
Show HN: Farm Feedery – menuless lunch delivery with farm-fresh ingredients - jmzbond
https://www.farmfeedery.com
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jbob2000
Cool, but I'm curious how this will scale and avoid becoming another Sodexho
or the likes. Quality food for hundreds of thousands of people is _hard_.

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jmzbond
Agree, but I think now is the time when many small companies have dreams of
figuring that out! We'll write about it if we do =)

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trcollinson
I wonder when old fashioned ideas will become more main stream again. When I
look at Farm Feedry it screams franchise opportunity. Why try to scale this
out yourself, if you can come up with a working model and equation for how to
source local farm fresh ingredients, a database of reasonable recipes for a
set of ingredients, and the logistics for delivery? It would seem like an
amazing business opportunity.

By the way, the food looks amazing! I wish I was in the area to buy it.

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jmzbond
At the moment we're not scaling out ourselves just yet, we're just in one
region, but you're totally right that franchising could potentially be a
model. We have a lot of ideas on how to better scale, when the time is right.
Thanks for your thoughts!

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rnernento
This seems cool, I could see making the necessary savings to enable the $10
price point by cooking in large batches. Isn't the delivery a killer though?

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jmzbond
You're right! You know every time someone tells me this is a tech startup, I
fire back that it's actually a logistics startup. Delivery is one of the
hardest things for the new wave of "deliver everything" startups. We'll see as
time goes on if it proves killer or not.

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msandford
Cooking will scale nicely. I spent a summer in a commercial kitchen and 15
people cooked enough for 2500 with no issues.

Delivery _can_ scale if you get people to order in groups and have a minimum
group size or something.

Actually having high quality fresh ingredients is a much bigger challenge.
Look at Subway. They _always_ have tomatoes but they're rarely _good_
tomatoes. Even Chipotle can have very substandard pico or guacamole and that's
basically their only really fresh ingredients (save lettuce).

All the other big restaurant chains use little to no truly fresh ingredients
and for a good reason. It's a legitimate problem with few great solutions at
scale.

That's part of why the local/seasonal food movement has taken off; restaurants
can't deliver on a perfectly consistent and great menu year-round. But once
you introduce the idea of local and seasonal then their hands are no longer
tied and you can alter the menu at will. People might complain if they show up
for a particular meal and can't order it, but ostensibly they knew that was a
risk if the restaurant made this clear.

Given that you record preferences and emphasize the "surprise" aspect you
might be able to scale appropriately.

But you may still find it's difficult to find any good ingredients at certain
times of the year and have problems keeping the rotation from week to week
large enough to keep customers happy.

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jmzbond
Yup, with the delivery thing it will be great if enough folks order from one
area that we can designate a drop off point (like Lyft hotspots) OR just do a
regular catering if that area is one business. Latter, specifically, would
make much more sense in my mind.

Re: ingredients. I totally agree with everything you said. We also preserve a
lot of food so could be tomatoes in December, just not the fresh form. You're
right that there may be challenges still, especially if people's preferences
are all: give me tomatoes in December! But this is a we'll see what happens
when we get there story =)

Thanks for your feedback!

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msandford
I think the ingredients problem is why chain restaurants haven't completely
dominated the landscape and why small restaurants can compete. No solution to
the ingredients problem scales in a way that favors big entities. In fact
there is a "tax" associated with being big for many ingredients that small
restaurants don't pay.

If I need 1 fresh tomato a day it's tough because any one supplier might or
might not have good tomatoes but I have to visit them all to see.

If I need 10 per day it's less bad for sure. The trip cost doesn't dominate
quite so hard anymore.

If I need 100 per day that's probably optimal because the trip cost is minimal
and it's easy to make sure that quantity are good. I can probably still get
this from a single source, from whichever vendor has the best tomatoes today.

If I need 1,000 or 10,000 per day I'm screwed. I have to have relationships
with multiple suppliers who aggregate tomatoes from a bunch of different
sources in order to get the volume. Each of which will have different levels
of quality and freshness and whatnot. So now I'm spending a lot of time trying
to do what I wish my vendor would do, but which it does not.

Big chains get big by removing the fairly well paid manager/operating partner
whose job it is to monitor quality and everything and replacing him/her with a
food factory at a remote location. So instead of paying several people real
middle class wages they pay several people to just manage the hourly staff. If
they can get away with paying $40k/year instead of $80k/year times three
people then that's $120k/year in profits per restaurant.

Chilis has 1500 locations and seems to do about $200mm in profits a year. 1500
* $120k = $180mm so it seems like my math isn't totally crazy.

I think what that indicates though is that if you want something that'll
really scale well and reach as many people as a nationwide chain you're going
to have to make the same compromises that most nationwide chains do in terms
of quality or price.

My guess is that there's not some magic bullet that everyone's overlooking.

To be perfectly honest I hope I'm really wrong and that it's possible to get
higher quality food for cheaper. It'd be great. That would be a billion dollar
company for sure.

Best of luck!

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jmzbond
Love the illustrative parabola thanks! I agree with so many of your points,
but I do hope there's an alternative as well, and that's actually why we're in
business, to explore those models. This is just the consumer facing engine
that will give us (hopefully) the funds to do so. And we have a lot of ideas
about things to explore =)

Feel free to keep in touch if you ever have other thoughts, I always like
chatting strategy: james@farmfeedery.com

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peterwwillis
Do they use steamer containers and those foil toasting platforms to get the
textures and flavors right? Without them it'd be very easy to overcook the
meats or change crispy to soggy. Some foods reheat very well, some don't, and
a dirty workplace microwave transfers nasty flavors.

I would love it if there were a way for city slickers to subsidize the
expansion of local organic farms. But at the same time, those farms need to be
far enough away from cities to not be affected by increased pollution.

In India there's an army of people who deliver lunches to the city's workers.
Maybe we could help provide part-time work to destitute inner city kids and
adults with similar services.

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jmzbond
I agree with you about how hard it is to maintain flavor and texture, it's
always something we're working on. The meals come to you in biodegradable
containers that you can microwave without transferring elsewhere. So far, so
good, but we've definitely had to cut some meals where the reheat didn't work
as well. We have stringent QC requirements!

I also love your last points, and totally agree that there are some work
opportunities here, which we'd love to explore when we get to that size.

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mrybczyn
Why so many food-related-delivery-service startups around YC? Yall hungry over
there on the left coast?

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jmzbond
Well we're in Boston and Cambridge, MA. But in general why is food-tech
"booming" more generally, I think it's a couple of things: 1) greater
awareness, at least on my social media, about healthy eating, 2) related, a
greater desire for full control of your food as people want to measure/ track
more and more aspects of their life. Granted Farm Feedery doesn't have menus,
but we do tell you exactly what you're getting with detailed ingredients, and
finally 3) food is a fun space to work in, it's something that's inherently
required for survival and frankly it's a delicious place to work =)

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CPLX
You misspelled the word "refrigerate" towards the top of your home page.
Misspelled words always make me disinclined to order from a new merchant.

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jmzbond
oh shoot thanks so much for the catch!

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o0-0o
Is there an HN invite code?

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jmzbond
Oooh thanks for asking, why don't I give you my personal code: "jamesdd".
It'll get you $25 off when you sign up for any of our plans =)

