
Show HN: PlateJoy (YC S15) – Algorithmic meal planner with integrated delivery - cbognet
http://platejoy.com/try
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cbognet
Hi all,

I lost 50 pounds a few years ago and realized that the options for healthy
eating are limited to frozen meal delivery services or nutrition apps that
never worked for me. So I started PlateJoy, which uses data about your
lifestyle, preferences, and goals to help you plan what to buy and cook each
week. We send customized shopping lists and recipes that match your
preferences with optional grocery delivery of your shopping list through
Instacart. Support for lots of eating styles including: paleo, vegan, whole30,
weight loss, kid-friendly, ketogenic, quick & easy, etc.

A few things that make us different:

1\. We care a lot about personalization. You start off by taking a lifestyle
quiz about foods you love, avoid, recipe complexity, time constraints,
preferences and more. You can also add a starting weight and goal weight and
we'll adjust your portions accordingly.

2\. We don’t want you to have to deal with waste, so we've created a Digital
Pantry of your kitchen which takes inventory of what you have, only
replenishing things like cinnamon or olive oil when you need it. We also pair
recipes together that use up the same ingredients to prevent food waste.

3\. We plan your leftovers, too.

4\. You can shop for yourself or use our integration with Instacart to send
your shopping list to them for same day delivery. (No dry ice or breaking down
Fed Ex boxes, because ingredients come fresh from your local grocer.) This is
a new feature that people have been liking a lot.

Our biggest technical challenges have been taking so many preferences into
account when creating a menu (takes a few seconds!), and synergistically
pairing meals to reduce food waste while also making sure there's ample
variety in plans.

Hope you'll check it out - just set up a free trial for everyone today -
feedback and questions welcome!

~~~
jonaf
This looks remarkably awesome. I have been looking for / contemplating
building something where I can put in some recipes and have it figure out the
most efficient, least wasteful shopping list for me. This seems like a fairly
complex problem to solve (in fact, it sounds like a linear programming
problem). It would be really nice if I could put in a monthly budget amount as
well, so that my meal options are also customized to what I expect to spend.
One nice potential side effect of doing this is that I might even be able to
reduce my current grocery budget by some amount -- and seeing what that amount
is could make the value of the service _real_ obvious.

Is there any way I can customize my plan even further for "meals good for
kids" and/or "easy to eat / no unusual textures"? Some of these recipes look
delicious, but my 18-month-old will refuse edamame outright. :)

~~~
cbognet
Thank you so much! The waste reduction algorithms we use definitely help cut
costs (on the back end, we can see the waste savings in $ over time -- though
it's not visible to users yet, it's pretty remarkable.)

There's a question in our personalization quiz that asks about whether you
want more familiar family flavors, so definitely check that box. Beyond that,
you can hit "remove" on anything in your meal queue that looks like it might
be unappetizing for your toddler. If there are specific foods you know are no-
gos, you can also add any ingredient as an exclusion ingredient in the quiz
(in the "other" field).

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benchtobedside
Great idea, especially around optimizing resource usage for items you already
have.

I'd like to see more transparency around cost up front - I should not have to
dig into the second question of the FAQ page to see that a plan would start at
$48+

~~~
cbognet
Thanks for the kind words and feedback. We do have a free trial set up for
everyone today (no cc required) if you want to check it out without paying
anything.

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ctb_mg
We tried Platejoy for 6 months. We found it was useful, but found a few
caveats:

It was very easy to back ourselves into a corner with food preferences such
that you see the same set of 20 or so recipes recycled from week to week. This
is probably our fault more than Platejoy's, but we are not especially picky
eaters.

Some recipes required ingredients that we just couldn't source. We live in the
midwest and the closest major city is 1.5 hours away. Try finding tahini paste
at your local midwest walmart or smalltown grocer. In these cases I'd have
loved substitution suggestions.

We don't have particular dietary restrictions. We also preferred old fashioned
pen and paper tracking of our grocery list/pantry, so that feature wasn't
something we used. We didn't really harness Platejoy's unique features. So for
our particular situation Platejoy ended up being little more than a recipe
suggestion tool.

I'd definitely suggest platejoy for people with dietary restrictions who don't
want to think about or go through the hassle of finding recipes.

~~~
danielvinson
I order pretty much all of the obscure food/ingredients I use from Amazon -
looks like Tahini Paste is widely available there. I'm not sure how much
notice PlateJoy gives you to shop before you make the recipe, but it has to be
less than Amazon's shipping?

~~~
cbognet
That's a great idea! You can create your new menu whenever you'd like (a few
days in advance) so this idea will work fine.

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caffeinewriter
This is the first startup in a while I've been excited to spend money on. It
looks great, and it looks like it already has a very mature feature set. The
one thing I didn't see was the pricing on the delivery options. Is that live
yet? Or is that a future feature?

~~~
bluejade
Thank you! This is Daniel (from PlateJoy). Delivery happens via Instacart.
They charge between $4 and $7 per delivery, depending on area. If you sign up
for PlateJoy, and you don't see the Instacart button on your shopping list,
let us know and we can activate it for you. (They are constantly adding zip
codes, so sometimes we don't know that a zip code is available for delivery.)

~~~
caffeinewriter
Awesome! It wasn't readily apparent that delivery is handled by a third party
before signing up. I've used Instacart before, so it's cool that it's just an
integration, but I wasn't sure if it was an addon I was missing somewhere that
had to be added to my subscription before I checked out.

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aphextron
I was all on board for grocery delivery with a customized shopping list, but
you lost me at $59 sign up fee... You may want to rethink that.

~~~
cbognet
Thanks for your feedback! It comes out to around $8-$10/month depending on
what plan you choose. I hesitate to say this because I don't want to come
across as too sales-y, but a customer told us last week that it's "the best
money they've spent all year." There's a free trial today if you want to try
it.

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chillydawg
The "What people are saying" section. Those photos have got to be stock or
models, right?

~~~
cbognet
Hahaha, they are truly not! But we will tell them you asked :)

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Mtinie
@cbognet: I love the concept and have signed up for the trial with the hope of
sticking with it going forward.

My question -- I don't know how representative my household is from others,
but we've got a few different sets of dietary restrictions to consider.

Do you have any plans to offer a way to set up variations that allow for, say,
gluten-free (non-vegetarian) dining for one member of the family, while the
rest are vegetarian (no gluten restrictions)?

It's certainly more work on my end to buy, prep, and cook for, but it's work
that I'm already doing and would love to benefit from the programmatic menu
and shopping list that PlateJoy generates.

~~~
cbognet
Hello + thank you! It’s something we’re working on tackling programmatically,
but right now this is really where our nutrition coaching comes into play.
You'll get an email from yours in a few days, and they'll make suggestions for
ingredients you’d like to substitute, or can find the best plan that can meet
everyone’s needs. Personally, I’d recommend going more restrictive (like our
gluten-free, vegetarian plan) and supplementing it if necessary with non-GF
pasta and simple meat/poultry/fish in place of veg protein - often everyone
finds something to like even with the restrictions, and you don’t have to be a
short-order cook :)

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bradyo
This is great. It seems that I can't select multiple dietary requirements
though (like vegetarian and clean eating). On Firefox mobile. Is that
intentional or are some of the dietary requirement s non-compatible?

Also, is there any way to specify I'd like to meal prep more than just sharing
a dinner with the next day's leftovers? E.g. Make a weeks worth of meals at
once by scaling a particular recipe? I suppose I could do that myself buy
having the software advise my grocery list would be awesome.

~~~
bluejade
Hi! Some of the dietary preferences can't be combined because we don't have
enough recipes to support the combination (at least not yet!). We're working
on batch cooking, so that should help. Currently, it takes hacks to achieve
that kind of thing (like adding more family members, e.g., Daniel, Daniel
Leftovers, and Daniel Leftovers 2). If you have a slow cooker, you could
select that in the appliances section and then just make sure that under time
constraints, you select "more than 50 minutes" for dinners. Slow cooker
recipes scale up well if you do that multiple family members trick. I hope
that helps!

~~~
bradyo
I tried simulating this by checking Clean Eating and either checking off the
pre-populated meats or searching for meats I could think of and selecting all
results and plenty of recipes came up, so it seems like these two dietary
restrictions should be allowed to be chosen at the same time.

Also, I checked off the pre-populated "Beef" option and a recipe came up for
breakfast involving sausage and another came up for dinner involving Filet
Mignon.

~~~
cbognet
Thanks for the feedback! We like to make sure we have enough new recipes for
many months of using the service before allowing two categories to be
combined, but you're welcome to hack it that way for now. Filet mignon was a
glitch (we just fixed it) but the sausage is made of pork.

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dweinus
Looks awesome so far! I wanted to give a thumbs up for adding the "seasonal"
option. It is much appreciated and often overlooked.

~~~
cbognet
Yes! It wasn't something we had initially but came up very often in customer
requests. The hard part there is knowing what's seasonal in different
geographies but we think we've got a good system.

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virgil_disgr4ce
Wow, this looks really great. It's both bittersweet and exciting when you come
across an idea of your own executed very well ;)

~~~
cbognet
I know the feeling ;) Thank you for the kind words!

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matthewowen
Isn't this the same as a business described in "The Lean Startup"? Kinda
funny.

~~~
cbognet
You can imagine my dismay at reading that book after I started this company,
lol. ;) Good thing it's all about execution.

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someone7x
Can the meal planner take into account the capabilities of my kitchen? Say for
example that I only have a microwave and George Foreman grill.

How is recipe complexity managed? Can I select recipes that optimize for
fewest dirty dishes?

~~~
bluejade
Hi, this is Daniel (Christina's co-founder). You can specify appliances on the
personalization page (though stovetop can't currently be unselected because it
is necessary for many dinners). Lunches—with the "pack something quick"
option—only use a microwave, so that can serve as a sort of work-around for
people who don't have a range / hot-plate.

Complexity is handled by time preferences, which can be specified for each
course (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks/dessert). Shorter times are less
complex recipes.

Sorry, no "fewest dirty dishes" options, but great idea!

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codewritinfool
I love this. I plan on signing up when I get home.

~~~
cbognet
Awesome, thank you!

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buckbova
Who are the "On-demand advice from our nutrition-focused personal chefs" and
how as a user would I gain access to this advice?

~~~
bluejade
Someone from the PlateJoy nutrition team emails new customers during their
first week to give tips and to be available as a point of contact. There are
also follow-up check-ins if people don't have specific questions right away.
Some people really get into it!

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_fs
Anyway to export meals to myfitnesspal?

~~~
cbognet
You can sync with JawBone & FitBit, but not MFP (they're not accepting API
requests this year). We do give you a full breakdown of nutritional info for
each meal though, so you can always enter the macros in manually.

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simplehuman
Wow, amazing!

