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Food waste is one of the biggest problems facing the world today.

The figures are quite outstanding - 30-50% of all food produced globally is wasted. This is worth over $1 trillion dollars.

If you consider that over 1 million people in the UK alone had to use a food bank last year, this is not ok. The resources required and land needed to make this wasted food are also outrageously high. Morally catastrophic inefficiencies all around.

What are the main causes of this food waste?

About 50% of this wastage happens at home. In fact, in the UK, the average family throws away £700 of food per year.

Restaurants are also major culprits, with £1bn+ of waste in the UK food service industry - a typical restaurant will see 5% of their food cost wasted. Sadly, making hot food to order is often extremely inefficient. It’s a big problem and it needs to be tackled.

At HomeCooks we strive for 0% food waste throughout our chain.

Chefs make their food in batches, which is much more efficient than making it to order. All our food is also flash frozen, allowing for longer storage whilst maintaining high quality. It also enables our customers to hold food for a longer period of time rather than wasting it. Any excess (which very rarely happens) is sent to our local food bank.

Thanks for being part of a bigger movement and have a great weekend.

- Andy

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One of the major reasons we started HomeCooks is that we believe the current food delivery industry isn’t sustainable.

We found this out the hard way. Both HomeCooks founders had thriving businesses that in one way or another found it impossible to make Deliveroo, UberEats and the plethora of food delivery platforms work for us.

This is in no small part down to the commissions that these third-party companies charged us. As a guide, we found that smaller independent restaurants were often charged a starting rate of 30% of the value of the order (some up to 35%). Bigger chains can get lower rates, but this is a pretty standard commission level.

Indeed, this only tells 80% of the story. Boring tax explanation coming up (skip the next two paragraphs if you aren’t interested in the maths)…

That commission is charged on the ‘gross revenue’ of the order value, rather than the ‘net revenue.’ The gross revenue includes VAT, the net revenue does not. So for a £20 gross order, the restaurant will normally pay VAT at a 20% rate, which is £4. The net revenue is therefore £20 - £4 = £16.

The travesty is that Deliveroo’s commission will be charged on the gross revenue. So, in the example above, 30% of £20 which equals £6.

Shockingly, this means Deliveroo’s 30% commission can be 37.5% of a restaurant’s net revenue.

This is why it’s important, if you have the chance, to collect from your local neighbourhood restaurant. DO NOT order delivery through a third-party intermediary if you can help it. The chances are, the local neighbourhood restaurant will be making a loss on your order.

Alternatively, you could order through HomeCooks where our chefs don’t have the same high-cost base and can sell food in a much more sustainable way.

If this topic is of interest, please let me know and I can go into more detail in another blog.

-Andy

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One question I’ve often asked myself is whether eating out is a particularly ethical thing to do? This thought process is mainly driven by many of the staff that I see, meet or have even previously employed in hospitality.

The truth is that most employed staff are heavily underpaid. The Low Pay Commission estimates that 46% of minimum wage jobs are in hospitality, and there will only be a small percentage of people earning above the national living wage.

In addition to this, conditions can be tough, hours are often anti-social, and the job itself is rarely secure - zero hour contracts are common within hospitality.

It’s no surprise that depression and mental health are rife among hospitality workers. I’m no saint - even knowing this I often eat out at restaurants and in my past years running a food operation employed many of these lovely people.

There is an argument to say that at least the jobs have been created in the first place! This used to be my view, but I am now strongly of the opinion that if your meal is being made by someone who probably can’t afford to order the food themselves, then something is fundamentally wrong.

It’s every reason to continue to support small local businesses (with good hiring policies) and independent chefs. There must be a better way of buying food.

It’s important to say that there are some good businesses out there as well, who pay well and look after their staff. But I do wonder whether one day we’ll look back at eating out as a particularly barbarous thing to do in its current format.

-Andy

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I often get asked why we don’t offer a free or heavily discounted meal for first-time customers - it’s something that a lot of businesses do!

The answer is quite simple. We prefer to look after our current community members instead of gifting free meals to people that we haven’t met before.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Many meal kit websites have a heavily discounted first-time offer, but this money doesn’t come from nowhere.

It often comes at the expense of existing users, often in the form of higher prices or tough to get out of subscriptions.

We’re the opposite. We prefer to put our budget towards making HomeCooks awesome for our regular users.

Our members benefit from us investing our time and money into keeping meal prices low and quality very high. Also in the flexibility of not being tied into a subscription - order what you want, when you want.

Our top community members who come back regularly benefit from the Council of Eaters, where we hold regular sales, testing new dishes and other exciting promotions for our most loyal members.

So there you go - we’re all about investing in long-term ongoing value and rewards, rather than short-term drastic promotions.

Hope this helps and explains our thinking on it.

-Andy

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