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Hi! I feel like I'm part of your target demographic. I almost signed up, but a few things stopped me.
Any one of these is mild, but taken together it walked me away from signing up for the free trial. I'm actively looking for products in this space and I'm 100% willing to pay $10/mo to remove the dinner frustrations from my life.
The featuresets I'm looking for:
One technical question, how are you handling meal collation? I'd love to see your high-level technical stack there. Any ML? Individual recipe linking? Very curious :)
Thank you for your structured and helpful feedback!
Let me try to cover some of the points:
- We have a small team of passionate foodies producing their own recipes and reviewing/curating weekly recommendations for our users. The team has an international background (incl. US/EU/Asia), which helps to tap into various experiences when it comes to generating the weekly menus. They have worked at some of the most popular European recipe apps. Feel free to check out our Instagram account to explore some of the recipes they have produced so far (
https://www.instagram.com/kitchenful/
)
- We provide our users with a personal menu each week. In addition there is the option to choose from standard categories and your own favorite recipes. Currently it’s not possible to import your own recipes, but we have it in the backlog. So far this hasn’t been a blocker for our users to use our service on a weekly basis.
- As of now we don’t have a feature to export the recipes. Mostly because so far we didn’t get that request from our users. But I see the peace of mind value in it as a user and will look into this.
- We are building our frontend clients with Flutter. So we look forward to supporting many platforms (iOS, Android, Web, Mac, Linux, ...) soon, stay tuned.
- Currently we are working with custom ranking and rotation algos for the recipe collation. But ML definitely on the horizon as we increase the number of data points :)
Happy to ping you once we have implemented a bit more features on the multi-platform and recipe import/export side. Excited to get your early feedback then.
I've thought about this myself, but it's an idea before its time that will fight a desperate fight against one big problem: quality. Quantity is easy. Quality is hard. People who cook for themselves want to choose the ingredients that go into what they're cooking. That's often the reason people cook for themselves: I decide what goes in my body.
I really, really want to know if the green bell pepper has three lobes or four, because they taste completely different. The person being paid minimum wage to shop for my bell pepper couldn't care less, but the wrong choice will ruin my meal. The convenience of someone else shopping for you, while helpful, is racked with such problems of selection, quality, availability, etc.
The problems created by people shopping for me, at least in my experience, significantly offset the convenience.
How to determine quality will become a very big deal in technology in our lifetimes. What's real? What's good? What's legit? I guess it already is. Look at the collasal cesspool that is Amazon. What do I buy? I don't know. I don't know what's good.
In 20 years, your bananas will text you that they're ripe and you should eat them, especially because your potassium is low. In fact, the bananas will order themselves. But today, with the quality problems so thick with muck and subterfuge, I can't even get the correct bell pepper delivered.
This quality problem is why Amazon bought Whole Foods and is about to go brick and mortar countrywide. You just can't solve quality problems with intermediaries at this stage of the game because those intermediaries have no incentive to care.
True, the picking quality is a big factor for the experience. Especially when it’s about shopping for ingredients for a meal. We try to improve this by placing the order on behalf of the customer, so we can optimize the product selection for the cooking experience and have the option to guide the pickers with comments/chat towards the most appropriate products or suitable substitutes if something is out of stock.
Besides that we are considering to give the user an option to simply export the optimized shopping list, so it can be used for offline shopping. We got this a few times as a feature request from users who like to shop the ingredients themselves, but still like a service which provides them with personalized suggestions each week and generates a combined shopping list.
> we are considering to give the user an option to simply export the optimized shopping list, so it can be used for offline shopping
The fact that this isn't included already is a bit of a red flag for me. It's a meal planning service that won't even give me the list of ingredients if I want to buy them myself?
Besides that, it does look interesting. I may sign up for a free trial after showing it to my wife and seeing if she'd find good utility in it. We've done grocery delivery for about a year, but we're on the verge of stopping. So having an exportable list of ingredients is obviously a must before I get too attached to your service.
Yes, do this and I’ll sign up. I live in Berlin and live next door to an edeka. I’m happy to do the shopping myself for fresh food every day after work. All I need is a shopping list in my phone that I can pull up from my phone when I head downstairs to buy food.
Are four lobed ones really sweeter?
I only use the green ones. The three lobed ones are strong up, the four lobed ones are milder. No theory on the sweetness, but then I don't use the red, orange, or yellow ones very often. Maybe like garlic? Young garlic super strong, mature less so?
The male versus female bell pepper nonsense is just that, nonsense. My mother thinks it's all nonsense, but she's wrong.
I tried a blind taste test, and the answer from my perspective was no.
_We never managed to meal plan a couple of days in advance..._
I'm a little envious of founders who think this way. You've taken a problem you faced and turned it into an opportunity, which is awesome. Faced with the same problem I am certain I'd simply have tried to learn to "be more organised", and likely have failed and carried on with the same problem for a long time. Even if I thought it was a problem lots of other people face I doubt I'd have actually executed on an idea of solving it; I don't see my "failures" as viable problems to turn into businesses.
There's a lesson here for me (and probably many others) that you don't always have to look for big problems or complex problems to find viable startup ideas. Sometimes it can be something simple that just bugs you. I wish you the best of luck.
Thank you for it being so well said!
The beauty of it is that everyone is likely to face or notice problems in their own life which offer the chance to be solved. And usually one is not the only one facing it :)
Hopefully this inspires someone to solve a problem which nags them and which they can get passionate about.
We are excited about the opportunity to work on this problem. And are grateful for the constructive feedback we are receiving from the HN community.
Cool idea, I had a similar hitch to scratch and have been playing with the idea to build something like that (for personal use, but ended up using
https://hay-kot.github.io/mealie/
).
I'm in Berlin and I wasn't aware you guys were already operational here.
A couple of notes: I signed up for the trial and answered the questionnaire. To me, it is not clear what happens next. I didn't receive any welcome/confirmation email.
Also, since I'm based in Germany, I would have expected a reference to German supermarkets (Rewe, Edeka, etc.) but the home page only shows American stores. For a moment, I thought this was a US-only service.
Good luck and looking forward to try out the service.
Thanks for the feedback and apologies for any confusion! The lack of clarity about the next step after signing up is our bad, we are currently working on making the process clearer. Happy to see Berlin users here!
I absolutely love this idea, I hope it bears well for you all.
Services like BlueApron, etc have way too much plastic waste, giving people a similar experience while letting them do the shopping (or not, I like the instacart integration) is a great idea.
Good luck!
Thanks! Having less packaging waste is actually one of the points our early customers who’d used a Meal Kit service before like about Kitchenful.
How do you compare to platejoy? I find their idea good but the workflow frustrating.
I pay for plantoeat but their grocer integration is pretty poor.
Edit: Also I should note that "free" trials that automatically start charging are becoming illegal in Europe for good reason. It's a dark pattern we've just gotten used to. You should avoid that model. One reason I've stayed with plantoeat is that they don't auto-renew. I consciously choose every year to renew my subscription.
Platejoy and plantoeat are great products!
We focus on two things which I believe set us apart: (1) creating personal suggestions each week based on your preferences, diets and goals, which are currently reviewed and curated by real chefs (2) taking care of placing the order for you with your favorite grocer. Meaning the order process for you is seamless. You simply choose the meals you would like to cook, and any other specific products (like beverages, snacks, etc.) and place your order with 1 click.
We’ve found that this combination solves a bunch of problems existing solutions still have from a user perspective.
Thanks for the point about the auto-renew. I can personally relate to this. We decided to go for the auto-renew on a monthly basis, meaning our users can cancel anytime with limited downside and without the need to commit to long time spans. But we’ll definitely take another look at the opt-in models, thanks for the hint!
what about Emeals or Mealime or Mealboard or PrepDish or Yummly or Prepear or Eat This Much?
Sounds like an interesting proposition by integrating directly with existing supermarkets like REWE and Edeka.
Any plans to jump on the < 30 min delivery services, e.g. Gorillas/Getir/Flink/Weezy etc to get me the produce for a meal now?
Greetings from BER
Great question! So far we’ve experimented with the quick commerce players mostly to cover for out of stock items from the bigger grocers. E.g. if the grocer was out of tomatoes at the point of delivery, we offer our users the option to have the out of stock item delivered by a quick commerce service around the same time of the main delivery.
The majority of our current users seem to prefer one big grocery delivery per week. Because the benefit of having the planning and shopping done a few days in advance means that it prevents decision making on the other days.
Having said that, we believe that shorter times from planning to actual delivery are still key in the user experience. So same day delivery and pickup options by the grocers help to improve the overall experience.
That's an amazing way to leverage in those awkward situations when the traditional grocery shops fail to deliver (which happens a lot from experience).
Will be def signing up to this service at some point.
p.s. I reported a bug to the email listed on your home page.
Thank you! Looking forward to serving you in the near future.
I hope you succeed. I believe this space is massive. Especially considering the permutation space of recipes and how nobody has tackled the problem well, even though thousands have tried.
But maybe with food delivery, it’s a problem that can be successfully tackled since you’ll get feedback on customers. That’s a sweet data pipeline.
Thanks for the kind words! And yes, indeed we feel that the combination with delivery services makes a significant difference. By improving the inspiration experience _and_ doing the related shopping on your behalf, we’re trying to deliver a smooth and successful cooking and dinner experience without the hassle. We believe that this is critical for a service like ours.
And in addition, as you pointed out, with each order we learn from the integrated shopping about the user’s preferences which enables us to continuously improve the service over time.
There's also a nonzero chance 10 years from now, automation and object recognition will improve fast enough that robots can essentially do certain (or most) aspects of cooking.
And if that's true, the advantage will go to the company that is ready for it.
Good luck -- looks nice!
I had the "What do I make for dinner?" conundrum too, and wound up making my own web app to address that. The main thing for me was that I couldn't think of any recipes, other than ones I'd already made very recently.
So mine is kind of a diary, in that I record whatever we make today, and then I can see what we've made over the last couple of years, and get inspiration that way. It also has a "Future" list, where I can add things I want to make in the future.
This sounds like a great hack!
Personally we faced a kind of cold start problem with such a diary. So what we’re trying now with Kitchenful is to recommend new recipes that are similar to a few favorite dishes of our users, which we ask about in the onboarding process.
We like the idea of a “Future” list and are already thinking about a bookmarking / recipe import feature. How do you save future ideas in your app? (urls?)
It's a database-backed app, so it's just a marker in the database.
I understand the cold-start thing about the "diary" feature, but I think it'd be nice to have a list you could look back on of everything you've made, with notes on how you liked it, what you'd change, etc. That's been a big win for me.
Is your webapp sharable? That sounds handy
Sorry, no, not at the moment. It wasn't a big deal to write.
There's no indication anywhere that this works for UK customers - other than some logos part way down the page for Ocado, Waitrose and Sainsbury's (all UK only AFAIK) and there's no context to the logos...
Does this work in the UK?
Sorry for the confusion with the UK logos. Unfortunately we’re not operating in the UK yet but are definitely looking into it.
As a potential US customer, I was also a bit put off by this. Do you support all US zip codes? What kind of recipes would I be able to order if I sign up, assuming the availability is partly based on my delivery address?
The free trial requires a credit card, I don't want to give you my credit card without an assurance that you have food I want to pay for, or that you'll be able to deliver to me.
Thanks for the feedback! Very helpful for us to think about how we can showcase our service before the sign-up event and remove the uncertainty related to location.
Do you mind me asking: in terms of food, what would be most important to you before signup? Is it to see the quality of the recipes, or rather a test if we can make good recommendations based on your specific preferences and needs?
I have some picky family, I'm mostly interested in ensuring they'll want to eat some of the options.
We have now started serving US customers.
It is not clear from the website. I expected to see a list of countries somewhere, maybe even after clicking a Try Free button. But it seems to be happy to accept a credit card from any country.
Thanks for the idea! We used
at the start to render different page content based on the country of the visitor. But like the idea of making this clearer on the homepage in general, because an ip address lookup might not be accurate and hard if there is no way for the user to influence / change the language/location.
For me, some paragraphs are in German, some are in English. Really weird.
Just a quick nit: Safeway is improperly pluralized as "Safeways" some way down the home page. Cool idea and interested to try!
Good spot! Will amend that asap. Thanks for the kind words though! Look forward to serving you.
What's the correct way to pluralize Safeway?
Wow, I've been trying to make the same thing for my wife.
Guess what is my name? yup.
One of the Christian's here :)
Christian would suggest itself I guess?
Great idea! I wrote some code to generate nutritionally complete, minimalist diets. It got some traction, but I never managed to integrate it with recipes/prices. lkm if you want to try to integrate it.
I've been working on something similar as a small project, as well:
https://automicrofarm.com/blog/2021/04/more-complete-nutriti...
Would love to chat/exchange thoughts!
Thanks! Generating nutritionally complete, minimalist diets sounds super interesting. Feel free to link it here or write to me at cs@kitchenful.com so we can take a look.
Email sent!
What's the difference with Jow?
Main difference is the strong focus on your preferences, diets, and goals. We use a combination of our own produced recipes, as well as recipes from food creators we work with. This allows us to tap into a wide range of different meals from the start and tailor the weekly recommendations to each individual.
On top of the personalization, we also have a different order process in which we take care of finding the best substitutes in case something is out of stock, and then provide you with personalized cooking instructions after the order.
Feel free to give it a try and let me know how it works for you.
Jow (
) seems to be a France-only service.
Holy cow, $10/mo for what amounts to Allrecipes? Our product, Homechart, does a whole lot more besides just recipe management and can be self hosted for free:
For recipes, Homechart can import recipes from the web and gives you an "I'm feeling lucky" button that randomizes recipes for a meal plan based on parameters like when it was last made or specific tags. For our users, this seems to work well and let's them curate their recipe collection.
Hey, it's already a bit delicate to post about your company in someone else's launch thread, but I'd say it's over the line to do it in a putdown sort of way, so please don't. It's not in the spirit we're trying for here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
.
(Just to be clear, although the OP is about a YC startup, for sure the same applies in anybody's launch thread.)
Looks like a great software product for household management!
What we learned is that when it comes to dinners, many decision makers in the household struggle with making the decision every week about what to eat for the next few days. The randomized recipe button seems to go into that direction. However making relevant suggestions is what we learned so far to be a key in the experience (e.g. considering the current season, what was for dinner in the past week, what is similar to a favorite dish but with a new twist, etc.)
From our existing users we get the feedback that a personalized menu each week and a much more convenient way to order their groceries saves them time and mental energy. For many worth the price. Feel free to give it a try and let me know how it works.
Not the OP but from my understanding their VP is they take care of the integration with all the grocery services to order the food required for the recipes.
Sounds like they also do nice additions such as using the influx of quick grocery services to order the missing bits from the traditional grocery delivery platforms.
With all this inadvertent mention of Christianity, one thing that did come to mind is seasonal dietary requirements--Catholic and Orthodox needs for Fridays and for Lent. I don't think the big meal services really address that, but it's not as difficult logistically as e.g. Kosher food, so it could be a useful market.
n33dfood.com
stay tuned :)