<aside> đź’ˇ TL;DR: Parsnip teaches you cooking techniques as you prepare your meals. Long-term, we're building an AI assistant that gives superpowers to home cooks and minimizes the cognitive load of meal planning, grocery shopping, and preparing food.
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Modern society has lost its connection to home cooking. In the digital age, we have prioritized convenience over culture, efficiency over craft, and quick dining over generational recipes. Our "apprenticeships" with those who traditionally taught the craft—our parents, grandparents, and home economics teachers—are tenuous and disappearing. For those who want to learn, limited experience paints home cooking as an intimidating and laborious process. And yet the COVID-19 pandemic has only reinforced our collective desire to cook. How then can we reconnect with home cooking as an expression of our culture rather than a hurdle of modern life?
Parsnip's goal is to reimagine the content of both classic books (e.g. The Joy of Cooking) and their contemporary interpretations (How to Cook Everything; Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat) as a delightful product experience for the digital age. These books don't use recipes to teach cooking so much as how to think about ingredients, techniques, and more. Yet the timeless, universal knowledge in these tomes is easily drowned out by monetized "food porn" on social media or ad-laden content sites. We want to build a world where home cooking becomes more joyful than ever with thoughtful technology, so that anyone can experience that the best food in the world comes from your own kitchen.
There are several approaches that different businesses currently take to serve the need for food at home. We'll introduce these at various points in this story.
First we have food delivery, exemplified by companies like GrubHub and DoorDash. These tech behemoths charge local businesses up to 30% of revenue just to participate in their ecosystem, ostensibly to acquire new customers. But as ordering out becomes the norm (further accelerated by COVID-19), local businesses are locked into a doom loop where they are often losing money but have no choice but to participate. Often, food delivery accelerates the demise of restaurants, and delivery workers are exploited, too. Moreover, the economics for local businesses are sure to worsen as these newly-public companies must quickly wean off their VC backing and appease Wall Street investors instead.
It gets worse. Since the unit economics for food delivery are clearly unsustainable, some investors are very excited about "ghost kitchens", most famously exemplified by Travis Kalanick's $400m fundraise from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund for a "WeWork for kitchens". The alarming idea behind ghost kitchens is that we don't even need actual storefronts anymore—just kitchens in nondescript locations where food can be made to order and delivered for anyone, anytime. And particularly "exciting" is that in the future, we might not even need cooks, or delivery people: the food could be prepared by robots and delivered by—you guessed it—robots.
If that doesn't sound like a world you want to live in, then we agree. One of the focal lessons from 2020 is that the advancement of technology does not necessarily make the world a better place. Tech can be empowering, but it can also be exploitative. We have a responsibility to create the world that we want to live in, and if robot food delivery from ghost kitchens isn't the future we want, then we must shape a different one. We believe that helping all individuals reconnect with the joy of cooking for themselves is the first step of that journey.
2020 was an exciting year for the Parsnip team—we talked with everyone (investors, market experts, ML gurus, and especially users) we could find on how to tackle this problem, and came up with a few hypotheses to test. This culminated in our Thanksgiving demo launch, an ostensibly simple app meant to help people with their Thanksgiving cooking—a need that is highlighted annually: