A Napa startup is giving the meal-kit concept an upgrade, while simultaneously helping restaurants boost their revenue.
Moveable Feast — founded in 2022 by CEO John Stubbs, Jon Sybert and Ricardo Reyes — partners with award-winning chefs at restaurants nationally to develop menus that can be turned into deliverable meal kits to serve four, eight or 12 people.
Stubbs owns New Orleans-based restaurant Jewel of the South, Sybert is the chef and owner of D.C.-based Tail Up Goat and Revelers Hour, and Reyes is a former communications executive at Tesla.
The founders wanted to help higher-end restaurants recapture the demand for at-home dining experiences that flourished in 2020. In the early months of the pandemic, many restaurants that had never previously offered take-out quickly pivoted toward limited edition to-go menus.
"There's this deadweight loss in the market that was established during the pandemic, and certainly we think that some of the demand has relaxed as people start going to restaurants, again, but not all of it," Stubbs said. "I think some of that behavior is sticky. I think people did have a return to the dining room at home during the pandemic and they are hosting dinner parties and they are cooking more at home."
In December, they began a limited rollout in the Bay Area and the service is launching nationally in March.
San Francisco chef Brandon Rice of Ernest is one of their first partners. His upcoming menu for the March box includes cacio e pepe profiteroles, Dungeness crab Rangoon dip, a chop salad with togarashi ranch dressing, New York strip steak with house-made sauce, a potato terrine, cornbread with cultured butter and miso chocolate chip cookies, according to the website.
Every month will feature a different chef's menu, and the service currently costs around $96 per serving, including shipping. That works out to $385 for a box for 4 people, $770 for eight people and $1155 for 12 people.
The restaurants will get a 10% take from the revenue. It's essentially a licensing fee to use their brands and intellectual property (aka the menus).
New York-based Dirty Candy was the first featured restaurant of the year, followed by D.C.'s Reverie. Subsequent months in 2023 will feature menus from Compère Lapin in New Orleans; Frasca Food and Wine in Boulder, Colorado; Albi in D.C.; Octavia in San Francisco; Roots Southern Table in Dallas; Birdie G’s in Los Angeles; and Nightbird in San Francisco.
The menus are designed with pre-meal snacks, a main protein dish, side dishes, sauces and dessert. Eventually, Stubbs wants to add an optional wine pairing add-on.
Each box has detailed instructions on how to prepare all of the dishes and also comes with a kitchen-themed "gift" such as a tool or small dish.
They also curate two music playlists — one for the home cook as they prepare the meal and the other is to be enjoyed during dinner.
The meals are prepped and shipped from a single kitchen facility in Napa, and the company primarily partners with local Bay Area farms to source ingredients. The menu from Ernest will feature steak from Schmitz Ranch, dairy from Straus Family Creamery, cornmeal Tierra Vegetables, crab from Four Star Seafood and Provisions, and oranges from Napa Wild, among other vendors.
Seven people work in the kitchen full-time at the moment. They have the capacity to fulfill 500 boxes monthly and Stubbs expects to ramp that up to 2,000 monthly boxes within the next few months.
Later this year, they will also introduce subscription options with monthly or quarterly options that will offer members discounts, early reservations, additional gifts and access to in-person events.
Moveable Feast is expecting to reach margins of 35% to 40%, or better, as it scales and reaches full capacity, Stubbs said, and will eventually open additional regional kitchens.
The company hasn't disclosed it funding or investors.
So, who is their target customer? At the price point, it's easy to imagine that Moveable Feast's meal kits might appeal to higher income urbanites in major metropolitan regions, but Stubbs also thinks demand will come from another type of consumer.
"You can obviously argue that metropolitan areas will drive it just because of the population density there but I actually think this is going to appeal to customers outside of markets where there are plenty of options to go to restaurants and have in-person dining experiences," Stubbs said.
In other words, they hope to find foodies everywhere.
"If you're in Montana, if you're in Nebraska, if you're in a lot of places that don't have a high density of Michelin restaurants but … you follow the James Beard Awards, you know what the Michelin restaurants are," Stubbs said, then "this is an opportunity for you to experience them in places where you otherwise wouldn't have a lot of alternatives."
Last-mile delivery for fresh foods is notoriously challenging, though, and even Blue Apron is struggling.
Investors poured more than $250 million into Blue Apron before the New York company IPO'd in 2017, but Blue Apron is now at risk of being delisted from the NYSE. It had 22% of the U.S. market in 2018, according to Statista, second only to Hello Fresh.
Other meal kit delivery services that have popped up over the past decade include Purple Carrot, Dinnerly, Home Chef, Marley Spoon, EveryPlate and S.F.-based Sunbasket.
