Everyday Eats Dashboard
Internal · Founder's Brief
everydayeats
from plan to plate

Company & Market Brief

Welcome. This is what I want in your head before you write a line of copy or spend a dollar — how I think about the company, the space, and what I need from you. Read it twice.

What we are

We take dinner off the household's plate

Everyday Eats turns "what's for dinner?" into a done-for-you week of meals and a shopping list that's already sorted by aisle and priced — so a household gets back the time, money, and mental load it burns on food every single week.

Browse or get recommended recipes → our AI builds a personalized, budget-aware week → it becomes a one-tap shopping list, aisle-ordered and priced → you shop it (Kroger integrated today; the list works at any store). We're a software layer that sits on top of grocers — no trucks, no warehouses, no meal-kit boxes. We are the plan, not the delivery.

The space we play in

A trillion-dollar habit where the money isn't in the food

$1.1TUS food-at-home spend / year (~$6,200 per household)
~$59BUS retail-media pool — 70–90% margin, ~20% / yr growth
$1.5–2.9KFood a household throws away every year
+30%Grocery prices since 2020 — shoppers are trading down
~300×"What's for dinner?" is asked per year, per home

Sources: USDA / BLS, eMarketer / BCG, ReFED / EPA — directional; validate before any external use.

Here's the insight that defines us: the profit in grocery isn't in food — it's in data and ads. Kroger nets ~1–2% on groceries but earns ~$1.5B in "alternative profit," mostly retail media on its 60M-household data. Instacart's ~80%-margin ad business is its entire P&L. Every fulfillment giant — Instacart, DoorDash, Kroger — had to climb the stack to reach the high-intent moment where those ad dollars are richest. We start there.

Grocery's profit pool moved from moving food to selling attention and data. We begin at the decision layer everyone else had to climb the stack to reach.

The plan — "what do we cook this week, what do I buy" — is the earliest, highest-intent signal in grocery. Upstream of search, cart, and delivery. Nobody owns it.
Why now

The demand is proven. The seat is empty.

Meal kits proved people will pay to solve dinner — a €6.8B business at peak. Then they died on the model: ~$9–12 a serving, customer-acquisition costs of $94–$400, and ~72% of customers gone within six months. HelloFresh is down ~93% from its peak; Blue Apron sold for pennies.

The demand didn't leave — the box was the flaw. Recipe apps store recipes but never do the shopping; Yummly (15M users) was shut down; Samsung Food is an appliance loss-leader; eMeals stayed tiny for 20 years. No one owns the hard part: turning a personalized plan into a real, priced, aisle-ordered cart at your store. It's unglamorous engineering — size-aware product matching, live pricing, pantry-aware quantities, graceful substitutions — which is exactly why the seat is empty. We're building it. That's the moat.

The value we sell

Money first, then time, then a better-eaten fridge

The wedge

Money saved

A plan that cross-shops, swaps in cheaper equivalents, and cuts the $1,500+ a household wastes. In a +30% world, a visibly shrinking bill is the retention engine — not novelty.

The relief

Time & mental load

Five minutes replaces an hour of planning, list-making, and standing in the kitchen deciding. We kill decision fatigue — the enemy is the daily "what's for dinner," not other apps.

The payoff

A fuller fridge

Personalized to the household's tastes, allergens, budget, pantry, and health goals — including the GLP-1 shift already reshaping ~16% of households' carts.

Model: Everyday Eats Plus, a subscription. Free = browse, view, add-to-plan. Plus = the AI planning, shopping lists, scan/swap, pantry. Subscription proves intent and funds the runway; the long-term prize is retail-media and retailer-data partnerships — being the demand-side layer brands and grocers pay to influence at the moment the basket is decided.

Who we're for

The household meal-planner

The one person in a home who owns "what's for dinner" for everyone else. Time-poor, value-conscious, cooks at home, tired of the daily decision tax and the wilted produce they keep throwing out. Not foodies chasing novelty — households running a weekly operation who want it to take five minutes. Write to her Tuesday night, not to the technology.

Where we sit

We win the first mile — the plan

They are…We are…
Meal kits (HelloFresh) — ship food, $9–12/serving, lock-inThe plan, not the box — your own groceries, any store, cheaper
Recipe apps (Mealime, Paprika, Allrecipes) — store recipesWe plan the week and do the shopping list, budget-aware
Delivery (Instacart, DoorDash) — the checkout + last mileThe decision layer that feeds them a ready basket — partner, not rival
Retailer apps (Kroger) — great once you have a listWe start one step earlier — before you know what to cook

We are not trying to out-logistics anyone. We win the first mile.

Brand & voice — protect above all

The Trader Joe's model: curation, trust, word-of-mouth

#1 in customer satisfaction, ~$2,100 a square foot, built on curation and word-of-mouth with near-zero ad spend. The product is the marketing. That's our north star.

Your mandate

Build the word-of-mouth engine first, buy growth second

The numbers you own — habit is the metric, ARPU is downstream:

Install Activation · first plan done Trial → Paid Retention · weekly plans Referral

First 90 days: a crisp brand system + messaging house (one-liner, three pillars, voice); the organic engine (a shareable product moment — the plan is our "Fearless Flyer" — plus content, social, and a referral loop); and acquisition instrumented as CAC against LTV, by cohort. DoorDash got to profit by driving marketing down to ~2.4% of order value while growing — carry that discipline from day one. Meal kits died on the opposite.

Do

  • Lead with money saved + mental load
  • Let the product be the hero
  • Talk to the household, not the industry
  • Measure every dollar as CAC / LTV

Don't

  • Hype, or discount to hollow installs
  • Chase foodies
  • Promise "any store" as deep integration — today it's checklist-portability, Kroger integrated
  • Blur what's live vs. roadmap

Welcome aboard. Now go make households feel like someone finally took dinner off their plate.