Its so much healthier, cheaper, and easier than any other option. She just emails us the menu on Monday morning and we all pick what we want and email it back. Couldn't be easier.
Point being: I think a lot of people want to buy this, and would if only it was easy to connect with local cooks (a friend referred us to Thao, or we'd have never known about her). ZeroCater is a great idea as well, but I really like the aspect of buying home cooked food from a local person vs. a restaurant because its cheaper, usually healthier, and its the closest thing to getting a home-cooked meal from my Mom.
(Sidebar: anyone in Raleigh, do yourself a favor and check out Thao Beck at http://www.lunchboxnmore.com/. Just shoot her an email and say you'd like to get the menu next week and she'll take it from there [or email me and I'll be happy to introduce you]. I can't recommend her highly enough, especially for companies. Here's a couple favs I had to photograph: http://imgur.com/a/v80kd)
My recollection seems to tally with the WP numbers, with hundreds of thousands of deliveries a day, with less than 1 in a million mistakes, despite a multi-party transport network and widespread illiteracy (no written addresses!)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/business/worldbusiness/29...
There is a gigantic market for "tasty, healthy, delivery" that is almost entirely untapped right now. I've been trying to pull it off myself (mostly ordering LOTS of veggie dishes and mixing in with the stereotypically absurdly-sized meat dishes that delivery is known for, and spreading over multiple meals).
Best of luck to these folks.
It sounds pretty good, too. The abbreviation caught me off guard though.
Edit: Mofo is actually a spin on Mofongo, not necessarily the same.
It's a well-executed idea, just really expensive right now.
Regardless of legality, there are food safety issues. I wrote about how the traditional peer to peer doesn't work for food: http://blog.munchery.com/2011/11/pro-to-peer-a-new-paradigm/
I was thinking a little while ago about how we're almost at the point of making the digital timer pizza-box from Snow Crash a reality -- or in my scheme, something more useful, like a data logging thermometer.
It might be a little clunky still, but if you established some sort of ongoing service, an upfront purchase/loan/amortised lifespan device might make it practical to have a little temp + humidity + realtime clock with bluetooth/nfc comms to talk to your phone when your food gets delivered. And you have a solid audit trail if anything turns out dodgy.
I've always thought the game changer in this field would be based around bulk orders (group buying) - e.g., cheaper curry dish for you if others in your office or immediate area group together to improve scale efficiency for the chef and delivery.
