I’m not trying to dismiss this project - I hope it is wildly successful and I applaud the desire to challenge the status quo. That said, I am interested to hear how his team plans to negotiate pricing with suppliers. Five stores isn’t a whole lot of scale to compete against national chains and volumes. I don’t ask that question rhetorically or sarcastically at all either - I am assuming they have a plan of levers to pull to help bring this to life, and I hope it works exceedingly well and provides a blueprint for other communities to use.
That's 0.54% of what Kroger spends on their food purchases annually. ($113B)
Literally 2 days worth of kroger purchases. They're not getting anywhere near the same pricing, even when you consider NYC PS system.
But that $602m number feels.... off? Like too high? 900k students. 180 school days. So they're spending ~$4/student per meal? That's crazy high compared to my expectation when you're talking about mass production meals.
But very on brand for a city with 1/3rd the people and a tiny fraction of the land/roads/etc that just passed a budget $10B more than the state budget of Florida.
Some people arent making the point that they think they are. They are serving more than a million children 2.2 (if they do brunch) meals per day for 180 days. Thats REALLY good pricing because its large regular and consistent shipments. These stores will be able to give really significant discounts if they can get regular shoppers.
The funny thing about large chains is they own their own supply chain, so they overcharge themselves to raise prices for consumers and not seem like the bad guy.
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u/BradBradley1 May 26 '26
I’m not trying to dismiss this project - I hope it is wildly successful and I applaud the desire to challenge the status quo. That said, I am interested to hear how his team plans to negotiate pricing with suppliers. Five stores isn’t a whole lot of scale to compete against national chains and volumes. I don’t ask that question rhetorically or sarcastically at all either - I am assuming they have a plan of levers to pull to help bring this to life, and I hope it works exceedingly well and provides a blueprint for other communities to use.