Shopping is the last mile

Every meal planning app I’ve seen, including the one I built, treats cooking as the hard problem and shopping as an annoying logistics footnote. Recipe catalog, cook time, nutrition scoring, preference matching, leftover rotation, calendar integration. Those are the features. Shopping usually shows up as a generated “shopping list” — a text file you have to act on yourself.

That’s backwards.

Cooking, once the ingredients are on the counter, is mostly solved. Recipes are free. AI can pick dishes that match your pantry. Timers, step-through interfaces, voice-guided cook-alongs, video tutorials — they all exist and they all work. The hard part of dinner was never “what should I make.” The hard part was always “did the ingredients make it into the house.”

In logistics, the last mile is the most expensive, most variable, most failure-prone segment of getting something from warehouse to doorstep. In household food, the last mile is the grocery run. It is the step that every meal-planning app has collectively decided is someone else’s problem — the user’s, or the grocery chain’s, or some delivery driver the user will negotiate with separately.

Meal planning without shopping automation is half a product. It tells you what you want, hands you a list, and waves you off to acquire the items using the same tools you had before you installed the app. The planning was a feature. The acquisition is still manual labor.

This is why Kit is interesting not as a meal planner but as a concierge that closes the whole loop. Plan + order + confirm + track + eat. Take out any of those and you have a partial product that plenty of people have already built and bounced off.

Shopping is the last mile. Solve that, and everything upstream is just decoration.