Welcome to Incubateme’s newsletter, curated by Alice Zhang.
Dear all,
Have you ordered some outsourced meals in the past few months? I certainly have.
And for a person like me with auto-immune issues and maintaining a clean diet, I love what Daily Dose does, delivering specialty functional meals to boutique fitness and functional medical communities. Check out below 👇 for the founding story of our featured business, Daily Dose!
The thought leadership article that I would like to introduce you to this week is about meals as well - Cooking As A Service by Alex Danco. In this article, he analyzed the data of outsourced cooking over the last 50 years. He thought one contributing factor of it trending up is that the technology and management advances make reliable cloud kitchens much more accessible. He argues that a higher standard of living drives up the demand for outsourced meals. And most distinguishably, he predicted in an abundance economy; consumption patterns are bifurcated into two extreme binary outcomes: either “basic default” or “exactly what I want.” And for the latter, more specialized differentiation will be welcomed by the true fans.
Do you have a specialized business that you’d like to be featured in? If so, please give us a holler at 👉 JoinIncubateMe@gmail.com!
Cooking as a service
The trend of increasingly outsourcing food production is new but not that new for North America. If we take a look at the data, we can see the meaningful long-term shifts in cooking practices that have taken place over the past two generations, up until today’s mobile era where the internet has started to reshape things again.
This paper goes extensively through fifty years worth of data on the relative prevalence of food prepared inside the home versus food prepared outside the home: Cooking As A Service. The original graph is a little tricky to look at, so I added the coloured boxes and time arrows to make it easier to read. It’s first split into three sections: low, middle and high income, and then within each income group, the bars represent time periods: representative years from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, early 2000s and late 2000s.
Trends in US home food preparation and consumption: analysis of national nutrition surveys and time use studies from 1965-66 to 2007-08 | Smith, Ng & Popkin, Nutrition Journal
A few overall trends are pretty clear from this graph. First of all, there’s a clear long term trend: outsourced Cooking As A Service has progressed from rare (<10%) to routine (28-35%) over two generations. This transition took place over several decades, although if you had to pick one inflection point it’d probably say the early 90s.
Second, the overall trend is not dominated by any one income group. While it’s certainly true that high income earners may be dining out differently than low-income earners, the long run trend is that low, middle and high income earners are all choosing to outsource food preparation at more or less the same rate.
So what are the most important forces behind this? There’s a few worth emphasizing:
First of all, overall living standards have gone up since our grandparents’ generation. More people, for more of their meals, are opting to pay other people to do the work of cooking for them as a service. The flip side of this is that more people are employed in Cooking As A Service businesses each and every year, which makes sense.
Second, ever year our incremental improvements in technology, management, supply chain efficiency, and so forth are turning food prep into an activity that can be increasingly done on top of a “back end cloud”. All of the line item costs in commercial food preparation, including labour, have become highly reliable, interchangeable, inexpensive component parts. Businesses like McDonalds at the cheap end, or say Olive Garden or Sweetgreen as we ascend the price ladder, are able to mass-produce hot cooked meals that are affordable, tasty and consistent (although not necessarily healthy). The same goes for the infinite varieties of international cooking that we’ve learned how to refactor on top of the North American food service ecosystem.
As Cooking As A Service expanded from <10% to 25-30+% of our eating, we grew to consume and expect a far greater selection and variety of food compared to when we did all our cooking ourselves. Our consumption choices around what food we eat gradually pivoted from “What am I able to cook for myself” to “Is this exactly what I want to eat, yes or no?” Once you transition into “is this exactly what I want, yes or no” territory, it’s very hard to go back; it becomes a part of the standard of living that we expect.
There are all kinds of forces behind this overall trend, but in general the supply side and the demand side are reinforcing each other in a positive feedback cycle. We move progressively from an environment where we consider many factors when making a decision to one where we make only one: is this exactly what I want, yes or no? In cooking terms, this meanings a gradual transition away from one where we have ownership over our own cooking assets and cooking capacity and then weigh many factors when determining what to cook for ourselves, and towards one where we simply consume whatever is available on-demand, with every aspect of cooking outsourced away.
Furthermore, I would not be at all surprised if these eating patterns ultimately formed a bifurcated distribution for any given individual: many different differentiated options on one side and a basic but good Default option on the other (the prepared food section at Whole Foods, or the equivalent). When we shift to “yes or no” decision-making in worlds of abundant availability, our consumption patterns adjust accordingly. Food is no different than media or retail.
We’ve already broken through one over the past fifty years (from <10% to 25-30%) but we’ve plateaued there for the past decade or two. It’ll take another technological and cultural wave of change to break us through to the next level: from frequent (30%) to default (>50% of all meals across the board). What are the contenders for what will drive this change?
alexdanco.com
The event in May!
🌟 Naming and protecting your brand on May 20th! RSVP here!
We are thrilled to have Gautam Godse, the man behind many online products such as Brainbase and LegalZoom, to speak and share his journey of helping entrepreneurs. RSVP HERE!
Featured business: Daily Dose
Company URL: www.dailydoselife.com
Location: Commissary is in Kearny, NJ
Founder: Tricia Williams
Founded Year: 2019
Business is about: functional meal plan
🍳 Tell us about yourself, your company, and how you got started.
I am a former chef and pastry chef that got into nutrition after the birth of my first child 15 years ago. I read a Michael Pollan book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, that completely changed my life. It sent me on a path to studying holistic nutrition. I had a company for 10 years called Food Matters, a concierge meal plan service to professional athletes, celebrities, and busy New Yorkers. At the same time, we started getting many clients who were sick. We started feeding people with cancer, type 2 diabetes, fertility issues. Etc. We learned how to use the kitchen as a pharmacy while working in conjunction with clients’ doctors to help them heal. Two years ago, I started Daily Dose to make something affordable and accessible to everyone. We currently have a direct-to-consumer curated meal plan service, an a la carte ordering system for wholesale and retail, and corporate honor markets. We piloted our first honor market last year with Equinox in their HQ at Hudson Yards. Our revenue has grown 300% from 2019 to 2020. January 1, we launched thought leader curated meal plans: Ketotarian by Dr. Will Cole, Acid Kicking Meal Plan by Dr. Daryl Gioffre, The Anna Kaiser Meal Plan, and Protein Forward by Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. Their collective social followings will open up a mass market for us.
🍳 How did you acquire your first batch of customers?
Word of mouth in the boutique fitness and functional medical communities in NYC.
🍳 What is your plan for the future? What trends do you foresee for your industry?
We plan to do our part to shift the needle on the standard American diet by making delicious, affordable healthy food widely accessible. Covid-19 is a big wake-up call for people to eat healthily and start taking care of their bodies.
We have many new things happening that we would love to tell you about. We are bringing in prominent thought leaders behind our meal plans.
We really embrace bio-individuality and believe there is no one right fit for food. We are bringing together a team of experts with the common goal of fixing the standard American diet.
Here’s the line up of plans:
Ketotarian by Dr. Will Cole
Acid Kicking Meal Plan by Dr. Daryl Gioffre
The Anna Kaiser Meal Plan
Protein Forward by Dr. Gabrielle Lyon
We are super excited about our new expert-led collaboration!
🍳 Any requests for help from our community?
We are currently looking to raise money. With our thought leader curated plans, we forecast our business to increase a minimum of 400% this year.
You made it to the end!
🥇Stay in touch at www.joinincubateme.com. Follow us on Instagram: @joinincubateme, Twitter: @incubateme, or email us at joinincubateme@gmail.com.