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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

meal delivery

Denmark’s Simple Feast Grabs $12M for Plant-based Meal Delivery

Today Danish meal delivery service Simple Feast raised a $12 million Series A. As TechCrunch first reported, the funding round was led by London’s Balderton Capital with participation from 14W and existing investors Sweet Capital and ByFounders.

Founded in 2015, Simple Feast’s website boasts that the company is working to create the most sustainable meal service on the planet. How exactly? By eliminating meat from their meals and skipping plastic and styrofoam in their packaging. But the main thing is meat, or lack thereof: after all, avoiding animal products is the single biggest action you can take to reduce negative environmental impact. Simple Feast wants to help people do that by delivering premade, plant-based meals to their doorstep.

They offer two plans: Green Feast, which is vegetarian, and Vegan Feast. Each is 63 DKK ($9.77) per portion if you order for 4-5 people, and features three meals per week. You can also order their “Comfort Food” set of three vegan stews for 69 DKK ($10.70), each of which have two servings. While we can’t access full pricing on the site because we are in the U.S., it seems like the three meal minimum would make ordering Simple Feast pretty expensive pretty fast.

Simple Feast, however, is very clearly not a meal kit. It’s actually more akin to microwaveable Indian food company Buttermilk Co. (also vegetarian!), or a Tovala or Suvie, minus the connected cooking appliance. The boxes come almost completely premade; all customers have to do is heat the food for 10 minutes and add dressing or sauces.

However, Simple Feast might still run into some of the same difficulties meal kit companies face. Customers might not like being locked into a subscription plan, forced to eat the Falafel with Herbs and Pitabread that they ordered last week and no longer crave.

Simple Feast is working to get around these pitfalls by offering customers the option to skip meals or forego the subscription altogether. The plant-based meals also come chilled, so if you have last-minute dinner plans you can always leave them for another night.

A bigger challenge they will face is variety. Each box contains three preset meals, with no option to change if you, say, don’t like oyster mushrooms. Also, when I looked on their website, the Vegan Feast and the Green Feast boxes were exactly the same — which isn’t really a problem, but does make me wonder about their breadth and creativity.

Regardless, Simple Feast seems like a good way to help (at least Danish) people who want to eat less meat but don’t want to put in a ton of (or any) time or effort. If they put some of their funding towards more meal options and ordering customization, they might be able to do just that.

EAT Club Acquires Farm Hill, Gets New CEO

Corporate meal provider EAT Club announced today that it has acquired another corporate catering service, Farm Hill. According to the press announcement, the acquisition will extend EAT Club’s reach and accelerate growth. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Farm Hill focused on providing meals the SMB market, and was founded in 2013, launching from the Stanford StartX Accelerator Program. Prior to the acquisition, Farm hill had raised $5 million in funding. As of now, the company’s site has been taken down with just a message saying “We’re cooking up something special for you…stay tuned for what’s next from Farm Hill!”

We reached out to EAT Club to see how many Farm Hill employees will be moving over to EAT Club, and will update this story as we learn more. UPDATE: EAT Club sent us the following statement via email: “We’re currently evaluating the strengths of both teams and determining the best course of action for our business needs.”

Available in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York City, EAT Club differentiates itself by allowing workers to each order their own individual meals (instead of a big trays of food), which are all delivered at once. Unlike other corporate catering services who simply broker food from restaurants to offices, EAT Club controls every step of its solution: taking orders, making meals and handling delivery. EAT Club has raised $50 million since its founding in 2010, and says that it serves 20,000 individualized meals a day.

EAT Club also announced today that it has brought on Doug Leeds as it’s new CEO (it’s third since 2016). Leeds was an executive in residence at August Capital (an EAT Club investor) and formerly the CEO at IAC Publishing.

There’s been a lot of activity in the corporate catering space as of late. ZeroCater raised $12 million earlier this month, and last month Square acquired Zesty.

Expect more consolidation like this as EAT Club brawls in the fight club among startups to deliver corporate meals to hungry workers.

This Menu-Planning Service Eliminates the Stress of Deciding What’s for Dinner

Somewhere between meal kits and planning dinner from scratch sit recipe-planning apps—you still cook the food, but you don’t have to create the dish from scratch. It’s cheaper than a meal kit, but you still have to shop for and prep the ingredients.

Two busy moms (who are also sisters) recently took this concept a step further when they created eMeals, a subscription-based menu, budgeting, and shopping plan. It’s basically shoppable recipes on steroids: you tell the app your meal preferences and dietary needs/restrictions; it tells you what to cook for the next seven days and how much the ingredients will cost. If you want to skip the shopping step, you can also choose to have those ingredients delivered or available for pickup at your grocery store.

Users choose the week’s recipes from several different plans: weight management (Paleo, portion control), dietary restrictions (diabetes, gluten intolerance), family meals, and slow cooker meals are just a few of the options.

Once you’ve selected the recipes, the app turns your menu into a shopping list of ingredients. You can also add your odds and ends, like toothpaste or milk, to that list. The rest is easy: select the number of people you want to cook for (up to 6) and your preferred grocery store.

Prices for the service vary based on how long you choose to commit: $29.99 for three months or $59.99 for a full year. (This does not include the cost of ingredients.)

Right now, partner stores include Walmart, Kroger, ALDI, Target, and Whole Foods, among others. With Kroger and Walmart, you can arrange to pick the ingredients up at the store, curbside. eMeals has also partnered with AmazonFresh and Instacart to provide delivery services.

According to one user, the menu plan you choose can affect which stores are available. For example, choosing the all-organic menu means you’ll probably have to buy from Whole Foods or other “health” stores—which usually means spending more money. I imagine your choice of stores is also affected by where you live; someone in San Francisco will probably have a lot more options than someone in Newark, Ohio.

Unlike a meal kit, with eMeals, the cost of ingredients isn’t baked into the overall subscription. For a second I though that rendered a service like eMeals pointless. Then I considered how much trial and error often goes into recipe planning. Unless you’re cooking the same rotation of dishes every single week, you’re probably going to wind up buying things at the grocery store you don’t use. Something like eMeals could save a lot of money on unused ingredients, depending on what you cook.

In his recent 2018 predictions, my colleague Michael Wolf noted that the recipe has become more, not less, important in this age of meal kits and 24/7 delivery services: It’s our “automated shopping list, the instruction set for our appliances, and the content is becoming dynamic, atomized and personalized depending on our personal preference.”

Shoppable recipes are seeing a lot of action as of late. Allrecipes and AmazonFresh partnered last year, as did Kroger and Myxx. Whisk, meanwhile, just joined forces with Amazon to offer shoppable recipes from over 20 publishers.

What’s attractive about a service like eMeals is that it turns the concept of shoppable recipe into an entire plan for the week or month, rather than just offering a set of individual recipes. There’s a wide audience for that kind of service: busy parents, caregivers, those managing significant food restrictions, and lazy, uncreative cooks like yours truly. All we need now is for the service to get integrated with a guided cooking program. Which will probably happen at some point in the very near future.

Weight Watchers Unveils In-Store Meal Kits—and Possibly a New Approach

Weight Watchers is trying to carve out a space in the meal kit market—they’re just skipping the whole delivery bit.

Instead, the weight management company announced last week that it is working with California-based FreshRealm to get a line of healthy meal kits on grocery shelves. The launch, slated for the second half of this year, could indicate a shift in the meal kit sphere—away from online ordering and delivery and towards brick and mortar stores.

WW’s meal kits will offer healthy ingredients and recipes that fit into the company’s points system. However, since they are coming pretty soon after CEO Mindy Grossman’s attempt to rebrand Weight Watchers as a healthy lifestyle brand, they are most likely also meant to appeal to people who just want to find quick, healthy meals.

WW already has a partnership with non-subscription meal kit delivery service Chef’d, offering healthy meals that range from 150 to 250 calories per portion. But placing their “quick-prep” kits in supermarket aisles instead of offering them exclusively via delivery turns these meals into potential impulse purchases for shoppers who want something healthy to cook but don’t already have a recipe in mind when they go to the store. And we all know the grocery store is a prime location for impulse-purchase-driven sales.

This shift towards putting meal kits in grocery aisles could be a trend to watch. Just a few days after WW announced the news, Walmart announced that they’ll also be launching meal kits in their stores. Both services will be available without the subscription requirement that comes with many other meal kits. However, while Walmart’s meals will only be available at Walmart, WW will presumably be in a wider variety of supermarkets. After all, their frozen Smart Ones meals are available in most grocery stores (including Walmart).

We don’t know how much the WW meal kits will cost, but price will no doubt be a big factor in whether or not they succeed. After all, high cost was the biggest reason people dropped their meal kit subscriptions in 2017.

It’s not news that the meal kit game is a competitive, uber-crowded one. As of last year, there were over 150 companies vying to get you halfway to dinner. It makes sense for WW, a company that is all about eating particular foods to reach and maintain a healthy weight, would want to take a piece of the (low-sugar) pie. It will be interesting to follow their progress and see how successful their decision to sell in supermarkets will be. I’m betting it scores them some serious points—and saves points for their customers.

Chef’d Partners with Campbell’s to (Slow) Cook Up a New Range of Meal Kits

What do you get when you take a meal kit marketplace, cover it with the contents of a can of Cream of Mushroom, and let the two simmer over low? Probably something like this new partnership between Chef’d and Campbell’s.

Chef’d, the self-described “online gourmet meal kit provider,” has teamed up with Campbell’s to offer customers a selection of slow-cooker recipes featuring the canned soup giant’s products. This announcement comes 9 months after Campbell’s invested $10 million in Chef’d, making Campbell’s their largest strategic partner. 

As of now, Chef’d offers 12 meal options with their “Campbell’s Kitchen” series. Recipes range from Slow Cooker Pulled Pork Sliders to Slow Cooker Short Ribs—certainly an upgrade from green bean casseroles of yore (no disrespect). The meal kits come packed with preportioned ingredients: fresh protein, produce, dairy, seasonings, and any necessary pantry goods. Basically all that the customer has to provide is salt, pepper, and maybe olive oil (sadly, the slow cooker not included). A few meals, like the Slow Cooker Chicken Tortilla Soup, do include a can of Campbell’s soup, while others require Campbell’s products like Prego tomato sauce or Swanson’s broth.

If speed is your aim, this is not the meal kit selection for you. Many of the recipes take quite a while to come together, some requiring an extensive 7 hour cook time. This, however, is made easy by the inclusion of the slow cooker: one of the strongest selling points of the Chef’d-Campbell’s partnership. Of the 12 recipes on offer, half of them are made in the much-beloved appliance. (I should note that the recipes not made with a slow cooker take only 30 minutes to make.)

Slow cooker chicken cacciatore from Chef’d + Campbell’s.

The emphasis on the slow cooker is, at least in my mind, is what makes this partnership intriguing; Campbell’s and Chef’d are trying to carve out a niche in the claustrophobically crowded meal kit delivery sector by capitalizing on the almost cult-like popularity of the Crock Pot and Instant Pot. Slow cookers make it possible for home cooks, even those with limited cooking skills, to produce complex, tender dishes on a tight schedule.

Surprisingly enough, Campbell’s and Chef’d are the first meal kit operation to fully capitalize on the slow cooker’s popularity. Other meal kit services have recipes that can be made in the appliance, but no line of products intended to be paired with a Crock Pot or the like. Speaking of Crock Pot, that company offers their own line of delivery meal kits, but requires the customer to buy any meat or dairy. This is markedly less convenient than a Chef’d meal kit, which includes fresh, pre-portioned ingredients so that the customer has to do little more than open, dump, and (slow)cook.

So will this partnership boost sales for Chef’d? It’s tough to say. Meal prices range from $27 to $30 for two servings up to $61 for six servings, which, when compared with other meal kits (such as Blue Apron, whose meals average $10 per serving), isn’t exactly a bargain. It’s also tough for vegetarians and vegans, with only one meatless recipe on offer: a Skillet Vegetable Lasagna with Herbed Cheese, which isn’t even made in the slow cooker.

If it is popular, however, it would probably say more about the ingrained popularity of Crock Pots (and the like) than about either Chef’d or Campbell’s. Success would indicate that slow cookers aren’t going anywhere—not quickly, anyway.

You can hear about Ched’d in our daily spoon podcast.  You can also subscribe in Apple podcasts or through our Amazon Alexa skill. 

Can Yumble’s Kid-Centric Service Break Through the Meal Kit Morass?

The meal kit delivery market is at a bit of a precipice right now, with the next steps unclear. Blue Apron just laid off 6 percent of its staff. HelloFresh is about to further test the public markets’ meal kit appetite with its own impending IPO. And we’re all waiting to see what Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods will mean for the upstarts.

So it seems like a solid strategy for Yumble to differentiate itself by going after the kids market. TechCrunch reports HelloFresh co-founder Dan Treiman joined up with Yumble last year and launched the company this past summer. With its kid-friendly prepared meal kit service, Yumble is targeting busy parents who still want to feed their kids nutritious lunches and dinners, but may lack the time to do so every day of the week.

One way Yumble does this is by sending meals that are already cooked, so all you have to do is re-heat them. Portions are kid appropriate, and menu items include Pretzel Chicken (with green beans and brown rice), Egg ‘Wich (with sweet potato fries), and Caprese Wheel (with carrots and grapes). They also offer snacks as well as options such as gluten free or vegetarian.

Pricing plans are $47.94 for six meals per week, $89.88 for 12 meals per week, and $167.76 for 24 meals per week. Right now, Yumble is only available on the East Coast, and is “hopefully” expanding to the West Coast in the first quarter of 2018.

I think Yumble is on to something here, but there is still a lot to unpack about the idea. First, I appreciate that the meals pre-cooked, which removes so much of the hassle I associate with Blue Apron and other meal kit delivery services. It’s easier to avoid dinnertime kiddo meltdowns when you can quickly fill their bellies. And not packing a lunch at 6:30 a.m. sounds fantastic.

Since I only have one child, spending roughly $8 per meal doesn’t seem so bad, given how much other eating out options cost. That fifty bucks a week can add up quickly, however, if you were to think of Yumble as a longer term solution. And if you were looking for something you can turn off and on, it just seems easier to keep a box of fish sticks in the freezer.

But that’s not even the bigger issue that I potentially have with Yumble (never having actually tried the service).

When it comes to dinner, at least, I don’t want to have two menus going: one for parents, one for kids. Especially six nights a week. Either my wife or myself prepare meals that are intended for the whole family to eat. For my son, this introduces him to foods he otherwise wouldn’t eat, and it also reminds him that his parents are not short-order cooks.

That said, my family is not every family, and there are situations where kid-focused meal kits are appropriate. Parents who work night shifts, or when you know one parent will be out traveling, or even a steady stream of lunches for summertime day camps.

Unlike other meal kit delivery services in this space, Yumble seems to be trying to solve a legitimate issue. So if and when it comes to the West Coast, I’ll definitely give Yumble a try.

Can Blue Apron Succeed? Five Questions With A Data Scientist Ahead of The IPO

In some ways, the meal delivery kit craze was one of the ways people started to notice major disruption happening in our food system. Technology and connectivity are finally starting to penetrate the ways we grow, cook, manage, order and think about our food – so it is fitting that one of the major IPOs of 2017 will also be the first meal kit startup IPO. Blue Apron is just a day away from being a publicly traded company on the NYSE where it will trade under the symbol $APRN. The company has already slashed its valuation ahead of the event, estimating stock prices will open between $10-$11 a share.

There’s been a great deal of speculation about the company’s S-1 filing and what their disclosures about revenue, customer acquisition costs and overall company health mean for interested investors.

We sat down with Daniel McCarthy, co-founder and Chief Statistician at Zodiac, a predictive analytics firm and data scientist at Wharton (aka he’s way smarter than us) to talk about the analysis he’s done on Blue Apron’s filing. He’s about to transition into a new role as a professor at Emory University. Daniel has written several interesting takes about the Blue Apron IPO looking deep into their disclosures and extrapolating additional info using data modelling and we wanted to ask him his thoughts about the company’s path to profitability on the eve of the IPO.

The Spoon: Given the challenge Blue Apron has with customer retention and your finding that retention actually gets worse with customer age, does the company have a path to profitability with the current model?
 

McCarthy: No, I don’t see a path to profitability if future customers are similar in retention and spend to the customers that Blue Apron has acquired in the past, especially those acquired over the last twelve months. At the same time, Blue Apron is a high-quality business. I would be optimistic that they could be profitable if they adopted a more LTV-centric way of doing business.

In particular, they should refocus and rationalize their customer acquisition spend around prospects similar to their high-value customers. This could (1) substantially reduce their CAC, which has moved up considerably over the past year, and (2) increase the quality of their subscriber base from a retention and spend standpoint. The downside to this strategy is that it will naturally be smaller, so there is less of a “sky is the limit” growth story to tell. Still, that seems better than being structurally unprofitable.

The Spoon: Blue Apron is reporting “active customers” in their filling as opposed to their subscriber base numbers, which you’ve noted is an unusual way for a subscription service to report their users. Do you have a sense of why?

McCarthy: I think they are reporting active customers instead of subscribers for two reasons.

  1. Active customers will always be a bigger number than total subscribers, so it makes them look bigger. Who doesn’t like to look bigger?
  2. I think that a part of them likes to think of themselves as more like a retailer than a subscription offering. If their customers come in and out periodically over time, they could argue that churn doesn’t matter as much, because the churners will come back at some point.There are a few issues with this line of reasoning. For one, churn matters at retailers too, even though we do not get to observe exactly when customers churn. For two, I think many of their periodic customers are strategic, only showing up when they are able to get a new promo discount. Finally, Blue Apron doesn’t provide us with meaningful data points about how periodic behavior (if there is any) affects the unit economics of their business.

The Spoon: You’ve reported that the revenue that Blue Apron is generating from more recently-acquired customers is less than from customers acquired in the past. Why is this?

McCarthy: They introduced the family plan in 2015, which has a lower price point ($8.99/serving versus $9.99/serving). It could be that we saw a mix shift in 2016 towards people with this plan, and that people on family plans are simply not generating as much revenue than the rest of the subscriber base.

The Spoon: Blue Apron turns a profit on 30% of its customers but their break-even point is moving farther away with each cohort due to declining revenue and growing customer aquisition costs (CAC) for newer customers according to your analysis. Can you tell how fast that percentage is declining?

McCarthy: It’s a great question, and it would be pretty risky to do a simple extrapolation off what we’ve seen over the past twelve months, especially since the rise in CAC has been very dramatic lately.

The Spoon: Subscription services for goods is a popular trend right now, both in the food market and outside. Is there an example of another subscription startup that’s getting customer acquisition right?

McCarthy: Dollar Shave Club has wonderful customer retention. While I generally am leery of relying on business intelligence firms to make absolute statements about retention, I think they are a very helpful tool for making relative comparisons across firms. This chart was very striking in that regard. It really highlights how much better customer retention is at DSC relative to Blue Apron. And that Blue Apron’s retention, while not good, is nevertheless better than their competitor, Hello Fresh.

We’re interested to see what happens to the Blue Apron stock tomorrow as it hits NYSE and how the first meal kit delivery IPO will shift the still growing market. Stay tuned.

ChefSteps Expands Further Into Food With Launch Of Pre-Cooked Meals

Back in February, I  wrote about ChefSteps’ plan to create a meat ‘marketplace’ that would connect “independent ranchers with ChefSteps users, offering them direct access to high-quality meat and ingredients at great prices.”

As it turns out, this effort was part of a larger initiative to expand into food sales that is starting to come into fuller focus. The most visible part of this foray into food sales is the company’s growing business selling meat and fish sourced from local food providers in the Seattle and Portland markets. In the Seattle market, the company offers fresh meat and fish from four local providers (three for meats, one provider of fresh fish). The kits for sale on the company’s website range in price from $79 to $239. And yes – one package, the ‘Mountain of Meat,’ includes 30 pounds of steaks. (Holy meat sweats).

And now, the company has started selling pre-cooked, frozen meals.The pre-cooked meals are sold as what ChefSteps is calling, ‘Joule On-Demand BBQ.’ The meals are all single-serve portions and range in price from $7 to $12. Unlike the fresh meat and seafood, the pre-cooked meals from ChefSteps offer local shipping as a fulfillment option.  Deliveries are fulfilled by PostMates.

The Mountain of Meat meal kit from ChefSteps

These pre-cooked meals appear similar to those announced by Nomiku in April. As with Nomiku’s new meal kits, the BBQ meals are intended to be prepared in a shorter amount of time than traditional sous vide, usually less than an hour.

This move into pre-cooked meals by both ChefSteps and Nomiku shows the growing effort by both companies to expand the appeal of sous video to a broader audience.  Sous vide has traditionally appealed to foodies who are willing to invest more time in preparing chef-like meals, but with pre-cooked meal offerings, the companies believe sous vide becomes more appealing to those home cooks who prioritize convenience.

Of course, pre-cooked meals aren’t the only way to make cooking with sous vide easier for the home cook. ChefSteps and Anova have both been busy launching hands-free voice interface integrations this year, and in February ChefSteps became the first cooking appliance company to launch a chatbot for cooking with their Facebook Messenger bot.

So what became of the meat marketplace teased by the company’s February job listing? According to ChefSteps CEO Chris Young, the idea was to create a nationwide marketplace for “sous vide ready ingredients during the holiday season last year in partnership with the Snake River Farms brand.” As part of the effort, they sell meats nationwide to help ChefSteps customers get, as Young put it, a “center-piece protein for their holiday meal.”

As they worked on the plan, ChefSteps realized that costs of setting up a nationwide delivery system would be too high at this time, so for now the company is content to work out the kinks while selling meat and delivering pre-cooked meals in the Seattle and Portland markets.

“We’re continuing to experiment based on the positive feedback we’re getting from our Seattle and Portland customers, and we’re very aware that we have customers across the United States,’ said Young. “We definitely want to be able to serve those customers asap, but only when we think our service will deliver the experience and value our customers expect from us.”

Make sure to subscribe to the Spoon newsletter to get it in your inbox. And don’t forget to check out the Smart Kitchen Summit, where ChefSteps CEO Chris Young and many others will speak at the first and only event about the future of food, cooking and the kitchen. 

Analysis: How UberEATS Continues To Compete in a Crowded Food Delivery Market

As the icon of the app-driven sharing economy, Uber never lets its followers forget that it sees itself as more than a ride-hailing service. The eight-year-old’s company’s aim is to become the logistics standard-bearer for the digital world and beyond. FedEx disrupted the package delivery business, and Uber has made clear that their mission is to follow that lead into the future digital world.

Depending on the source, Uber is valued at between $30 billion and $60 billion. Therefore, the San Francisco-based company is long on resources which drive its vision to explore all avenues in profitably moving things from point A to point B. The March 2014 move into restaurant delivery was easy and a low-risk one for the company building the new service as an adjunct to its existing infrastructure and brand.

UberEATS is now in 65 cities in North America, Europe, Asia, South America, Australia, and Africa. While that total pales compared to acknowledged industry leader GrubHub, with more than 1,100 locals in its fold, UberEATS is coming on strong. UberEats poses a major threat because of the massive reach of its ride-hailing business, thus providing the company access to a huge total available market. In addition, major chains such as McDonald’s are more favorably inclined to work with Uber than its competitors because of its army of drivers.

In Southern Florida, McDonald’s is running a test with 164 area restaurants where customers can order Big Macs and other fast-food delights using the UberEats app. A $4.99 service charge is added to all orders. “We are most certainly very interested in the fast-growing delivery business not just in the U.S. but globally, so we are excited about the opportunity to provide even more convenience and more accessibility to our customers who have been asking for us to deliver, “Pam Williams, director of growth platforms for McDonald’s USA told the Miami Herald. Uber has more than 10,000 drivers in the Miami area alone that provide food delivery service.

UberEATS is positioned to take a bite out of the food delivery market. According to App Annie, a measurement site for app downloads, UberEats is the number one app for food and delivery. That ranking compares to competitors GrubHub at number seven and Postmates at number eight. However, UberEATS does not offer its restaurant’s partners an API to allow integration of its service with the eatery’s Point of Sale System. Most of its competitors, including GrubHub, Postmates, and DoorDash offer POS APIs which allow the restaurant to gather customer data and push directions and special instructions to drivers.

Even with all its digital ducks in a row, UberEATS might be little more than an experiment for the high-flying startup. In addition to its lack of an API for its partners—a vital element—there is little transparency on how it reimburses its drivers as well as the percentage it takes from the restaurants it serves. There is driver concern over the lack of guarantee hourly rate, as well as some major bumps in its logistics platform. Many drivers complain that deliveries that appear to be nearby can be much further than indicated, negatively impacting their daily delivery totals. And then there is the rule that UberEATS does not allow tipping. In summary, Uber offers little beyond its brand and dynamic driver network to differentiate itself in this space.

Much like other digital companies in growth mode, Uber has a number of new products and service trials in the pipeline– UberPool is a new service aimed at providing corporations carpooling services; working with Daimler; the company is experimenting with self-driving cars in San Francisco; and with partner Ehang, it is looking at drone taxis with vertical takeoff and landing capabilities. Where does food delivery fit into this future scape?

Unlike its closed-loop ride-hailing business, the food delivery business includes the reputation and brand of its restaurant partners. Once a meal leaves to the establishment for a customer’s home, the eatery loses control of its brand. For that reason, many restaurateurs maintain their own delivery drivers which give them some control of their name and reputation. As it scales, quality control for its food delivery arm will be something UberEats must address. Uber cannot afford more negative headlines such as the $20 million settlement ordered by the FTC for misleading drivers about potential earnings.

Nearly three years after the launch of UberEATS, food delivery is still a high-risk, high-reward proposition for Uber. Tempting data about the eating habits of millennials point to opportunity in the food delivery business. In order to be successful, Uber must also contend with an overcrowded market, plus the entry of Amazon which has more money, a superior infrastructure, a larger footprint and more experience in home delivery. Perhaps the wisest decision for Uber is to buy one of its competitors and marshal its resources into getting people—rather than food—from one place to another.

CES 2017 Audio Interview: Habit’s Neil Grimmer

I caught up with Neil Grimmer, CEO of Habit, to talk about his new startup that aims to take personal health and nutrition profiles and create customized meal kits.

Ashley profiled Habit back in October when Campbell’s invested in them as part of their new $125 million fund, Acre Venture Partners. From the post:

“Habit is a newly launched company that will deliver a “complete personalized nutrition solution” based on factors like someone’s biological makeup and metabolism. The CEO of Habit, Neil Grimmer, is also the founder of Plum Organics, a company that he sold to Campbell’s back in 2013. Despite having the VC fund, Campbell’s invested directly in Habit and is the startup’s sole funder, according to a Habit spokesperson.

The company will deliver a testing kit to users and together with the app, users are instructed to gather DNA samples to ship to their certified testing lab. The data collected is combined with the user’s reported lifestyle and personal goals and thrown into their priority algorithm known as the Nutrition Intelligence Engine. The algorithm spits out recommendations for what to eat from registered dieticians and a wellness guide along with fitness goals.”

You can listen to the conversation above and read more about Habit at their website.

Kick Charting: 7 Crowdfunding Food-Delivery Services

Delivery services aren’t just for David Chang and Martha Stewart. While food delivery investment has cooled this year (see chart) as venture capitalists question the economics of these capital intensive businesses, that hasn’t stopped enterprising startups from heading to crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter to fund a unique take on food delivery.

Here are seven companies trying to become the next Blue Apron via crowdfunding campaigns:

Beer-Making Kit

Every three months Bierbox sends you the ingredients you need for a new recipe: think liquid or dry malt extract, hops, and yeast, as well as detailed instructions to make these homebrew-lab-tested recipes. Pair it with the Zymatic and you’re a 21st century kind of home brewer.

Meat

Forget your local butcher or meat CSA. Grass Cow wants to deliver grass-fed beef, grass-fed bison, and wild hog to your doorstep. Right now it looks like these are onetime deliveries, which on the surface seems like they are using the same business model as Omaha Steaks. However, the quality is much better, and for people in areas without access to grass-fed meats, this could be a game changer.

Supper Club

Are you an “aspiring entertainer” (read: millennial) who wants to throw a fancy hipster supper club (read: dinner party) but hates planning (read: is lazy)? The Caramelized Supper Club might be for you. Every other month it delivers décor and nonperishable items along with recipes, grocery lists, and wine pairings. No one will ever suspect your dinner party came out of a box.

Fresh Herbs

Don’t worry about growing basil or rosemary on your porch anymore, because Herbly will deliver whatever you need. The startup partners with small-scale farmers to deliver those herbs on a monthly basis. Choose from everything from basil to stevia to chocolate mint “and indulge” with (non-medical) herbs, as their Kickstarter page says.

Mini Cocktails

Let’s be clear. SaloonBox is basically a box of mixers, delivered to your door. You have to add the alcohol. That said, they provide crafted recipes for fun drinks like mulled cider and even the ubiquitous Moscow Mule. The new mini line includes enough for four to six servings of one cocktail, so to get through the holidays, you might need, oh, about 10 of these.

Craft Beer

If you live in the U.K., Black Market Beer will send you a case of beer from a craft microbrewery each month. We’re talking seriously small microbreweries too: The goal seems to be as much to help those folks stay in business as expose you to the great beers they’re making.

Dogs

No, unfortunately, this is not a service that delivers adorable dogs to your door. But it is a service that delivers treats for your dog to your door. Each kit includes three to four types of healthy treats with real meat, chews, toys, and functional accessories. For my super anxious shih tzu, that functional accessory would probably be a Thunder Shirt.

Clearly not all of these projects will make it to the funded stage, but the high level of interest in delivery services confirms that it’s an area poised for growth. Over the next few years the space will become more and more crowded, until the few who have mastered their business model win out over the weaker offerings and the rest move on to the newest trend.