Freshly

» see freshly.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Michael Wystrach and Carter Comstock founded Freshly in 2012 with a distinction that turned out to matter commercially: it shipped meals that were already cooked. Blue Apron and the rest of the meal-kit category sent you ingredients and a recipe, which is to say they sent you homework. Freshly sent a refrigerated tray you put in a microwave for three minutes.

The money arrived on schedule. A $7 million Series A in July 2015 was followed by $21 million a year later led by Insight Partners. Then in June 2017 came $77 million in a round led by Nestle, which was watching the category from the position of a company that sells prepared food for a living. In October 2020 Nestle bought the whole thing for $950 million plus an earnout worth up to $550 million more. At its height Freshly was delivering a million meals a week.

The unwind was quick. In November 2022 Nestle folded Freshly into a joint venture with the private equity firm L Catterton and a manufacturer called Kettle Cuisine, handing L Catterton the majority stake. In December the distribution center in Savage, Maryland closed with 454 layoffs. The last day to place an order was 17 January 2023, and the final shipments went out on the 21st.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a cold box costs ~

Every one of those million weekly meals traveled inside an insulated liner with enough frozen gel to survive a courier's schedule, and every one of them carried a deadline measured in hours. That is the line item the whole category kept losing to. The food can be cheap and the logistics still will not be, because you are not shipping dinner, you are shipping refrigeration.

~ the lockdown number ~

2020 made the category look like a permanent change in how people ate. Subscriptions spiked while churn fell away, and every forecast in the sector got drawn straight through the peak. Nestle bought at exactly that moment, for close to a billion dollars, and then watched the behavior revert as restaurants reopened and grocery inflation made a $12 tray of chicken look like a luxury.

By the November 2022 investor seminar the chief executive was already saying publicly that the transaction had not met the company's objectives. Two months later there was no service left to meet them.

~ lunch, solved differently ~

Freshly answered a question that a Turkish city does not really ask. In Ankara a cooked lunch is five minutes away and costs less than the shipping on an American meal box, and the delivery habit here formed around restaurants rather than subscriptions: Yemeksepeti launched in 2001 and was already the default long before Delivery Hero bought it in 2015. A recurring crate of microwaveable dinners solves an absence of nearby cheap cooking, and that absence is a specific feature of American suburbs.

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