
Ingredient delivery for restaurant recipes - joshfraser
http://www.forage.co
======
cw3
Is there any difference between this and blueapron? Do I get to choose which
recipe I'd like to have delivered?

~~~
joshfraser
Yes, you get to pick the recipes you want each week.

We kept hearing from our early users that they didn't have an hour to spend
cooking every night. We knew that restaurants could fire any dish in 20 min,
so we really focused on how to use the same techniques they do to make a
20-min dinner possible for home cooks without compromising on flavor. We're
the only service that offers delicious, home-cooked meals in 20 mins or less.

~~~
tdicola
Dumb question, but if this is marketed at folks who are short on time for
preparing meals then why not just offer delivery of cooked restaurant meals?

~~~
tzs
If meals were delivered cooked, then you'd have to arrange for the delivery to
occur near the time you wished to eat, unless you are willing to refrigerate
them and reheat them. If you do that, you are essentially eating leftovers.
Ingredients can be delivered and stored well before it is time to cook.

------
scotje
I'm curious as to what your turnaround time from order to delivery is?

We actually tried something pretty similar last year here in Portland (the
site is still alive at www.localplate.com although we have ceased operations),
we found it pretty challenging just to get people to plan ahead far enough for
our offering to be viable. (We came across some consumer research that
something like 70% of households don't have a plan for dinner until sometime
the same day.)

We eventually tried distribution through existing retail channels which
definitely helped with the traction side but made the economics pretty
challenging. :)

Best of luck though, it's an interesting space with a lot of people attacking
it from different directions right now.

(E-mail is in my profile if you want to know any more about our experience.)

~~~
joshfraser
I appreciate your comment. I just sent you an email and would to chat more.

------
yock
I wonder what this will actually look like in practice. Will they be sending
subscribers restaurant-branded ingredients to make named dishes from their
menus, will they be marketed as approximations, or just generic recipes?

~~~
joshfraser
We're working directly with the restaurants to create the meals. Often the
restaurants make a key ingredient in their own kitchen. Other times they'll
share the recipe with our chef and we do it.

What restaurants have mastered is how to prepare delicious meals quickly.
Anything you order in a restaurant can be served in 20 mins or less. What
we're doing is taking their techniques for making things fast and making them
available to home cooks.

~~~
Yourfags
I'm surprised they work with you, arn't you basically in direct competition
with them?

~~~
joshfraser
The restaurants love it. We're free marketing for them. We introduce their
brand to a much larger audience and everyone who makes one of their dishes
wants to see how their cooking compares to the restaurant experience.

------
andrewkitchell
Smart team, who knows the food space well. Agree with Josh that sending all
the ingredients is key, as well as finding great unique recipes that can be
ordered (I assume) any time.

Seems like a cool mix of Blue Apron & Goldbely.

------
fowkswe
I'm curious how many of these kinds of services the market will bear - there
seem to be quite a few clones now. And do they have staying power?

I think people are curious to see what they are all about, but I suspect this
kind of food shopping experience will not change peoples behavior longterm.

I tried Blue Apron and was generally happy with the service, but canceled it
because it put too many constraints on my week - I had to stay home and cook
Monday - Wednesday or else the ingredients would perish.

The bigger issue for me though was packaging waste. I hate all the plastic
crap that was generated out of a meal.

~~~
joshfraser
Clearly I'm biased, but I think we're only beginning to reimagine what a
grocery store of the future will look like.

I totally feel you with regards to packaging waste. One of the key areas we've
been focusing on in our beta is making sure our packaging is minimal. All the
packaging we do send is reusable, biodegradable or recyclable.

------
tom3k
Pretty much the same concept as these guys who are doing it in London:
www.simplycook.com

~~~
joshfraser
We're a little different in that we actually send you everything you need to
make the dish (minus salt, pepper & olive oil). Forage would be considerably
less valuable to me if I still had to make the trek to the grocery store and
deal with all the waste that goes along with that.

~~~
tom3k
Totally agree! I'd be really interested to see how pricing between the two
services compares.

~~~
joshfraser
I can't speak to their pricing, but ours is $15/serving which includes free
shipping.

------
true_religion
I'd be more excited if this was raw ingredients and not prepped ingredients.
Prepping (at least for me) doesn't take all that much time; but running around
different stores to get fresh ingredients does.

~~~
joshfraser
We'll still send you raw ingredients. This isn't about pre-chopped onions.
It's more about the ingredients that take forever to make at home. Think more
along the lines of fresh ramen noodles or pre-marinated meats.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Think more along the lines of fresh ramen noodles or pre-marinated meats.

Ramen noodles may be time consuming (never made them, but most noodles are),
but marinated meats tend to be pretty low prep time (not much different than
your example of pre-chopped onions; they may have a long _passive_ time, but
other than for impulse cooking that's not really a barrier.)

------
gravity13
Can I suggest you include a sample recipe like so:
[http://www.blueapron.com/pages/sample-
recipes](http://www.blueapron.com/pages/sample-recipes)

------
zkirill
Great idea and product! Where do you plan to source your ingredients and how
much will the customers know about where the ingredients in their meals are
coming from?

~~~
joshfraser
We're currently sourcing from some great distributers here in SF that give us
really high quality ingredients. We talk a lot about the potential to bring
transparency into the food chain, but we're still figuring out the best way to
surface that information in our product.

~~~
free2rhyme214
Are the ingredients organic?

~~~
joshfraser
Yep. And fresher than the grocery store because ours don't sit around for days
like the ones at your local grocery store.

------
kandalf
Neat concept - I've tried Plated which is similar.

As a note for Josh, the banner image is unreadable when the window is
maximized on my 30" thunderbolt display.

~~~
joshfraser
Thanks for the heads up. I'll look into it.

------
everettForth
This looks a lot like Tomato Sherpa, a startup in Berkeley.
[http://tomatosherpa.com/](http://tomatosherpa.com/)

------
ameister14
Nice job following the Harry's model of pre-launch promotion.

~~~
joshfraser
We're even using their code!
[https://github.com/harrystech/prelaunchr](https://github.com/harrystech/prelaunchr)

Here's the context for those who missed the story:
[http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/07/21/harrys-prelaunchr-
ema...](http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/07/21/harrys-prelaunchr-email/)

------
jzzskijj
Why not just to learn cook from scratch? Cooking for someone at home with
restaurant pre-prepped ingredients is like ordering from McD and adding a
mayonnaise to fries. If you can't make it, then learn to make it. Or go to
restaurant that can make it.

~~~
soneca
Why don't you learn to program a compiler from scratch? If you can't code from
bare metal, then learn to. Or outsource all your code to someone who can.

~~~
macNchz
Shopping and prepping ingredients for cooking is not actually difficult...

A more apt analogy would be: using this service is like installing WordPress
and a pre-built theme; prepping your own ingredients is like learning to make
an HTML website from scratch.

~~~
gknoy
It may not be difficult, but it's time consuming. This seems targeted at
people with long commutes, or kids, who don't have a lot of time in the
evenings but want to enjoy the process of cooking neat things.

