Food startup startup battlefield: How and with whom food delivery services compete with recipes
In our blog on Geektimes, we not only talk about the development of technologies used in the restaurant business (for example, the restaurant automation system Jowi ), but also consider various issues related to the organization of food projects in general. We have already talked about the pros and cons of table reservation services and the problems of restaurant mobile applications .
Another popular direction in creating food startups is the launch of projects for delivering food ingredients to your home with recipes for further cooking - you can read about famous Russian startups in this area, for example, here. Today, using the example of similar American projects, we will talk about how similar services can compete with each other.
Replacement grocery stores
The material TechCrunch reporter asked the founder of food delivery project with recipes Munchery those he sees the main competitor of the business. As it turned out, the greatest danger to such projects is not their clones, but ordinary grocery stores.
According to the journalist, despite the fact that startups Blue Apron, Plated and HelloFresh offer essentially the same services, “the real competition in this area today is food stores,” said Munchery director and co-founder Tri Tran. “People used to cook on their own,” and they like it. “They always say they would like to cook more often, but they don’t have enough time to cook.”
Cooking time and taste
One of the main competitive advantages in the field of services for the delivery of ingredients for cooking is the speed with which customers can ultimately assemble a prepared lunch from the proposed “details”.
The popular American food startup Food Apron , which received hundreds of millions of dollars of venture funding (http://recode.net/2015/06/09/blue-apron-confirms-new-135-million-investment-led-by-fidelity/ ), declares that the user can prepare food in no more than 35 minutes.
You can drag users of such a serious player by offering them significant time savings - the new Munchery service claims that all dishes from its menu can be prepared in 15 minutes.
Tech Crunch Browser Megan Rose Dickey Tested both mentioned projects:
Although Blue Apron claims that it takes no more than 35 minutes to cook their food, I have never been able to meet this short deadline. A couple of weeks ago, my friend and I spent more than an hour preparing one of the Blue Apron dishes. So when I heard about the new Munchery offer , I decided it was worth a try.
Today before lunch, I received from Munchery a detailed description of Vietnamese-style beef from The Slanted Door and La Boulangerie chocolate cake.
Cooking lunch took 16 minutes - just a minute more than the stated time. All the necessary products delivered by Munchery were already washed, peeled and cut, which greatly simplified the process. All I had to do was season the beef with spices and fry it with vegetables.
Original menu
As a rule, “lunch designers” offer the opportunity to choose different dishes - from the classic restaurant menu for gourmets, or from the diet menu for lovers of “light” food. In addition, some companies provide special menus for vegetarians, vegans, children, or for pregnant women and nursing mothers.
The presence of original dishes that can be popular in a certain region or country also helps to stand out from the crowd of similar projects — for example, one of the Russian services offers dishes such as “hungover hodgepodge with smoked meats”. The final choice of a service for food delivery depends on the dishes presented in its menu and the speed of their preparation - the main reasons why users resort to the help of such projects are time saving and the ability to “cook independently” complex dishes, albeit according to the described algorithm.
And if it is not so difficult to offer a menu of interesting dishes, then making sure that they can be prepared quickly, and the resulting result could be enjoyed with pleasure, is already much more difficult.