
Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered within 20 minutes - getbreadbox
http://getbreadbox.com/yc
======
smacktoward
I guess I'm just at a loss as to what is even remotely "hacker"-ish about
this.

It's a bakery that delivers. That's great, I guess, but there's nothing
particularly _technical_ about it. They're not using tech in some unusual or
interesting way to cut down on delivery costs, or make bread in a different
way, or anything. It's just... a bakery, that delivers.

There's a Web form to order your bread through, but in 2014 that's not really
any different than having a phone number to order your bread through used to
be. (It looks like there's a mobile app to come, but if all it does is show
you a menu and let you order it would fall roughly into the same category.
Table stakes.)

I was talking with a relative of mine who's been in the grocery business for
decades over the holidays last year, and we were joking around about how it
wouldn't be long until someone started touting home milk delivery -- something
that was commonplace before most homes had TV sets, or even radios, much less
computers -- as a "tech startup." This isn't _that,_ of course. But it's
close.

~~~
reso
They're doing something that doesn't scale in order to learn more about their
potential customers. It doesn't have to make sense as a long-term business in
order for them to get good data out of it.

~~~
ballard
My hats off to folks that execute on something.

What's the end game? It seems like premeditated failure into murderously
brutal markets where distribution is painful. If they're going to do it
themselves they're going to learn quite quickly that it can only work in about
a dozen metros. That's a 20 million a year business with margins that will be
tiny....

Doesn't butter my bread.

------
dangrossman
Strange business, if that's what it's going to be. I've never had a sudden
craving for a loaf of bread and wished I could order just that online. Not
that I can't already; the local grocery store has a delivery service, and they
bake their own bread every morning. I'm sure there's at least one bakery that
delivers in the city, and there's a half dozen restaurants on GrubHub in my
area that offer some kind of bread delivered.

It'd be a strange thing to pitch to investors too. I don't hear of much VC
funding going to low-margin fresh food businesses. Bakeries generally don't
make many billionaires; I think the entire Cinnabon company was sold for $30M
some years ago. Perhaps they're going to pitch some kind of scheduling /
routing / dispatch technology for delivery businesses?

Edit: Nope, missed the link to their real site. They want to be a bakery that
delivers for free.

~~~
rgbrgb
There's a high end bakery in the mission called Tartine where people queue up
every day to buy $13 loaves of bread. I could never justify the expense but
from the line outside I'd say there are definitely a lot of people in SF who
can. You might have a hard time scaling this outside of really posh areas, but
I'd bet that if you can make a profit delivering 5$ loaves in SF that you
could do it for cheaper with the same margins in less wealthy areas. Good luck
to the OP!

~~~
dangrossman
I'm skeptical there's any profit selling $5 loaves in SF. How many can one
driver really deliver per hour, 3-4 trips? $20 per hour in gross revenue is
barely enough to employ the driver and his fuel, let alone the bread, bakers,
managers, facilities, taxes, health licenses, marketing, customer service,
payment processing, etc. unless people tip _very_ generously.

~~~
jwheeler79
solution looking for a problem

~~~
ballard
Yup. Gotta find a problem and a solution and make money at it. Otherwise, it's
not survivable.

------
primitivesuave
What a brilliant way to validate an idea. No online payment processing, no
fancy dropdown modals asking me to make an account, just pay when you get the
bread.

I hope it stays this simple.

~~~
Pacabel
I've ordered pizza from several chains that use exactly the same process for
their online orders, and have done so this way for years now.

No account is mandatory, although such functionality is offered if you want to
save your preferred pizza toppings, your address, and so forth for greater
convenience during future orders.

You can prepay, if you want, or just pay the delivery driver once the pizzas
have been delivered.

I'm not really sure what needs to be "validated" here. This approach has been
successfully used by many other organizations offering the exact same type of
service.

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getbreadbox
Hi everyone!

Thank you all so much for your interest in this!

The spike in interest from HN has been totally overwhelming, so while we are
thrilled with the validation of this concept, we are running out of stock and
falling behind on delivery schedule.

I'll be sure to reach out individually to everyone who submitted an order.

We can't wait to launch this service in a way that can handle demand spikes
like this -- thank you all for yor support.

Edit: for reference, we've had orders for 150 loaves of bread in 2 hours.

~~~
ChuckMcM
So you achieved your goal right? Historically bakeries are very 'spikey' in
their demand, a friend of mine runs one and they spend 3AM to 6AM making
donuts and bagels which they sell out of between 6AM and 7:15AM, and then sell
maybe a handful or two for the rest of the day.

Given the complexities of bread, it would interesting to hear a post mortem
about ways you might both account for spikes without compromising delivery
times, delivery scheduling to make maximum use of delivery resources, and even
recipe variations to support those goals.

~~~
enterthemist
There is a donut place in Berkeley that works very similar to that. The reason
for them is that there are a lot of large-scale orders that want the donuts
for breakfast (e.g. the school dining facilities).

~~~
ballard
150 tiny orders is like cutting down a forest with a herring. Catering events
is where the real cash is at. Large universities like Stanford operate like
cities with 100s of autonomous departments free to choose whichever vendor/s
they like.

------
sheetjs
Just picked it up (two people in a black Prius :)

They seemed swamped (they were 10 minutes late and were visibly frazzled) but
upbeat. Bread was decent.

I suspect that if you go into pastries, you probably can command a higher
margin (I really dislike keeping desserts in the apartment, and "dessert on
demand" definitely would be appealing)

~~~
ballard
I could also get used to delivered deserts.

Esp delivered by quadcopter.

------
camillomiller
That's very cool, but jeez is that really in line with the price of baked
bread in San Francisco? This morning, 3,50€ bought me half a kilo of 5-cereals
focaccia, two loaves of cereal breada and half a kilo of white bread. That's
bread for a eight people lunch. That's probably one of the few things I'm
gonna miss about Italy when I'll leave.

~~~
Ecio78
I suppose you're located in the south of Italy, as in the north (Milan for
example) bread (standard, not multicereal or special ones) is around 4-5€ per
kilo. NB I'm Italian now in Luxembourg and one of the thing I miss is the
quality of bread (here it is generally not very good, too many "boulangerie"
of the same brand, Fischer, with all the same bread / taste). And of course it
is even more expensive...

~~~
camillomiller
Tuscany, small province town. Those prices in Milan are crazy, though!

------
thwarted
I wonder where the bread is being baked. SF has some pretty strict laws around
the quality/inspection/safety/licensing of kitchens (even home kitchens) used
to create food for sale. My girlfriend wanted to sell lamb cakes during Easter
season a few years ago (we saw an indication of demand and absolutely no
supply from established bakeries) and while figuring out how to do it at minor
scale (planning on 25-50 cakes) we became aware of these inspection limits. It
seemed like it was going to be a lot of footwork to handle and was
discouraging enough to not follow through on at the time.

Maybe they most likely won't run afoul or attract any legal attention for this
test run for a single day. If it proves to be popular then it wouldn't make
sense to do it out of someone's home kitchen, of course.

~~~
stellar678
Thanks to the Cottage Food Act, as of 2013 it's super-easy if you're
relatively low volume. It's a self-inspection (as in, "follow this checklist")
and a cheap registration so they can track you down if you cause some kind of
outbreak.

See:
[https://www.sfdph.org/dph/EH/Food/AB1616.as](https://www.sfdph.org/dph/EH/Food/AB1616.as)

------
pud
In one place on the front page, it says delivery takes 18 minutes. In another
place on the same page, it says 20 minutes.

Not that 2 minutes makes a difference, but the numbers should be consistent.

I like 18 minutes because it sounds precise.

------
vishaldpatel
Is it a mobile oven? The bread gets baked as you drive to the delivery point?
:D

------
pappyo
I'm disappointed with the comments here about this future YC applicant. Can't
we think bigger than a food delivery app?

If you read the homepage, you'll see their tag line is "Fresh bread, snacks
and coffee beans. Delivered in 18 minutes." Now, let's remove the baked goods
accoutrement for a second and focus on the "delivered in 18 minutes or less".
Isn't this the very real problem Amazon is trying to solve for themselves?
Isn't there tremendous value to dynamic delivery logistics?

To be clear, I don't know these people, nor do I know if delivery logistics is
their endgame. If they're bakers, then all the previous critique is warranted.

But if I lived in SF, I would sign up to see what they're up to.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>I'm disappointed with the comments here about this future YC applicant.
Can't we think bigger than a food delivery app?

Yeah, it was incredibly depressing to visit a really nice web page, become
interested, and then read the top comment which basically dismisses the entire
thing as "not hacker-ish" enough. Mind you, that comment is coming from a guy
who blogs about mostly political topics...

------
christkv
I might be worth looking at where kozmo.com went wrong with a similar attempt
during the dotcom boom.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com)

~~~
rkuykendall-com
What makes you assume something went wrong? It sounds like they were doing
really well, but the bust hit them extremely hard, like it hit many others.

~~~
ben1040
According to the S-1 for the IPO that never happened, they spent nearly as
much on delivery as their total revenue. Seems like they weren't doing _that_
well.

[http://www.secinfo.com/dRqWm.5c8t.htm#1jjz](http://www.secinfo.com/dRqWm.5c8t.htm#1jjz)

------
jt2190
It's refreshing that instead of putting up a fake landing page and pretending
to be an established product, they're just coming right out and telling us
that this is an experiment. Very cool!

------
kunle
Bravo for doing things that don't scale. Good luck here & I hope this works
out. Happy to help read through your YC app as well. ayo at hipmob.

------
troels
Wouldn't it be a logistic nightmare when everybody wants their bread delivered
at the exact same time (breakfast)?

~~~
eternauta3k
In an ideal world, they'd adjust the price according to demand. But,
realistically, no one's gonna shift their schedule to get cheaper online
bread.

~~~
thwarted
Then there will be complaints that surge pricing for bread is price gouging
when people need bread the most.

------
bornabox
Oh boy. That's nice. Could you deliver to São Paulo, please? Pretty please :)
But seriously, that's quite a great idea. If you can deliver in time, it would
be supremely convenient. Reminds me of the milk bottles that used to be
delivered by the milkman early in the morning.

~~~
ojii
And while you're on the way to Sao Paulo, mind stopping by in Tokyo? it's
impossible to find decent bread here...

~~~
toufka
Sadly true. I'd have paid $20-30 for a real life loaf of bread that you
couldn't roll into a golf-ball sized nugget between your palms.

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needacig
So, a bakery that delivers? The tech industry sure is expanding its scope.

------
sarah2079
I clicked through to read about how they plan on running it long term. They
will carry a very limited number of products, and every delivery person has
all the products stocked in their van. They then route the nearest delivery
person to you when you order, so it's kind of like a mobile coffee shop.

I don't know if it is possible to make it profitable, but it is definitely a
service I would use. It is a pain keeping bread on hand because the good stuff
only keeps for a day or two.

~~~
bch
> It is a pain

...in French speaking regions.

------
songgao
Please let there be an API.

Home Sensors + ifttt + Bread Box would be a good alternative for morning
alarms :-)

Or make it integrated with the navigation app on my cell phone. Based on
traffic status, it'll schedule bread baking. After I park my car near my
office, I can pick some freshly baked bread on my way.

Or integrate with a voting system that hooks with GitHub. The person who makes
the most awesome PR of the day gets a basket of healthy bread delivered to
her/his home next morning.

------
trumbitta2
Given I'm now hungry as a bat out of hell, I guess you already nailed the
website both in content and in pictures.

Now if only I wasn't based in Italy...

~~~
selectodude
I can't imagine it's that much of a struggle to find good bread in Italy.

------
shanac
I rather deliver a great "give yourself upworthy's advantages for your
content" and break my own sourdough...

But this is a startup that jumped the shark of meaning of startups. If they
told me they had angel money, I'd be very concerned about investing in
startups myself (if only I could)

which remind's me, I need to feed my sour starter today!

------
petergreen
Finally. But i'd prefer to get every day a fresh loaf @7am, and then you can
really save on delivery costs. And give me a $2-3/per smaller bread (cuz u
don't go through it in a day) if I subscribe like yearly.

I'll give it a shot though.

------
mililani
I could see this being economical with quad copter (drone) delivery. But, home
delivery from a car? Man, the gas expenses (among other car related expenses)
would eat the profits to a bare minimum. Especially driving around SF.

~~~
ShaneCurran
Bicycles are your friend in the likes of SF :)

------
brryant
Which bakeries source your breads? The Mill? Tartine? Acme? Would love to know
which before I buy! (though I might buy anyways because I think this is
awesome). Awesome Webflow site that is simple and to the point.

------
pwenzel
Brake Bread in the Twin Cities area has something similar with its
subscription service, delivered by bike.

[http://brakebread.com/](http://brakebread.com/)

------
nemothekid
Placed an order at 4:35 PST, still nothing? Safe to assume they got swamped?

EDIT: See the update now, seeing as how they had my phone, it would have been
cool if they texted me.

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encoderer
Am I the only one who thinks this might not be about the bread?

YC has funded delivery-as-a-service before. If you were going for that, a
stunt like this could be brilliant.

------
Jarred
I love bread. I'd use this if I lived in SF.

------
pistle
Does SF not have Jimmy Johns? They'll stick some oats and sesame seeds on a
roll if you ask nicely. They are freakishly fast.

------
sgrove
Just got our delivery now, fantastic service. I hope the unit-economics work
out, because I'd certainly use this, yc or not.

------
wudf
Oh man... I would love some fresh, warm bread right now. breadbox is going to
set a trend with this stunt.

------
state
Seems like a good idea to me. I submitted my info but didn't hear back. Did
anyone get a response?

~~~
rohan404
I've been waiting about 10-15 minutes for a response myself; guess it's not
automated?

------
cheshire137
I need this up in Lexington, KY. It's the San Francisco of Kentucky! ...Or
something like that.

------
evanb
Do you guys know about SpoonRocket? It's only in the East Bay, but seems
conceptually similar.

------
_random_
Add to subj: "only in SF"

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sixQuarks
I like the picture on the site, it's from one of my favorite wineries - Scribe

------
rkuykendall-com
Do you tip? or just the $5?

------
mhluongo
Maybe the business they're validating is an HN-specific PR firm :)

------
jerryhuang100
by glancing the title this comes to my mind first:
[http://www.nick.com/shows/breadwinners/](http://www.nick.com/shows/breadwinners/)

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dalek2point3
it was only this morning that I was thinking, I wish someone could buy me
breakfast from the nearby Au Bon Pain while I work on campus. This would work
too. Great idea!

------
riffraff
somewhat OT, but: if you have never tried baking bread at home (not even
sourdough, beer yeast is ok) you should definitely try it, it's incredibly
satisfying.

------
stephenhandley
What the world needs now is on demand bread.

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ballard
Is there anything similar in Paris already?

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rohan404
Anyone else not receiving the text message?

~~~
mfkp
Same here, check my above comment.

------
ShadyX
Dat sexy bread tho..

