# Pantry Bridge — Customer Research Transcripts

**Project:** Pantry Bridge meal-kit concept exploration
**Research firm:** In-house
**Round:** Discovery interviews, March 2026
**Format:** 45-minute semi-structured interviews, video; excerpts below are lightly edited for length and clarity

The four interviews below cover four distinct potential customer segments. We are sharing all four for context, though the team's current product hypothesis targets one specific segment.

---

## Interview 1 — Susan, 38, working parent

**Household:** Two kids (ages 6 and 9), spouse works full-time, both parents work demanding office jobs. Suburban Chicago.

**Susan:** "Honestly, the question is just — can I get dinner on the table by 6:30 without it being chicken nuggets again? My kids don't eat anything green unless we play games about it. My husband and I both have late meetings sometimes. We've tried HelloFresh, we've tried Blue Apron, we tried Home Chef. They all kind of work, and they all kind of don't.

The thing that breaks them for us is the prep time. The boxes say 30 minutes but you need to add 10-15 to actually get it done. By Wednesday night I don't have 45 minutes. So we end up using the boxes on weekends and ordering takeout three nights a week, which is the opposite of what the boxes are supposed to do.

If you really wanted to crack it for families like ours: pre-chopped vegetables, sauces that are actually finished and not 'whisk these eight things together.' I'll pay more for less prep. And the recipe books need to read like the kid is going to eat it — not like 'spicy harissa-rubbed cauliflower steaks.'

Portion sizing — most kits send way too much for our family. We're a family of four but the kids each eat about 60% of a meal. We end up with leftovers that go bad. Better sizing would help."

**Interviewer:** What about price?

**Susan:** "We spend $250-350 a week on groceries currently and probably another $200 on takeout. So a meal kit that replaces three nights of takeout could be $200 a month and we'd still come out ahead. Most kits are priced fine; it's the time that breaks them."

---

## Interview 2 — Marcus, 21, college student

**Household:** Junior at state university, off-campus apartment shared with two roommates, kitchen has a microwave, a stovetop, and a half-broken oven. Limited budget.

**Marcus:** "I'm probably the wrong person for this conversation, no offense. I'm not really a meal-kit person. My food situation is, like, dining hall meal plan when I can use it, and the rest is whatever's cheap and fast. Trader Joe's frozen stuff. Eggs. Pasta. Costco runs with my roommates once a month.

I tried a meal kit when my mom signed me up as a 'starting college' gift. It was nice, but it was $80 a week for two people, which is way out of budget. And honestly, the thing they don't get is that I don't have time at 7 PM to cook. I have time at 11 PM. I want to grab something on my way back from the library and not think.

If you're trying to do meal kits for college students — and I don't really think you should — but if you were, the price has to be like $5 a meal. And it has to be food that survives in a fridge for two weeks because we don't shop on a weekly schedule. We shop when we run out.

Snacks matter more to us than meals, actually. Like, the moment when I'm desperate is 10 PM in the library, not 7 PM. Solve that and I might pay attention."

**Interviewer:** Do you have any dietary restrictions?

**Marcus:** "I'm vegetarian, sort of. I eat fish. So pescatarian I guess. But mostly because meat is expensive."

---

## Interview 3 — Eleanor, 71, retired, lives alone

**Household:** Widow, lives alone in the same single-family home she's been in for 36 years. Suburban Cleveland. Two adult children live out of state. Drives during the day but no longer at night.

**Eleanor:** "I'll tell you what I miss. I miss cooking for someone. My husband Walter passed five years ago this June, and the hardest thing — well, not the hardest, but one of them — is that I don't really cook anymore. I cook eggs. I cook a piece of fish. I open a can of soup more often than I'd like to admit. I used to make Sunday dinners that would feed eight people. Now I eat standing up at the counter half the time.

The grocery store is genuinely difficult. I drive there, I park in the back of the lot because I can usually find a spot, and then it's a long walk in. I get tired by the time I'm in the dairy aisle. Carrying the bags from the car to the kitchen — that's a project. My daughter wants me to use grocery delivery and I've tried, but the apps are all designed for someone twenty years younger than me. Tiny buttons, asking me to click through six screens to add a single tomato. I get frustrated and give up.

What I would actually want — and I've thought about this — is meals for one person. Real portions. Not a frozen TV dinner. Not 'serves four, freeze the rest.' I have a freezer full of leftovers I'll never eat. Just one good meal that I can heat up or finish cooking, that tastes like food I would have made.

I'm watching my sodium because of my blood pressure. Watching sugar too — borderline diabetic, my doctor calls it. So I read labels carefully. The frozen meals you can buy in stores are loaded with both. I'd pay more for less of both, if I trusted that the labels were accurate.

The other thing — and please put this in your notes — is that I'm careful about who I let into my house and what I sign up for. There are scams. My friend Marian got taken for $4,000 last year. So if some company asks for my information, I want to know who they are. I want a real customer service number with a real person. I want it to feel like a real business, not a flashy app.

I don't want it to feel like 'old-people food.' That's an important thing. The Meals on Wheels program in our township is wonderful but it's clearly designed for people who are sicker than I am. I'm not sick. I just live alone and grocery shopping is a lot."

**Interviewer:** What would the ideal experience look like?

**Eleanor:** "Someone delivers good food, in real portions, made with the kind of ingredients I would have used. I can heat it up or finish it. It doesn't taste like a hospital. The packaging is something I can actually open without a knife. I get a phone call once in a while from a person, not a robot. The price is reasonable — I'm on a fixed income but I can spend on things that matter. Eating well matters."

---

## Interview 4 — Dimitri, 44, Director of Food Services, mid-size hospital

**Organization:** 340-bed hospital, food service operates patient meals, staff cafeteria, and a small retail café. Reports to the COO.

**Dimitri:** "I'm probably also not who you should be talking to, but happy to share. We don't buy meal kits. We buy ingredients in institutional volumes from Sysco and US Foods primarily, with some specialty buys for dietary restrictions. We feed about 1,800 people a day across patients, staff, and visitors.

What I deal with that you might find interesting is the patient diet matrix. We have to produce meals that meet specific medical requirements — renal diets, cardiac diets, diabetic diets, dysphagia textures, allergen-free, religious restrictions. Each patient gets a tray that meets their specific orders. It's complex.

If a meal kit company wanted to play in our world, they'd be selling to me at the institutional level — bulk pricing, multi-year contracts, ability to deliver consistent specs across thousands of meals. That's not really a 'meal kit' anymore; that's wholesale food service.

Now, where I might be a buyer in a different sense: my staff cafeteria. We're trying to compete with grab-and-go culture. If you produced ready-to-heat meals targeting our staff demographic — nurses, doctors, techs, who are working 12-hour shifts and want real food, not a sandwich — I might pay attention. But the price point would have to make sense for institutional buying, and you'd need to integrate with our existing food safety protocols.

For consumer meal kits, I'm probably not your customer. We did try one when my wife and I were both working through COVID, and we let the subscription lapse after about three months. Fine product, just didn't fit our patterns."

---

## Note from the research lead

These four interviews were selected to represent the range of segments we've considered. The team's working hypothesis after this round is that the older-adult-living-alone segment is the strongest fit for the Pantry Bridge concept — distinctive needs, acknowledged friction with current options, willingness to pay for quality, and a meaningful unmet need around portion sizing and trust. Working parent segment is well-served by existing competitors. College student segment is too price-sensitive. Institutional segment is a different business entirely.

The brief should target the older-adult segment based on the Eleanor interview specifically.
