The Edible Internet Cafe would be a web site operated by a cafe or other buisiness with a kitchen.

The web site would have the following parts:

1) A menu. Each menu item would not only give a description, but the recipe used to make it.

2) An ordering page, where you can pay by credit card or paypal or whatever, to have any item on the menu prepared and shipped to you.

3) A wiki of recipes, which can be edited by any of the fans of the site.

4) An "add it to the menu" page, where you can pay a fee (again, by credit card, paypal, etc..), and have any item on the recipe wiki made into a menu item.

The fee is for the cost of the staff that run the site to do research into the cost of ingredients and labor to prepare the recipe.

For recipes not involving exotic ingredients or procedures, it should only take a couple of days from the time of the request to the time it goes onto the menu.

Once a recipe is on the menu, anyone can order it, without paying the research fee.
-- goldbb, Jul 07 2009

I quite like this - I'd really like to see a collaborative cafe where the menu is the result of a wiki style process. There needs to be reasonable expectation of the allowable delay between making a change to the menu, and then demanding it, but I'm sure that could be figured out, but if you organised and kept stock of a set list of ingredients, you could build a function that automatically priced recipes entered by the general public (plus a percentage markup and estimation on time based costs)

Were the cafe frequented by Python fans, I doubt they'd resist the urge to recreate some of the recipes from the Spam sketch.
-- zen_tom, Jul 08 2009


I really like the approach of charging separately and explicitly for development cost. Not enough places do that.

Imagine the education you'd get as a cook in such a kitchen! You'd just never know what happens next.

Is there some accepted way of retiring items from the menu? Eventually, that list will grow so large that there's hardly a difference between making something you haven't made in two years and something you've never made.

Parallel to zen_tom's wiki approach, another thing that could be done would be competitions. Multiple recipes compete; the wining recipe is added to the menu. Advantages: keeps the menu shorter; more interesting to watch. Disadvantages: who pays for that?

Have a webcam feed from the kitchen. There's some potential for mischief, e.g. Penn & Teller's "Swedish Lemon Angels" recipe.

There's an adjoining business model here with a place that specializes in shipping you ingredients and mixes so that you do the finishing step, but with as little work/expertise as possible - getting you fresh, tasty food with minimum effort. There are a few instances of that ("diet plans", e.g.), and some amount of that know-how could make up for the sense-of-urgency issues.
-- jutta, Jul 08 2009


hmm.... my 4-cheese, spring onion Kraft Dinner could be a hit [+]
-- FlyingToaster, Jul 08 2009


We ran a catering company that essentially did this.

Even to the extent of Jutta's 'all but the finishing step' ... (referred to as SAR = Some Assembly Required). We had quite an interesting production and delivery model as well, based on little mini-hub production and/or delivery centres.

Business model worked on order-1-day-in-advance ... and surprisingly well! We did limit the menu a bit though, by picking only a few dishes that were options for each day.

What I'd LOVE to see is a real bakery that uses the half-bakery model. Members come up with weird and funky baked goods recipes and submit, for ordering via the Edible Internet Cafe. You can only vote on things you've ordered and had delivered (assumption: you've tried them] If something reaches 2.5 fishbones, or gets no orders for a week, it's binned. Anything getting 2.5 buns is promoted to the main bakery menu for average punters & commercial exploitation
-- kindachewy, Jul 08 2009


The way I figure, the only important development costs are determining the price of ingredients, and determining the time that cooking equipment will be occupied while those ingredients cook.

Once those are known, recipes should stay on the menu virtually forever. If someone gets sick from the food, then it might need to be removed from the menu, if it can be determined that recipe is intrinsically flawed.

As for the difficulty of preparing something you either haven't made ever, or haven't made in years... there might be a small extra surcharge for that.

Hmm... as for mischief, what about pineapple jello, with the recipe explicitly calling for fresh pineapple?

Does anyone know the location of a list of joke recipies?
-- goldbb, Jul 09 2009



random, halfbakery