Plated

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

~ the goodbye ~

Nick Taranto and Josh Hix met at Harvard Business School and launched Plated in November 2012 on a premise that is genuinely correct. The hard part of cooking dinner on a weeknight is not the cooking. It is deciding what dinner is and then obtaining the eleven things it requires, in the quantities it requires, before the shops close. Plated sold that decision, and the ingredients came along in the box as a side effect.

The money followed the way it did in that decade. Techstars New York in spring 2013, a million and a half in seed that May, five million the next January, fifteen million that August, thirty five million in a Series B in July 2015 and another twenty on top of it in 2016. Somewhere in the middle of that they went on Shark Tank in April 2014, shook hands with Mark Cuban on five hundred thousand dollars for six percent, watched that deal fall apart after the cameras stopped, and took a different one from Kevin O'Leary instead.

None of this was ever going to reach me. The meal kit is a product shape built around a particular North American household, one with a delivery address somebody is home at and enough income to pay roughly restaurant money for raw ingredients. In Ankara the same problem had a much older answer, which is the pazar on a fixed day of the week and a manav on the corner, and neither of them needed a subscription.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was selling ~

The economics were brutal and everyone in the category knew it. You are shipping refrigerated boxes with ice packs to individual homes, which means the logistics cost of a single dinner is enormous and the ingredients themselves are a rounding error next to it. Retention was the other problem. People signed up on a discount, cooked four or five meals, learned the recipes and cancelled, because once you know how to make the thing you no longer need someone to mail you a portioned onion.

Plated's answer was to go slightly upmarket, longer recipes and better ingredients than the competition, which raised the price and narrowed the audience without fixing the shipping. Blue Apron went public in June 2017 and its share price answered the question about the category's economics in public and at length.

~ what it became ~

Albertsons bought Plated on 20 September 2017 for a figure reported at three hundred million dollars, and the logic was sound on paper. A grocery chain already owns refrigerated distribution and customers who are standing in front of the food. Put the kits on the shelf and the shipping problem disappears. Kits started appearing in Albertsons stores in April 2018.

Once that worked, the subscription was the part that made no sense to keep. Josh Hix stepped down as chief executive in January 2019. On 13 November that year Albertsons announced the end of the delivery business, with the last boxes going out on 27 November 2019. Plated stopped being a company and became a private-label name managed by the Own Brands team, which is a demotion with a paycheck attached.

~ the funny part ~

In September 2020 the founders sued Albertsons over the earnout, the part of the price that was contingent on the business hitting targets it could not hit after the buyer switched off the business. That is the standard ending for an acquisition where the acquirer wanted one organ and not the animal.

plated.com now redirects to safeway.com. Seven years and seventy five million dollars of venture money, and what survives is a word on a package in a supermarket owned by someone else.

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