In the spirit of manifesting - I am going to tell you about the business I want to create - the idea that for the last few years, I keep thinking about, that if a friend were to say, let’s quit our jobs, drop everything and start a venture, or if Tyler Cowen were to offer me a $100k grant - the thing I’d quit my job for and pursue.
I have a lot of thoughts on this. I won’t talk about freeze drying. You should read the book “frostbite” if you want to learn more about cold chain logistics, which are a bit more complicated and costly than you seem to perceive them to be. In general I would challenge you to think about starting a food brand rather than a grocery store, as some other folks here have hinted at
One thought: my intuition here is that if the thing you *really* want to achieve is evangelizing flash-frozen food and shifting more of the world’s consumption to it, starting a grocery store (& all the non-mission-essential things required for that) feels pretty indirect? (And so I’m wondering what alternative paths you’ve considered?)
On the other hand, Whole Foods probably played a huge role in making organic/‘natural’ foods more popular and more in the public consciousness, and so maybe all the slog was worth it in the end & in fact had a large counterfactual impact
This an interesting take on food handling. In general, I think frozen food gets a very poor rap and the emphasis on fresh foods leads to higher transportation costs and more fuel use. Nutritional values of frozen foods are equivalent and quality can be fantastic. Frozen is a more sustainable direction. I still remember the taste of the flash frozen cold water shrimp that I had in a small harbour town in my home province of Nova Scotia. The fishers caught them very far offshore and froze them onboard. They gave my host a box when they came back to the dock. We ate mounds of them and everyone got shrimp omelettes for breakfast.
I'm French, and like many French people, I'm a huge Picard fan, for exactly the reasons you describe.
I think one thing that people outside France often miss is that Picard isn't really about frozen 'prepared meals'. That's what gives frozen food a bad reputation, because prepared meals range from excellent to terrible. The real gem is the frozen 'raw ingredients': vegetables, diced onions, chopped herbs, mushrooms, fruits, seafood...
It really changes how you cook. Instead of planning around a whole cabbage or wondering what to do with the other half of an onion, you simply use exactly what you need. Waste drops dramatically, and it's much easier to cook varied meals on weeknights because your pantry suddenly includes dozens of ingredients that never spoil.
Picard actually tried twice to expand into Switzerland while I was living there, and both attempts failed. My impression was that the products weren't the problem so much as the fact that people didn't really understand the model. To get the most out of Picard, you either need:
- home delivery (and someone home to receive it),
- an insulated cooler if you're shopping in person,
- and a reasonably large freezer.
Many Swiss urban households didn't really have that setup. I often saw people buying a single ready-made dinner for the evening, which is probably the least interesting part of Picard's offering.
By contrast, another French frozen-food company, Thiriet, has managed to establish itself in Switzerland. Their model is aimed at suburban and rural families with large freezers: they deliver on scheduled monthly routes, so customers stock up rather than shop spontaneously.
Another thing I find fascinating about Picard is its business model. Almost everything is sold under the Picard brand, but very little is actually manufactured by Picard itself. They work with specialist producers and sell the products under their own brand, which gives them a lot of flexibility to source the best supplier for each category while maintaining a remarkably consistent level of quality across the range.
If I were starting a competitor today, I'd probably follow the same model: begin with a narrow product range, partner with an established manufacturer in that niche, sell under my own brand, and expand from there.
This is an amazing comment! Thank you so much time for the thought that went into it.
It's helpful to hear the french (and Swiss) perspective - and this aligned with what I thought, esp re: education. It's a good point about the lack of freezer space - as even with a larger freezer than I imagine what the median Urban swiss has, is too small for the amount of frozen food I want to store. I am jealous you get access to Picard!
Great thread -- and isn't the British frozen food chain Iceland like a somewhat down-market Picard?
Fun fact: in 1998, Iceland was the major chain to declare itself GMO-free, thereby triggering other chains to do the same. This and other efforts by Iceland did not succeed in making them as nice and relatively upmarket as Picard, but they have a similar specialization in flash-frozen food.
Interestingly, this pair of chains seems unusual, as two exceptions that prove the rule of frozen food being an underrated thing.
I wish you the best in this endeavor. This post made me self conscious about predominantly skipping the frozen section at grocery stores.
I've been curious to try flash frozen coffee, which is one unusual frozen food item. I've seen ads for Cometeer, which sounds promising, though the high shipping cost has put me off from ordering. Some Sprouts stores stock it, I'll try it next time I see it. It's still too expensive as a daily drink, but I just want to know how the quality is. I haven't been able to get a cafe quality espresso drink from an under-$1000 home machine, Nespresso is bad from what I've tried, and specialty instant coffee is mediocre at best, so flash frozen coffee is a chance to really improve homemade espresso based drinks.
For another unusual frozen food item, my friends sell high quality flash-frozen durian. They are super particular about the durian quality (though it has the reputation of being love it or hate it, part of the problem is that most people only try poor quality, often overripe durian), and they showcase rare varieties, plus some other fruits from Malaysia. I've tried a good range of what they sell and it's all amazing: https://www.yearofthedurian.com/shop
I've done several businesses, and am generally a huge fan of encouraging people to do their own business. I'll break down the things you want to consider here.
Grocery stores have famously low margins, on the order of 1-2%, and are formidable enterprises in terms of the amount of logistics, analytics, optimization, and negotiation that needs to go on to get to those low margins. Even Costco, the best in the biz, makes ~3% net margins. If you're serious, I would read Errol Schweizer's Grocery Nerd and The Checkout substacks, and I'd probably also read Benjamin Lorr's book The Secret Life of Groceries, and Joe Coulombe's book Becoming Trader Joe (great books, worth reading even if you weren't interested in starting a store).
Those margins means you NEED to pump volume to remain a viable enterprise. So your first and only consideration if you actually planned to launch this business is "what is my location and / or business model (ie will you have significant online / shipped sales in addition to physical retail) to attain the volume I need to make a reasonable payoff for the amount of effort this will take?"
Because that, the amount of effort, is the other consideration. To get ANY business off the ground takes a ton of effort - years worth of 60-80 hour weeks from the founders, generally, and small businesses like this aren't an exception.
So you can actually back into that - say you'd need to end up making $500k a year to have it be worth putting in 5 years of 60-80 hour weeks.
I assume you'll take on investors, because $100k isn't anywhere near enough to open a store, just the annual rent is more than that. So we'll say you end up with a relatively generous 20% of ownership after a few rounds of investment and dilution. Then to end up at $500k, your enterprise needs to be making $250M top line revenue (with $500k 20% of 1% of topline). Whoops!
Most grocery stores make about $1k a square foot per year, and generally end up at 30-50k sqft and $30-$50M topline revenue. So you'd need to be a goliath, Walmart supercenter or Costco sized sort of place to hit $250M topline.
Maybe you have higher margins? Maybe you can pull a Costco and make $2k a square foot? Even pulling both those levers means you still need a very significant store and / or sales volume, which is itself going to need a fair amount of capital and still more logistics, optimization etc.
Broadly, I think it's a fine idea, but your best bet logistically and from a sanity perspective is probably a website where you educate people, post recipes, and drop ship high quality frozen food to interested folk. You can do that on the side as a hobby, and probably still end up making some money with a lot less complexity and difficulty and years invested.
Feel free to DM if you're curious about anything I mentioned here. I also have a checklist post about "when should you consider a startup / small business" I can link if you're interested.
Cool idea! I certainly didn't know how good frozen food could be until I had a steak my father cooked from frozen.
I might be wrong but I think I remember that fish meant for sushi and sashimi is actually better frozen first than fresh for some reason and that is why it is done.
By coincidence, my father works in supply chain of frozen products if you ever need help getting data for the economics research.
I have a similar idea with financial contracts to buy produce:
Many producers in Chile lose 30-35% of the fruit they sell ( grapes, watermelons) in the main industrial market, simply because they don´t have time to sell it before the fruit goes to waste.
The idea is for producers to pre-sell whatever they produce next year, and formalize it trhough a contract. That way, the buyer ( a school, a grocery store, local govt) buys in bulk at lower price in advance, and producers secure a sale without risking food waste in the market. It´s essentially trying to erase the short time window producers have, which forces them to sell at a loss or else throw the fruit away.
Maybe you can start with a small project focusing on delivery of one specific product? Bagels to shops in NYC?
It seems like Trader Joes and (to a lesser extent) Costco are already going down this path. Perhaps the best route is convincing Costco management that this should be a focus (hopefully this will get emailed to them in one way or another)?
Many stores are selling frozen foods but one of the challenges (aside from not enough of it), is that there isn't the education about ensuring the food stays frozen. I do buy huge quantities of frozen food from Costco though.
I have a lot of thoughts on this. I won’t talk about freeze drying. You should read the book “frostbite” if you want to learn more about cold chain logistics, which are a bit more complicated and costly than you seem to perceive them to be. In general I would challenge you to think about starting a food brand rather than a grocery store, as some other folks here have hinted at
This is a helpful idea that I didn't really consider before, but I think I should - I will check out the book, thank you!
One thought: my intuition here is that if the thing you *really* want to achieve is evangelizing flash-frozen food and shifting more of the world’s consumption to it, starting a grocery store (& all the non-mission-essential things required for that) feels pretty indirect? (And so I’m wondering what alternative paths you’ve considered?)
On the other hand, Whole Foods probably played a huge role in making organic/‘natural’ foods more popular and more in the public consciousness, and so maybe all the slog was worth it in the end & in fact had a large counterfactual impact
This is helpful feedback and a great point.
Another benefit: Some frozen food actually retains more of its properties than on-shelf fresh food: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/frozen_tinned_fresh
This an interesting take on food handling. In general, I think frozen food gets a very poor rap and the emphasis on fresh foods leads to higher transportation costs and more fuel use. Nutritional values of frozen foods are equivalent and quality can be fantastic. Frozen is a more sustainable direction. I still remember the taste of the flash frozen cold water shrimp that I had in a small harbour town in my home province of Nova Scotia. The fishers caught them very far offshore and froze them onboard. They gave my host a box when they came back to the dock. We ate mounds of them and everyone got shrimp omelettes for breakfast.
Hi! I came here via Kevin Lynagh's newsletter.
I'm French, and like many French people, I'm a huge Picard fan, for exactly the reasons you describe.
I think one thing that people outside France often miss is that Picard isn't really about frozen 'prepared meals'. That's what gives frozen food a bad reputation, because prepared meals range from excellent to terrible. The real gem is the frozen 'raw ingredients': vegetables, diced onions, chopped herbs, mushrooms, fruits, seafood...
It really changes how you cook. Instead of planning around a whole cabbage or wondering what to do with the other half of an onion, you simply use exactly what you need. Waste drops dramatically, and it's much easier to cook varied meals on weeknights because your pantry suddenly includes dozens of ingredients that never spoil.
Picard actually tried twice to expand into Switzerland while I was living there, and both attempts failed. My impression was that the products weren't the problem so much as the fact that people didn't really understand the model. To get the most out of Picard, you either need:
- home delivery (and someone home to receive it),
- an insulated cooler if you're shopping in person,
- and a reasonably large freezer.
Many Swiss urban households didn't really have that setup. I often saw people buying a single ready-made dinner for the evening, which is probably the least interesting part of Picard's offering.
By contrast, another French frozen-food company, Thiriet, has managed to establish itself in Switzerland. Their model is aimed at suburban and rural families with large freezers: they deliver on scheduled monthly routes, so customers stock up rather than shop spontaneously.
Another thing I find fascinating about Picard is its business model. Almost everything is sold under the Picard brand, but very little is actually manufactured by Picard itself. They work with specialist producers and sell the products under their own brand, which gives them a lot of flexibility to source the best supplier for each category while maintaining a remarkably consistent level of quality across the range.
If I were starting a competitor today, I'd probably follow the same model: begin with a narrow product range, partner with an established manufacturer in that niche, sell under my own brand, and expand from there.
This is an amazing comment! Thank you so much time for the thought that went into it.
It's helpful to hear the french (and Swiss) perspective - and this aligned with what I thought, esp re: education. It's a good point about the lack of freezer space - as even with a larger freezer than I imagine what the median Urban swiss has, is too small for the amount of frozen food I want to store. I am jealous you get access to Picard!
Great thread -- and isn't the British frozen food chain Iceland like a somewhat down-market Picard?
Fun fact: in 1998, Iceland was the major chain to declare itself GMO-free, thereby triggering other chains to do the same. This and other efforts by Iceland did not succeed in making them as nice and relatively upmarket as Picard, but they have a similar specialization in flash-frozen food.
Interestingly, this pair of chains seems unusual, as two exceptions that prove the rule of frozen food being an underrated thing.
I wish you the best in this endeavor. This post made me self conscious about predominantly skipping the frozen section at grocery stores.
I've been curious to try flash frozen coffee, which is one unusual frozen food item. I've seen ads for Cometeer, which sounds promising, though the high shipping cost has put me off from ordering. Some Sprouts stores stock it, I'll try it next time I see it. It's still too expensive as a daily drink, but I just want to know how the quality is. I haven't been able to get a cafe quality espresso drink from an under-$1000 home machine, Nespresso is bad from what I've tried, and specialty instant coffee is mediocre at best, so flash frozen coffee is a chance to really improve homemade espresso based drinks.
For another unusual frozen food item, my friends sell high quality flash-frozen durian. They are super particular about the durian quality (though it has the reputation of being love it or hate it, part of the problem is that most people only try poor quality, often overripe durian), and they showcase rare varieties, plus some other fruits from Malaysia. I've tried a good range of what they sell and it's all amazing: https://www.yearofthedurian.com/shop
This is amazing! Although, I am not surprised because it seems like people really truly absolutely love their Durian.
I've done several businesses, and am generally a huge fan of encouraging people to do their own business. I'll break down the things you want to consider here.
Grocery stores have famously low margins, on the order of 1-2%, and are formidable enterprises in terms of the amount of logistics, analytics, optimization, and negotiation that needs to go on to get to those low margins. Even Costco, the best in the biz, makes ~3% net margins. If you're serious, I would read Errol Schweizer's Grocery Nerd and The Checkout substacks, and I'd probably also read Benjamin Lorr's book The Secret Life of Groceries, and Joe Coulombe's book Becoming Trader Joe (great books, worth reading even if you weren't interested in starting a store).
Those margins means you NEED to pump volume to remain a viable enterprise. So your first and only consideration if you actually planned to launch this business is "what is my location and / or business model (ie will you have significant online / shipped sales in addition to physical retail) to attain the volume I need to make a reasonable payoff for the amount of effort this will take?"
Because that, the amount of effort, is the other consideration. To get ANY business off the ground takes a ton of effort - years worth of 60-80 hour weeks from the founders, generally, and small businesses like this aren't an exception.
So you can actually back into that - say you'd need to end up making $500k a year to have it be worth putting in 5 years of 60-80 hour weeks.
I assume you'll take on investors, because $100k isn't anywhere near enough to open a store, just the annual rent is more than that. So we'll say you end up with a relatively generous 20% of ownership after a few rounds of investment and dilution. Then to end up at $500k, your enterprise needs to be making $250M top line revenue (with $500k 20% of 1% of topline). Whoops!
Most grocery stores make about $1k a square foot per year, and generally end up at 30-50k sqft and $30-$50M topline revenue. So you'd need to be a goliath, Walmart supercenter or Costco sized sort of place to hit $250M topline.
Maybe you have higher margins? Maybe you can pull a Costco and make $2k a square foot? Even pulling both those levers means you still need a very significant store and / or sales volume, which is itself going to need a fair amount of capital and still more logistics, optimization etc.
Broadly, I think it's a fine idea, but your best bet logistically and from a sanity perspective is probably a website where you educate people, post recipes, and drop ship high quality frozen food to interested folk. You can do that on the side as a hobby, and probably still end up making some money with a lot less complexity and difficulty and years invested.
Feel free to DM if you're curious about anything I mentioned here. I also have a checklist post about "when should you consider a startup / small business" I can link if you're interested.
this comment is incredible and I feel grateful for it. Thank you :)
If you do this I will invest 1% of the 100k you require in your business (microgrants!)
Cool idea! I certainly didn't know how good frozen food could be until I had a steak my father cooked from frozen.
I might be wrong but I think I remember that fish meant for sushi and sashimi is actually better frozen first than fresh for some reason and that is why it is done.
The freezing kills parasites, although otherwise does not enhance flavour.
Really cool idea! Not sure why there is not more innovation on food retail, especially in high income countries.
I have seen similar stores in Barcelona:
https://congeladosbajocero.com/
https://www.lasirena.es/es/
By coincidence, my father works in supply chain of frozen products if you ever need help getting data for the economics research.
I have a similar idea with financial contracts to buy produce:
Many producers in Chile lose 30-35% of the fruit they sell ( grapes, watermelons) in the main industrial market, simply because they don´t have time to sell it before the fruit goes to waste.
The idea is for producers to pre-sell whatever they produce next year, and formalize it trhough a contract. That way, the buyer ( a school, a grocery store, local govt) buys in bulk at lower price in advance, and producers secure a sale without risking food waste in the market. It´s essentially trying to erase the short time window producers have, which forces them to sell at a loss or else throw the fruit away.
Maybe you can start with a small project focusing on delivery of one specific product? Bagels to shops in NYC?
Sounds cool. Agree navigating cold supply chains may be a serious challenge
There’s a store called wild fork that is sort of this but they focus on meat and carrying exotic meats.
It seems like Trader Joes and (to a lesser extent) Costco are already going down this path. Perhaps the best route is convincing Costco management that this should be a focus (hopefully this will get emailed to them in one way or another)?
Many stores are selling frozen foods but one of the challenges (aside from not enough of it), is that there isn't the education about ensuring the food stays frozen. I do buy huge quantities of frozen food from Costco though.