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March 21, 2024
Eric Stein, co-founder of Mama Meals, will be joining us on March 19th to discuss all things shipping. Founded in 2020, Mama Meals has become a powerhouse i
Will Schreiber: We usually kick these off with what's your normal morning routine, coffee schedule. I'm in New York right now. Work out of Union Square. I usually just drink coffee at the coworking space, which is what I've got here. I'm on my fourth cup today. I'm pretty over caffeinated, which is usually good for coffee chats. But what's your usual routine?
Eric Stein: Yeah. My routine is I get up about 4 a.m. and just move my body a little bit, do some breath work, and read for a bit. I'm reading this one right now called "The One Thing." The tagline is "the surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results." I'm a couple of chapters in, and it's basically about prioritizing and organizing and staying focused on one thing at a time, as opposed to chasing shiny objects. Something I feel like we all know, but I'm reading this book and I'm like, dang, he's talking to me right now. So yeah, I do a little breath work and then read, and usually have my coffee. I like to do a cold brew with raw milk and maple syrup. That's my jam. And then yeah, maybe do a little work, and then my kids get up and I'm on dad duty until eight o'clock. So that's usually my mornings.
Will Schreiber: Are you cold brew year round or do you switch?
Eric Stein: I do hot in the winter. Cold brew just feels cleaner to me. I don't know. It just feels better. But I don't like the cold aspect of it in the winter. I'll admit that. I'm struggling with that at the moment.
Will Schreiber: It's a big cultural divide. Hot coffee people, cold coffee people. I'm hot coffee year round, and I'm from Alabama. In the summer when I'm visiting my parents, hot coffee. I know it's insane, but I know people who are the opposite. They're drinking cold brew in the snow. I just don't get it.
Eric Stein: Yeah, I was doing cold brew in the dead of winter this year. So yeah, my wife was questioning that.
Will Schreiber: That's the perfect time for a steaming mug. All right. Let's get rolling here. This is going to be a really fun talk. We were just chatting right before this on all of the stuff Eric has learned and is willing to share about shipping and building his business, which is really exciting. So thank you all for joining. Obviously, one advantage of joining these live is you can ask Q&A, so just throughout the talk, if anything sparks something, toss a question into the Q&A. We will get through whatever questions we can both during and at the end of the talk. We're recording this, and we'll post it online, send it out. So if you have to drop, or just have someone that you think would benefit from listening, we'll send out the recording and a transcript, and you can forward it to them.
In the future, if you have friends who you think would benefit from these, please forward them the recording or the page to sign up for the next one. We've loved hosting these. We'd love to hear from you what kinds of guests you'd love to see. But today we have Eric Stein, one of the founders of Mama Meals, a very interesting and cool meal delivery service that exclusively ships now and has an interesting model and a lot to share about building that business.
Will Schreiber: As a starter, Eric, would love just a quick background on how you got started with Mama Meals.
Eric Stein: Sure, yeah. And thanks for having me. I was excited to chat with you guys. So we started a little over two years ago now, and it really just came through our experience. My wife and I have two kids. For the first kid, she did all this research and prep for pregnancy and the birth and what do you want to do, how do you want to do it? And it went really well. We did a birth center with our midwife and we got home. That time is called postpartum. It's basically the first 40 days or so after having a baby. It was tough. It was really hard.
I don't know if you have kids, but I went back to work pretty quickly and I was cooking a lot. I was trying to help around the house when I could, and it was just tough. We really value organic, clean food. There was nowhere we could really go to get it. So it took a lot of time and Holly was bloated and constipated and just didn't feel good. It was just a tough experience.
So before baby number two, she read about Chinese medicine and Weston Price and what did our ancestors do in that time after the baby comes. It turns out it was soup and stew and warm, soft, easy to digest things cooked in bone broth. When we looked back on her first pregnancy, she was eating cold salads, smoothies, and crunchy dry things. That stuff wasn't conducive for that time.
Before baby number two came, we prepped 60 meals and just froze them in our standup freezer in the garage. Once the baby came, we just had a stockpile full of food waiting for us. Historically, your friends and family would always come around and do that. I feel like that's just disappeared in our culture. People will bring food here and there, but it's not like a big thing.
After the baby came, I was just thawing food and heating it up. It was so much easier, even with a toddler running around. My wife felt a thousand times better. She recovered better. No constipation. Life was just so much easier.
Then my wife did it for a couple of her friends as a gift when they were having their second and third kids. They were like, "You know what? That was the greatest thing anybody's ever done for us. Thank you." We were friends with doulas and midwives, birth workers who help the ladies during the birth. They were like, "You guys, this is a business. People need this."
So my wife made a menu and a couple of doulas shared it on Instagram. She put a Venmo link on there and strangers just started Venmoing us for food. We got a couple of big stock pots and used our standup freezer in the garage, and Mama Meals was born. It was pretty cool.
Will Schreiber: So started in your kitchen, big stockpots. What were some of the initial challenges? You're starting to take orders from strangers. Really exciting. What came next?
Eric Stein: We already cooked a lot of food at home because there's not a lot of places you can go to get all organic food. So the big challenge was that we already had a pretty busy kitchen just as our home kitchen, and now we're starting to cook all these soups and stews. The pots we had were so big that the hood of our stove was only this high above the pots. If you can imagine having two pots on this little kitchen stove, you can barely fit a spoon in there to stir.
We start cooking and freeze all the meals in soup containers. One roadblock that happened pretty quickly was that we'd cook all this food and put it in our freezer. We get more orders, but people haven't come to pick up their food yet. We couldn't even cook for somebody who just ordered until the other person picked up their food from our house. That was a bottleneck that happened within probably the first two months. We had to go buy another standup freezer from Home Depot and put a second one out in the garage.
Living and making food in your house was tough, especially when summer came around. We were doing lactation cookies, and those were really popular. People were paying for us to ship those all over the country. The oven was running constantly and those pots were running constantly. Our house has no AC. We live in Southern California. A lot of people don't have AC, and it was just hot. I was sweating in this house.
Will Schreiber: I can't imagine. I lived briefly in San Francisco with no AC. If you cook a lot, it is a problem. Every night we went to bed, it was 85 degrees in the apartment just because of the oven.
Eric Stein: We had these three gallon stock pots. A giant pot like that is a giant heater. It'll stay hot for eight hours if you just leave it there. So we were putting it in the sink. Then I would go buy a bag of ice and pour it around the pot and fill up the sink with water to cool it down before we could get it into the containers. We were using cardboard soup containers, and if you put it in there hot, it's just going to destroy the container.
Will Schreiber: You mentioned before that you started doing some home delivery. Did you get Uber drivers or something? So you've got this problem: your kitchen's full, your freezer's full. Is that when you're like, we got to get this stuff out of here?
Eric Stein: Yeah. So then we started thinking, all right, I'm going to get in the car and deliver. We would pack the orders. We couldn't wait for people to pick up their food, and a lot of times they had just had a baby too. So I started driving around Orange County and I'd be gone for a couple hours, just dropping three packages off, and then we'd have freezer space again.
We did that for a little while, and then somebody was like, "Why don't you just put it in an Uber?" I was like, "Oh, okay." So we started ordering an Uber, and then the person would show up. We would just put a box in their car and be like, "Hey, just go to this address and drop the box off." But then what happened is you can't order another Uber until that one delivers. So it was a matter of okay, that one delivered. All right, call another one. We would just have the customer Venmo for the Uber costs. It was just a nightmare, honestly.
So then we hired one of our Uber drivers and said, "Hey, do you want to start doing deliveries for us?" He just became our delivery driver. He came once a week, then twice a week, then three times a week, until we moved to the shipping-only model.
Will Schreiber: So when you started, it was all local orders with local delivery. What made you decide to flip to nationwide shipping?
Eric Stein: Yeah, I learned a lot about how shipping is done. We were getting Butcher Box at the time. They ship frozen meat directly to your house. I was thinking in my head, our stuff is frozen. I order it and it shows up on my doorstep frozen. Like, why can't we do this? I talked to some people about it and got good advice, and that was the goal from the get-go. After we figured that out, it was like, all right, we want to ship this.
Before we even started shipping only, that was on our radar. When we cut over to shipping only, here's basically how it works: you can go to the FedEx website, type in your zip code, and it gives you a radius. Here's your one-day radius, two-day radius, three-day radius. What we did was everything is going to be two days only, so we could do one-day or two-day ground. That was our first initial free-shipping radius. We just built the cost in and said it's free shipping. We got good rates on that.
Anybody outside that two-day radius had to go express, which means it gets on a plane. At that point, we created zones. Zone one and two were our free shipping areas. Then zones three, four, and five were progressively further away from us. The cost would be progressively higher. I did a couple averages, and all right, so this rate for this zone for this box is going to be this price. We would lose money on some and make money on others, and it would pretty much even out. At the end of the day, it's only in the mail for two days regardless. So I knew we had to put a certain amount of gel packs in there. If it's one day, you put more if it's two day. We were just passing the cost on to the consumer.
Will Schreiber: Are you transparent about that, or is it all built into the item price?
Eric Stein: Yeah, throughout the checkout process, we said we'll give you free shipping if you're in California, Arizona, Nevada, or Utah, because those are the two-day radiuses from FedEx from us. When they go to check out, it says, "Here's your shipping price based on your address." It was basically what state they were in. I picked states to keep it simple. So if you're in Texas, you're in zone three. It doesn't matter if you're in the closest part of Texas or the furthest part, it's going to be the same price.
I tried to set it up where it would give you the exact rate, but Shopify wanted hundreds of more dollars a month just to do the carrier-selected rates. I just was like, I'm not going to do that.
Will Schreiber: I'd love to talk about how you grew this business. You're now talking about shipping to Texas. But before we talk about all the shipping details, how did you grow this thing out of your kitchen? What kind of marketing did you do to build a brand and grow your business?
Eric Stein: Yeah, good question. This really all spawned from a frustration. We started learning about food and pesticides and GMOs and all these things, and I was like, I don't really want to participate in that. I want just real food. That's it. You look around and there's nowhere you could just go to get that. Nobody was providing that service.
In the beginning, our philosophies were like, it's only real food in here. There's no preservatives, no pesticides. The meat is from well-treated animals. It's just as nature intended. That was the foundation of our brand. There's a growing segment of the population that's like, that's what I want. And you can't go out and get it. So we started with an Instagram account and it was just word of mouth. We never paid for ads or anything like that. People would just share with their friends and tag us on Instagram. That's literally all the marketing we did. It was organic.
Another piece was that Google was very kind to us because we have this niche of postpartum meal delivery. It's very specific. We were carving out the niche. So when you type into Google "postpartum meal delivery," there's nobody doing it. We were just there, and people were finding our website from all over the country.
Because there's also that frustration of "I can't just go to a local restaurant and get this type of food," we were able to charge a premium, and people will also pay for shipping. But candidly, we're not gouging people. We make the price appropriate. We choose the best quality ingredients. You want it, you got to pay for shipping. In terms of how we grew it, we stuck to our values and people shared it.
Will Schreiber: There's so much to discuss here because I think your specific product lends itself to how you market it, how you think about pricing. The fact that it's really a one-time thing, granted someone might have multiple kids, but you're not trying to get them to sign up forever. It's a specific use case. And you also have this big gift component because of that, like your friend might have a kid.
Eric Stein: Yeah, great question. The gifting thing is huge, right? Everybody wants to get you stuff at two times in life: when you get married and when you have a kid. The food thing is becoming a bigger conversation. You look at our orders, there's a billing address and a shipping address that are different all the time, different names. It's super common. So that's been a big deal.
What we've done recently for our marketing is we find moms on Instagram who are pregnant or about to have a kid, and we'll be like, "Hey, let me send you a box. Try this. If you like it, share it with your people." They're so willing to share it. We've been so blessed in that way. Once they see what we're doing, our marketing cost is basically just shipping them a box of food.
Will Schreiber: So you're specifically targeting the use case. You're finding moms who just had kids or are about to.
Eric Stein: Yeah. That's like the best. If we can get them to post about it, we target mom influencer type people who are into trying to teach people to be healthy and live a less toxic life. My wife follows these people. There's so many niches within that. This woman had a baby, my wife was like, let's get her a box. So we sent her a box, and like overnight we had 3,000 new followers on Instagram. This woman posted her new baby holding one of our meals. That's our marketing right there. How can we just send free food out?
Will Schreiber: And that's remained the case? You discovered this early and it's still a big part of your strategy?
Eric Stein: Yeah, we've had somebody who was from Twilight, Ashley Green. She posted us and she's got millions of followers, and it was like crickets. Nobody cared. But this woman who's got 200,000 followers, like gangbusters. Super relevant people actually care what she has to say. Somebody with 50,000 followers or 10,000 followers, if they're a mom trying to help other moms, we're like, yeah, here's some free food.
Will Schreiber: Yeah, intent of audience matters a lot there. It's really interesting. So part of this as well, I think, gels well with the gift component. You're willing to spend a little bit more money to send someone a gift than to buy for yourself. It's almost like the psychology of wanting it to be nice and treating them. But you mentioned before the call about wanting to price the product fairly to meet your values and do your part to fix the food system. I'd love to dig into the pricing and how you justify to the consumer the price of the meals, because they are expensive on a relative basis. What's your pricing philosophy and how do you help educate the customer that this price is fair?
Eric Stein: Yeah, it's something. Very early on, I'd never been in the food industry before. I've always been really into food since I learned about it 15 years ago. I've been such a foodie and love cooking, but as I got into the space and started talking to people, the conversation was always around cutting costs. How can I get a cheaper per unit? Where can I buy this product at a cheaper rate so the margin can be better? We never looked at it like that.
When I go to the grocery store, I almost don't look at the price. I look at the ingredients, and that's my guiding light. So approaching this business, we had a business coach early on who ran a cookie company. She was shipping cookies all over the country. She told us, aim for a 70 percent margin. Try to get it there in the beginning. That was our guiding light.
What I would do is I would basically try to find the most expensive food. Then we'd put it into spreadsheets. I'm so grateful for our early business coach who gave me a spreadsheet of how to build out a costing sheet. Here's your chili. You gotta put all your ingredients in, and we knew down to the gram the dollars per gram for each SKU. I'm plugging that into the spreadsheet and here's the cost. All right? We're shooting for 70 percent. That's the price.
We were selling 32 ounces of our chili for like 32 or 34 dollars. We used to do à la carte. I always stuck to our principles of clean, no preservatives, highest quality. It was almost like, how can I get the most amount of nutrients in this container? That's the people who are going to buy it. That's what they want. There are some people who might not see the value in it, and that's okay. But the world is changing in a way where people see that value.
Will Schreiber: I'm hearing from you, and correct me where this is right or wrong: you just have to follow your values. In your case, it's the highest quality food. This is a very important part of your life. It's either worth it or it's not. Let customers self-select into that, and don't think about cost cutting. Instead, think about how to deliver the best product and let people who want that buy it. I wonder why 70 percent as a target from the business coach?
Eric Stein: I have no idea. That's just what she said. We literally never done a food business before, so we're like, okay, we'll do that. But I see now there's almost like a threshold. When you're up there at 70 percent ingredients, at the end of the day, after it's all said and done, if you could be around 70 percent, you have a staying power in your margin. As you get a little lower, it gets eaten up quicker. I can't be like I'm just making that up right now, but that's what I've noticed. If it's up there and you increase the price a little bit, it stays up there. But if it's 50 percent and you increase the price a little bit, it drops faster. You've got room to play with it.
Yeah, and now we're not at 70 percent anymore. It's gotten eaten up by so many different things like boxes and dry ice and labor. But we had it built in from the beginning. We had a very high 70 percent margin. Then we have room to play with it.
Will Schreiber: To be clear, that's 70 percent margin on your food costs. You're not counting labor and production and shipping. You're looking at how to make sure 30 percent of hard costs are at the ingredients and food.
Eric Stein: So what I think that we did was we took our ingredients, and then we also took our hourly rate. I think we paid ourselves like 20 bucks an hour or something like that. So it included the container that it went in and the labor that we were spending in the kitchen, like the hours in the kitchen. That wasn't everything, but it was pretty close. So it's more than food. It was like our hours going into it at 20 bucks an hour, and the containers at a dollar per container or whatever it was. Yeah. So we just kept it high and kept the quality appropriate.
Will Schreiber: You seem to share this sentiment that at least in businesses we see, high price point and low customization are correlated with success. There are people that buck that trend, but for the most part, if you can sell a high price product or high cart value—we really think about cart value—but if you can push so that every order hits at least a hundred dollars, we see real benefit in getting there. Second, low customization: you're setting yourself up for success. On your website, talking to you guys, you don't have much customization. You have some add-ons. Can you talk about learning that and where it came from?
Eric Stein: Yeah, early on we just wanted to please people. So somebody would be like, "Hey, I don't eat pork. Could you do a hearty sausage without pork?" We're like, okay. So we did one. Then, "Hey, I'm this, can you remove that?" We're like, okay, we'll do that. Because this is going to be a sale. So we did that early on, but as you increase the batch size, you can't do that. For example, the pork thing: we had multiple people saying they don't eat pork, so we switched to beef sausage instead of pork sausage for that recipe. That was something we did, but we did it permanently.
But we get a lot of people saying, "Can you do a vegetarian option?" We're just like, no. We can't do that because it makes us go crazy. We want to actually live a life where we're not going crazy too. I think that's something we've tried to focus on: quality of life. We're so confident in our product and what we do that we just own that.
Yeah, and we've had to cut stuff. My wife and I talk about it. She's like, let's add this. Let's do that. I'm like, stop it. We can't do that right now. I'm already trying to figure out all the other dry goods and stuff. People add that on, and how's it going from Shopify to Shipstation, and splitting up because they're coming from different warehouses? One comes from our kitchen, one comes from the garage. They have different boxes, different postage. All of a sudden, as you start creeping your way up in scale, the complexity just gets insane and you lose track of things.
I had good advice early on. They were like, just cut away anything that's not your bread and butter. Get yourself scaled up, and then you can start adding in. You can try to increase the cart value by 10 or 20 bucks by doing add-ons and stuff.
Will Schreiber: Yeah. I think that's a really healthy perspective. Definitely a hard discipline to maintain because you want the sales so badly. But I think you all have done a great job. So let's dig into the logistics of actually shipping. I see a question in the Q&A about specific sealing machines and testing couriers. We'll get into that, but I'm curious at a high level: what challenges have you faced in getting into a shipping-oriented business?
Eric Stein: Yeah, I had some great advice early on and they were like, it's simple. You put the food in the bag, you put the food in a box, a temperature-controlled box, you put the coolant in there, you tape up the box, and you give it to the carrier. Don't overthink it. I remember trying to overthink it early on. One of my mentors was like, stop. It doesn't matter if it's in New Mexico or Florida. It's the same. Just look at it the same and just treat it the same. You just have to pay a little bit more. So I was able to clear away all the anxiety and doubt of who am I to ship a box to Florida, a box of food to Florida? It was really helpful to hear like, just keep it simple.
Some of the challenges were that we were an e-commerce store, so we have an order management system. We use Shipstation. Orders go from Shopify into Shipstation, and that's where we buy all the postage. The bread and butter of our business is the soup, stew, and congee. That's what people are ordering. But we also have lactation treats: lactation cookies, lactation brownies, pancakes. We have tea and other things.
As we started to scale up, all of a sudden we're shipping 30 boxes a week. Our frozen food is at our commercial kitchen in the freezers, but there's no space for all the dry goods. So the dry goods were in the house. We had to make all the dry goods and then get them over to the kitchen. Then we put it all in one box with dry ice. All of our dry goods were going to be frozen because dry ice freezes anything that's in that box. And then packages would show up with ashwagandha hot cocoa all over the food. I got a picture and I was like, oh jeez.
We had to split. I hired Rob, who's amazing. He helped me set up Shopify so that when the order comes into Shipstation, it will know if it's our frozen food or the dry goods. It would actually split the order. Now you get two separate shipments in Shipstation: a dry goods shipment and a frozen meal shipment. The frozen meal goes out in one box with one postage, and then the dry goods go in a different box with different postage. We luckily had the margin built in, so when people order, they don't know they're going to get two boxes. But we're actually paying two different shipping charges.
We're actually separating all the dry goods right now to a different storefront. It's going to be the pantry section. So that's going away at the beginning of next month.
Eric Stein: Another challenge I'll never forget: when we first started shipping, we were doing gel packs. All of our food is frozen. It's dense too. It's really thick. It stays frozen pretty well. We'd pack the boxes, and I had to order gel packs.
There are several struggles around that. One is sometimes we've run out of gel packs. We're supposed to ship the box out, but we don't have any gel packs. We're not shipping the box out. That happens.
Two was like, I found out that you need to have a gel pack in the freezer—especially these big freezers we were using at the time. They should be in there a week to make sure they're fully frozen. So there was this time where we only had a certain amount of space in the freezer. We'd use all these gel packs and we'd have to put more gel packs in, but they wouldn't be frozen in time to keep the food cold enough. That was a struggle.
And then summertime came around. We were doing this all in the winter, and then summer came around and all of a sudden I'm getting emails of people saying food was showing up thawed. I'm like, oh my gosh. There was like a heavy moment of—are we might be in trouble right now. So we'd have to ship a new box and cross our fingers. Usually it would show up. Sometimes it got delayed a day or something like that, or it was sitting in a hot truck or hot warehouse, and the gel packs just weren't enough.
So I had to move to dry ice, which is extraordinarily more expensive than gel packs. Our costs went from 350 bucks for gel packs to 1,500 a month for dry ice. Just like overnight. But again, margin was there. Those were some struggles to learn early on. Now we're just dry ice only, and everything shows up like a brick. It shows up frozen.
One other struggle: we're in a commercial kitchen that we rent. To do this kind of shipping, you have to have boxes with temperature-controlled liners. You've probably seen them: thick, like paper, mushy cardboard liners. It takes a huge amount of space. You have to order by the pallet. All of a sudden I have three pallets of boxes show up that we don't have space for in our rental kitchen. I'm trying to figure out how we're going to Tetris these liners and boxes into our small storage space. Then we're getting low, so I have to order another pallet and it has to fit. The logistics of it was tough in the beginning before we figured some stuff out and got some good help.
Will Schreiber: Some tactical stuff here: what kind of permits did you need to ship food all over the US? Is it hard to get those?
Eric Stein: Yeah, there was no specific permitting from what we've seen. We're direct to consumer, and talking to the health department and everything that we were doing, they never said we needed any sort of specific permits.
Will Schreiber: What sealing machines do you use or have you used to actually seal your meals?
Eric Stein: We use these containers—bamboo containers—and they don't have a good seal on them. It's one of the things we're doing right now. We have bags getting made. I've got design work and all that stuff in progress. It's been something we've been thinking through long term. The food we make is gone within two weeks. It sits in the freezer for two weeks and then it goes to people's houses. I know long term we want to get into something that has more of an airtight seal. But it hasn't been a huge issue. We've maybe got one or two complaints of food that's kind of frostbitten. We're like, sorry, we'll give you a refund or ship you a new one. But nobody's really complained much.
Will Schreiber: Where are you getting your boxes and insulation? What have you settled on? Are you still doing the gel stuff?
Eric Stein: We have containers from a company called World Centric. They have a lot of different paper products that work pretty well and they're reasonably priced. For the big boxes for shipping, Pratt is one place where we get them. Temper Pack is another one that does those insulated shippers. Green Cell Foam is another one where you can order a pallet of boxes and they come with all the liners and everything.
Now I actually have a company that warehouses all of our boxes for us and they bring them twice a week, prebuilt. You've got to build the box, tape it up, and put the liner in. So they warehouse the box and bring them with the dry ice twice a week. I just pay like an extra dollar 25 to have them build the box and bring it. We eat each box each week. So we're able to move faster.
Will Schreiber: When you were exploring shipping, did you test with any local couriers first, or did you just go straight to shipping with FedEx or UPS? Do you use a mixture?
Eric Stein: Yeah, we just kept it simple. That was another piece of advice: you could get multiple carriers. For example, from us, FedEx will get to San Francisco in two days, but Washington or Oregon, it's express—it has to get on a plane. But there's another carrier called GLS that can hit Washington and Oregon in two days ground. So I could have used different carriers. But again, that raises your level of complexity. We were just like, keep it simple. So we just use one carrier. We use FedEx for everything. Once we scale up to the next level, then we'll start playing with multiple carriers.
Will Schreiber: Is that like a Shipstation add-on or something where you can flip orders to different places?
Eric Stein: It's actually called Grip Shipping—G.R.I.P. They've got frozen warehouses across the country. You can send your product to their warehouses and then they integrate with your e-commerce store. If you get an order and you have product in Texas and California in their warehouses, and you get an order in New Mexico, Grip is going to say, all right, here's the shortest route. Use the Texas facility, use five pounds of dry ice, use this carrier because it's the most successful. Or it'll say, oh, there's a weather issue here. Send it from California instead. Use this carrier, use 10 pounds of dry ice. Because the last thing you want to do is lose a box. So it'll analyze shipping rates and carriers. You've gotta have a pretty decent size volume to get in with them, I would imagine.
Will Schreiber: It's like fulfilled by Amazon for frozen.
Eric Stein: Yeah, very much so. There's Grip. There's a few others that are out there that are just frozen fulfillment networks.
Will Schreiber: Do you have a corporate account with FedEx? And where you get your liner boxes for shipping, you mentioned Pratt or Temper Pack or Green Cell Foam?
Eric Stein: Yeah, we have a really nice FedEx account that gives us really good rates. You can try to find a company you can piggyback on because you've got to get the volume up. If you just go in and try to ship a box with FedEx, the rate's going to be so high that to pass that through to the customer is just going to be tough. I found a really great strategic partnership that allowed me to get incredible rates. If you're really serious about wanting to ship nationwide, that's the way to go. There's a couple of other companies out there that do that. Grip is one of those. There's other ones, but there's a few others out there. You're basically grouping buying power with them, and then you can get discounted rates. Shopify does that too. You can get discounted rates through Shopify.
Will Schreiber: What's your recommendation for getting the meals reheated or instructions to the customer? Do you tell them to thaw them out? Do you say go straight from frozen?
Eric Stein: So important. So important. Because when the meals get to you, they can look a little lackluster, especially our rice-based dishes. We're very intentional in our wording in the emails. There's a whole page on it. Low and slow. Put it in a saucepan. Thaw it for 24 hours overnight in the fridge. Then heat it up low and slow. Add a little water as you stir it and bring it back to life. It comes back to life really well. But if you just nuke it and blast it with a lot of heat, we don't recommend doing that. For reheating, you've got to be intentional with it so that people get a good experience.
Will Schreiber: Yeah, the low and slow pan thing. I've seen so many Instagram videos about that recently with reheating anything. Yes. Everyone goes to the microwave, even with pizza and stuff. I put it in a pan and reheat it. Yeah, we're so untrained as consumers to do that.
Eric Stein: The microwave vaporizes the water molecules inside the food and it just destroys it. I had a guy from the Building Biology Institute come and do an assessment on our home in terms of electromagnetic frequency and all that stuff coming off. He had a meter. He's watch this. Go put a cup of water in the microwave, turn it on, and then follow me. I'm like, okay. Glass cup of water in the microwave. We walked 20-something feet away and he held a meter out and he could hear the frequency coming from the microwave over by our outside slider door. He's like, you can't. Don't stand near that thing if you ever use it. It was very obvious. I was like, I'm not going to use that thing anymore. I wasn't using it anyway, but still.
Will Schreiber: Was there a minimum number of orders where you were like, we've got to start shipping now versus doing local delivery?
Eric Stein: I don't remember if there was a minimum. I just remember being ready to jump out the window doing it out of my house. It was so tough. When we finally got ourselves into a commercial kitchen and made that jump, we basically cut over to shipping at the same time. It was just like a good time for it to happen. I don't remember the exact number, but I remember after a year of doing it out of our house, it was like, get me out of here.
Will Schreiber: Yeah, it sounds brutal operationally. Are there label requirements when you ship this stuff? Is there a question about whether you have to put expiration date, nutrition facts?
Eric Stein: No, we put a date on it just because it's I think three months out from when it was made. We stamp it. But it's frozen. I just ate one recently that was like six or eight months old and it was still great. It's frozen. It might lose a little bit of its luster, but certainly safe.
Will Schreiber: On that note of frozen, have you ever shipped non-frozen stuff? I know you have the packaged goods, which is straightforward, but have you shipped non-frozen food? And as an extension of that for your frozen stuff, what's your freezing process like?
Eric Stein: Yeah, we shipped like the baked goods and that was, we had to cut. We used to let people order like pre-cooked baked goods à la carte, but we had to get rid of it. There were just too many orders and it was like, they would show up broken sometimes and we just had to have them be add-ons. So we ship it frozen. If you were going to ship fresh, there are tons of companies that do that, right? You just throw some gel packs in there and make sure that the packaging is good. It's not going to open up in transit. And then as long as it shows up cold, right?
For production now, we cook it. We get a 40-gallon brazier. We do big batches at a time. Get it out of the brazier into chafers to get some of the heat off. Get it into the art containers and then it just goes right in the freezer. That's where it stays. So we put it in boxes.
Will Schreiber: So you're more just making inventory and then pulling from inventory and staying a little bit ahead of the order trends?
Eric Stein: Yeah, we say we're a little bit ahead, but right now we're only in the kitchen once a week. We do all of our production on a Sunday. We would only do two recipes a week and that was able to keep us up. Now it's been like, oh man, we had to throw in a third recipe. And then last weekend we had to do four. So now I've had to add another day.
But I've got three three-door freezers—the walk-ins. We don't have a walk-in anymore because the new kitchen we're at just doesn't have the space. So I had to buy three of those three-door freezers and they're full. They get full and then they get emptied and then we refill them back up and then they get emptied. It's a dance right now. I'm flirting with fire, to be honest. We're doing our best to keep up.
That's why I've started to talk to some companies that have bigger production. They've got bigger freezers and they can start helping us with this because we're just going to run out of space. There's only a matter of time before we made 150 creamy chickens this week and we sold 160. Shit, what are we going to do? We're going to get in trouble and we don't have freezer space to keep adding. It's literally at the kitchen. We're at. We cannot put another freezer there. So we're just, people like, oh, do you want to build a kitchen? I'm like, I don't want to do that.
Will Schreiber: How often, how many items are on your menu at any given time? And do you switch them out or are they pretty consistent?
Eric Stein: We have seven soups and stews. There's no switching. We're at a place where we have so many good ideas and so many things we want to do, and it's just like, to add in anything else into our production, okay, where do I source that? Where are we going to keep it? Where are the raw materials going to be? It's just, we're out of space. So we can't add anything else. We've gotten really good at where the seven we're doing now. Once we get some help with production, then we can talk about all right, let's get some more of these other SKUs that we wanted to add for a while. But not now. We're just dangerous.
We were talking about that quality of life thing, right? I want to be able to sleep at night. Not like last weekend, our processor that does our veggies—that chops them and stuff—they shorted us on potatoes and onions. I'm like, okay, I gotta go to Whole Foods and go buy all of their potatoes right now. I literally cleaned out all of their potatoes and their onions. They're like, you can do special orders. I'm like, I've, this is not a normal thing. I'm not hoping to never see it again.
Will Schreiber: Right, exactly. And you don't offer subscriptions, right? This is a buy-once situation. There's a set amount of meals, implying like you're going to use this over the one month, two month, three month timeframe?
Eric Stein: Yeah, we have smaller and bigger packages. We see subscription in the future for sure. Look, the secret of our business is it's postpartum food, but really it's just real food. It's soup and stew, like, you ever like to eat chili? You don't have to be postpartum to eat chili, you know what I mean? Or oatmeal or whatever. It's super nutrient dense.
So we've been open for a little over two years. We've had people reordering the whole time. We just don't have a subscription model yet. We're going to work on that as we figure out production a bit more. I'm actually working on that now. Just like how can we make that work? How can we actually do it? But we haven't done it yet.
Will Schreiber: Really awesome questions here. I'd love some final wrap-up. What's one thing you wish you had known before starting? I've been saying recently, just about running a business: we didn't do it because it was easy. We did it because we thought it would be easy. So what's been unexpectedly hard?
Eric Stein: Let's see. Unexpectedly hard. I probably would have gotten a bit more help with the store—the e-commerce store. I probably would have learned more about it or paid somebody more, or paid somebody to teach me more about it, or had somebody on staff that can help us a bit more. Because when I want to do something now, it's slow, and I don't want to break things. That's the technology piece. I think we could have had a bit more help on that side.
And I think we learned our lessons about keeping it simple. But also I run a business with my wife, and if she's like, she wants to do something and I say no, and then we still got to sleep in the same bed tonight, there's a whole thing there. That's probably a whole other podcast. But yeah, I think just keep it simple and really stand that ground because it's going to pay off in the long run.
Will Schreiber: I think that's great advice. I think you guys seem, outside looking in, to be doing that, really towing the line of keeping things simple but pushing the envelope and serving great food. We certainly love the business you all are building. It's really cool to chat and connect. You're so kind to share all these learnings with everybody here. I know I speak for everybody when I say thank you so much for your time this morning and helping pay it forward for everybody who's thinking about shipping and even just their meal delivery business in general.
Eric Stein: Thanks for having me.
Will Schreiber: Yeah, absolutely. My final comment to everyone listening: we send out free coffee for being part of the Coffee Club, so expect that at the beginning of April. We've flipped to start sending free coffee at the beginning of every month, and we're hoping to host a bunch more talks like this next month. So please email in people you'd love to hear from and learn from, because we'd love to have them. It would be helpful for everybody in the meal delivery world. So Eric, thank you so much. This has really been awesome. Have an awesome day.
Eric Stein: See ya.