I love cooking but hate shopping. I’m not alone. It’s from that vein several startups have appeared recently. Blue Apron, Plated, and HelloFresh are all trying to solve this decidedly first world problem by shipping pricey boxes of food to your house each week. Add Atlanta-based PeachDish to the list, too.
At its core, PeachDish is just like the other services: For a monthly subscription, the company will mail a box of fresh food and recipe cards every week. There are two meals for two in each box. Just like the other services, on the surface PeachDish is a bit costly. It costs $50 a week for these two meals. That works out to $12.50 a plate, which is on par with the industry average.
After trying PeachDish for a week, I can attest that the meals are well worth $12.50 a plate. My box shipped with peppercorn salmon and barbecue chicken pizza. The meals were easy to cook, came with an appetizer and dessert and were delicious. They have to be delicious.
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I met up with PeachDish’s Hadi Irvani founder prior to TechCrunch’s Atlanta meetup. He’s passionate about the quality of food within each box. He stated unequivocally that his box dinners have better food than the other box dinners. But I’m sure the founders of Blue Apron and Plated would probably state the same thing.
However, the quality of the food will not ultimately decide the leader in this emerging market. It’s a sad, but true reality. This is a long game and PeachDish has built its company to be lean and effective.
“For now we are bootstrapping the business,” Irvani said. “I’ve loved running PeachDish as a lean business because it has forced us to be more innovative with everything from our marketing strategy to our packaging. However we are beginning to look for new financial opportunities to scale up and move forward.”
The company uses Amazon for payments. It takes just two clicks from the point a person says they want to subscribe to making the payment. That is, as long as that person subscribes to Amazon. If not, it’s a traditional payment process.
“We wanted to partner with Amazon because we decided it’s better to embrace the ‘wheel’ rather than reinvent it,” Irvani told TechCrunch. “I know that I hate pulling out my credit card every time I need to make a purchase, and we wanted to simplify that for our customers.”
PeachDish is also located in Atlanta, which is one of the country’s largest transportation hubs. The founder tells me there are a lot of perks to being located in Atlanta including easy access to transportation hubs and access to local farms. Atlanta-area subscribers get their boxes the day after they’re shipped; the rest of the country gets their boxes two days later.
Compared to other food delivery services, it’s clear that PeachDish is new to the game. Its website is not as interactive as Plated’s site. PeachDish’s pricing is higher than Blue Apron’s and it doesn’t have as deep of pockets as HelloFresh.
PeachDish has fantastic food. The food ships in a gorgeous container and is as fresh as anything you would find in a supermarket. I used to scoff at these types of services — get out and shop, slackers — but as my life has gotten more busy and income increased, I’m starting to get it. I love to cook and would gladly pay a slight surcharge to have someone else like PeachDish plan and shop for me. Plus, who doesn’t need a little southern hospitality in their life?