Dinnr

Idea

Introduction

Cooking a quality meal at home from scratch takes too much time and effort in planning and executing. The convenience of eating out or using take-away options is appealing when most of us work an average of 48 hours per week, but it's expensive and often unhealthy. At the same time, there's little product choice in local grocery stores which means that many of us re-produce the same unimaginative go-to dishes from week to week.

Dinnr is an alternative, making it simple to select a delicious-looking meal online and have the measured ingredients and recipe delivered so customers can whip up an amazing meal at home. By using Dinnr, customers don't have to spend mental energy and time figuring out what recipes to cook, they don't have to spend time searching through supermarkets looking for the right ingredients and there are no leftovers. At the same time, our easy-to-use instructions make it a breeze to learn how to make amazing dishes - quickly.

Dinnr delivers recipe ingredient kits without requiring a subscription or any other commitment. We've recently launched a new, user-friendly website and are constantly refining our recipes and processes. We offer an ultra-flexible service with 18 delivery slots per week (3 per day, 6 days a week) which can be delivered to you at home or work and every week we provide a new set of recipes. Each day, 6 dishes (that change on a weekly basis and constitute a common theme, e.g. a certain local cuisine, cook like a famous chef, etc.) are available for same-day delivery (which substantially improves our operations) and the other recipes are available on a next-day basis in London (add 1 day for deliveries outside London).

Intended impact

Cooking a quality meal at home from scratch takes too much time and effort to plan and execute. The average person’s lack of skills and a limited product choice in inner-city supermarkets lead to a narrow repertoire of dishes. Online recipes are often not well-curated and leave room for doubt. Ingredients bought in bulk end up being wasted. These obstacles result in heavy use of takeaway food and ready-made meals (often unhealthy) or restaurants (often expensive).

Dinnr provides a real alternative by delivering ingredients with a recipe to create exciting meals at home. By using Dinnr, customers don't have to spend mental energy and time figuring out what recipes to cook, they don't have to spend time searching through supermarkets looking for ingredients and there are no leftovers. At the same time, our easy-to-use instructions make it a breeze to learn how to make delicious dishes quickly.

In a nutshell, we hope to durably transform how people discover new recipes and want to foster a better dine-in culture. We also want to leave our mark on how people LEARN to cook. Have you ever gone to a cooking class? Everything is prepared for you, you just dice a few onions and score a duck breast - it's fantastically simple but doesn't offer much room for actual learning. The most important aspects (like time management) are being completely neglected in most ad-hoc cooking classes.

We want to radically change this (and ultimately build our own cooking academies). We believe that the best way to learn is by doing and reducing the cognitive load that surrounds cooking. We think that Dinnr could become the best way to learn to cook.

Substantial accomplishments to date

Dinnr launched in September 2012 and has had solid month-on-month growth (30%) until February 2013, garnering 1,600 FB likes and over 1,100 Twitter followers. People like what we're doing but we realised that we had to increase user retention. We spent the following few months investing in an improved product proposition.

At www.dinnr.co.uk, you'll see that we now have:

*) Weekly changing menus around a theme. We have created X weeks' worth of tested recipes to-date.
*) A membership feature with volume discount
*) Professional, visceral photography
*) A recipe library (bit.ly/15UC9Wq) that drives user-generated and curated content

All of this has worked! We now achieve very high customer satisfaction rankings, with a Net Promoter Score of 52.5, and our customer retention has improved as well.

We did not put efforts into marketing and sales to save our resources for product development. Now that we've got a great offering, we're ready to increase our user acquisition efforts and are looking for investment to help us with this.

Monetisation strategy

When at volume (100+ orders per week), we expect to make at least 30% gross margin, pushing 40%. We also plan to add kitchen utensils and wine into the offering which will increase this further.

Traditional business model: buying in bulk and selling at retail.

A note on delivery cost: Delivery in London is expected to be reduced to £2 per order. We ran a test with a delivery person on a motorbike, gave him 10 addresses to visit scattered between Pimlico and Old Street Roundabout and asked him to wait for 5 minutes at each address, simulating delivery. He managed to visit all 10 addresses including waiting time in 2 hours 8 minutes on a Friday afternoon during rush hour.

Use of proceeds

During the next 6-12 months, after significant traction, we plan to pitch for an angel round (£300-£500K). To keep us going until then and to help drive our user acquisition we're looking for at least £15K.