets increase margins further. Make it $20.

There's not a single meal kit company on the market at this time that sells kits for 2 people for $20 a meal on a non-trial basis.

WholeFoods, Wegmans, KeyFoods, ShopRite, Ahold are going to kill this entire "industry". They already have pre-packaged "dinner ready" containers that they are willing to sell at their cost + 10%. It is just a matter of time until they start marketing it.

The cost of WholeFoods "meal kit" for two people needed to make the standard Asian fare? About $11. That's the competition for meal kit companies. They need to compete with $11 spent at Whole Foods.

Currently they have about $10 worth of margin (currently 80% to 100%) on this before they are hitting price points of intro period of meal kit companies (nearly $20-$30 post intro). If they spend $3 of that margin on little things ( soy sauce, tahini paste, miso, oyster sauce, sprouts ) that are just for that meal they recreate meal kit cheaper, faster, fresher and most importantly from an already existing infrastructure that is designed to operate successfully on 5-10% margins.

If you want to play a different game, such as maximizing nutrition, maximizing taste or texture instead of appearance in an ad, meet some specific health goal, or try something that might (or might not) be enjoyable, then home cooking is better.

By analogy its like the difference between formulaic pulp fiction mass market paperbacks vs the total sum of all human literature ever written.

Delivery is more profitable, but profit does not imply better food. A bad HN car analogy is delivery/restaurant food is like a 70s american car before the foreign car invasion; someone's making money but its not a good product.

So I'd be looking at about 4x the cost if I ate a delivery pizza every day.

How do the figures compare in your area? Is delivery food radically cheaper?

A couple of footnotes: 1. Pizza is absurdly cheap, even for takeout food. I don't really understand how that works. 2. I prefer takeout over paying for delivery, which saves a lot. My favorite pizza places are in walking distance.

Too often we'd order Indian and realise they had added extra salt to preserve some 'overstock'

Also, invariably the content in takeaway food is the lowest cost produce.

If you care about where your food comes from and what goes into it you cut out the middleman.

The big one is that I know what's in it and can select/exclude ingredients based on my own criteria. Another big plus is that I can tweak the flavors to match my preferences.

Also the meals were generally good, but not spectacular. They take as long to prepare, you need to be at home to get the delivery. The only upside is not having to go shopping - and if you any non-standard ingredients I always have to go to the further bigger supermarket, not the 2 that are easy to walk to. The cost was maybe 0-20% higher than buying it yourself. More toward 0% with nice cuts of meat, more like 50% markup if you did some non-fancy pasta or pancakes or whatever - but you could choose to ignore those, to be fair.