[amigoingtodie]

There is money there.

People are willing to pay a premium for convenience.

Not having to travel to the grocery store, not having to wait in line, not getting mad at the person who cannot bag your groceries, and not having to buy excess amounts of ingredients, nor measuring them, I consider valuable.

Also, Plated offers meals w/ ingredients that would take me a full day of travel to source.

If somebody is already willing to travel to the store, why would grocery delivery increase their existing customer spend?

[ethbro]

The question is whether a grocery store doing meal prep can extract more profit than they already get on selling food. And I'm not convinced people are willing to pay enough to make that worth the meal prep companies' time.

Furthermore, we already have folks who are experts at that: we call them restaurants.

So I see meal prep from grocery stores (so losing the "secret organic small farm ingredients" sauce a lot of them bandy about) as being targeted at: (1) people who want a price point lower than restaurants, (2) are willing to pay more than grocery stores, (3) derive enough benefit from "cooking light" that they prefer meal kits over restaurants.

... That doesn't seem like a huge demographic. Which makes me think most of the meal companies are Uber-like unsustainable VC-propped up businesses, except without end-to-end automation on the horizon to save them.

With grocery delivery, the key would be regularizing logistics for some portion of their stock a la Amazon subscribe and save (and thereby optimizing inventory and saving on waste).