Build Meals Not Groceries
The Food & Beverage (F&B) Industry has been a constant in the ever-transforming growth of technology. Everything around it may have changed but there is still a market that often is not easily realized. The “at-home” restaurant. Sometimes we forget everything we need from our favorite restaurant might just be sitting in our homes awaiting their destiny. After all, isn’t cooking just another well-executed chemical experiment.
The fundamentals of a restaurant are a combination of the ambiance, the presentation, the service and most importantly the recipes of flavor. Yet, sometimes all that really matters is the last part, the food. Millennials spend 44% of their food budget on eating out. Why is it so hard for us to enjoy restaurant quality meals at the comfort of our groceries and home?
Time, skill and availability (of groceries) are, in my opinion, the 3 key factors that lead us to eat out.
- Time is attributed to the process by which the raw ingredients are converted to their final form. This includes buying groceries, identifying recipes, preparation, cooking, serving and presenting and cleaning.
- Skill is attributed to the ability to produce a savory high-quality meal.
- Availability is attributed to the presence of the right raw materials required to produce a high-quality meal.
In some disconnected form, all 3 of these are seeing efficiencies such as time improvements because of Amazon Fresh & InstantPot. Skill substitution with prescriptive recipe machines like Rotimatic. And lastly, smart fridges that ensure you are aware of the perishables at home.
But the transformation lies in re-imagining this process. Imagine an application which has a Yelp of recipes that you can select for the week. These recipes are curated from the world of food experts (or hobbyists). The groceries are delivered right to your door and your fridge is merely a smart interface for you. You feed it the groceries and it identifies and stores them as it deems appropriate.
On a late Monday night when you want a quick meal, before you reach home you tell your fridge the meal you wish to prepare. It identifies the recipe, measures the raw ingredients, chops, slices, and grinds them as requested and dispenses them to you right when you arrive. Next, comes cooking; we put the dispensed raw materials in labeled compartments in a machine (an intelligent, integrated version of the InstantPot) that translates the recipe into the process of cooking (Saute, Stir, Pressurize, Simmer, etc.). Click Start.
It’s time to freshen up and you come back in your pajamas and turn on Netflix. Lest you know, when you finally picked your favorite show the machine beeps. Let’s keep the plate right in its dispensary so it serves a Michelin Star Chef’s meal at the comfort of your home.
Although this seems all too exciting we are not too far from it. The technology to build this is hardly unavailable. But it does require the change in the conventional approach to design and modeling of the appliances in the kitchen. The focus here is on re-thinking the process by which we realize access to restaurant quality meals. It's our ability to successfully translate the process of making a meal via the internet of things (IoT) so that we can effectively focus on the recipe of culinary happiness rather than the two extremes (groceries or restaurants).
And you can start today. Even so, without these imaginary machines, I believe we can change the way we cook. As long as we are able to think of our meals first and put a process around our cooking we can effectively manage our culinary needs with our groceries, rather than be wasteful or go out. The mindset should be around focussing your week on the set of meals you want to eat, simplifying the ways you order groceries, prepare and cook with the right tools (Vitamix & Instant Pot or on the top my of list!) and lastly spending a little effort to present your meal like the way you would want to be served. Like every manual process that’s eventually automated, I believe we can learn to build and automate processes around the way we manage meals so until they are eventually automated.
So let’s start building meals and not groceries and until we fully automate this process. Let’s embrace changes that enable us to manage our culinary needs. On a different note, if you were here for the possibility of a shared economy for restaurants from our homes — I will leave that to a different article but for now, let’s enjoy the best food from the comfort of our homes.
