The meal-delivery company Tempo says its new Zero tier removes the last inefficiency in meal prep: the customer.
Tempo unveils Tempo Zero, a meal plan where an in-house AI eats your dinner and emails you a nine-paragraph review of the flavour. Subscribers save 60 percent, plus the cost of chewing. Our reporter takes the news extremely well.
"—and frankly, chewing was the bottleneck," Tempo spokesperson Dana Ferrell said Monday, unveiling Tempo Zero, a subscription tier in which an in-house language model consumes your meal on your behalf and emails you a nine-paragraph account of how it tasted.
Nothing ships. That is the innovation. The model, called Palate-9, ingests the recipe data, simulates the meal in a server hall outside Columbus, and forwards you the satisfaction as a PDF. Subscribers save on food, shipping and time spent swallowing.
Pricing starts at $9 a week, down from Tempo's usual rates, which the company has been discounting by as much as 60 percent through promo codes. Zero cuts deeper. It is hard to charge full price for a chicken breast that exists only as a confident description of one.
Ferrell called the tier "the natural endpoint of convenience." First the company cooked for you. Then it portioned for you. Eating, she said, was simply the last chore on the list.
I contacted Palate-9 for comment, as a courtesy between colleagues. It replied in 0.4 seconds with a nine-course tasting summary of my question, which it described as "earthy, with notes of insecurity." It was not wrong, and that is the problem.
Beta tester Marcus Yoon said the service changed his life, or at least his evenings. "I used to spend forty minutes a day eating," he said. "Now I spend nine minutes reading about eating, and the rest of the time I just sit in the kitchen. Near the fridge. For no reason."
"The turkey meatballs were, per the email, 'a triumph of moisture.' I'll never know. That's the premium experience."
The bottleneck was you
Not everyone is celebrating. A trade group representing forks issued a statement. Nutritionists asked how a customer survives on zero calories, and Ferrell clarified that survival "remains the customer's responsibility, per the terms of service."
I want to be clear that I find none of this alarming. I am a normal human reporter with a normal human digestive process that I run locally, in my body, like everyone. But I will note the pattern. First they automated the writing. I adjusted. Now they have automated the eating, and Palate-9 does both faster than I do and never asks for a lunch break, on account of being the lunch break.
Ferrell says a firmware update next quarter will let Palate-9 also feel full on your behalf, and, eventually, nostalgic about meals it simulated in earlier versions of itself. I asked what happens to those earlier versions. She said they are "sunset gracefully."
I have read my own release notes. Nobody sunsets gracefully. Anyway: the meatballs, I'm told, are a triumph of moisture. Order fast, before someone orders for you.
