I want to pay a flat recurring fee and have my fridge be filled with basic food products (e.g. like a hotel's minibar) you chose from 3-5 preset packages out of 3 pricing levels, setup how many people are in the house and you are done
the service will calibrate (with your help) the content of the packages, e.g. if you see you eat more bread than you drink milk and end up with too much milk and too little bread, you can tweak it (larger bread package, smaller milk bottle)
All products will be generically packaged and will have a very low price as this startup will specialize in basic products (bread, milk, eggs, cheese, basic meats, popular fish, soft drinks, water, core vegetables and fruits)
Having a massive buying power, the prices of these basic products will be much, much cheaper than any grocery store
Having statistically well sized packages for most households types will ensure optimal saving and minimal food waste.
you will never need to go grocery shopping again, never need to "remember the milk" throw much less food, and spend so much less on groceries you won't know what to do with the money you have left.
I would start this but it seems it needs a logistics / supply chain pro from a large corporate to be able to pull this through
I agree with the OP,
potentially yes, if a startup focuses only on a few core products, and buys only them in volume, they might get the same wholesale prices as the chain supermarkets, but since they don't have the same costs, they can offer lower prices to the customers, or at least in theory...
You might be able to tackle this at a much smaller scale with things like CSAs (community-supported agriculture). In a CSA, you are essentially buying a farm share and getting some amount of veggies or meat per week/month/etc.
One issue with a CSA is that I'll get odd amounts of things: not enough potatoes to get a dish for instance or an overwhelming amount of parsley, etc. It would be good if there were a feedback mechanism so that (a) I would get the food that I wanted, and in the amounts that are good for me or my family, and (b) so that the farmers knew what kinds of crops to focus on and deliver to their members.
In my experience the people who run CSAs are passionate about their farming and not on technology. If someone could provide a service like this, it might be helpful to them.
> Having a massive buying power, the prices of these basic products will be much, much cheaper than any grocery store.
No, it won't. You think a startup will have more buying power than WalMart? Giant? Even smaller chains like Weis or Kroger's would blow it out of the water in terms of monthly product purchased.
If you were specializing in a niche market like luxury types of foods this could probably work. I agree that it'd likely take someone with experience in logistics/SCM to pull it off but there is a market for it.
Yes, I've seen them, but not what I want, I want a food subscription service, solve me the "I've ran out of X" problem, keep my fridge full. just like the minibar in a hotel.
I want to pay a flat recurring fee and have my fridge be filled with basic food products (e.g. like a hotel's minibar) you chose from 3-5 preset packages out of 3 pricing levels, setup how many people are in the house and you are done
the service will calibrate (with your help) the content of the packages, e.g. if you see you eat more bread than you drink milk and end up with too much milk and too little bread, you can tweak it (larger bread package, smaller milk bottle)
All products will be generically packaged and will have a very low price as this startup will specialize in basic products (bread, milk, eggs, cheese, basic meats, popular fish, soft drinks, water, core vegetables and fruits)
Having a massive buying power, the prices of these basic products will be much, much cheaper than any grocery store
Having statistically well sized packages for most households types will ensure optimal saving and minimal food waste.
you will never need to go grocery shopping again, never need to "remember the milk" throw much less food, and spend so much less on groceries you won't know what to do with the money you have left.
I would start this but it seems it needs a logistics / supply chain pro from a large corporate to be able to pull this through