I know people who eat out multiple times a week (with their spouse), every week of the year, and other people who eat out every day during lunch. I guess it's somewhat understandable if you're single and maybe even working at one of the places where they have catered lunch, but if you have a family at home and have to actually pay for restaurants yourself it's a huge item on your monthly expenses.
And that's just the economics of it. Let's not even talk about how having catered meals for nearly every occasion distances you from the act and ritual of preparing a meal together with your family, taking the time, sitting down and enjoying it.
Eh. Most Americans can't afford this type of service, even if they think they can. 10$ for a meal is insanely expensive, sure going out to eat once in a while but not for multiple meals a week. You can eat for multiple days off of 10$, one of their 10$ meals can be less than 1/3 of a 2k kcal diet's needs meaning you need 25-35ish dollars a day to survive off their service.
This is for suckers, like the 'dollar shave club' customers that don't realize they can buy the exact same blades they sell (at least initially) direct from the manufacturer (Dorco) or spend far less and use a safety razor. Or suckers that fall for 'loot crate' type services where you get garbage product, sometimes stuff that just didn't sell well retail, and are told you're getting a bargain.
Well, surely, you were trying to survive off their meals you'd use the family plan, where it's $9/serving, rather than the $10/serving plan.
Plus, we're talking Blue Apron, not Soylent; it's not even aimed at people living off of it.
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.
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.
Federal minimum wage is $7.25 and median HOUSEHOLD income is around 59k so let's look at their pricing: the cheapest plan they offer is $39.96 a week for 4 servings a week ranging to $143.84 for 16 servings a week for $143.84.
That means 1-day's kcals for someone on a 2k kcal diet is $25.68 to $39.96 a day depending on the plan. PURE INSANITY.
Many of my colleagues thought $10/meal was great! My mouth dropped when they claimed how good of a deal this was.
I spend $45-60 for a WEEK (depending on sales and meat close to sell-by date) and I'm a 300+ pound powerlifter!
Check out subs like
- https://www.reddit.com/r/EatCheapAndHealthy/
For DIY food my wild guess would be butter. My somewhat educated guess for prepared food would be something off the value menu at McDonalds/Burger King/Wendys.
Butter is around $5/lb for 32 x 100-Kcal servings, so it's only around 640 Kcal/$. That would put it pretty far down the list, below milk and eggs, and on par with lentils.
[1]: https://efficiencyiseverything.com/the-highest-calorie-per-d...
A Big Mac is actually only 500 cals, a double Whopper 1100.
Pizza can end up being 6000.