Munchery Is Trying to Reinvent The Personal Chef, And Early Signs Are Promising
techcrunch.comAt my shop in Raleigh, NC, we order lunch delivery once a week from a local, home-based cook for $8/person (sandwich, side, drink). It's our favorite day of the week now, and one of our most productive because everyone eats together in the office or the park next door.
Its so much healthier, cheaper, and easier than any other option. She just emails us the menu on Monday morning and we all pick what we want and email it back. Couldn't be easier.
Point being: I think a lot of people want to buy this, and would if only it was easy to connect with local cooks (a friend referred us to Thao, or we'd have never known about her). ZeroCater is a great idea as well, but I really like the aspect of buying home cooked food from a local person vs. a restaurant because its cheaper, usually healthier, and its the closest thing to getting a home-cooked meal from my Mom.
(Sidebar: anyone in Raleigh, do yourself a favor and check out Thao Beck at http://www.lunchboxnmore.com/. Just shoot her an email and say you'd like to get the menu next week and she'll take it from there [or email me and I'll be happy to introduce you]. I can't recommend her highly enough, especially for companies. Here's a couple favs I had to photograph: http://imgur.com/a/v80kd)
Don't want to detract from your recommendation but just piggyback on the price remark - the guys in my office buy sandwich supplies at the start of the week and do four days worth of two sandwiches each. $10-12pp for the week. It's pretty social too as everyone preps and eats together.
Why not everyday?
the sort of casual home-based cooking for others as a small enterprise works well in india (any big city where people flock for work has tons of people working to keep them fed). however, in the usa i believe commercial kitchen requirements would make it a very high-overhead enterprise.
I came across something about this a little while ago, specifically the Dabbawalla/Tiffin[1] industry in Indian cities. The organisation and effectiveness of the system is quite astounding, especially given how ad-hoc and decentralised it all is. I can't seem to find the original article I'm thinking of, but there's one by the NY Times[2] that looks ok.
My recollection seems to tally with the WP numbers, with hundreds of thousands of deliveries a day, with less than 1 in a million mistakes, despite a multi-party transport network and widespread illiteracy (no written addresses!)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/business/worldbusiness/29...
This is awesome, I can't believe it took me this long to hear about it. Too bad, since I'm moving away from SF in two weeks. Gah.
There is a gigantic market for "tasty, healthy, delivery" that is almost entirely untapped right now. I've been trying to pull it off myself (mostly ordering LOTS of veggie dishes and mixing in with the stereotypically absurdly-sized meat dishes that delivery is known for, and spreading over multiple meals).
Best of luck to these folks.
For anyone else wondering what "mofo" is (see the article's screenshot of the daily push notification), its full name, Mofongo, shows up here: https://www.munchery.com/menus/mofo-with-shrimp-marinara-sau...
It sounds pretty good, too. The abbreviation caught me off guard though.
Edit: Mofo is actually a spin on Mofongo, not necessarily the same.
This looks great, and while I feel the market for local, healthy dinner is large, the price points are too high. $18 - $20 is very expensive. I don't think I've ever paid over $15/person for takeout and even those times are infrequent.
It's a well-executed idea, just really expensive right now.
Are there any legal issues here? Aren't these chefs acting as a restaurant and wouldn't they need a license?
Indeed there are. Our chefs have business licenses, ServSafe certification, and food reseller permits.
Regardless of legality, there are food safety issues. I wrote about how the traditional peer to peer doesn't work for food: http://blog.munchery.com/2011/11/pro-to-peer-a-new-paradigm/
It seems like there's a much greater scope for casual/ad-hoc delivery than production, based on the safety/certification issues. Of course, there are still potential risks with poorly trained/equipped transport workers letting your food get too warm|cold|stale, etc.
I was thinking a little while ago about how we're almost at the point of making the digital timer pizza-box from Snow Crash a reality -- or in my scheme, something more useful, like a data logging thermometer.
It might be a little clunky still, but if you established some sort of ongoing service, an upfront purchase/loan/amortised lifespan device might make it practical to have a little temp + humidity + realtime clock with bluetooth/nfc comms to talk to your phone when your food gets delivered. And you have a solid audit trail if anything turns out dodgy.
Are these generally off-work or out-of-work chefs, or people specifically setting up to provide this service? In the TC article, it sounded like a current restaurant chef; in that case, isn't it basically takeaway?
I've always thought the game changer in this field would be based around bulk orders (group buying) - e.g., cheaper curry dish for you if others in your office or immediate area group together to improve scale efficiency for the chef and delivery.
Looking forward to you delivering in Mountain View! Our office is stoked.