Redefining
Food
Convenience
THE PROBLEM
People are craving a fresh, convenient, & cheap meal
and despite there being an $847bn industry built around food convenience, not a single option on the market has been able to provide this... not yet
Food Delivery Services: Costly
Though fresh and convenient, the structure of food delivery service models makes them inherently a costly option for users, with typical prices ranging from 25% to 35% more than what you would pay for in-store.
Frozen Meals: Unfresh
While frozen meals offer a quick and easy solution for those short on time, their convenience comes at the cost of being unfresh and, innately, unhealthy.
Cooking: Inconvenient
The average American spends 400 hours a year on cooking— that's 2.5 months of a full-time job. That's asides from grocery shopping and cleaning thereafter. 86% of Americans reported they don't have the time they need to cook the meals they want.
Meal-Kit Services: Suck
While meal kit services aim to provide convenience and fresh ingredients, they fall short in delivering a satisfying solution for users, merely reducing the average user's cooking time from 1 hour to 45 minutes.
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Meal Kits fall into one of two categories, Pre-cooked Meal Kits & Portioned Ingredient Kits. Each with strong user pain points.
Pre-cooked Meal Kits, whether frozen or refrigerated, face the inevitable challenge of quality deterioration and staleness during shipping.
Portioned Ingredient Kits, popularized by companies like HelloFresh, claim to simplify the cooking process but really only do the user's grocery shopping. The time spent on cooking and cleaning remains significant, with many users still dedicating fourty-five minutes to an hour to meal preparation.
SWISH
Unparalleled User Experience
We've developed robotic cooking technology that we embed into a meal kit subscription service. This enables users to a convenient, cheap, and freshly cooked meal within 20-minutes of the click of a button.
SWISH SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE
We're owning the process end-to-end.
By providing the "Swish-ready Meals" as part of our subscription service and with technology developed at a cost-efficient price point, we can afford to embed the robot into the meal-kit subscription at no added cost to the user.
We're charging exactly what HelloFresh and Blue Apron charge, but with us you get a robot for free.
"SWISH", THE ROBOT
"Swish" is the at-home robot that you get as part of your subscription service. You simply put your robot-ready meals consistent of fresh, raw ingredients and you'll have a fully-cooked meal within 20 minutes or less.
Including the robot in the meal kit not only solves the underlying, root user need — cooking — but also induces a reduced churn rate.
Three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and the desire for a better standard of living. As this aspiration continually rises, we view food convenience as an essential future service and are developing the intellectual property to make this convenience a reality.
OUR PROGRESS
This isn't science fiction, it's here
VERSION 0.1
November 2023
"Gordon"
In November of 2023, we developed our first version of the robot. We built v0.1 as college students fully bootstrapped out of our founder's parent's garage.
The idea was significantly different, but proved to us that the technology just might work. Following this prototype, we raised a small Pre-Seed Check and got into ZFellows and Prod.
VERSION 0.2
January 2024
"Guy"
While Gordon proved the technology worked, it also enabled us to a world of user discovery. Leading us to our v0.2, Guy.
Upon testing, we learned that consumers were drawn towards various aspects of Gordon, but also that it was not very user-friendly. You don't go to a restaurant and order a protein, a veggie, and a carb— you order a full meal. Hence, the inception of "Food Pods", drawing an analogy from Coffee Pods, but for full meals.
With bullet-speed iterations, we converged on a design that was compact enough to fit on the countertop but cost-effective enough to be bundled with a subscription service, at a landed cost of ~$200.
Guy did great— by far a better user experience than Gordon and the concept just made sense to users with no instructions, and more importantly, they wanted it.
The technology still needed to be iterated upon for it to achieve the level of accuracy needed for this to hit a customer countertop.
VERSION 0.3
April 2024
Swish zero
To iterate on the technology more freely, we decided to split the problem into two portions: User Experience and Technology.
Our goal was to answer two main questions:
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Can we get achieve a repeatable, consistent quality meal?
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How badly do users need a product like this?
Unit Economics
We're anticipating the cost of our finalized robot to be in the range of $200-$250, landed, similar in cost to v0.2 but in functionality to SwishZero. We expect the total lifespan of the product to be 5 years on average. Meaning, embedded into the cost of the subscription, the robot costs $1.2 weekly. With delivery, reverse logistics, servicing, and a generous factor of safety, we can expect the final weekly cost of the robot to be around $2.5/week and enabling us to decent margins.
Robot Cost
$1.5/Bot/Week
$200-$250 Total Cost
5 Year Avg Life Expectancy
Accounting for Logistics, Servicing, & more.
Ingredient Cost
$22/meals/week
Quote from local farmers on raw ingredient cost for our specified 10 meals/week.
Delivery Cost
$0.7/week
We estimated, alongside the expertise of Stanford Operations Management Professor, the above approximated cost.
Customer WTP
$110/Ten Meals/Week
Customers currently pay $110 for 10 meals per week with services like HelloFresh and Blue Apron.
Pre-Seed Fundraise
We are opening our Pre-seed Fundraising Round with goal of utilizing this capital to finalizing our design and prototyping before mass manufacturing. By our Seed Round, we will have a product designed for manufacturing (DFM) as well as continued user-testing/market validation.
We're changing the future of cooking.
TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENT
Swish ZERO
By splitting the problem into two parts, we were able to experiment with the technology with fewer restrictions on cost/form-factor and quickly develop a prototype that is a pioneering technical advancement, "Swish Zero".
Swish Zero utilizes a 6 DOF (Degree of Freedom) robot arm that serves as a blank slate for the team to research and develop. Rather than rebuilding the robot for every question we have, we invested into a framework that enables us push the limits on what could be done with computer vision models, robotic manipulation techniques, and cooking technology.
We've used and continue to use this robot to guide our next design phase in building out a low-cost, repeatable model that combines all of our previous learnings into a robot that's ready to hit the shelves.
USER EXPERIENCE
With the many user questions that a startup asks, we realized that ours can be boiled down to one main question: How badly would a user want this service?
To do so without a robot, we noticed that air-fryers were capable of cooking around 5% of the meals that our robot could cook, making air-fryers a perfect candidate for a "Terrible MVP". If a service this bad in comparsion to our robot could sell and stick, then certainly would the one with our robot.
What Cooking Sucks then became was an air-fryer ready meal kit subscription service sold to students on Stanford University's campus. The results of this experiment were overwhelmingly positive— we couldn't keep up with student demand. The service was alleviating student's pain points with the vast majority being willing to subscribe for an entire academic year. We also learned a great deal on how to improve our product moving forward.
