[mitraraman]

TastyBite is definitely a similar product/company. The key differentiators are:

- Our products are fresh and don't have any preservatives, meaning they must be refrigerated or frozen whereas TastyBite is shelf-stable for 9+ months. Our food is inherently fresher and tastes more homemade because of this.

- Our recipes are crowdsourced instead of developed in our kitchen. This ensures that the food is actually authentic with a homemade taste and we are able to expand into a much larger variety of products much quicker. For instance, we have a few recipes in our pipeline that you would be hard-pressed to find in TastyBite or even regular Indian restaurants because they are authentic to smaller regions of India.

- I can't say that you'll definitely like our product's taste better than TastyBite, but I do believe so :)

[murukesh_s]

From the amazon link to TastyBite's packaging, it looks like they also don't use preservatives (It's explicitly mentioned in the packaging that no preservatives are used). Good luck with your startup, but their shelf life of 9+ months doesn't seem to be due to use of preservatives, it could be due to the packaging process.

On a relative note, there are tons of such products in India and most of them taste sub par to home cooked food. One exception I found was Butter Chicken I used to buy regularly when I was spent some time in Newyork few years ago. You just have to freeze it until you open and then, heat it in microwave and ready to go. It tasted very good, but spoiled my stomach (I am bearing the burden even till today) due to the usage of preservatives. Anything that doesn't use preservative is a welcome addition.

One more, when you mentioned sustainable packaging, what does it mean? Is it paper or bio plastic? If so another +1.

https://www.amazon.com/Tasty-Bite-Chickpeas-Tomatoes-Microwa...

[EvilEndures]

So you are going to market as an upscale version of TastyBite with no preservatives that sells niche Indian food?

I wish you the best of luck with that.

Personally, I find a package of Vindaloo from TastyBite, some riced veggies, and a shredded chicken breast lasts me about 2 meals and is comparable to the price you are charging. I really only use TastyBite as a backpacking/on-the-go meal or as a quick curry out of laziness. I'm probably not your target market but shelf stability has alot going for it.

[mitraraman]

Your use case for TastyBit makes total sense. We're hoping to be a go-to option for a normal meal at home when you don't want to spend the time/money/energy on making a meal from scratch.

We are starting with Indian food but will hopefully be expanding to different cuisines, too!

[sjg007]

Maybe you could offer low(er) sodium versions. I find 20% daily sodium intake is too much for a dish.

[opportune]

That is perfectly normal for a meal with that many calories

[southerndrift]

Do you eat more than 5 dishes per day? How are you going to get your daily sodium dose?

[emodendroket]

Since most people are overshooting by huge margins, that'd be among the least of my worries.

[astura]

The evidence suggests most people are not overshooting their salt needs and especially not by huge margins.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/we-only-th...

>With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death... Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit” is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time. In the United States, for instance, it has remained constant for the last 50 years, despite 40 years of the eat-less-salt message. The average salt intake in these populations — what could be called the normal salt intake — was one and a half teaspoons a day, almost 50 percent above what federal agencies consider a safe upper limit for healthy Americans under 50, and more than double what the policy advises for those who aren’t so young or healthy. This consistency, between populations and over time, suggests that how much salt we eat is determined by physiological demands, not diet choices....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/we-ea...

>People tend to consume about the same amount of sodium no matter where they live, and this amount hasn’t changed much in decades. Those facts hint at the biological basis of our sodium appetite.... “Over the last five decades, salt content of commercial food in our food [in the United States] has gone up. But if you look at people’s 24-hour urinary sodium excretion, you see that the amounts of salt people consume have been constant,” he says. Irrespective of age, sex or race, between 1957 and 2003 Americans have been eating on average 3.5 grams of salt a day. “This suggests that we are somehow regulating the amount of salt we are eating,” Breslin says.... In one of Leshem’s studies, babies who had low concentrations of sodium in their blood in the first weeks of their lives grew up to be teenagers with a penchant for salt, even salt that is seemingly hidden in processed foods. “Even if you can’t taste the salt, apparently your body does. It’s working on an unconscious level to condition a preference for sodium,” Leshem explains.

[bogomipz]

>"Our products are fresh and don't have any preservatives,"

But Salt is probably the most common food preservative there is and the reason canned foods have such high levels of it.

Why is the salt content on many of these items through the roof for ready-made meals meant to be eaten soon after delivery.

[sir_akshay]

> don't have any preservatives

Just what I was looking for. Definitely going to use this service.