
Gobble (YC W14) Automates Your Dinner With A Subscription Meal Delivery Service - ooshma
http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/21/gobble-subscription-meals/
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throwaway887766
Throwaway account, these things have been shared with me by someone with
firsthand knowledge of the business:

Gobble completely disregards food safety. Many of the "local chefs" are just
local restaurants from which Gobble orders in bulk and then repackages into
individual portions. While primary food preparation happens in a real
commercial kitchen, the repackaging happens without food safety oversight ("In
our old office, we would just repackage all the food in the office"). Food is
often handled with bare hands, and sanitation/washing is not a significant
concern.

The vague language regarding food safety on their FAQ doesn't increase one's
confidence in the service. There is no mention of any certification of their
facility, or of their own staff.
[https://www.gobble.com/faq](https://www.gobble.com/faq)

I wouldn't eat their food if you paid me.

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codezero
I've been using both Gobble and Munchery for the past three weeks. Munchery by
far has superior meals and service. The portions are consistent and large, the
only catch is that it's more expensive than Gobble.

Gobble has a higher variance on arrival time and portion size, and once
couldn't find my apartment. Gobble food is more like a well put together take
out, and it's cheaper. So far it has tasted fine but a 2 hour window on
arrival is kind of meh. The range in portion size means that sometimes I wish
I had ordered a side or appetizer but there's no way to tell in advance
whether I should.

Munchery meals are like restaurant meals at a nice place. They offer a cheese
plate, and I think the meal quality is similar to that of good meals you'd get
at a place that had a cheese plate :)

Gobble apparently has better vegetarian options according to my wife so that
combined with the price will probably mean we keep Gobble.

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pg
We've been using Gobble lately and I would recommend it to any family with
small children. This is one of those things you don't realize till you have
kids, but 4 year olds don't want to eat the same things you do. Eventually
your kids' tastes may converge sufficiently with yours, but till then you
either have to (a) not eat together, (b) cook two different dinners
simultaneously, (c) eat hot dogs yourself, or (d) have endless fights.

Gobble has given us a fifth and better option, and I think that will be the
cornerstone of its appeal to customers.

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avalaunch
Yeah, but aren't most families more cost conscious precisely because they have
kids? I might recommend the service to any affluent family with small children
but definitely not to most families.

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kjackson2012
I use munchery 2-3 times per week. I love it, it's restaurant quality meals at
similar price point. The difference is that I don't like the subscription
idea, since I want a meal to be opt-in rather that opt-out. I don't want to
have to change my plans and then be forced to cancel with this service.

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JeffL
Do you tip the delivery guy with these kinds of services?

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diminoten
I'm very excited about these companies trying to solve a very significant
problem in my life - what to eat. I don't have the time or the interest in
health to figure out what I should be eating or when - I would prefer to
merely supply the mouth.

However, currently the competition is pretty stiff - fast food and current
delivery services have _huge_ flaws in their lack of nutrition and the daily
time cost of obtaining them, but they're dirt cheap.

$10/meal is nice, but it doesn't scale all that well. If I go grocery shopping
(the _worst_ possible solution, time-wise), I'll probably spend ~$300 or so
for a month's (30 days) amount of food for myself. That comes out to a meal
cost of ~$3.50 (let's round up, it makes sense in a moment).

Fast food and delivery are more expensive. If I used fast food every day for
30 days, I would estimate that cost around ~$7 per meal (see?), or double the
cost of grocery shopping. At this point, costs are _already_ soaring, as we're
in the neighborhood of ~$600/month for food!

Now throw on an additional $3 per meal, plus delivery charges, and you're
sitting somewhere around ~$900 I'd have to spend every month to make sure I
won't die. That's a lot of cash, especially compared to the ~$300 I could
spend just buying groceries.

I want a way to spend closer to $300 than $900 to get this time waster solved
for me. Am I asking too much?

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d23
How much is your time worth though? Let's say you make $50 / hour (which I'm
assuming is on the low end, given the audience). Even if you only grocery shop
twice a month and spend about an hour getting there and back and putting away
the groceries, you've already dropped $100 for your time.

Then consider the much bigger time-sink: cooking the stuff! Even if you
consider a mere 30 minutes a night for cooking and cleaning dishes, you're
talking another 15 hours a month (or $750 given our aforementioned rate).

Just a thought.

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diminoten
That's a good point, but I dunno if pricing my free time at precisely the same
amount as the cost of one hour of my work is a good idea.

Frankly, I'd value it higher, though that only further supports your claim. :)

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themoonbus
It's posts like this that remind me I'm out of step with the hacker news
majority. My first thought when seeing this was "why would anyone want that".

It just makes eating seem so... mechanical? In my house, so much family time
was structured around food – grocery shopping, cooking, eating, choosing a
restaurant to go out to, driving to grab take out, etc.

I guess it just depends on the food culture you're used to. I do appreciate
that this is helpful for a certain subset of the population who don't have any
interest in food (if you have interest but are too busy, maybe you should make
yourself less busy), but I guess I was just surprised to see unanimous support
in the comments.

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noir_lord
I'd _happily_ pay this to have a meal delivered to me at 6pm every day.

The only options near me are a pizza place and a chinese and while both are
excellent...not every night.

Personally I just wish there was a pill I could take every day that would take
care of all dietary needs and hunger occasionally I eat for pleasure the rest
of the time it's just fuel and gets in the way.

I'm aware of Soylent but I'll give it a few years before I consider it (there
are some things where been a beta tester may not be a good idea..).

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btrautsc
I've used Gobble a few times between traveling (hate to go grocery shopping
then be out of town) and I've had legitimately excellent meals. I was really
pleased with the simplicity and the ability to schedule or unschedule based on
my travels/plans.

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vivekpreddy
Love the direction these companies are taking. Food delivery as a whole tends
to be unhealthy, expensive and takes a ton of time to get delivered.

Couple other options for those of you in SF/East Bay:

-Sprig (eatsprig.com)

-SpoonRocket

Personally, I haven't had SpoonRocket before, but I've loved Sprig's service
and the food. Having Google's former Head Chef doesn't hurt :)

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devd
I tried this service out - Was in a bit of crunch mode recently, and I liked
the fact that I don't have to worry about dinner anymore. However, I recently
decided to move to a low sodium diet, and I now have a system of
cooking/prepping over the weekend

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cloudify
This is very sad actually, people should be educated to buy the ingredients
and cook their own meals, unless they they plan to die young :) The average
quality of restaurant (and delivery) food in the US is very very very very low
:(

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scotth
That's a lot of verys. Have anything to back that up?

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cloudify
Mostly personal experience of me, my wife and a few friends of mine. All
people coming from countries with cultures based on quality food and food
education. After a few years in the US, and after having embraced the US food
lifestyle, most of us developed different sorts of diseases caused by the
quality of the food we were ingesting. Worth nothing to say that as soon as we
got back to our home country, almost every disease went away.

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nobodysfool
Well, I'm sure people from Brescia will not appreciate american restaurant
food, but that's not the point.

You specifically mention foodborne illnesses.

The most common are: Botulism Campylobacteriosis E. coli Hepatitis A Norovirus
Infection Salmonellosis Shigellosis

Normally this is because the food itself was contaminated at some point in the
restaurant. That's not because the food itself causes illness, but the
different bacteria, viruses, and parasites due to the environment. It's
entirely possible that your regional friends are not used to the same
pathogens as americans, so you had to suffer. Yet chances are if americans
were to go to Brescia and eat out a lot, they would come down with the same
foodborne illnesses because they also are not exposed to the same microflora
as you have been exposed your whole life.

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borski
Munchery?

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joelrunyon
FWIW - from a brand perspective - Gobble > Munchery

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mschaecher
How so?

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weixiyen
How much are we supposed to tip for delivery?

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svetha
Love this new direction!

