So if you liken it to getting take-out, that isn't that crazy, maybe a little high. They also seem to have a lot of variety, and might help people segway into doing their own cooking.
I can see the value in it. If you compare it to buying the raw ingredients yourself and then cooking them, yes, it is expensive. If you compare it to take-out (which is a convenience commodity, like this) it is within the ballpark (depends which takeout).
Also locally to me there isn't much selection of healthy take-out. I mean if you want a burger then you have tons of selection. You might even be able to find a solid salad. But beyond that? Meh.
I tried plated for a while. It was super expensive and came with insane amount of packaging. Like 1 onion was carefully packed in 5 layers of packaging. It was just absurd and silly.
My favorite was a Blue Apron recipe that called for a "farm fresh egg", which came in a cardboard box, which had a plastic egg tray inside, with a single (cracked) egg in it.
I'm fine having sorrel or scallops pre-packaged for me, but getting a triple-boxed egg or an onion wrapped in bubble tape just felt sad.
It seems like ideally you could link up your pantry management app (and your menu planning, to know what's spoken for) and they could just send you the difference.
I'd be happier with the low-tech solution of assuming you're not some feral monster who doesn't have eggs or flour in the house.
Oddly, the one thing they don't provide for you is cooking oil. Who are these high-income loners living in a bare apartment with just a single bottle of olive oil?
You've never run out of eggs? Certainly I'd be happy enough with that approach, but not happier I think. Particularly if the pantry management stuff itself provided value.
I do keep eggs in my fridge; that doesn't mean I never run out (my egg use is bursty). Whether that's relevant probably depends much on the time frame these kits are acquired over.
Well, part of that is up to different personalities. I am a disorganized fellow and I dislike internet-of-things type stuff a lot; other people aren't/don't.
To me the salient difference is between stuff I can easily pick up at the corner store (eggs, milk, flour) and things that it really is helpful to get in a kit box (premeasured hoisin sauce, blue potatoes, daikon radish).
For sure - and like I said to tptacek, it depends a bit how easy the kits are to obtain relative to groceries. If they magically appear on my doorstep the same day when I otherwise don't have time to run to the store and cook, that's worlds different than if I have to plan for them as much as any other meal.
I agree! I'm the founder of Gobble, and I can't stand packaging waste. With vacuum sealing and having only 4 - 5 ingredient components per dinner for two, the ingredients are compressed and flattened and the packaging is very minimal for us, 4 - 5 thin plastic sheets.
The key is re-using the boxes, ice packs, and insulation liners, all of which we are setting up with our new delivery+return system for delivering a box and picking up a box each time we visit a customer.
My experience in trying Blue Apron (a sous-chef simulator):
* extravagant, simply incredible amounts of packaging. There was easily a 4:1 ratio of packaging to food. I had to stop using the service out of packaging shame
* The produce was often not that good because it needs to withstand transport and storage. The tomatoes were faint pink and could have probably made it through a baseball game without a lot of damage
* It made me try recipes and ingredients that I wasn't used to, which I enjoyed. I feel like it's a kind of Guitar Hero for cooking.
My understanding is that Gobble is taking this stuff one step further, by doing the prep work. I'll be interested to see how they address the problem of having stuff be freshly prepared and transportable/storable at the same time.
This stuff gets marketed at beginning cooks, which seems unwise. If you're just getting started, fancy restaurant meals are not the way to go. Make an omelette or two.
Omelets are actually hard for a non experienced cook since it is SOOOO easy to overcook eggs and omelets specifically require a bit of intuition (at least for me).
Yeah! I meant that it's a great thing to practice on because the difference between a good omelette and a bad one is so vast, starting with the same exact ingredients. And eggs are cheap to practice on.
Most of cooking is about mastering a few fundamental skills and developing a feel for how food reacts to heat. Better to ruin your first dozen omelettes (and similar simple dishes) and build up your base of experience than try to autotune your way through these elaborate dinners.
However - I don't think these services are trying to teach you how to cook any more than boxed mac and cheese is. They are for the "I want to have a home cooked meal but I don't want to make it." types.
Speaking of eggs, I didn't know what I was doing wrong with them for a long time, they weren't bad by any means, just everyone else did them better. Then I was having a conversation with my mom about how she makes better eggs than me. She told me "eggs are done before they are done." Now I cook eggs like a champ.
I completely agree with you. But I think a number of the recipes (at least the ones I tried) actually had tricky bits that required a little experience. I can see how it would frustrate people who were complete beginners.
My own egg epiphany was "cook them on the lowest heat you can, until you think the waiting will make you insane."
But you also make an excellent point—ask your mom (or some other person in your life who cooks well)!
The big problem I had with omelets was egg-to-pan ratio; all the timing problems I had went away when I bought a small nonstick pan just for eggs. Three beaten eggs to one pan, fold when the edges look dry, reasonably bulletproof.
Using my original (larger) pan, the eggs cooked through so quickly that I had a very narrow window to hit.
I think the most important bit of advice on this thread though is: plan to throw a couple away. Eggs are very cheap. An easy way to get hung up cooking is to assume you only get one shot.
That's exactly what I meant by intuition! Once you've done successful omelets you just know the proper egg/pan ratio that works for you without even consciously thinking about it.
I've made a few cheese omelets of my own and they were great. I have no cooking experience and almost never cook beyond overeasy eggs or grilled cheese.
When cooking omelettes, I usually add a little water to the pan and steam the eggs after flipping and adding the veggies and cheese. The water would then moisten the eggs, making it hard to over-cook them.
I probably cooked 50+ Blue Apron meals so far. I absolutely love it.
* Packaging: it just takes a bit of planning to deal with. Personally I fold the cardboard box and it fits nicely in my outdoor garbage can for paper (which is recycled), and I make sure the ice packs are re-used by giving them away[1]. So I only have to trash the foam (approximately 1x8 feet of foam every week).
* Quality: I am blown away by the quality of the meals. It is similar or better in taste to what is offered by a trendy restaurant rated 3½-4 stars on Yelp in my area (San Francisco). Even my wife would agree and she is a picky eater :) Yes sometimes I receive a lettuce or parsley that does not looks that great, but it is rare (<3-5% of the ingredients).
* Difficulty: I find the Blue Apron instructions very easy to follow, and I only had very basic cooking experience before (frying steaks, making rice and pasta, etc). I have never messed up the cooking of a single meal or found any one to be difficult. Just follow the instructions precisely and I believe anyone can do it.
[1] I accumulate 4 weeks's worth of ice packs, then put them in a box on my doorstep and post them on Craigslist in the "free stuff" section - someone usually picks them up in the next 12-24 hours.
In case anyone was thinking of signing up for this, I found a 50% off first week promo link. You could probably find one googling, but it was like the third result I tried. This page might have a referral deal or something in it but the link was http://promotions.kinja.com/fresh-ingredient-recipe-delivery...
In particular, the packaging is a big concern for me. I'm actually in the works of landing a huge partnership that will allow us to easily pick up all of our packaging when we drop of each week's current box all across the state (just like the milkman). We're so excited to be able to re-use all the boxes, ice packs, and insulation. We'd be the first in the industry to take this big step. Look out for this announcement in the next couple weeks :)
I've never signed up for their $$$ervice but I've tried a couple of their recipes. Sure, a few of them have hard-to-find ingredients or a spice blend that they don't share details on, but the rest are very possible to source yourself.
Looking at the recipes a lot look very good but I would tweak every single one to my tastes so having the ingredients sent would be pointless, I'd either have stuff I don't need or stuff I need but don't have. Which completely defeats the purpose. If I wanted "someone else's food I [mostly] can't modify" I would get takeout. I guess that's why these services don't appeal to me, for me cooking means I'm in complete control. Recipes are suggestions.
The one thing that drives me nuts about these kits is that they're all designed for two people or more. I live alone. Am I forever destined to eat TV dinners to feed myself? Am I supposed to eat out, because it's cheaper than mailing the box? :/
There's all kinds of things you can make for one... I make one person meals all the time, or two person meals and save the other half for lunch the next day. Hell I'll make 5 person meals like a pan of lasagna and eat that for the next 3-4 days. You usually wanna toss leftovers past the 3 day mark.
My meals even where there's excess that's tossed cost generally 1-3 dollars per sitting.
Buy deli cups, make braise dishes, deli cup the leftovers, have amazing lunches for a week. You can vary the carb and veg with each serving and get a variety of different meals out of a single low-effort evening at the oven: over pasta, as a sandwich, in an omelet, as a potato hash, saucing chicken breasts.
A great thing about braises is that they're bulletproof. Almost the only thing you can do to mess them up is to pull them too early. 4-6 hours in a slow oven. Done when you bother to check and the meat pulls easily with a fork. We do carbonnade overnight.
No knife skills required.
... not that I'm recommending the kit. Don't do that, if only because it'll drive you to try to cook fussy stuff.
When cooking for one, I used to cook a couple nights/week the staples, and then reheat them. For example, I'd make a cous-cous salad thing on Sunday night, then pair it with a fresh cooked fish or chicken on Monday/Tuesday, maybe swap out the veggie (usually something steamed). That way, I only cooked the really quick/easy things on a given night. On wed, I'd cook a fancy rice dish that would end up making it into lunch for Thursday/Friday.
It's all about a little planning and getting into the habit.
I found that while cooking, I could watch some tv shows, or listen to some pod casts, etc...
It seems like a much better idea for 99% of people is:
1. Learn three or four fast single-pan recipes so that you can do them without this hand-holding.
2. Eat more things out of cans, for days you want variety beyond your standard pan dishes- Just because it's in a can does NOT mean it's unhealthy, if you choose the right cans.
3. Take the money you saved in steps #1 and #2 and use it to eat meals prepared by a real chef in a real restaurant, with real fresh ingredients.
My guess is that most people that would try this have fallen into believing that they simply can't cook, and that eventually they will realize that they don't need a service for them to make the same meals at home.
I don't quite get the point of all these services; one of the joys of cooking is shopping for fresh ingredients, choosing them, prepping them.
Putting pre-cut ingredients in a pan for a specified amount of time is not "cooking".
You can get pretty good / excellent meals that have been separately cooked sous-vide in a factory, that you simply reheat in a microwave -- they're much faster, much cheaper, probably better tasting than these pretend-cook meals (and just as healthy).
These kinds of services kinda make me think of "TV Dinner 2.0." Same exact concept but trying to class it up and make it more acceptable.
For me the "annoying" part of cooking is actually the mess I make that I have to clean up afterwards. Not even spills, just dirty pans/knives/cutting boards. Of course I usually end up with a little bit of spill anyways, I'm messier in the kitchen than most others.
If I was going to spend $12/person a meal I would get delivery or takeout especially since I would have to clean the counters and do dishes afterwards.
Yeah, I was wondering the same thing, why not just order a takeaway from the restaurant instead if you just don't want to cook, it's almost the same price and it's also pre-cooked.
There are countless recipes in cookbooks throughout my house that I've never tried because they require somewhat unique or rare ingredients that households are very unlikely to have available day to day.
It can be a very specific cut of meat. A less common herb (fresh). "Ethnic" spices. A distinct type of dairy (which can be simply something like whole milk. I rarely use this, and never buy it in a normal shopping trip), such as a unique type of cheese. A strange vegetable. A very specific oil (even something like peanut or sesame oil would be odd in a normal house, though the moment you open it the expiry clock starts ticking). Etc. And if I do buy them, I usually have to buy them in such a quantity that it makes the meal very expensive, because I know the end result is that I throw out 9/10ths of it, having used the small amount in the recipe.
I usually just skip the recipe, not trusting my judgment on potential substitutions. In the odd case I do pursue it, the shopping experience is usually time consuming and brutal, and very expensive, to make one meal.
There is a business, or at least social, model somewhere in this. e.g. a "menu club" where everyone works through the recipes of a Jamie Oliver book, ideally in a more sustainable manner -- e.g. everyone stops by a location with their own containers and takes the right quantity from the bulk and economically purchased ingredients, taking a little vial of peanut oil, an eggplant, three anchovies, and on and on.
The chopping for me requires the most attention. It takes me a while to rinse all the vegetables, chop them, set them aside, and then clean and dry my cutting board, colander, and knives.
Then I have to trim up the protein, season that and set aside, wash those utensils, and move on to actually cooking.
Any meal with more than three major ingredients, meat, veg, and starch, I save for the weekend.
We tried the Shitake Miso meal last night, it was tasty and fun to make. We work long hours, so it was a nice treat to cook without the time sink of shopping and prepping.
I made that meal myself last night! It's one of my personal favorites. It's good to hear you found the recipe fun and quick. If you have any other questions or suggestions for me personally, don't hesitate to reach out at ooshma@gobble.com. Perhaps a favorite dish that you want to see on the menu soon? :)
I wonder if it is better for these food start-ups to perhaps sell a food starter package? Something like all of the woks, knives, and small amounts of spices you would need for all recipes. But then, I'm not sure exactly how they would make money after that.
Great idea -- We're actually making a few starter kits: one of basic cooking equipment and one of spices for our customers. You can either buy or "earn" the kits as you go along with Gobble. It's exciting to see kitchen-averse folks take an interest in basic cooking and help everyone get up and running.
Really? That is a useless (to me) article that contains a whole bunch of expensive stuff you don't need.
Your kitchen isn't my kitchen. The stuff I find important for my needs isn't the stuff you find important for your needs.
No, you don't have to spend almost $30 on a damn strainer!
I'm a big fan of only buying the stuff you actually need when you need it, not the stuff you might need in the future because someone else told you you need it. If you find yourself needing a blender, buy one. If you find the food you like to cook doesn't require one, don't buy one.
This guy says get a stand mixer and not a slow cooker! WHOA THERE! I use a slow cooker all the time and never once in my life did I think about getting a stand mixer. The other thing is I (and probably 90% of everyone else I know) don't have room for a stand mixer. I don't even know a single person who has one due to their bulkiness and expense.
And a kitchen scale because "Professional chefs measure many things by weight rather than volume since ingredient density can vary?" Um, well I mostly guesstimate my ingredients and my food tastes just as good. I even guesstimate some things when baking which people say will RUIN YOUR CAKE but I never had a problem with it. I also have never used a wooden spoon in my kitchen.
My experience with Gobble went as follows: I was going to do their trial but bailed before completing checkout because their terms automatically subscribe you for weekly meals. I got a call a few days later saying that I was being sent the meals anyway and that, also, they weren't sure which meals I was supposed to be sent so they might be wrong. No offer to refund my money. They said the meals would be arriving the next day. It's now over a week later and I never received the incorrect meals that I never actually ordered but was charged for. I emailed customer service again about this and haven't heard back. Caveat emptor.
I'm not a lawyer, but doesn't fraud imply intent? In this case, it sounds like an accident (caused by a bug). Still serious of course but based on ooshma's post above it has already been addressed.
I haven't dove down into fraud statutes too much but I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that when someone takes payment they have a legal obligation to verify the credit card holder actually authorized the payment they collect. At the very least Visa,etc,'s lawyers will care. There are also a whole bunch of other statutes that can apply too.
I sorted things out yesterday, but one thing I do have to note - every time I have called customer service (which I've had to do a number of times, because emails are never answered), whenever I am promised a callback, it never happens. Same thing again yesterday.
You never think "Do X every week" is going to be difficult to code, but man, when I actually coded that ... a lot of things can go wrong in subtle ways that you don't really consider in advance until a customer clicks something or uses features in a sequence nobody's ever stumbled onto before.
As for the credit card thing - easily explained as "Submitted info to Stripe, but not the actual form, backend system got confused"
MVP LYFE!
Disclaimer: I never worked at Gobble, I don't know if this is what's happening, but I painfully know how this can happen
Which is why companies with thousands of employees and a bunch of money launch buggy products to the market every day and scrappy startups shouldn't. Right?
For some reason I can't replay to your other comment. Weird.
I build modern async web apps for a living and it's not that hard. I ran eCommerce for a medium-size software company (as a part of my duties) for several years. If you find an ecommerce application difficult to maintain, it is probably a result of poor design.
I too build modern async web apps for a living and I think anyone who says it's not hard (or at least complex) is either lying or in denial.
And there's eCommerce and then there's eCommerce. Recurring weekly subscriptions with moving parts are hard. Amazon Subscribe&Save is a mess and I haven't heard of anyone who's had a good experience with that. And Amazon probably devoted much more engineering power to that problem than people at a startup can.
Sometimes hardness isn't a result of poor design, but the result of things being complex. Especially if (as in a startup) your definition of "things" is changing rapidly because you're still not sure what exactly you are building.
I've build web applications of all different sizes from the pretty simple to the really friggin complex (and I'm talking really really complex, not just some damn reoccurring food order). I'm more than familiar with it.
If you are doing something so brain dead as charging customers who abandon the checkout process that means there is a huge problem with how you are running your shop. When you charge a CC you have to make absolutely SURE you get permission first, that's like really important. From a moral standpoint, a legal standpoint, and a "I want to keep my agreements with MasterCard/Visa/etc" standpoint.
It was really great to chat with you on the phone just now. I'm so immensely sorry for the completely botched souffle that was your experience with us pre-launch. We fixed the website bug you encountered immediately, and equally important -- we've just hired two new "Gobble Sous Chefs" (our term for your assistant or customer service) that will start tomorrow and next week to properly handle any and all questions or issues for our community. Being available to our customers is my #1 priority (after helping you make insanely delicious meals), and you won't be encountering any lack of service in the future. Separately, if you ever want to try a few meals on the house, I would be so happy to personally deliver meals for you and say hello.
This reminds me how important customer service is. I was not entire convinced about Gobble, but willing to try the trial. I saw this comment, and decided against the trial based solely on sboak's experience.
Sort of a neat service but at $12/meal, a bit on the high side. And amazingly inefficient with respect to packaging & delivery.
It seems that what people might want are 1) simple guide to what basics I should have in the kitchen (spices, oils, etc) and 2) simple recipes where I buy the chicken/fish/veggies fresh. Probably not a fundable idea and likely already exists (although I haven't quite seen it).
My wife's fledgling startup does something like this -- she makes meal kits with all dry ingredients and instructions that are designed to encourage experimentation with recipes. Her initial set is Indian cuisine, but she is working on other cuisines as well http://recipesack.com
(I know I risk being down-voted, but this seems relevant.)
Also note http://forage.co which is more of recreating the famous restaurant dishes (they do all the lengthy prep and then ship it to you to do the final prep).
This was my first thought, and it's always my first thought when I read about meal delivery. For $24 my wife and I can go 5 minutes from our house and get good Mexican, Thai or Chinese (and serviceable Italian) made for us and brought to a table, and we get to walk away from the mess.
This service isn't for you. I can see a market for seemingly fresh healthy ingredients for a well portioned meal shipped to the customer's doorstep to be cooked up in 10 minutes on demand during the week.
I can cook a microwave burrito or a ramen package if I chose to much quicker and considerably cheaper than you can get a burrito or chinese takeout. This doesn't mean taquerias are a ridiculous concept.
i ordered these meals last week; the quality was better than any meal service i've tried, including fully cooked (micrawave/oven reheat) meals. The problem with other meal services is that when meat and fish are pre-cooked and then re-heated in a microwave, they get rubbery; Gobble solves this problem by doing everything EXCEPT the actually cooking. People on this thread say that the prep work is part of the joy of cooking; to them, I say that Gobble is not for you. Gobble is for people that want to eat delicious, fresh-tasting meals, but on the time-line/convenience of take-out. Price-point is also similar to take-out. Gobble is not intended to be an alternative to home-cooking, it's an alternative for take-out. And for that purpose, it's awesome. One suggestion to the Gobble team: list ingredients, especially allergens (on the website as well as in the package). We had to call every night to find out whether each dish contained egg, because we have a severe allergy in the family.
Thanks for ordering the meals and for the support! You're right -- Gobble is a much fresher and healthier alternative to takeout that takes even less time than ordering/waiting and costs the same or less. You just need one pan :)
About allergies: We are adding that information to next week's menu (among other exciting improvements!). Stay tuned and you'll see a full ingredient list and allergy labels starting tomorrow.
So I tried it and here is the upside compared to takeout:
- It tastes better. There IS a dramatic difference in the taste when something is served hot straight from the pan as opposed to something that had been cooked 45 minutes ago and has been winding its way towards you in a brown bag
- You can control ingredients like butter/oil/spice etc. You can add/remove and customize it to your taste.
- It is fun. You can cook something tasty and unique and interesting and learn how to cook new dishes.
You can't really customize. You can customize at an extremely superficial level unless you go to the store and buy your own ingredients and are ok with throwing out the ingredients they sent you that you don't like. Which completely defeats the purpose. You can customize takeout the same amount, perhaps even more "hold the onions" "light on the spice" "sub beans for beef" "sub onions for mushrooms" I do it ALL THE TIME.
Perhaps because to me if I am going to cook something, I'm going to cook something that is to my tastes as well as how much cooking as I'm feeling like doing today. I see recipes as suggestions more than anything.
I also don't like my food hot. It tastes much much better when you let it sit for 10 minutes or so.
Just goes to show: the more The Current Bubble continues to purr and hum along, the more gimmicky-er, patently implausible (business-wise) & just plain wasteful the business models become.
Here is my take on all these pre - made food services.
I love cooking, but I'm not great at it yet and probably never will be a master chef. Over the year, I have learned (the hard way sometimes) ingredients that work well together and one that don't. The whole experience of going to the supermarket, preparing food and cooking it at is somewhat therapeutic really. The best part is when it works out so well you feel satisfied...something like programming and you get it to work, bug free.
I'm sure we here have heard the of the phrase "Cooking is like programming", it really is in a way.
But I guess we live in an age where people think its a chore. Cooking is a craft, just like every other skill. Take some time out and learn the basics of cooking and you will be fine.
It'll be interesting to see how food delivery plays out over the next few years.
From a quick Crunchbase & YC search, I see Instacart, Sprig, Chefday, Munchery, Plated, PlateJoy, Spoonrocket, Postmates, Goldbely, Doordash, Plate, Zerocater, Delivery. com, Orderup, Tasteio, Zesty, Ezcater, Table Runner, and Gobble.
I think most of these players serve similar geographies, and while they all have their own unique spin (which usually involves speed of delivery, pricing, or ingredients vs. already cooked), that seems like a lot of competition in an industry with tiny margins.
Working nonstop at my computer has always made eating 3 meals a day tough for me[1]. Even with OrderAhead and DoorDash, nearby restaurants get played out fast.
I first tried Gobble when I saw a trial card over at Zombie Runner on California Ave. Back then, Gobble delivered fully cooked dinners at 7pm on weekday nights. I used Gobble about 3 nights a week for a few months. Dinner went from something I had to figure out, to the highlight of my evening. We'd get to eat something new and delicious a few times a week without playing out local restaurants or the handful of dishes that we'd normally cook. Gobble actually improved my relationship with my girlfriend.
At the time, my primary complaint was that I had to reheat the food and eat out of a takeout container.
About a month ago, Gobble switched to delivering these meal kits. Having just met Ooshma in person, I (naturally) gave her a really hard time about this. Cooking takes too long and I have other things to do.
There were fewer choices than before, I needed to wash a pan (sometimes two, if pasta was involved), and I needed to actually get off my computer to help make dinner happen.
That was 15 meals ago.
I still think about the first Gobble dinner kit I made in back August. I actually woke up the next morning thinking about how good perfectly the fresh mozzarella balanced the spicy kick of the chili flakes.
Dinner-Kits Gobble is the best Gobble yet. Now I actually eat dinner like a real person. Sometimes dinner takes a little longer than 10 minutes to prepare, end to end, and sometimes it needs more than one pan, but it ends up tasting so good that I feel stupid complaining about either of those things.
Out of 15 meals, about 8 of them have been wish-there-were-more-leftovers-amazing about 5 of them were good enough order again, and a couple were just ok. All of them were worth way more than the $12 and ~10 minutes of effort.
I have never had a problem with Gobble that a message to Ooshma didn't fix.
Yesterday I got an email from Gobble with 3 invites for 100% free boxes. I've got two left. I think you still need to sign up to use it, but I'm pretty sure you can cancel immediately. If you want one of the invites, first come, first served.
[1] Unless a double espresso and a nice piece of bread counts as a meal.
I cook up to three times a day and eat five meals every day. My schedule literally revolves around food. And yes, I work nonstop at my computer all day.
Therefore I'd love to take you up on the Gobble invite offer. I need to try this. -> swizec@swizec.com
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadSo if you liken it to getting take-out, that isn't that crazy, maybe a little high. They also seem to have a lot of variety, and might help people segway into doing their own cooking.
I can see the value in it. If you compare it to buying the raw ingredients yourself and then cooking them, yes, it is expensive. If you compare it to take-out (which is a convenience commodity, like this) it is within the ballpark (depends which takeout).
Also locally to me there isn't much selection of healthy take-out. I mean if you want a burger then you have tons of selection. You might even be able to find a solid salad. But beyond that? Meh.
anyway. carry on.
I'm fine having sorrel or scallops pre-packaged for me, but getting a triple-boxed egg or an onion wrapped in bubble tape just felt sad.
Oddly, the one thing they don't provide for you is cooking oil. Who are these high-income loners living in a bare apartment with just a single bottle of olive oil?
Just keep a dozen eggs in your fridge all the time.
To me the salient difference is between stuff I can easily pick up at the corner store (eggs, milk, flour) and things that it really is helpful to get in a kit box (premeasured hoisin sauce, blue potatoes, daikon radish).
The key is re-using the boxes, ice packs, and insulation liners, all of which we are setting up with our new delivery+return system for delivering a box and picking up a box each time we visit a customer.
* extravagant, simply incredible amounts of packaging. There was easily a 4:1 ratio of packaging to food. I had to stop using the service out of packaging shame
* The produce was often not that good because it needs to withstand transport and storage. The tomatoes were faint pink and could have probably made it through a baseball game without a lot of damage
* It made me try recipes and ingredients that I wasn't used to, which I enjoyed. I feel like it's a kind of Guitar Hero for cooking.
My understanding is that Gobble is taking this stuff one step further, by doing the prep work. I'll be interested to see how they address the problem of having stuff be freshly prepared and transportable/storable at the same time.
This stuff gets marketed at beginning cooks, which seems unwise. If you're just getting started, fancy restaurant meals are not the way to go. Make an omelette or two.
Most of cooking is about mastering a few fundamental skills and developing a feel for how food reacts to heat. Better to ruin your first dozen omelettes (and similar simple dishes) and build up your base of experience than try to autotune your way through these elaborate dinners.
However - I don't think these services are trying to teach you how to cook any more than boxed mac and cheese is. They are for the "I want to have a home cooked meal but I don't want to make it." types.
Speaking of eggs, I didn't know what I was doing wrong with them for a long time, they weren't bad by any means, just everyone else did them better. Then I was having a conversation with my mom about how she makes better eggs than me. She told me "eggs are done before they are done." Now I cook eggs like a champ.
My own egg epiphany was "cook them on the lowest heat you can, until you think the waiting will make you insane."
But you also make an excellent point—ask your mom (or some other person in your life who cooks well)!
Using my original (larger) pan, the eggs cooked through so quickly that I had a very narrow window to hit.
I think the most important bit of advice on this thread though is: plan to throw a couple away. Eggs are very cheap. An easy way to get hung up cooking is to assume you only get one shot.
* Packaging: it just takes a bit of planning to deal with. Personally I fold the cardboard box and it fits nicely in my outdoor garbage can for paper (which is recycled), and I make sure the ice packs are re-used by giving them away[1]. So I only have to trash the foam (approximately 1x8 feet of foam every week).
* Quality: I am blown away by the quality of the meals. It is similar or better in taste to what is offered by a trendy restaurant rated 3½-4 stars on Yelp in my area (San Francisco). Even my wife would agree and she is a picky eater :) Yes sometimes I receive a lettuce or parsley that does not looks that great, but it is rare (<3-5% of the ingredients).
* Difficulty: I find the Blue Apron instructions very easy to follow, and I only had very basic cooking experience before (frying steaks, making rice and pasta, etc). I have never messed up the cooking of a single meal or found any one to be difficult. Just follow the instructions precisely and I believe anyone can do it.
[1] I accumulate 4 weeks's worth of ice packs, then put them in a box on my doorstep and post them on Craigslist in the "free stuff" section - someone usually picks them up in the next 12-24 hours.
In particular, the packaging is a big concern for me. I'm actually in the works of landing a huge partnership that will allow us to easily pick up all of our packaging when we drop of each week's current box all across the state (just like the milkman). We're so excited to be able to re-use all the boxes, ice packs, and insulation. We'd be the first in the industry to take this big step. Look out for this announcement in the next couple weeks :)
I've never signed up for their $$$ervice but I've tried a couple of their recipes. Sure, a few of them have hard-to-find ingredients or a spice blend that they don't share details on, but the rest are very possible to source yourself.
Free means $0, not $0 + $n.
My meals even where there's excess that's tossed cost generally 1-3 dollars per sitting.
12 dollar meals is completely absurd.
A great thing about braises is that they're bulletproof. Almost the only thing you can do to mess them up is to pull them too early. 4-6 hours in a slow oven. Done when you bother to check and the meat pulls easily with a fork. We do carbonnade overnight.
No knife skills required.
... not that I'm recommending the kit. Don't do that, if only because it'll drive you to try to cook fussy stuff.
It's all about a little planning and getting into the habit.
I found that while cooking, I could watch some tv shows, or listen to some pod casts, etc...
Most things that come out of cans, taste like the can they were in. Canned vegetables are terrible. I'd go frozen prepared veg over canned.
http://bpafreecannedfood.wordpress.com/bpa-free-canned-food-...
Putting pre-cut ingredients in a pan for a specified amount of time is not "cooking".
You can get pretty good / excellent meals that have been separately cooked sous-vide in a factory, that you simply reheat in a microwave -- they're much faster, much cheaper, probably better tasting than these pretend-cook meals (and just as healthy).
Give me a break, people. You are not busy, you are just wasting your time being distracted by your phone! It's about priorities.
For me the "annoying" part of cooking is actually the mess I make that I have to clean up afterwards. Not even spills, just dirty pans/knives/cutting boards. Of course I usually end up with a little bit of spill anyways, I'm messier in the kitchen than most others.
If I was going to spend $12/person a meal I would get delivery or takeout especially since I would have to clean the counters and do dishes afterwards.
And.... the plastic!
It can be a very specific cut of meat. A less common herb (fresh). "Ethnic" spices. A distinct type of dairy (which can be simply something like whole milk. I rarely use this, and never buy it in a normal shopping trip), such as a unique type of cheese. A strange vegetable. A very specific oil (even something like peanut or sesame oil would be odd in a normal house, though the moment you open it the expiry clock starts ticking). Etc. And if I do buy them, I usually have to buy them in such a quantity that it makes the meal very expensive, because I know the end result is that I throw out 9/10ths of it, having used the small amount in the recipe.
I usually just skip the recipe, not trusting my judgment on potential substitutions. In the odd case I do pursue it, the shopping experience is usually time consuming and brutal, and very expensive, to make one meal.
There is a business, or at least social, model somewhere in this. e.g. a "menu club" where everyone works through the recipes of a Jamie Oliver book, ideally in a more sustainable manner -- e.g. everyone stops by a location with their own containers and takes the right quantity from the bulk and economically purchased ingredients, taking a little vial of peanut oil, an eggplant, three anchovies, and on and on.
Then I have to trim up the protein, season that and set aside, wash those utensils, and move on to actually cooking.
Any meal with more than three major ingredients, meat, veg, and starch, I save for the weekend.
Your kitchen isn't my kitchen. The stuff I find important for my needs isn't the stuff you find important for your needs.
No, you don't have to spend almost $30 on a damn strainer!
I'm a big fan of only buying the stuff you actually need when you need it, not the stuff you might need in the future because someone else told you you need it. If you find yourself needing a blender, buy one. If you find the food you like to cook doesn't require one, don't buy one.
This guy says get a stand mixer and not a slow cooker! WHOA THERE! I use a slow cooker all the time and never once in my life did I think about getting a stand mixer. The other thing is I (and probably 90% of everyone else I know) don't have room for a stand mixer. I don't even know a single person who has one due to their bulkiness and expense.
And a kitchen scale because "Professional chefs measure many things by weight rather than volume since ingredient density can vary?" Um, well I mostly guesstimate my ingredients and my food tastes just as good. I even guesstimate some things when baking which people say will RUIN YOUR CAKE but I never had a problem with it. I also have never used a wooden spoon in my kitchen.
I haven't dove down into fraud statutes too much but I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that when someone takes payment they have a legal obligation to verify the credit card holder actually authorized the payment they collect. At the very least Visa,etc,'s lawyers will care. There are also a whole bunch of other statutes that can apply too.
Issue a chargeback and report them, that's beyond shady.
You never think "Do X every week" is going to be difficult to code, but man, when I actually coded that ... a lot of things can go wrong in subtle ways that you don't really consider in advance until a customer clicks something or uses features in a sequence nobody's ever stumbled onto before.
As for the credit card thing - easily explained as "Submitted info to Stripe, but not the actual form, backend system got confused"
MVP LYFE!
Disclaimer: I never worked at Gobble, I don't know if this is what's happening, but I painfully know how this can happen
Someone abandoning the checkout process is absolutely the first thing you should consider in advance.
There's a lot of things you should do, but the truth is that making modern async webapps with a million moving parts is hard.
I build modern async web apps for a living and it's not that hard. I ran eCommerce for a medium-size software company (as a part of my duties) for several years. If you find an ecommerce application difficult to maintain, it is probably a result of poor design.
HN has built in rate-limiting. Sometimes you have to wait for the reply button to show.
And there's eCommerce and then there's eCommerce. Recurring weekly subscriptions with moving parts are hard. Amazon Subscribe&Save is a mess and I haven't heard of anyone who's had a good experience with that. And Amazon probably devoted much more engineering power to that problem than people at a startup can.
Sometimes hardness isn't a result of poor design, but the result of things being complex. Especially if (as in a startup) your definition of "things" is changing rapidly because you're still not sure what exactly you are building.
If you are doing something so brain dead as charging customers who abandon the checkout process that means there is a huge problem with how you are running your shop. When you charge a CC you have to make absolutely SURE you get permission first, that's like really important. From a moral standpoint, a legal standpoint, and a "I want to keep my agreements with MasterCard/Visa/etc" standpoint.
So it's your #2 priority then...
It seems that what people might want are 1) simple guide to what basics I should have in the kitchen (spices, oils, etc) and 2) simple recipes where I buy the chicken/fish/veggies fresh. Probably not a fundable idea and likely already exists (although I haven't quite seen it).
(I know I risk being down-voted, but this seems relevant.)
I can cook a microwave burrito or a ramen package if I chose to much quicker and considerably cheaper than you can get a burrito or chinese takeout. This doesn't mean taquerias are a ridiculous concept.
About allergies: We are adding that information to next week's menu (among other exciting improvements!). Stay tuned and you'll see a full ingredient list and allergy labels starting tomorrow.
This is more expensive or just as expensive than takeout.
It has all the downsides of home cooking with ZERO of the upsides
So as far as I can see they are making takeout more expensive and less convenient.
- It tastes better. There IS a dramatic difference in the taste when something is served hot straight from the pan as opposed to something that had been cooked 45 minutes ago and has been winding its way towards you in a brown bag
- You can control ingredients like butter/oil/spice etc. You can add/remove and customize it to your taste.
- It is fun. You can cook something tasty and unique and interesting and learn how to cook new dishes.
Perhaps because to me if I am going to cook something, I'm going to cook something that is to my tastes as well as how much cooking as I'm feeling like doing today. I see recipes as suggestions more than anything.
I also don't like my food hot. It tastes much much better when you let it sit for 10 minutes or so.
I love cooking, but I'm not great at it yet and probably never will be a master chef. Over the year, I have learned (the hard way sometimes) ingredients that work well together and one that don't. The whole experience of going to the supermarket, preparing food and cooking it at is somewhat therapeutic really. The best part is when it works out so well you feel satisfied...something like programming and you get it to work, bug free.
I'm sure we here have heard the of the phrase "Cooking is like programming", it really is in a way.
But I guess we live in an age where people think its a chore. Cooking is a craft, just like every other skill. Take some time out and learn the basics of cooking and you will be fine.
From a quick Crunchbase & YC search, I see Instacart, Sprig, Chefday, Munchery, Plated, PlateJoy, Spoonrocket, Postmates, Goldbely, Doordash, Plate, Zerocater, Delivery. com, Orderup, Tasteio, Zesty, Ezcater, Table Runner, and Gobble.
I think most of these players serve similar geographies, and while they all have their own unique spin (which usually involves speed of delivery, pricing, or ingredients vs. already cooked), that seems like a lot of competition in an industry with tiny margins.
I first tried Gobble when I saw a trial card over at Zombie Runner on California Ave. Back then, Gobble delivered fully cooked dinners at 7pm on weekday nights. I used Gobble about 3 nights a week for a few months. Dinner went from something I had to figure out, to the highlight of my evening. We'd get to eat something new and delicious a few times a week without playing out local restaurants or the handful of dishes that we'd normally cook. Gobble actually improved my relationship with my girlfriend.
At the time, my primary complaint was that I had to reheat the food and eat out of a takeout container.
About a month ago, Gobble switched to delivering these meal kits. Having just met Ooshma in person, I (naturally) gave her a really hard time about this. Cooking takes too long and I have other things to do.
There were fewer choices than before, I needed to wash a pan (sometimes two, if pasta was involved), and I needed to actually get off my computer to help make dinner happen.
That was 15 meals ago.
I still think about the first Gobble dinner kit I made in back August. I actually woke up the next morning thinking about how good perfectly the fresh mozzarella balanced the spicy kick of the chili flakes.
Dinner-Kits Gobble is the best Gobble yet. Now I actually eat dinner like a real person. Sometimes dinner takes a little longer than 10 minutes to prepare, end to end, and sometimes it needs more than one pan, but it ends up tasting so good that I feel stupid complaining about either of those things.
Out of 15 meals, about 8 of them have been wish-there-were-more-leftovers-amazing about 5 of them were good enough order again, and a couple were just ok. All of them were worth way more than the $12 and ~10 minutes of effort.
I have never had a problem with Gobble that a message to Ooshma didn't fix.
Yesterday I got an email from Gobble with 3 invites for 100% free boxes. I've got two left. I think you still need to sign up to use it, but I'm pretty sure you can cancel immediately. If you want one of the invites, first come, first served.
[1] Unless a double espresso and a nice piece of bread counts as a meal.
Therefore I'd love to take you up on the Gobble invite offer. I need to try this. -> swizec@swizec.com