[baron816]

If I were to do a start up right now, I think I would do a meal kit start up (not that I actually know what I’m doing). There’s still a market for it—people really like the kits—it’s the business model that’s the problem. I think the delivery part is where they go wrong. It’s too expensive to cold pack these things every day and deliver them to individual addresses.

I’d try to partner with restaurants to prepare the meal kits. Restaurants have a staff that’s trained to handle food, plus a kitchen to do it safely, and time during the day when they’re not busy. Oh, and they already received regular large food deliveries. Restaurants are well distributed enough that it’s easy enough for people to pick up a kit on the way home from work.

From the point of the startup, there’s not intense capital costs, you just have organize orders and pickups and ensure quality.

[giarc]

I think the cost to subsidize this program is too much. I have countless flyers for $50 off first order etc etc.

I think if I were to enter this space, I would start a B2B meal prep where I have staff go into grocery stores, put together boxes that the stores own customers can buy. I'm not talking about the prepped food, but boxes with all the ingredients. Stores retain some lost customers from these meal kits and people get the experience of cooking something new.

[bm1362]

I'd buy meal kits from Whole Foods, etc as a way to learn to cook. You could probably get me to even pay subscription fee if the quality was good and you can deliver via the Whole Foods home delivery couriers. You have all the ingredients available, seems incredibly easy to do for a big innovative chain.

[trimbo]

You've outlined why grocery stores are going to take over this market, just like they did for roasted chickens in the 90s. I posted about this a year ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14706793