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About Platera

A rack for food that already exists

Platera began with a tired week, a new baby, and an order that took nine messages to place.

The name

A platera is a plate rack. In an old Mexican kitchen it is the wooden frame on the wall where clean plates stand on edge, ready for the next meal. Our logo is three of them lined up on a shelf.

We picked the word because it describes what we are actually doing. The food already exists. Someone near you already cooked it, and cooked it well. What has been missing is the rack: somewhere to put all of it so you can see what you have.

How it started

Platera started in a kitchen in Guadalajara, at the end of a long week, in a house with a new baby in it.

Anyone who has had a first child knows the shape of those months. You are tired in a way that sleep does not fix. The day comes apart into small pieces. Cooking, which used to be ordinary, becomes the thing that keeps getting pushed to tomorrow. We ate badly for a while and did not enjoy it.

Looking for meal prep

So we went looking. Guadalajara has plenty of it. Good cooks, real menus, people who will bring a week of food to your door.

Finding them was not the problem. Ordering from them was.

  1. 01You see an adOn Instagram, or from a friend of a friend in a Facebook group.
  2. 02You send a messageA DM, and then you wait. Sometimes for hours.
  3. 03You move to WhatsAppThe conversation starts over somewhere else.
  4. 04You ask for the menuIt arrives as a photo, or a PDF, or a screenshot of a photo.
  5. 05You commit before you tasteMost plans want a week, sometimes a month, paid up front.
  6. 06You transfer the moneyA bank transfer to a personal account, then a screenshot as proof.
  7. 07You hopeNo confirmation. No tracking. No idea what time it turns up.

Do that twice and you understand why most people give up and order tacos again. Not because the food is bad. Because the path to it is exhausting, and because at every step you are asked to trust someone you have no way to check.

What we noticed second

These businesses are not on Rappi or Uber Eats, and mostly they cannot be. Those apps are built for restaurants: a kitchen, a menu of single dishes, an order that shows up in forty minutes.

A meal prep business sells something else. It sells ten meals on Sunday for the week ahead, on a plan, with portions and delivery days. There is no marketplace for that in Mexico.

Independent chefs, home kitchens, cooks who work around nutrition, small family operations. All of them running a real business out of an Instagram inbox, because nobody ever built them anywhere else to sell.

What we are building

One place where these businesses can be found and compared. Menus you can read side by side. Prices visible before you commit. Plans, portions, delivery zones and days in the same format, so that comparing them means something. You order, you pay, and you can see where your food is.

For the cooks it is the first storefront shaped like the way they actually sell.

We are building it in Guadalajara first, because that is where we live and where we got tired of the old way.