SpoonRocket may have been around for awhile, but with its big move to SF it's only operating in SOMA and only for lunch hours. Munchery has the largest scope, with by far the largest delivery range (Oakland, Berkeley, SF, San Rafael, San Mateo, Palo Alto and Sunnyvale). SpoonRocket expands to Downtown Oakland. Posted on November 5, 2013 by Christina Mitchell. Photo: Christina Mitchell. Steven Hsiao and Anson Tsui started SpoonRocket about 5 months ago in Berkeley: 'We want to accomplish what has never been done before. We have the power to change how people eat and live. Imagine a world where you can get. Find 2 listings related to Spoonrocket Inc in Berkeley on YP.com. See reviews, photos, directions, phone numbers and more for Spoonrocket Inc locations in Berkeley, CA.
Spoonrocket
Does food delivery need to be disrupted?
Can technology make it possible for busy families to eat healthy, affordable meals? Some people think so.
Anson Tsui and Steven Hsiao are a couple of smarty-pants Cal grads, already known as the kings of late-night food delivery for UC Berkeley.
After graduating in 2009, they started what can only be described as an empire of 'late night stoner food delivery' businesses. Under the Late Night Option umbrella, Pho Me Now, and later Munchy Munchy Hippos (deep-fried twinkies and bacon-wrapped hotdogs, nuff said) and Burrito Supreme delivered greasy junk food to UC students in the wee hours for four happy years.
But Peter Pans sometimes grow up, and the Late Night Option dream is over. Tsui and Hsiao have suspended operations to focus on Spoonrocket, their home food delivery service for twenty-something tech guys. Just kidding, Spoonrocket is intended to be a healthier fast meal solution for everybody, not just single geek guys whose tummies can't tolerate fried junk anymore.
This past weekend T324's owner David Daniels tried Spoonrocket.
His words: Sad satan pc.
'It was good, fast, and not expensive. Too bad they don't yet deliver to Albany.'
Spoonrocket is coming to Oakland, where I live, on Nov. 1.
After that, I will no longer be subject to the tedious labor of putting microwaveable dinners delivered by Instacart into the microwave for my boyfriend.
There's a great article about the 'artisanal fast food' concept here on HuffPost. It contains this marvelous quote that explains why people like me, who grew up on whole, nutritious foods, don't eat drive-thru.
'For those millions who would rather starve than bite into a Bonus Jack, 'fast food' does not exist. Their brains are wired to block it out. Place them, desperately hungry, on a street dotted with Taco Bells and Burger Kings and they will wander, arms flailing, until they starve to death.'
Eating whole, nutritious foods as a choice can be the experience of privilege, but it can also be the experience of people whose families have always grown their own food.
I have some of both; I grew up in Chelsea when it was a poor Puerto Rican neighborhood, and we often had takeout black beans and rice with chorizo from the Cuban-Chinese diner for dinner. It was cheap as hell, but so delicious. My father grew cherry tomatoes on our fire escape. We had a garden every summer at our decrepit summer house in Maine, bought lobsters off the pier, and canned jams from our blackberry patch. It was '70s Back to the Earth stuff, but it was also the frugality of a Midwest Depression baby father and a mother who'd been born in Scotland during WWII, where her mum used to lock the kids out in the garden when she left the house so they wouldn't get into the sugar jar.
The purported mission of Spoonrocket is to change people who consider fast food to be food into people like me without crippling them financially or adding to their overclocked lives. It seems honorable and based on the adoption around here, it may be possible in some areas. Of course, around here it's being adopted by people who eat arugula on the regular, not fast food junkies. To balance that, there's a philanthropic component: 'Through World Food Program USA, we donate one nutritious meal to a child in need with every meal you purchase. We just don't think anyone should ever go hungry.'
Will it scale?
Spoonrocket, since it uses it own kitchen (just one so far) to prepare foods and its own trucks to deliver, faces some of the exposure to infrastructure cost risk that doomed Webvan.
And their stated goal of buying local and organic as much as possible could become a commodities logistics nightmare in areas not so well-supplied with nearby organic farms and organic produce delivery services. Sadly, our intel indicates the noble experiment is already devolving.
T324's Senior Project Manager Brian Nowell, a Cal grad who came up on Late Night Option but also knows his fine foods, was an early Spoonrocket adopter and evangelist.
It was everything he loved, and his household ordered five nights a week. But after a flurry of pushback on review sites about portion size, Brian started to get Spoonrocket emails with polls. 'Do you want bigger portions?' 'Do you want more home-style meals or more artisanal meals?'
Fast social metrics mean fast pivots, and Spoonrocket published poll results showing the landslide victory of big American meals and pivoted.
Spoonrocket hit profitability in August. So the food is getting dumbed down and carbed up. 'It's just mac and cheese and ribs now', Brian said sadly, 'I've completely stopped ordering from them.' David's picture shows mac and cheese and ribs, as it happens. Lucky for me, my boyfriend loves homestyle American food. I'm deeply sad I won't be able to get an order of goat-cheese stuffed squash blossoms at the same time, though.
And as an aside: why is it always why Y-Combinator? I'd like the next necessary tech lifestyle upgrade I become hooked on to be backed by some other incubator, cause YC has too many tentacles in my life. My bf works for a YC-backed startup, and YC keeps backing these companies that are a perfect fit to add quality of life to our geek household. Like Instacart. Yet as a company, YC is a little gross, a bunch of privileged bros sitting pretty on the Peninsula, funding projects that will make their privileged, comfortable lives even more so. And funding their first non-profit doesn't make it all better.
this post originally appeared on the T324 blog.
Imagine craving a healthy gourmet meal and having it appear minutes later—fresh and piping hot—on the curb outside your front door for just $6. That's the idea behind the startup SpoonRocket, launched by two UC Berkeley grads who aim to revolutionize the very concepts of fast food and delivery.Enterprising engineering major Anson Tsui and social engineering major Steven Hsiao created a late-night delivery service called Late Night Option four years ago, while they were Cal students. Back then, they catered to their classmates' cravings for junk food in the wee hours of the night; the city's restaurants typically shutter their doors by 11 p.m. They operated under an array of targeted business names, most notably Munchy Munchy Hippoes, which peddled finals fuel such as deep-fried Oreos and Philly nacho cheese steak fries.
Spoonrocket Oakland
Tsui and Hsiao realized they had identified a gap in the market. But the duo decided to profoundly shift their collegiate-focused, junk food model, raising the caliber of the cuisine while whittling away the typical restaurant delivery time.
'We want SpoonRocket to be a new model of fast food,' says Hsiao. 'We want it to be cheap, accessible, and have high quality ingredients. Fast food in general is bad for society. Just look at the obesity rates.'
They pitched their plan to Y Combinator—a prestigious incubator for budding entrepreneurs in Mountain View—in May, and launched at the end of June. In the wake of their eighth week, Hsiao says SpoonRocket has been so successful that it is ready to branch into new neighborhoods in San Francisco and Oakland; currently, it delivers to Berkeley and Emeryville. He declined to reveal how many meals the company is selling per day.
'These next two weeks we're going to try and find a bigger facility,' says Hsiao. 'Every day I get 10 to 20 emails from people in San Francisco asking us to expand.'
SpoonRocket supplements its website with iOS and Android apps, enabling customers to pull out their phones and order entrees with the click of a button. They also have an automated phone order system for customers who don't have internet access.
Currently the business boasts seven delivery cars, each outfitted with a heating unit in the passenger seat that holds up to 60 entrée servings. Powerdirector 15 patch review.
'In the typical delivery model, there's a lot of time wasted,' says Hsiao. 'When the customer orders the food, the restaurant has to make it and then send it out with the driver and by then, it's been an hour. Once the driver arrives, the customer is scrambling around for money, and it always takes a while for them to come down…and then the driver has to go all the way back to the restaurant to start it all over again. It's the old model of doing things.'
With SpoonRocket, their menu changes daily and always features two options—one carnivorous and one vegetarian—such as corned beef cabbage and roasted eggplant lasagna, or chili-glazed short ribs with roasted potatoes and oyster mushrooms, or rigatoni Sante Fe with sweet corn, black beans and yams in a tomato puree.
There's little-to-no down time: Because the driver rarely has to return to the kitchen for more grub, delivery typically takes a mere 10 minutes. Customers place an order when they're hungry, SpoonRocket issues an automated notification call two minutes before the driver arrives, and the customer strolls to the curb to retrieve a $6 lunch or supper. The company's business model asks customers to pay a $40 per year membership, but to recruit newcomers, it is offering for a limited time free 'lifetime membership.'
The purported mission of Spoonrocket is to change people who consider fast food to be food into people like me without crippling them financially or adding to their overclocked lives. It seems honorable and based on the adoption around here, it may be possible in some areas. Of course, around here it's being adopted by people who eat arugula on the regular, not fast food junkies. To balance that, there's a philanthropic component: 'Through World Food Program USA, we donate one nutritious meal to a child in need with every meal you purchase. We just don't think anyone should ever go hungry.'
Will it scale?
Spoonrocket, since it uses it own kitchen (just one so far) to prepare foods and its own trucks to deliver, faces some of the exposure to infrastructure cost risk that doomed Webvan.
And their stated goal of buying local and organic as much as possible could become a commodities logistics nightmare in areas not so well-supplied with nearby organic farms and organic produce delivery services. Sadly, our intel indicates the noble experiment is already devolving.
T324's Senior Project Manager Brian Nowell, a Cal grad who came up on Late Night Option but also knows his fine foods, was an early Spoonrocket adopter and evangelist.
It was everything he loved, and his household ordered five nights a week. But after a flurry of pushback on review sites about portion size, Brian started to get Spoonrocket emails with polls. 'Do you want bigger portions?' 'Do you want more home-style meals or more artisanal meals?'
Fast social metrics mean fast pivots, and Spoonrocket published poll results showing the landslide victory of big American meals and pivoted.
Spoonrocket hit profitability in August. So the food is getting dumbed down and carbed up. 'It's just mac and cheese and ribs now', Brian said sadly, 'I've completely stopped ordering from them.' David's picture shows mac and cheese and ribs, as it happens. Lucky for me, my boyfriend loves homestyle American food. I'm deeply sad I won't be able to get an order of goat-cheese stuffed squash blossoms at the same time, though.
And as an aside: why is it always why Y-Combinator? I'd like the next necessary tech lifestyle upgrade I become hooked on to be backed by some other incubator, cause YC has too many tentacles in my life. My bf works for a YC-backed startup, and YC keeps backing these companies that are a perfect fit to add quality of life to our geek household. Like Instacart. Yet as a company, YC is a little gross, a bunch of privileged bros sitting pretty on the Peninsula, funding projects that will make their privileged, comfortable lives even more so. And funding their first non-profit doesn't make it all better.
this post originally appeared on the T324 blog.
Imagine craving a healthy gourmet meal and having it appear minutes later—fresh and piping hot—on the curb outside your front door for just $6. That's the idea behind the startup SpoonRocket, launched by two UC Berkeley grads who aim to revolutionize the very concepts of fast food and delivery.Enterprising engineering major Anson Tsui and social engineering major Steven Hsiao created a late-night delivery service called Late Night Option four years ago, while they were Cal students. Back then, they catered to their classmates' cravings for junk food in the wee hours of the night; the city's restaurants typically shutter their doors by 11 p.m. They operated under an array of targeted business names, most notably Munchy Munchy Hippoes, which peddled finals fuel such as deep-fried Oreos and Philly nacho cheese steak fries.
Spoonrocket Oakland
Tsui and Hsiao realized they had identified a gap in the market. But the duo decided to profoundly shift their collegiate-focused, junk food model, raising the caliber of the cuisine while whittling away the typical restaurant delivery time.
'We want SpoonRocket to be a new model of fast food,' says Hsiao. 'We want it to be cheap, accessible, and have high quality ingredients. Fast food in general is bad for society. Just look at the obesity rates.'
They pitched their plan to Y Combinator—a prestigious incubator for budding entrepreneurs in Mountain View—in May, and launched at the end of June. In the wake of their eighth week, Hsiao says SpoonRocket has been so successful that it is ready to branch into new neighborhoods in San Francisco and Oakland; currently, it delivers to Berkeley and Emeryville. He declined to reveal how many meals the company is selling per day.
'These next two weeks we're going to try and find a bigger facility,' says Hsiao. 'Every day I get 10 to 20 emails from people in San Francisco asking us to expand.'
SpoonRocket supplements its website with iOS and Android apps, enabling customers to pull out their phones and order entrees with the click of a button. They also have an automated phone order system for customers who don't have internet access.
Currently the business boasts seven delivery cars, each outfitted with a heating unit in the passenger seat that holds up to 60 entrée servings. Powerdirector 15 patch review.
'In the typical delivery model, there's a lot of time wasted,' says Hsiao. 'When the customer orders the food, the restaurant has to make it and then send it out with the driver and by then, it's been an hour. Once the driver arrives, the customer is scrambling around for money, and it always takes a while for them to come down…and then the driver has to go all the way back to the restaurant to start it all over again. It's the old model of doing things.'
With SpoonRocket, their menu changes daily and always features two options—one carnivorous and one vegetarian—such as corned beef cabbage and roasted eggplant lasagna, or chili-glazed short ribs with roasted potatoes and oyster mushrooms, or rigatoni Sante Fe with sweet corn, black beans and yams in a tomato puree.
There's little-to-no down time: Because the driver rarely has to return to the kitchen for more grub, delivery typically takes a mere 10 minutes. Customers place an order when they're hungry, SpoonRocket issues an automated notification call two minutes before the driver arrives, and the customer strolls to the curb to retrieve a $6 lunch or supper. The company's business model asks customers to pay a $40 per year membership, but to recruit newcomers, it is offering for a limited time free 'lifetime membership.'
Hsiao explained that he and Tsui knew they had to offer a trifecta to make SpoonRocket a success: The food had to be swift and salubrious, but supremely, it had to be delicious.
So they hired David Cramer, a UC-Davis grad who gained his master chef designation from the Le Cordon Rouge Culinary School and worked at Napa Valley restaurants. 'He was very excited when (we) contacted him,' says Hsiao. 'He really saw the vision. He cares so much about sustainability and where we got our food. Right now, our ingredients are nearly 90 percent organic. And because we do such high volume we can get the price break—the same prices as Cal Dining and local hotels—to make it inexpensive for the customer.'
According to Hsiao, Cramer currently is cooking around the clock: 'It's a labor of love. David is committing to changing the world with us.' As an extension of that vision, SpoonRocket pledges that for every meal it sells, it donates a quarter to the UN's World Food Programme, enough to cover the cost of feeding a hungry child somewhere in the world.
SpoonRocket also aspires to extend its reach, envisioning shipping refrigerated meals to far-flung outlets where they can be reheated and dispatched to curbside clients. And although SpoonRocket had narrowed its business hours from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. to refine operations, fret not, late night noshers— 4 a.m. snack attack deliveries may return soon.
'We're developing different menus for lunch, dinner and late night, still with two options—vegetarian and meat—per shift,' says Hsiao. 'In the future, the company's goal is to operate 24/7.'
Posted on August 27, 2013 - 3:48pm