on 15-Dec-2016 (Thu)

Blue Apron is one of three fast-growing, venture-backed meal kit startups are based in New York City.

Plated, which was founded by Salzberg's former business school classmates, scored a Shark Tank deal and has annual revenue estimated in the tens of millions.

HelloFresh, which was founded in Berlin but operates a regional headquarters in New York, just raised $85 million at a valuation of $2.9 billion and has global revenue of about $40 million a month (HelloFresh declined comment).

Sister Miriam Joseph acknowledges her debt to Aristotle, John Milton, and Jacques Maritain.

Where does the initial knowledge come from? The section on [...] answers that question.

Grammar is an experiment al knowledge of the usages of languages as generally current among poets and prose writers. It is divided into six parts: (1) trained reading with due regard to prosody [versification]; (2) exposition, according to poetic figures [rhetoric]; (3) ready statement of dialectical peculiarities and allusion; (4) discovery of etymologies; (5) the accurate account of analogies; (6) criticism of poet ical product ions which is the noblest part of grammatical art.

Tran is telling this story from an office on the third floor of a former warehouse in San Francisco’s Outer Mission district. He’s a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and chief executive officer now. Four years ago he started Munchery, which delivers fully cooked meals to people’s homes, each day presenting an abundance of foods that stands in stark contrast to the deprivation of his early life.

Munchery is one of dozens of technology startups around the world trying to solve the challenge of mealtime planning with the tap of an app. GrubHub in the U.S., Just Eat in Europe, and Ele.me in China, to name just a few, all connect Internet users with restaurants and their takeout menus.

The company is in four cities—San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle—operating industrial kitchens in each.

Munchery has served more than 3 million meals since Tran and a friend, Conrad Chu, delivered their first entrees in 2010. The company has raised more than $115 million in venture capital, and Tran says it’s now the largest single-kitchen pro-ducer of freshly prepared food in the cities where it operates.

Like many other startups in the frenzied on-demand economy, Munchery isn’t yet profitable. It’s churning through venture capital in search of new customers.

The crowd of well-capitalized dining startups, all fighting for attention, is Munchery’s biggest challenge.

There are services that send you groceries, services that send packages of ingredients and recipes in boxes, even services that send cooks to your home to make you dinner.

“People need to eat three times a day,” says Michael Dempsey, an analyst at CB Insights. “Munchery is in a great position. The problem is that there are so many other options, and there always will be. There will never be a monopoly on dining out or getting food delivered, and it’s always going to be impossible to raise prices.”

Tran’s in-laws started teasing nervously that he’d gone to MIT to become a food deliv-ery boy. “They half-jokingly asked, ‘Are you going to protect our grandchildren?’ ” Tran says. “I said, ‘Look, I’ll give this a year. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll get a job.’ ”

Munchery was rejected by Silicon Valley’s popular Y Combinator startup program in 2011 and the next year started delivering prepared lunches from its chefs to other tech startups to bring in some cash. Customers were fickle. When Munchery didn’t get the boss’s lean grilled chicken breast exactly right, it usually lost the account.

Muvhery needed to get more production from their chefs, who were constrained by their primary jobs. So Munchery rented space at a shared kitchen and offered it to chefs with the promise that they’d sell their cuisine beyond the physical walls of conventional restaurants. Putting so many chefs together, each running his own business, turned out to be a problem. Tran had to break up constant fights over access to tables and equipment.

The company kept shifting strategies. It offered a subscription plan for a few meals each week, then pivoted to an a la carte model, where customers could schedule a delivery time online if they didn’t feel like cooking dinner that night. A series of angel investors—some of whom first discovered Munchery as customers—contributed the first $210,000 in 2012.

A year later, Munchery took over the lease for the entire kitchen and started hiring its chefs as employees instead of con-tractors. That was more expensive, but it allowed the company to control the food’s quality and buy ingredients in bulk. Lamb dishes were popular but hard to make money on—the meat was costly and didn’t come with discounts. Salmon and chicken were both popular and profitable, especially at volume. Anything with kale did brisk business.

Last May, Munchery raised $85 million in a round of venture funding that valued the company at $300 million. It’s a relatively meager sum by Silicon Valley standards, but it made Tran a mil-lionaire, at least on paper.

Munchery had just reclassified all of its delivery people and kitchen staff as either full-time or hourly employees instead of contractors, out of pragmatism more than benevolence. Categorizing them as employees and giving them benefits—and in some cases a share of the company—made workers feel invested in doing a better job for customers, Tran says. The company had also examined IRS regulations and found its workers met most of the legal definitions for employees. They were carefully screened and trained, asked to work at specific hours, and given Munchery jackets to wear.

Munchery’s high fixed costs pose one of the main drags on its business.

Tran and his executives, naturally, pitch Munchery’s expensive infra structure as its biggest advantage. It enables the company to control all of its operating costs, so it doesn’t have to wring profits out of delivery charges. Cooking tens of thousands of meals each night also lets Munchery save on ingredients. Using routing and scheduling software and state-of-the-art computerized ovens makes the operation more efficient. Munchery is also trying to save on real estate costs: In the next two months it will open a 30,000-square-foot kitchen in South San Francisco, a less expen-sive neighborhood than the Outer Mission.

The closest direct competitor Munchery has is Sprig

Logic is the art of thinking

grammar, the art of inventing symbols and combining them to express thought

rhetoric, the art of communicating thought from one mind to anot her, the adaptation of language to circumstance

The utilitarian or servile arts enable one to be a servant—of another person, of the state, of a corporation, or of a business—and to earn a living.

The liberal arts, in contrast, teach one how to live; they train the faculties and bring them to perfection; they enable a person to rise above his material environment to live an intellectual, a rational, and therefore a free life in gaining t ruth. Jesus Christ said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). 3 The

An art may be used successfully before one has a formal knowledge of its precepts. For example, a child of three may use correct grammar even though the child knows nothing of formal grammar.

logic and rhetoric may be effectively used by those who do not know the precepts of these arts. It is, however, desirable and satisfying to acquire a clear knowledge of the precepts and to know why certain forms of expression or thought are right and wrong.

Metaphysics or ontology, the science of being, is concerned with reality, with the thing- as-it-exists.

Logic is concerned with the thing-as-it-is-known.

Grammar is concerned with the thing-as-it-is-symbolized.

Rhetoric is concerned with the thing-as-it-is-communicated.

desires multiply as knowledge increases

The seven liberal arts differ essentially from the many utilitarian arts (such as carpentry, masonry, plumbing, salesmanship, printing, editing, banking, law, medicine, or the care of souls)

the seven fine arts (architecture, instrumental music, sculpture, painting, literature, t he drama, and the dance)

Some symbols are less convenient than others for t he same purpose. For example, Roman numerals are less convenient for computation than Arabic numerals.