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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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 =)
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.
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
I think the ability to provide fresh ingredients is one of your strong points, the whole deal is you decide the menu. Just don't offer anything with tomatoes in December.
More to the point, I wonder about the long term viability of some of these services. If the economy hits a snag, or food prices or gas prices soar, they don't have a whole lot of margin to work with and would likely face a very bleak situation.
True story for almost anything in food. The industry is famous for razor thin margins. We're passionate about small-scale local food systems and the ability of certain models of said systems to better weather economic downturns. That's all a part of our larger mission and vision, to see which systems work and promote them. Wish us luck =)
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.
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.
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 =)
