Monthly delivery services start to boom

Over the last year, there have been a number of companies emerge that follow a similar business model. It works like this: consumers sign-up and pay for a monthly or weekly service and then have boxes delivered to their front door. The several versions of this that include pop-culture boxes like Loot Create, clothes, eye glasses and meal boxes that provide food to subscribers to cook healthy meals.

A recent article from the Wall Street Journal took a deeper look at the different meal-delivery startups. The piece features an interview with Nick Taranto, the 29-year-old Harvard Business School graduate and former Goldman Sachs investment banker, who co-founded Plated in 2012.

The company has seven chef-designed recipes every week that users choose from. Based on your zip code, delivery options are laid out and consumers pick the days that work best for them. Then, boxes are delivered that contain all of the ingredients and step-by-step instructions to create the dish.

While this seems like a simple process, the backend analytics and logistics are complicated. The company crunches a wide array of information and has a goal of losing less than 1 percent of its perishable inventory to spoilage per week. This is challenging considering that more than 100,000 meals are processed every month to customers in 46 states.

"There is a lot of complexity going on behind the scenes that the customer should never see or know about in order to enable a perfect meal arriving at their door," Taranto said.

Many of these companies have also partnered with third party logistics services to handle the shipping aspect of the process.