Josephine is closing its doors

Josephine is closing its doors(blog.josephine.com)

87 points by szermer 8 years ago | 44 comments

> We will also be sending our cooks off with a transition packet, which will include their business data, customer contact info (for those who opt-in), alternative business proposals and recommendations, tool/service recommendations for replacing our platform functionality, and other general resources. We hope that these personalized packets, along with community-run versions of our cook community forums and groups, will be a stepping stone for folks who would like to continue making income through their cooking skills.

That is actually really impressive. I hope other companies have the forethought and compassion to remember that their responsibilities lie with everyone who comes to depend on them -- not just those to whom they have a legal duty.

NamTaf 8 years ago | |

I agree. That shows some real care about seeing their community propser in the long term. I'd never really known anything about the company (maybe their name, though I couldn't confirm) but this speaks volumes to the type of company they likely were.

mcherm 8 years ago | |

It seems like it is roughly equivalent to a company releasing their software as open source when they go out of business -- it acknowledges that the profit was simply not there to sustain the company, but makes it possible (not necessarily likely) that the idea can still be sustained without profit.

I really like it.

crsv 8 years ago |

Two sided market business are burn barrels for cash until you hit crazy scale. The ambition and idea was great, but actually pulling this off at some sustainable model would be incredibly difficult with all the moving pieces. Loved what they did around the brand, but the idea is so high on the difficulty of execution scale, how this played out is unsurprising.

dawhizkid 8 years ago |

I like the idea but I think the food safety/perishabiliy/logistics challenge is too much.

Personally I would like something like a “social buying” restaurant delivery app, where you can vote on what you’d like made in a centralized kitchen and then place an order to be delivered if whatever you voted on was chosen by popular vote.

Recipe holders could submit recipes to be voted on and make a commission from sales if their recipe is chosen.

s0rce 8 years ago | |

Don't restaurants already effectively do this? Although voting doesn't happen in the traditional sense people will vote with their purchasing choices. The restaurant will offer certain things on the menu and ones that don't get ordered will likely get eliminated (assuming the restaurant wants to make money). From what I've read most restaurants in America tend to offer many choices compared to countries like Japan where much more specialized places can prosper so your idea could be much more efficient but I'm not sure how practical it is to get people to agree on anything.

dawhizkid 8 years ago | | |

Not really. I mean this would be more like Top Chef on demand with no fixed menu. There's an inventory of non-perishable/perishable ingredients available in a commercial kitchen. If a lot of people want to order some meal then that gets made with some scheduled delivery time.

Surprised no one's attempted the "Uber for whatever meal your heart desires prepped by a personal chef." It'd be expensive, yes, but I could see that being a luxury food delivery option that would be appealing to someone with money but no personal chef.

firasd 8 years ago | |

Not a bad idea. Like GroupOn without the discounts.

alpb 8 years ago |

It was good until it lasted.

Although it was a bit inconvenient, I had a chance to try out a few homemade ethnic meals that I have no chance of finding in a restaurant. Eating strangers’ meals was strange, but I bet it will become a thing in increasing sharing economy.

mceoin 8 years ago |

Ouch. And they had just had a big win with their microkitchen bill passing the California State Legislature:

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

danso 8 years ago | |

owenversteeg 8 years ago | |

Did it pass the Senate or just the House? I can't tell from that page.

porsupah 8 years ago | | |

The "Status" tab holds what you're looking for, at the bottom:

"01/29/18 In Senate. Read first time. To Com. on RLS. for assignment."

So, just the House, for now.

echan00 8 years ago | | |

What's the difference between passing in senate and the house?

greatamerican 8 years ago |

This is pretty shocking and sad. I really loved the idea of this company. I don't see this as the 'end' of this idea.

nasso 8 years ago |

The site doesnt really explain what they did....

brazzy 8 years ago | |

It's just the blog. If you go directly to josephine.com, it's much better about introducing itself.

Kinda stupid not to have a very prominent link (or any link as far as I can tell) from the blog to the main site, though.

gregschlom 8 years ago | |

I believe they allowed people to cook and sell meals in their neighborhood.

nmeofthestate 8 years ago | | |

...with an huge amount of touchy-feely "empowerment" messaging larded on top of the whole thing.

phyller 8 years ago |

I had never heard of them before, the idea is really interesting to me. I went to their website to see if there were any cooks in my area to see if it was worth trying out. It looks like I have to sign up before I can even see any of that :( I am skittish about giving out my contact information, I don't want to deal with throwaway accounts either. I wonder how much growth they missed because of that.

anitorosyan 8 years ago | |

Are you by chance in the Los Angeles area? If so maybe there are some of our cooks in your zip code: https://www.dishdivvy.com/

hosh 8 years ago |

Huh, interesting. I wonder what happened, after reading this: https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/why-i-left-google-to-join-gr... (Steve Yegge talking about joining Grab, and the meal-delivery boom)

danso 8 years ago | |

IIRC, Grab would/will facilitate homemade food service by facilitating cheap delivery, whereas Josephine focused on the meal creation. Both businesses would presumably have symbiotic relationship.

taneq 8 years ago | |

I wondered why Steve Yegge stopped blogging. I really enjoyed his old blog, hopefully this will see him back at it!

praneshp 8 years ago | | |

In the blog post your parent linked, he spoke about it.

"I have a lot of good stories saved up that I’d love to share. Google corporate didn’t much care for my blogging, and even though they never outright forbade it, I received a lot of indirect pressure from various VPs. So eventually I stopped. Sad."

gambiting 8 years ago |

What was Josephine? I've looked at their homepage but I still have no idea what they did. Was it a restaurant? That served home made food?

meritt 8 years ago | |

It facilitated the ability for people to sell (or simply share, I believe you could set $0 prices) meals from their home kitchen to their neighbors. It'd be like putting up a flier saying "We're making a ton of chili, come by 435 Birch tonight if you'd like a bowl!"

brazzy 8 years ago | |

Did you look at josephine.com, rather than blog.josephine.com? IMO the former does well at explaining itself. The latter seems to be rather stupid in being a pure social media thing.

gambiting 8 years ago | | |

Ah, I actually didn't there was another "main" website - I just clicked on "home" in the corner, and that only shows stories about food, not what Josephine does. But now with this and other replies I can see it's a food sharing-like service, thanks :-)

anonytrary 8 years ago | |

p2p food

aidenn0 8 years ago |

I don't know what the final outcome was, but there was a charity that would provide food for the homeless by having volunteers bring home-cooked casseroles. After operating for over a decade, the county health board shut it down because publicly serving food not made in a certified kitchen was illegal.

I moved away from there, so never found out if they were able to resolve it, but that wasn't that long ago and was a push in the opposite direction of what Josephine would need.

anitorosyan 8 years ago |

Equally sad for this.. but Josephine is doing a great job handling the transition. My company just launched in this space (DishDivvy) and are truly appreciative of the work they've done on the legislative front, for bringing opportunities to homecooks. We are working with their COOK alliance and making sure AB 626 gets through the senate as successfully as it did the CA Assembly.

dmode 8 years ago |

My wife visited Israel and told me about the concept of Kibbutz. Since then I have been thinking about it and it is such a great concept. May be someone can borrow some aspects of the kibbutz and invent a business model. A big communal kitchen for the neighborhood where professional chefs make food for the community, but costs are kept low by households volunteering in prep work and clean-up. Everyone subscribes to the communal kitchen like an HOA. Would be great for the neighborhood community to better know each other and also access healthy "home cooked" meals.

mooreds 8 years ago | |

Here in the USA I believe it's called co-housing. I have some friends who live in such neighborhoods and they love it.

More here: http://www.cohousing.org/

marcus_holmes 8 years ago |

I coached two startup founders looking at this exact model (there were about five founders plus one Startup Weekend team that attempted this all around the same time). Josephine became my go-to "this appears to be working, let's try and work out why..." model. I never could work it out.

Shame they couldn't get it to work. As far as I can see, the whole niche/model is fubar'd. Good try, though, and great community attitude :)

mooreds 8 years ago |

Here's a take from the CEO of a competitor of Josephine: https://medium.com/@ashleycolpaart/saying-farewell-to-joseph...

(full disclosure, I'm her co-founder.)

wnissen 8 years ago |

Dang. It seemed like a great thing, never became available in my neighborhood. I know there are informal unpermitted food sellers all over the place, but this seemed like a nice balance between getting ceviche from a random person off Facebook (real example) and a full-up restaurant.

tonydiv 8 years ago |

Nooooooooo! I never managed to try the service but their team and mission was awesome.