[barkingcat]

I can imagine a UberChef where an Uber driver gets an order, and drives a freelance Chef to a freelance kitchen where the chef cooks the food (groceries provided by an uber shopper who can also get one-off ingredients from specialty stores), the chef cooks the food to order (steak, medium rare, or seafood boil for a party of 2, etc) - and then uber driver delivers the food.

[lotsofpulp]

If you’ve ever managed a food business, this is unimaginable.

[barkingcat]

only if you imagine small.

at Uber scale, they can get VC funding for $500-800 million, to hire the thousands of chefs that were laid off during the covid shutdowns. You can also imagine going international, so Uber Chef is actually thousands of chefs around the world. (hiring chefs without the overhead of restaurants - that's the play)

[selestify]

Why?

[vkou]

Because any food business already has insanely tight margins, and operates incredibly efficiently.

The scenario proposed by the grandparent poster adds so much waste and slack and overhead in the system that the family-owned-and-operated Thai kitchen on Main St. will eat Uber's lunch, and the Dominos franchise two doors down from it will pick through its bones.

[barkingcat]

the family operated kitchen on Main St. has rent, fire codes, safety equipment needs, some form of sanitation code/inspection to pass with the city.

Uber Chef ignores all of that and bypasses all overhead - you don't need a restaurant or even the physical location of a building to employ chefs to cook food. No need for health inspections or expensive fire suppression equipment. (you use people who want to rent their home kitchens out for cooking)

That's Uber's raison-d'etre - to bypass all legal restrictions and externalize all overhead in the way of getting the items to you.

This isn't a joke, this is what Uber did with their taxi service at the beginning as MVP so why not do it to food services as well?

[vkou]

The reason a restaurant wants the physical location of a building to cook food is because you can't make industrial quantities of food in your kitchen. Well, you can try, but it's going to be slow, inefficient, and your kitchen will become unusable quite quickly.

[Psyonic]

If you use your home kitchen commercially, you'll still need to get health inspections, etc. Even camp kitchens at Burning Man (https://burningman.org/event/preparation/health-safety/permi...) get visits from health inspectors.

[ithinkinstereo]

I recall some East-Bay based startup a few years ago that basically tried this model.

They allowed individuals to sell food / operate as a pop-up restaurant.

IIRC, it got closed down because of health and food-safety related regulations.

A more sustainable version of this business model is basically a food truck / cart.

[lotsofpulp]

Food business is laborious, hard work that needs to be done at undesirable times (when others are out enjoying themselves). It’s hard enough to find quality workers via humans, I find it hilarious that one would be able to do it via software.

It’s also a high liability business, especially when dealing with animal products.

Not to mention prepared food is barely affordable for the vast majority even with the tiny margins that exist today, so the only people who would be able to afford such an on demand personalized chef service surely could just afford their own chef?