And given that MTR's products cost just $2.50 per pack where I currently live, $24 isn't exactly cheap. I haven't tasted your product, but I have tasted the MTR ones and they seem pretty authentic. And MTR being a very old, traditional brand, it's as authentic as it gets. Would love to hear about your differentiation strategy.

[1] https://www.mtrfoods.com/products/ready-to-eat

- MTR provides just the spices, you have to bring everything else. This includes vegetables/meat, seasoning, additional spices, oil/salt, etc. Our products include all of this so that the only ingredient you add is water which makes it much more convenient.

- Our packets are 100% fresh and don't have any preservatives, whereas existing packaged Indian foods are packed with them. This makes our products tastier, fresher and much healthier, although it comes with a shorter shelf-life.

- Our recipes are curated from people in the community (for example, the rasam is my mom's!) This lends a very homemade taste to each dish.

- We deliver to you! All existing pre-packaged authentic Indian foods are only available in Indian stores, so we're making good Indian food available to a much larger audience.

- At the end of the day, the taste just isn't comparable. Microwaveable chana masala from Haldiram's, let's say, comes out looking/smelling/tasting not at all like a homemade dish. Ours is made completely from scratch and you as a customer can feel that difference.

MTR/Haldiram's are 'last-resort' type meals, and we aim to be a meal that you actually crave + is good for you :)

Sorry, this is not accurate. If I buy an MTR Sambhar rice, or Paneer masala, everything is included. I just need to heat it and eat it.

> Our packets are 100% fresh and don't have any preservatives, whereas existing packaged Indian foods are packed with them. This makes our products tastier, fresher and much healthier, although it comes with a shorter shelf-life.

I can't vouch for the freshness of MTR's products, but I know they don't use preservatives (as it's printed on their cartons). They use a combination of food engineering and package engineering to preserve the food without using preservatives. That's why when you buy their ready to eat products, you will find a lot of oil in them (which you're supposed to drain away) as it helps to preserve the food for months, if not years. This is no different than storing dead specimens such as rats in biological laboratories, I assume.

> Our recipes are curated from people in the community (for example, the rasam is my mom's!) This lends a very homemade taste to each dish.

Ok, this sounds good.

> We deliver to you! All existing pre-packaged authentic Indian foods are only available in Indian stores, so we're making good Indian food available to a much larger audience.

So, basically a uber type of service? So that almost makes you guys like any other restaurant, no? I mean, what's the difference between calling an Indian restaurant to have fresh food delivered vs calling you guys?

> At the end of the day, the taste just isn't comparable. Microwaveable chana masala from Haldiram's, let's say, comes out looking/smelling/tasting not at all like a homemade dish. Ours is made completely from scratch and you as a customer can feel that difference.

This is subjective. Like I said, if you call up a decent Indian restaurant (HSB / Anjappar / Raj / etc.), you can get a similar experience.

> MTR/Haldiram's are 'last-resort' type meals, and we aim to be a meal that you actually crave + is good for you :)

Sorry, but I am still not convinced why your product is worth $24 and based on what you answer, seems like there isn't much difference between ordering from a decent Indian restaurant and you guys?

I appreciate taking the time to explain your points so far.

I know it seems absurd on HN, but there are people who live in areas without decent Indian restaurants.

I have to agree with OP. I wish you well, but if I want to pay this much money for Indian food I'll likely go to an Indian Restaurant near me. I'm supporting a local business and being provided with a restaurant experience.

(of note: I worked in restaurants for over a decade, so my food spending tends to fall into "dining experience at a great restaurant" or "ingredients to prepare my own food because it's cheaper than convenience foods". I was going to be a hard sell from the start).

Appreciate the support :)

That's not to say you wouldn't see this product at a store and go "oh, I've heard of Indian food and always been interested!" but that's not the common buyer behavior. People tend to pick convenience foods based on established food preferences/familiarizes.

This is HN, bike shedding is a thing.

- The microwaveable complete meals are definitely more similar to our products, but those are once again shelf-stable and lack in taste and nutrition. We will be doing a live comparison of our Chana Masala vs. the MTR Chana Masala to show how different it is in amount of product, look, smell, taste and nutrition.

- The oil that they include is definitely a type of preservative, and they use packaging engineering called retort packaging. This is very similar to vacuum sealing where you are drying up the product to remove the nutritional value. I think we could agree that there's a pretty big difference between MTR paneer masala and a homemade paneer masala. I would say that our products are similar if not the same as if you made it from scratch.

- We are e-commerce delivery, not on-demand. The difference between ordering from us vs. an Indian restaurant would be price-point (most dishes start at $7-10).

- Taste is definitely subjective!

You seem really hung up on the preservatives thing and I was giving the benefit of the doubt, but now it is just disingenuous. If oil of all things in a competitors product as a preservative then I think the tremendous amount of salt in your product qualifies as well.

The sodium content from our products comes from the spices in the recipes themselves. Indian spices especially have a large amount of salt (which makes them so flavorful and spicy!), but we do not add any additional salt for preservation. We are also currently working on low-sodium options!

This is nonsense - chillies, ginger and spices (e.g. black pepper, cloves, cinnamon, cassia, mace, cumin, coriander) barely contain any sodium. In the quantities such ingredients will be present in each meal, the sodium content is completely negligible.

> Indian spices especially have a large amount of salt (which makes them so flavorful and spicy!)

OK, this is just flat out lies - the only 'spice' that contains a large amount of salt is... salt! I now have zero faith that you have any idea about the very product you are marketing.

Also from Wikipedia retort packaging seems much more similar to canning than vacuum sealing.

I don't know specifically about Haldiram's or MTR (I might have tried out MTR Indian food ready-to-eat packs), but some others that I used to buy and eat sometimes (I forget the name, it may have been from an ITC group company - the Indian food and tobacco giant), mention on the package that they use DRDO-licensed technology. DRDO is an Indian defence-oriented R&D organization of the Indian government. The technology was originally developed for soldiers on the field. So likely made in such a way as to last long, and could account for its not tasting that good, and not as good as the same item, but freshly made (obviously).

As far as authenticity goes, most of their stuff isn't. I would actually put them in the "very very bad attempt" category. But it could just represent the food of local area where they started (and that's not really acceptable, given that they make a wide range of stuff).

I do that too! MTR and the Trader Joe's Indian dishes are my camping food. Definitely no comparison to fresh food.

If it doesn't greatly increase the price of packaging for your product, you may want to experiment with showing pictures of (and sending) food in single-serving packages (so instead of sending five-six packets, you'd send 15-24 of them).

Another option is to go with a "Home Chef" style pitch -- basically saying "here's a dinner date night for two in a box".

Edit: was wrong about MTR using preservatives, but I've always found their food to have an off taste.

https://www.mtrfoods.com/mtr_admin/data_content/products_gal...

It seems like Buttermilk is definitely competing for quality, not price.

https://www.amys.com/our-foods/indian-mattar-paneer

https://www.amys.com/our-foods/indian-palak-paneer

Amy's bowls typically come in around $5 per dish as well.

Two quick thoughts:

1) I don't get your branding, especially the company name, and especially as all of your meals are vegan.

2) Shipping meat-based meals is presumably a very different and more expensive logistical challenge so I get the reason why there's no meat in these but it seems as though these packets could easily be combined with pan-cooked chicken to make a more substantial meal - is that the case and is that something you've considered promoting as part of the marketing?

I wish you the very best of luck!

As I mentioned downthread, I was planning to skip this completely because of the name until one of the founders happened to mention in a comment that the meals are vegan. I don't normally associate "buttermilk" with anything that I eat as a vegan.

This might be a tricky marketing issue, because a huge amount of traditional home-cooked Indian food is lacto-vegetarian but not vegan. So there might be not an enormous customer segment that would view the lack of dairy in these meals as an advantage (although I'm in that customer segment myself).

We didn't actually launch with the aim of only providing vegan meals, it just so happened that our first dishes are all vegan! This has definitely caused some confusion so we'll continue to iterate on our branding/messaging.

A key part of a manageable vegan life is building a database of what you can consume that you enjoy and using that to drive choices, so if you can get vegan customers buying your food and enjoying it then they’re going to be stickier customers. I am a very loyal customer to my favourite food brands out of necessity, as are my vegan friends.

That said there’s certainly a double edged sword here in that there are some non-vegans who see “vegan” and are turned off but given Indian food is so often vegan I don’t think this would be a concern in your market. Although the name is cute, it’s definitely misrepresenting your product to a growing portion of your potential customers. If you stick with the name, regardless of marketing, you’re going to lose vegans, because many won’t look beyond the name because that’s a necessity for getting by.

There’s a few companies in the U.K. doing intentionally vegan ready meals (e.g https://allplants.com) and there’s a growing market for vegan ready meals (we are as busy/lazy as everybody else), so I think it’s worthwhile to reconsider the name, but also it’s a great name so maybe you can be the company to get vegans to look beyond red flags. Your product seems absolutely great for my needs and would, assuming they’re enjoyable to eat, integrate into my life well. Good luck!

Yeah, I've become very quick at glancing at an ingredient list and noticing "whey" or "gelatin" and then putting the product back. So indeed, the brand name itself would trigger a similar reaction for me if the founder hadn't happened to specifically mention that it was vegan.

> That said there’s certainly a double edged sword here in that there are some non-vegans who see “vegan” and are turned off but given Indian food is so often vegan I don’t think this would be a concern in your market.

There might be some knowledgeable customers who expect a particular dish to contain ghee and feel like it's not likely to be that great without the ghee.

Great initiative. But even I don't understand the use of this name as Branding. As ideally "Buttermilk" is a Drink consumed throughout India, and ironically your company is not selling it. :-).

Also its a name of the Drink and you are selling ready to eat food items which also make this name a little inappropriate, as for any Indian it gives the impression of Drink selling site rather than Food selling site. (Even i was not planning to look at it, if I have not read the comments).

Anyways all the best and have a great success.

Buttermilk is commonly drunk with meals in India (both North and South, although lassi is very popular in the North too), and also separately as a refresher, more so in summer, often lightly spiced with cumin, hing (asafoetida), etc. and sometimes with a few green chillies in it (for the brave - heh:), and is considered a soothing drink, and also healthy and wholesome. In fact I remember a childhood friend of mine saying that (as we both drank a glass each of buttermilk at lunch at his house), and it stuck in my memory. And it is really that - soothing.

http://www.amul.com/products/amul-pouchbuttermilk-info.php or try this https://www.amazon.com/Amul-Masti-Spiced-Buttermilk-1Liter/d...

I don't know. I'm not Indian either, and I was drawn to it in part because it wasn't advertised to westerners.

Re: meat-based options, we have added suggestions for meat to mix in with each dish under 'How to eat'! We plan on adding more in-depth recipes in the near future.

http://tastybite.com/products/

> The options were expensive, time-consuming, or tasted horrible.

Tasty bite tastes decent, takes 60-90 seconds to heat up, and costs about $3/package with no need for refrigeration.

---

This seems like a YC to clone TastyBite without any differentiation beyond the nebulous "quality food".

So....

Are you telling me your quality is so much better a household staple of my life is going to be replaced for twice the price?

----

https://www.amazon.com/Tasty-Bite-Chickpeas-Tomatoes-Microwa...

$15 for 6 packages / 60 oz.

https://thebuttermilkco.com/collections/singles/products/cha...

$13.50 for 3 packages / 30 oz(?)

- Our products are fresh and don't have any preservatives, meaning they must be refrigerated or frozen whereas TastyBite is shelf-stable for 9+ months. Our food is inherently fresher and tastes more homemade because of this.

- Our recipes are crowdsourced instead of developed in our kitchen. This ensures that the food is actually authentic with a homemade taste and we are able to expand into a much larger variety of products much quicker. For instance, we have a few recipes in our pipeline that you would be hard-pressed to find in TastyBite or even regular Indian restaurants because they are authentic to smaller regions of India.

- I can't say that you'll definitely like our product's taste better than TastyBite, but I do believe so :)

On a relative note, there are tons of such products in India and most of them taste sub par to home cooked food. One exception I found was Butter Chicken I used to buy regularly when I was spent some time in Newyork few years ago. You just have to freeze it until you open and then, heat it in microwave and ready to go. It tasted very good, but spoiled my stomach (I am bearing the burden even till today) due to the usage of preservatives. Anything that doesn't use preservative is a welcome addition.

One more, when you mentioned sustainable packaging, what does it mean? Is it paper or bio plastic? If so another +1.

https://www.amazon.com/Tasty-Bite-Chickpeas-Tomatoes-Microwa...

I wish you the best of luck with that.

Personally, I find a package of Vindaloo from TastyBite, some riced veggies, and a shredded chicken breast lasts me about 2 meals and is comparable to the price you are charging. I really only use TastyBite as a backpacking/on-the-go meal or as a quick curry out of laziness. I'm probably not your target market but shelf stability has alot going for it.

We are starting with Indian food but will hopefully be expanding to different cuisines, too!

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/we-only-th...

>With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death... Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit” is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time. In the United States, for instance, it has remained constant for the last 50 years, despite 40 years of the eat-less-salt message. The average salt intake in these populations — what could be called the normal salt intake — was one and a half teaspoons a day, almost 50 percent above what federal agencies consider a safe upper limit for healthy Americans under 50, and more than double what the policy advises for those who aren’t so young or healthy. This consistency, between populations and over time, suggests that how much salt we eat is determined by physiological demands, not diet choices....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/we-ea...

>People tend to consume about the same amount of sodium no matter where they live, and this amount hasn’t changed much in decades. Those facts hint at the biological basis of our sodium appetite.... “Over the last five decades, salt content of commercial food in our food [in the United States] has gone up. But if you look at people’s 24-hour urinary sodium excretion, you see that the amounts of salt people consume have been constant,” he says. Irrespective of age, sex or race, between 1957 and 2003 Americans have been eating on average 3.5 grams of salt a day. “This suggests that we are somehow regulating the amount of salt we are eating,” Breslin says.... In one of Leshem’s studies, babies who had low concentrations of sodium in their blood in the first weeks of their lives grew up to be teenagers with a penchant for salt, even salt that is seemingly hidden in processed foods. “Even if you can’t taste the salt, apparently your body does. It’s working on an unconscious level to condition a preference for sodium,” Leshem explains.

But Salt is probably the most common food preservative there is and the reason canned foods have such high levels of it.

Why is the salt content on many of these items through the roof for ready-made meals meant to be eaten soon after delivery.

Costco in the Seattle area also now sells some tasty bite bulk packs.

Yeah, which isn't really a positive unless it saves on sodium/etc. If it does, its really a niche "healthy" version of TastyBite and they need to market it as such.

Others in this thread seem dubious that quality could be a differentiator, but I think you should double down on that. It’s not just ingredients, but technique that makes food delicious and if you can truly scale proper par-cooking technique, that will be a strong core for your business, and difficult to copy from the outside.

I also think you are absolutely correct to focus on a core market who loves real Indian food. There’s no price you can put on your family’s home cooking, which makes it a good market for you to start in low volume.

Just a random idea as you grow: you might try supporting an “experiment community” the way Soylent did. I think that forum became https://www.completefoods.co. They encouraged people to share and develop their own recipes.

In the long term, you will need to compete against “monoculture” brands who are selling one size fits all products. Because you aren’t storing inventory, you will be positioned to sell a wider selection of products, even short runs of one-off special foods. Could be another differentiator.

That's a great suggestion about the community. We are experimenting with community building through our recipe curators, who send in their recipes to be turned into Buttermilk products. They receive 5% of the proceeds of their product sales, too. There are tons of great opportunities for this!

The website has a really clean look - it makes the product seem delicious and authentic. The minimalist design compliments the minimalism of the product.

I would be careful with identifying your target market. I live in Chicago, which I believe has one of the highest percentages of Indian immigrant populations in the nation. This might seem like your target market - but in fact the large percentage of immigrants has led to a slew of Indian markets and restaurants, that are likely equally delicious and cheap. It is a common theme among my coworkers to bring in homecooked Indian meals on a daily basis.

I also noticed the Upma pack is listed as gluten-free, but contains semolina. That's just asking for legal trouble from those with Celiac's. It might be worth consolidating all of the different packages and their ingredients lists on a separate page, QAing them, and making them more available to the reader in an organized, possibly drop-down format. Hope this feedback is useful.

Cheers

That's a good point about the target market. There's definitely a sizable portion of immigrants who continue to cook from scratch. There's also an emerging part of the market who are first/second-generation and don't cook at home as often -- either because they don't know how, don't have all the ingredients on hand, or don't have the time/patience. We are aiming to serve this population, and also be a nice-to-have for the former group of people!

That is a great call out on the Upma and a mistake on our end (that we accidentally added last night!). We will fix this immediately. I also really like your feedback about putting all the ingredients and nutritional information on a single page. Thank you!

Speaking of which, I'd love to know of Indian restaurants in Chicago, ideally closer to south side, that are truly friendly to Celiacs. Thanks.

Agreed. And also may be worth putting all the nutritional information (I mean what ingredients are used, and all - not some - of them, and in what percentages or weights - again, for all), on the food packages themselves. Saying this because a pet peeve of mine about Indian products here is that many of them put such info for some, but not all of the ingredients. Common example: Haldiram snacks: they often mention many ingredients, but the labeling can go like this: Peanuts (8%), gram flour (12%), rice flour (no number given), and so on. I mean what the heck is the use of putting that info, then? if a person wants to know that info, they want to know it for all ingredients, not just some, for their health or whatever other reasons.

I suspect it is because we never get the spices right. We went to an indian cooking class many years ago, and the woman who taught it hand ground all the spices herself. The results were amazing, but who has the time?

If you had a service that coupled premixed spices with recipes that use them, that would have been really exciting to me.

We can already buy various pre-made pastes/mixes at the grocery store, but they are really unhealthy.

If we could get the spices, then have control of all the fresh ingredients (meats, veggies) and also all the unhealthy ingredients (salt, anything with fat, etc), that would be attractive to me.

I know that is not what you are doing, but just for the future (a) spices are cheaper to mail and shelf-stable (b) the spice mix is probably the secret sauce of what makes it taste good, and it is difficult to duplicate in my experience (c) leaving the other ingredients out would allow home users to follow either a healthy recipe (fat free yogurt) or special occasion recipe (heavy cream!)

Anyway, FWIW, when I read the first lines of your description, that is what I was hoping for.

I have an electric spice grinder, and it makes this process really quick - just drop in the spices and push a button! It grinds them to a powder within just a few seconds.

If you're interested in making your own spice blends, I highly recommend getting one.

Also, if there are blends that you particularly like, you can make a bigger batch and store them in an air-tight container, and they will retain the majority of their flavour for up to a few months.

My wife's last job was at a factory that produced ice cream, and I was astounded to learn all the stuff that goes into quality control and keeping the food safe to eat. It's actually made me switch my cat food from those sort of 100% organic, high quality things to more mainstream brands, since I think what's being produced is less important than how it's produced, and I tend to trust larger factories by known quantities a little more.

Can you detail a little more your industrial process? The home page says "We make everything from scratch in our Seattle kitchen using only locally sourced ingredients + fresh vegetables" which sounds nice at first, but actually kind of creeps me out a little bit. I assume you have random FDA inspections and the like? Precautions to manage listeria, e. coli? A "locally sourced" supply chain with known quality controls, etc?

Also, is there a detailed ingredient list somewhere? My wife is allergic to chickpeas and lentils, which unfortunately makes eating Indian food very difficult for us, as much as I love it! I see lentils explicitly in some of the items, but others don't mention either, but that doesn't mean it's not used, e.g., in the flour or something.

You can find a full ingredient list on each product's page under 'Benefits'.

Can't comment on pricing until I taste and get a sense of quantity. Certainly reasonable enough to let me try.

Some feedback on the site: - Love the pastel colors and packaging design. Very clean, with excellent photos. Any concern about appearing too feminine for your target customer? - I feel like the "Details" should already be open when I go to a product page. I ended up having to twirl it open each time I visited a page. Also annoying that the Drift pop-up covered up those details every time! - I got confused about bundles, quantities, and meal counts, and just ended up ordering enough to get free shipping. Maybe that's the intent? - Loved the "How to Eat" section. Helped me decide what to buy, but once again, it was hidden. - I would suggest left aligning your text on product descriptions. Centered text is harder to read, especially with the bulleted lists. - I want more imagery of the food! Photos of the ingredients! Videos of the cooking process! "How to Eat" as a video or photo series, instead of text!

Few points: * If you're targeting Indians. You need to price competitively. You need to make it hard to resist. * Find a village/s in India where you can procure and pack. * Post some videos of how it's prepared (tasty.com style).

Minor website issues: * Fix coloring "Buy it now" barely visible - https://thebuttermilkco.com/collections/single/products/daal * When user selects single. Images should show singles not multiple packs. * confusing product categorization. click on "shop now" on the landing page. goes to https://thebuttermilkco.com/collections/all I could not find "Singles" mentioned the listing. * on the shop menu it displays "Suites, combos, bundles" confusing just keep it simple "combos" and "singles" allow user to mix and match using cart? based on there selection apply pricing changes and let them feel they won a lottery by choosing the right combination.

All the best.

I'm dismayed by the folks harping on the sodium content (for health reasons not taste). I think it warrants a deeper look because sodium intake is controversial. But there's lot of evidence that people can have more than 2.3g and still be healthy if you have normal kidney function, etc. Shrug, maybe they just wanted to find something to hate on.

New England Journal of Medicine: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1311889

Summary: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-t...

For a student, the alternative is to go to McDonald's and spend $8, or to go to an on-campus cafeteria.

For a parent, the alternative is to take a whole day (or more) to visit their child and bring a home-cooked meal in the trunk of their car (or on the train/plane/etc). At that price point, $24 is a steal. And the price of a "proper" dinner kit is probably on par with gift baskets the universities sell full of junk food/cake/candy/flowers/fruit salad.

* I really had to dig to find descriptions of the dishes.

* The emphasis on pre-built combo packs turned me off somewhat. You've only got ~10 dishes, I'd rather explicitly pick the 3 or 4 dishes that intrigued me than sift through all the combo packs to find the one that most closely matches what I want.

- We changed our product page design recently to move descriptions to a different part of the page and will definitely look into redesigning it! - We find that pre-built packs are helpful for people who can't choose or want to try a bunch of different ones. You can also purchase the individual products here: https://thebuttermilkco.com/collections/singles

Much good luck with your company, if I could make two suggestions: add a subscription option (or make it the default), and maybe do not appeal to the 'homesick' part as much as you do now, there are a lot more people out there that enjoy Indian food than there are Indians abroad.

Also, it appears you do not sell outside of the United States, maybe make that more clear up-front?

You dishes typically have 1 direct overhead picture of a bowl of the food. you then have several styled pictures of the "combos" or of the food in a sealed package. People eat with their eyes first. You're trying to sell comfort and yet you present your food in a very minimalist/sterile way.

Compare your images, to someone in a similar space, hello fresh: https://www.hellofresh.com/menus/?redirectedFromAccountArea=...

Food styling is aspirational. It's about getting the consumer to look at an image and say "I want that". It needs to speak to those desires.

A zip-top, solid colored plastic bag does not make me want to eat what is inside the bag.

Have you thought about trying to sell your products, or similar products, to people who camp/hike/etc? I think the fact that the meals are dehydrated and easy to cook would appeal to them

One point of constructive criticism I would offer is that I find the nutritional information hard to find and read in some circumstances.

That is a great point, and we will definitely update our website to make the nutritional information more readable.

+ Good package design especially color palette

+ Good website

- Expensive for packaged food

- Nothing that stood out (from comments) as strong differentiator from competitors (that they can not do)

- Unclear target market, this is what I gathered from comments, people

    * Who don't have access to Indian restaurants

    * Who don't have time or know how to cook Indian food at home

    * Who don't have access to competitors products 

       ** Hard to make case here as all major retailers sell one or other Indian food packages, and for everyone else there is Amazon Prime

    * Who have access to restaurants, have time or know how to cook but would instead prefer to spend about same amount of money on packaged food as they would by ordering it with food delivery services.

My suggestion: was looking for a video on your site... Something like that on the very first page might help people understand better what is being offered and how easy it is to prepare.

That is a good suggestion -- we've actually been talking about that internally recently and will revisit it.

I'm am an expat who lives in the UK. I'm from India as well. $24 for 3-4 vegetarian meals seems really expensive, will you adjust pricing as you scale?

How do you plan on preserving taste and the "home cooked feeling" as you scale? This might be an absurd question at this stage, but a friend and I who wanted to get in this space couldn't come up with a good answer.

Personally, I just cook a lot of food whenever I cook so that I am able to do a couple of meals. I've recently considered having a soylent for dinner and I just ordered my first pack of Huel. I can cook whenever I want to eat really authentic food.

Here in the UK a lot of house wives provide a tiffin service. Is there something similar in the US?

Great website. Nice story. I wish you luck :)

We're working on a few things that will help us automate a lot of the repeated processes but still ensure the same homemade recipes are being followed correctly. It's definitely a hard problem but one we're working hard to solve!

I believe there are similar services in some larger cities, but those usually have higher prices ($10-14 per meal) and aren't able to scale with the demand as necessary.

We hope to be the go-to for authentic food when the existing options don't cut it and you don't have the time or energy to make it yourself!

I agree that cooking can get quite exhausting, procuring ingredients, cooking and then cleaning up is a long process.

You are solving a real problem. Good luck!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala

(I don't know anything about the U.K. situation.)

This matters because there is an ever-growing mountain of evidence that shows that fructose is the primary cause of the obesity epidemic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Regarding your tangential point, watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM. I used to be quite the Atkins dieter, and I didn't gain any weight when I started eating _some_ non-fructose carbs. Thanks to the fact that weight tends to correlate with age, I look a lot younger than most people think I am. (I've been doing this for nine years...)

Have you done a blind taste test?

BTW, when I say gluten and dairy free, I am talking about celiac friendly food. You need to ensure that gluten content is below 20 PPM.

I'm also sensitive. This kind of product would be excellent for me if I knew it wasn't poisoning me.

This is a big issue for celiacs. We get treated like trash (not as bad as a decade ago) and have been burned countless times with so called "gluten free" food. One example, there was a local chief telling people that he was a celiac and then cooked "gluten free" noodles in the water with gluten noodles. We later found out he didn't have celiac, it was only a marketing ploy.

We've learned just not to trust people unless they are serious and "get it", show genuine understanding of our concerns and the serious consequences of cross contamination.

Best of luck, I hope this prospers.

One bug: the Amazon cart discarded my old items after I added new ones.

Steps to reproduce: 1. Add a sampler to the cart 2. Try to check out using Amazon 3. Discover that shipping is $6, or free shipping at $35+ 4. Go back and add a few more items 5. Try to check out with Amazon again

Expected result: The items all show up, now at the $35 level

Actual result: Only the newly added items were show

Very sorry to hear about that issue and thank you for the debugging instructions. We will look into it immediately!

Fresh and convenient? Sold.

Is there some new technology element?

Or a tech switch happening making this possible?

I am in Thailand and this approach would be very interesting for a number of Thai foods as well. The king of ready-made or easy-prep meals here is 7-11. They even microwave, toast, add hot water, etc. in the store for you. This would be a direct upgrade to many of the Thai meals they offer.

The other options all have their downsides. The imported pre-packaged stuff has a lot of oil (and has an overwhelming amount of garlic) and honestly smells rancid. Frozen options like Amy's are alright, but quite bland. And restaurant delivery, even if available near you, is not very healthy.

It looks like this won't have any of those drawbacks. Excited to try it out.

You should mention that it's vegan more prominently, might sway some people even faster.

FWIW, I really like the website and personally I do like that you sell it in pre-set packs. I don't know my way around non-Americanized Indian food very well and would be happy to try anything - happy to let you all pick what that is at first. It's nice that you let people buy multiples of 1 pack once they find something they really like.

Some of the starter packs don’t have nutrition label on it either.

There are restaurants at all cost points.

Pre packed food is a huge turn off for most Indians, and Indian-Americans. I mean people who have immigrated, not their kids born in America. Plus Indians are cost conscious.

I see you are selling that curry pack- Rice + curry for $28. You could a month worth Indian food with that kind of money. Indians are very cost conscious people. The bag of Basmati rice(5 kg) costs $15, you also get Idly/Dosa batter, heat and eat chapathis for pretty less too. And even if you shopped lavishly, the grocery bill is a lot less than anything you can sell.

Plus you have to also fight the affiliation people have towards things like Maggi Noodles, MTR and MDH masalas.

The other part making your case worse is the huge supply of Indian shops in most economic centers. Everything is available, like everything- Including cooking equipment. Heck, I had more diverse Indian food in Sunnyvale than I have eaten in Bangalore.

Firstly congratulations on launching the product.

Being myself from india, I love cooking and really like the choices what you have.

However I notice one main thing which may cause issue

"Made in a facility with meat, wheat and nuts"

As you know few majority of Indians prefer vegetarian food and they may be bit skeptical of eating if it was processed in facility with meat.

Also you did not mentioned what kind of meat ? As you know we have different religions and people have certain restrictions

The only thing from just skimming the site (haven’t dove deep in just yet) is that it seems it’s only veggie dishes right? Not a deal breaker, but if you had at least easy to follow recipes accompanying these on how to add some meat to them, this might turn into 100% of my meals

Anyways, will be ordering when I get home. Good job launching and good luck!

Example: https://thebuttermilkco.com/collections/singles/products/sam...

Also it just sounds naaaaaaaaaasty lol

However: Shipping meat in packages is pretty commonplace, you just need to keep it sufficiently chilled. (Maybe only frozen is acceptable?)

Check out Crowd Cow.

Thanks!

Upma 1 serving has 660 mg of sodium. Khichdi has 1760 mg of sodium. The daily requirement is 2300 mg of Sodium and if you are hyper tensive the requirements are lesser. Is there a reason it has such a high sodium content?

The pricing also seems high to me. I think your should rethink pricing. For staple items like khichdi, upma you should drop the pricing. I am confident that you will make it up with volume. If you price staple breakfast and dinner items too high, you will drive away your core customer base of Indian students. You want Indian students to buy your items in bulk for a month. Will a Indian student spend 200 dollars per month (20 * 10 (1 khichdi + 1 upma)) on your food items? You can use these staple items as lead gen tools to establish a long term relationship with your customers.

If more people affirm that a given recipe is the most desirable, it would be completely ridiculous to impose a lesser recipe upon the menu, if it sells poorly.

I can easily prepare low sodium pretzels, and try to sell them at the county fair, but what good would that do, if every passer by takes one look at my pretzels and asks, “Where’s the salt?”

Then I’m selling maybe 90% fewer pretzels, but wow! Look at the complements I get from those one or two people who appreciate the effort, but still don’t necessarily buy anything.

If three or four people out of one hundred are apt to complain about a detail like sodium, that the rest happily ignore, then keep the preferred recipe, and offer a separate low-sodium menu, optionally.

I read the OP as explaining why they won't currently buy the product, but what might change their mind in the future. Further, what's the problem with holding companies to a high standard? If the world consumed less salt health would improve.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-t...

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/we-only-th...

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/08/the-magi...

However what it boils down to in practice is that I've learned to not even ask whether you have a low-sodium menu. Because you probably don't, and even if you do, your idea of low-sodium is still way too much for what my body can take.

My solution is to only eat food prepared from scratch, or eat at specific restaurants where I can choose the exact ingredients that went into my meal. There is no point in restaurants trying to cater to people like me, because if they did I'd have no way to hear about it.

I'm serious about that. Advertising won't work because I've learned that advertising is misleading. "Reduced salt" means 25% less than a comparable product, which had several times what I could accept. Offering "healthy salads" won't sway me because I've learned the hard way that their salt content is usually just as high in practice as a burger and fries.

There are only two phrases that I respond to. "No salt added" and "Raw ingredients." If you're less restrictive than that, you're probably consuming too much salt. Even though you think that you're being good. So much so that if a normal person tries to eat what I eat, their first thought is going to be that the food tastes awful and needs more salt.

Incidentally for the record, our recommended daily allowance is 1500 mg, which is around 1/4 tsp of salt. Most adults in the USA eat more than double that. If you eat out every other day, you almost certainly are getting a lot more than most adults.

Salt not as damaging to health as previously thought, says study (theguardian.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17746420

- Sodium comes directly from the spices of the recipes. We don't add any for preservation or any other reasons, but we are currently working on low-sodium options for all of our meals! - Our pricing is based on the cost it takes to produce each dish. We make everything from scratch just as the home recipe calls for and include fresh vegetables, seasoning, spices, etc. Our products are more comparable to restaurant meals ($7-10) than instant meals ($2-4), although we fall closer to the instant/microwaveable meals range ($4-6). - Bulk options is a great idea and something we will definitely consider!

As a home cook, things taste much better with salt, and they preserve better. Both are desired here in a packaged meal.

Furthermore this allows introducing a low sodium variant for those looking for it.

https://thebuttermilkco.com/collections/singles/products/cha...

I love Indian food, but I live in the middle of nowhere (more specifically in a rural area 10 miles from the nearest town). The closest Indian restaurant is at least 45 minutes away and the closest good one is probably over an hour away.

I'd buy this in a heartbeat.

Specially with Indian food, most Indians cook from scratch and the food only tastes good if cooked fresh with raw items/whole spices.

I remember you used to have more detailed nutritional information on your website. I recall this specifically because of noticing how much sodium is in the product. Am I misremembering? I guess a visit wayback machine would sort this out but thought I’d ask here first.

How would you rate the quality of these?

Regarding take-aways, Indian food has a history of being a fairly cheap option in the UK. (Everyone's drunk? Let's grab a curry!) I'd be slightly put-off a restaurant that said it offered take-away. There's a similar problem with Cantonese food, and burgers.

With respect to restaurants, I’m in central London, so not a suburb with many Indians, and there’s some decent places like Dishoom, Roti Chai etc but I wouldn’t say they’re cheap. Im thinking outer London in the west and then places like Birmingham probably have cheaper places but I never go out that far.

We just subscribed to the Buttermilk Suite. Looking forward to trying it.

This is the wrong market. What fraction of Indian immigrants spend over 10 dollars on a meal -- which is a waste of money at median income? How will you satisfy the nuanced tastebuds of Indian men who only prefer their wife's specific cooking on a daily basis? I would guess your actual market consists mostly of wealthy Americans who think all Indian food is "the same". I don't think too many Indians will go for this, but best of luck.

The very first product they feature on the homepage, the "Out of Office" pack, is $23.50 for 3-4 meals.

Second, each "meal" is 340 calories, which isn't even enough calories for a teenage boy. A teenage boy should be eating at least 700 calories per meal, and that's on a bad day.

So, correcting for real life, these meals come out to about $20 per meal.

What is HPP?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascalization

Two things that annoyed me: 1. In the beginning of the flow, you show logos of PayPal and Google Pay (I'm on Android), but I didn't get a chance to pick them later in the flow. 2. I was asked for my address twice (once by your flow and then again after the Amazon Payments redirect). Why didn't it preserve my address between the redirects?

Looking forward to receiving the items I ordered.

As somebody with dairy allergies, I was going to avoid this, given the name, but since I saw you mentioned that the meals were all vegan (so far) I am tempted to give it a go.

You cannot compete with packaged foods wrt price point. You must also have something unique with no competitors. This market is too crowded. You had me at rasam and buttermilk..it’s because of the radar kinship, I want you to succeed.

If you are interested, I can help with pivot ideas but I honestly don’t think you can hit it at this market base with that price tag.

Large amounts of plastic waste is a big reason I will never ever use blue apron and similar companies.

That having said, as a European person I'm always amazed at the "instant food" culture that seems to be the standard in US. Wonder if it will ever cross the ocean.

:)

I'm interested to see how filling I find them, since that's the problem I often have with prepared meals, but lentils and beans are a good start.

> Remember that your packets are perishable, so refrigerate or freeze them as soon as they arrive!

That's definitely not true of Tasty Bites. :-)

Can you please reply?

I'd say the market is certainly there, and not just from Indians. In the UK curry is very widely eaten and many consider some dishes to be part of our national cuisine. While I've been abroad I've often struggled to find decent curry.

They provide jars with all the ingredients mixed. You need to add an onion, can of tomatoes and some chicken/beef.

Read their story here: https://www.pataks.co.uk/our-story

There's a scale:

1. Prepare everything from scratch.

For anything that isn't fairly simple, this is reserved for special occasions.

2. Use pre-prepared sauces like Patak's (there are also cheaper ones)

This still feels like "cooking", and scales up nicely to multiple hungry students without costing much more.

3. Microwave a chilled ready-meal [2]

There's a big price range for this, say £1-6 per portion. The cheap ones aren't very nice, and the expensive ones were too expensive as students, but were fine if I felt lazy once I had a job.

4. Order take-away.

I couldn't afford this.

5. Pour boiling water over instant noodles.

No-one admits to doing this sober.

[2] https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/shop/gb/groceries/chilled-/meal...

[N] There are suppliers in the USA: https://www.pataksusa.com/find-pataks

Also East End foods and Natco as bulk cheap national brands for various pulses. The local (predominantly UK born Pakistani/Lahore oriented) shops stock Laziza prepared masalas for various meals (chana, chicken, fish &c) and the fearsome mixed pickles. I find the prepared masalas very salty.

25Kg sacks of rice and 10Kg sacks of attar as well :-)

To the rest of you - why is there so much negativity and doubt in this thread? HN generally has some negativity but it feels like there's a lot of mansplaining in here. Stop it.

If you read the comments, you'd know that there's an unclear market which is a totally reasonable concern. HN is a place where people share their thoughts and concerns.

This is super tricky to achieve. But, are you sure that this process is what makes your food flavoourful yet preservable by just freezing/refrigerating ?

Good luck though!

Pictures can be ok but I would really prefer the info in text/chart form

I am not sure about the name though. Buttermilk though is consumed in India more than other countries it does not seem to resonate with your product.

Good luck with the launch