Obligatory post that you can make healthier, tastier meals for marginally more cost if you buy and boil frozen vegetables. If it doesn't taste good enough then add salt or whatever other freebies you can find.
You can eat for $3 a day!
EDIT: forgot to add, garlic is like 49 cents and will make the cheapest, tastiest, oil/salt free flavoring you've ever had. Chop very thin and throw it in. This isn't marketing BS, not many people are out there making money off of something that costs 49 cents and makes your breath smell like you've been warding off vampires!
And there's your startup idea: Foo'd (You can have "bar" there, too). Hackers must eat, too.
On a side-note: one of the greatest pieces of knowledge I've ever found was lyophilization, commonly called freeze-drying..
Soldiers eat MRE's (Meals, Ready to Eat). The technology is just amazingly clever: they sublimate the frozen water contained in the food. The water goes from solid phase to gaseous phase without going through a liquid phase.
MREs are quite tasty and good for survival situations (liquid water is extremely heavy and voluminous- hard to transport).
I haven't looked specifically at the salt and preservatives inside MREs but if they have a long shelf-life without those (like frozen veggies do), then I hope the industry grows.
Side-note, I'm actually reasonably sure that McDonalds fries have their taste and texture thanks to rapid freezing and reheating over the course of multiple weeks. The starches are broken down through this process as they are transfered from farm to truck to store to table.
I wish you luck if you want to compete with those companies but at least it is better than Soylent.
You can eat for $3 a day!
EDIT: forgot to add, garlic is like 49 cents and will make the cheapest, tastiest, oil/salt free flavoring you've ever had. Chop very thin and throw it in. This isn't marketing BS, not many people are out there making money off of something that costs 49 cents and makes your breath smell like you've been warding off vampires!