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I really love the concept and the care it took to put this box together. The only challenge I see is for the person who is always on the go. Most assuredly that person is guaranteed to go out to eat once or twice a week. It would appear that you would need quite a bit of discipline adhering to the consumption of these meals each day. Did that go into your thought process when putting this together?
@bryansarnold That's a really solid insight! We were wary of that when we were designing the box: That a user would go out for a few meals and end up with leftovers at the end of the week!
We found that the best way to counter that was to pick the right items. So in our mental model, we divided the items into two categories- staples and specialty.
We found that the staples (like milk, bread, fruits etc.) were pretty much unaffected by seasonality or changes in schedule (since people tend mostly to go our for lunch/dinner and most staples are built for breakfast/snacks.
The real trick was with picking the right specialty items. We've gone for specialty foods that
1. Stay fresh longer than a week
2. Combine easily with specialty items from other weeks.
An example of this would be pasta + pasta sauce. If you've got either left over, you can always use them in a later week since they don't perish at the same rate. And also, they can get combined with other specialty food from either week!
We've seen that with this arrangement, any irregularities balance out over 12-14 days for a majority of the folks. While there will always be some amount of wastage, by designing the right meals and portion sizes, we're able to reduce it significantly!
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@chai_mishra love the answer! Makes sense and I appreciate the in-depth response.
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Great work Chai and Sebastian; loved the video! A couple Q's that jumped to mind: Can boxes be expanded or multiple boxes be combined for people who live in the same household/families (maybe this is something you're thinking about in the future)? Any thoughts on how to bring down the price point for low-income individuals/families who have similar needs for healthy food and also may not have time to shop?
:)
@mk_leon Solid questions, Michelle! I'll do my best to answer them but please feel free to reach out with more questions!
1. Absolutely! You can order multiple boxes in one purchase. The coolest part is that everything we sell is small-batch and labelled with your name. That way the experience is much more personal and custom. But its especially helpful if you live in a shared home so everyone knows who a certain piece of food belongs too!
2. This is our North Star. Our vision (short and long term) is to create better food access for everyone, not a small community that can afford us. We're also in a very unique position to take this on. Since we're built online, we don't face the same issues as traditional supermarkets of being limited to the areas that we can serve. Our model and our economics are identical whether we ship to a wealthy suburban home or to low-income government housing in the inner city. The key is to reach necessary scale with our supplies so we can introduce a parallel service for low-income households. The Founder's Box helps get there. Once we're shipping enough boxes monthly, the incremental cost of shipping a lower-cost box becomes zero since we're able to use the same warehouse, suppliers and equipment!
I could go on! But I'll stop for everyone's sake- if you'd like to know more, please feel free to ping me at chai@movebutter.com :)
Would be cool if there was an option for 1/2 a box. I can't imagine most people eat all 21 meals at home per week, but does make sense for sharing or dual households.
@allany888 That's a really solid suggestion! I'm going to try to make that happen very soon!
On a related note, we were having a similar conversation in the thread a lil bit ago-
We were wary of that when we were designing the box: That a user would go out for a few meals and end up with leftovers at the end of the week!
We found that the best way to counter that was to pick the right items. So in our mental model, we divided the items into two categories- staples and specialty.
We found that the staples (like milk, bread, fruits etc.) were pretty much unaffected by seasonality or changes in schedule (since people tend mostly to go our for lunch/dinner and most staples are built for breakfast/snacks.
The real trick was with picking the right specialty items. We've gone for specialty foods that
1. Stay fresh longer than a week
2. Combine easily with specialty items from other weeks.
An example of this would be pasta + pasta sauce. If you've got either left over, you can always use them in a later week since they don't perish at the same rate. And also, they can get combined with other specialty food from either week!
We've seen that with this arrangement, any irregularities balance out over 12-14 days for a majority of the folks. While there will always be some amount of wastage, by designing the right meals and portion sizes, we're able to reduce it significantly!
@chai_mishra@allany888 Another suggestion based on our household would be allowing to double up on some things - meat, cheese, etc. Pasta, nut butters, preserves are the things we'll probably end up with extras, even with 3 in our house based on our eating habits. But add 2x seafood, meat, etc, and we might actually have meals for 2.5 for most of a week.
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What's in the Urbanite plan?
It says "no cooking" so are there only ready-to-eat ingredients? If so, how is it replacing the existing experience for a person who doesn't cook and orders hot food online or goes out and still eats hot prepared meals?
@lukaszczekaj Solid question!
With the urbanite box, we go for partly cooked ingredients. So instead of just rice, you'd get parcooked rice that you can just stick in the microwave.
There are three main benefits: quality, price and health. Cooked restaurant meals and entire microwave dinners tend to use copious amounts of palm oil as preservatives. The frozen, cooked microwave meals also tend to taste pretty bad (In my opinion).
Lastly, on a cost-per-calorie basis, you'll end up paying significantly more if you eat out versus if you cook your own meal at home. We remove all the friction around that, making it easier!
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I'm surprised to see that vegetarian and meat boxes are the same price. Tofu is dramatically less expensive than grass-fed beef and sustainable fish. Any plans to re-align pricing with cost of goods?
Also, what was the thinking behind cutting the fruits instead of whole fruits? Just curious.
@kevinz Hey Kevin!
I'm the Head of Marketing here at Movebutter, and I'm a strict vegetarian, so this question really applies to me and my role here. We've talked about that, and it's definitely something we're considering. We've seen a small number of vegan and vegetarian box orders, so we're still ironing out kinks in the pricing structure for the more plant-based boxes. In last week's box, we had fennel spiced seitan from a local producer, steamed lentils, vegan ground beef, and tamari baked tofu as substitutes. There was also a garden heirloom vegetable and bean soup included. We're always looking for great options for people's dietary restrictions, and it's super important that people who eat like me are full and satisfied with the box.
I'd love your thoughts on an appropriate price difference between the standard and veggie boxes. My email is darby@movebutter.com
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@darbsies@movebutter Thanks Darby! It's great to hear that you're including other meat alternatives. On your 'inside the box' page, it just states meats are replaced with tofu. Might be worth updating that as I think including other meat alternatives make the price much more reasonable. I'll shoot you over some thoughts once I've taken a closer look.
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high nitrate coldcuts on my door!? plus enough fish to feed one half of one man!? plus great high cholesterol choices and savory fats!? dreams really do come true!
@passingnotes Our cold cuts are nitrate free and we do half-pound portions of wild-caught fish. I guess it depends on the man but that's pretty sizable.
Nonetheless, appreciate the wokeness.
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I'm completely enthralled by this. It seems everything has been considered both in terms of efficiency and ethics. I guess my only concern is although the price is probably prohibitive for many, it still seems low enough that I'm concerned about sustainability. How can individual preferences be managed at scale?
@_taurean Thats a very insightful question. I really mean it. Here are some views that we've discussed around those topics here at the office in SF:
Firstly, around sustainability of both our food and our business: We often think of ourselves as "the supermarket of the future" and attempt to benchmark our operations off of what traditional supermarkets do. Now, a majority of the money that a customer spends at a traditional supermarket (81%) goes to middlemen, overhead, marketing etc. (basically the cost of getting the food to you, not the food itself).
That becomes our yardstick. The average American family spends around $150/ week on groceries. 80% of that, $120 of their money is spent to get their food to them. So our challenge is really "can we get you your groceries for less than a $120"
Shipping from our warehouse, we're able to get to most anyone in the continental US for less than that. That gives us room to pay our producers more and still have a way healthier margin than any supermarket (even without scale).
Hope that helps explain our thinking around this!
Excited to have you taste the food and try the service :D
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@chai_mishra Thanks for the response! Is that average per household, per person, or specifically per household in which there is only one person? Also, I want to make sure I understand you, are you saying only 19% of the money spent on groceries goes toward the cost of the product and the remaining 81% is purely the cost of logistics and marketing?
I totally understand the intent behind targeting single person households first. Is there a plan to make this accessible to a family in areas of the country where fresh food is hard to come by?
Lastly, I just wanted to share this with you as well: http://mashable.com/2017/01/06/f.... I have no idea what it would entail to take part in something like that but I know it would go a long way toward making a service like that more accessible to people who may find $100/wk prohibitive.
Happy to move the conversation over to email if this is getting too wordy 😅
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