PlateJoy Delivers Healthy Food to Your Door When You Need It

What's This?

By Seth Fiegerman2013-10-11 02:59:06 UTC

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Name: PlateJoy

One-Liner Pitch: Healthy eating for busy people.

Why It's Taking Off: PlateJoy recommends recipes for every meal of the day based on a customer's family size and dietary restrictions and delivers the food within 24 hours.

Let's face it: Many of us grew up with canned soups and ramen noodles, and we just don't know how to cook. Either that, or our parents took care of the cooking while we did the studying. Or better yet, our parents worked two jobs and we typically ate cereal for dinner (that last one was me sometimes.) I still don't know how to cook well, and I miss my mom's home cookin'.

Thanks to PlateJoy, though, people like me — busy, hopeless cooks with big appetites for delicious, nutritious food — can eat healthy, save time, and even save money.

PlateJoy enables users — even those with specific dietary needs — to customize their food orders, from breakfast and lunch to dinner, dessert, and snacks. The time-strapped entrepreneur, for example, can get her weekly shopping done for every meal of the week, including those go-to snacks she can't live without.

The site recommends relevant recipes for every meal of the day based on user preferences ranging from family size to dietary restrictions. In just a few clicks, a user can add recipes to her cart and within 24 hours the order can be delivered.

Unlike other meal-kit delivery services, including Plated and BlueApron, PlateJoy has a flexible delivery schedule, achieved by its local partnerships with grocers, including Peapod and Whole Foods. This framework allows for deliveries to be made seven days per week from 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.

Christina Bognet, cofounder of PlateJoy, imagined the platform during a period of dieting in her own life. She says many of its users are seeing cost savings from decreased restaurant outings and also from the site's surplus reduction algorithms, which keep track of what the user might already have at home.

"We have an awesome team of recipe curators and developers who find the best recipes out there and then tweak them to make them tastier, easier to prepare, and in alignment with any given user’s preferences," Bognet said. "It’s basically what a typical person would do to the average recipe after making it five times and coming up with all of the tricks about which ingredients are important, which can be left out to save time, and how it can be adapted to your tastes. We do that for you and then transform the recipe into a visual representation of itself so that you’re not reading through something long, tedious, and confusing."

PlateJoy's minimum order is $79, and users tend to order a mix of meals, Bognet says, all with the goal of saving time and eating well. Breakfasts and lunches are built for preparation times under 10 minutes, while dinners are designed to take less than 30 minutes to make.

"We created PlateJoy to be a super intuitive and quick process for our users," Bognet says. "We don't actually want you to spend an hour on our site — we want you to be able to order what you need and go back to living your life."

The startup is based in Cambridge, Mass. and PlateJoy's service is currently available in Boston and San Francisco. The startup recently won the Healthbox Innovation Award and a $25,000 cash for the most innovative solution to a healthcare problem and is in the process of raising its seed round.

Image: PlateJoy

Topics: Business, Food, Health & Fitness, Startups, The Launchpad