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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Chef'd

Chef’d Meal Kits Get Into Gelson’s Markets

Chef’d, the meal kit company that came back from the dead, is available once again at retail. Supermartket News reports that Gelson’s will be stocking Chef’d meal kits at its 27 California locations.

True Foods had announced its return to retail back in January of this year, and to be honest, we kind of expected its first foray back to be a little more… non-traditional. In 2018, The Spoon had named Chef’d to our Food Tech 25 list of companies because of its innovative approach to selling meal kits, which included using drug stores and smart fridges as sales channels and partnering with big CPG names for branded meal kits. The company abruptly shut down soon thereafter, and its assets were purchased by True Food Innovation, which said it would drop the mail order business and offer meal kits only through retail.

But this news marks a bit of a homecoming for Chef’d which, in its first incarnation, launched at Gelson’s in 2017. In this go ’round, Gelson’s will carry all 8 menu options from both the Chef’d and True Chef brands.

Unlike the last time Chef’d launched, however, retail is lousy with meal kit providers. Kroger bought Home Chef and Albertsons owns Plated, both of which have been rolling out their own meal kits nationwide. But as my colleague, Jenn Marston, wrote in January, True Foods believes it has a product differentiator:

Under True Food, Chef’d kits will return to stores, this time with a 55-day shelf life thanks to a patent-pending formula True Food has developed that uses high-pressure processing without the need for preservatives.

One of the drawbacks to mail order meal kits was the fact that they locked you into eating whatever arrived, regardless of whether you were in the mood for it or not (an admittedly first world problem). If true, the 55 day flexibility of Chef’d meal kits could be a nice way to add an attractive layer of convenience for consumers.

Gelson’s customers will get a chance to see if that claim holds true. Whether it does or doesn’t, drop us a line and let us know.

Chef’d Returns From the Dead to Invade Retail Stores Across the U.S.

Shuttered meal kit company Chef’d is back from the dead, this time as a clean-label retail kit courtesy of True Food Innovations. The latter just announced it will roll out meal kits under the Chef’d and True Chef monikers in retail outlets in 2019.

True Food purchased the assets to Chef’d in July 2018, shortly after Chef’d unexpectedly closed its doors, citing funding and expense issues. The company was one of the first to sell meal kits in stores, via a Costco partnership, in addition to its mail-subscription service.

Under True Food, Chef’d kits will return to stores, this time with a 55-day shelf life thanks to a patent-pending formula True Food has developed that uses high-pressure processing without the need for preservatives. All kits require 15 to 20 minutes of prep time. Most interesting, True Food claims its kits’ 55-day shelf life has “cracked the code” on meal kits and that it’s a “key differentiator and absolute requirement for retail meal kits to be commercially viable for nationwide distribution.”

No word yet on which stores will carry the resurrected Chef’d meal kits, but True Food has said the rollout will be nationwide. We’ve reached out to True Food for more launch and pricing details and will update them here as they roll in. What we do know is that Chef’d historically worked with non-traditional retailers, forging partnerships with drug stores, wholesalers, and even one with Byte, to supply office fridges with meal kits. One wonders if True Food will continue that approach with the newly resurrected Chef’d.

Whichever stores Chef’d lands in, it will go up against numerous other meal kits that have turned to the retail sector over the last year or so. Kroger, who bought Home Chef, announced in December 2018 it was rolling out a pilot with Walgreens to sell meal kits in the drug store. Walgreens previously had a deal with Chef’d before the latter shut down. Albertsons bought Plated last year and started offering its meal kits nationwide in stores.

No one’s been so bold as to claim they’ve cracked the code, which is a way of saying you have the ultimate solution the industry has been frantically digging to find the last few years. “We listened to our retail partners and we developed products to solve their problem: shelf life,” Alan True, CEO and founder of True, said in a release.

The numbers will tell us soon enough if a longer shelf-life is indeed they key to selling more meal kits. But if that’s the case, I can’t help thinking it might be cheaper and easier to just grab a frozen dinner and call it a day.

Chef’d Assets Acquired by True Food Innovations, to Focus on Retail

True Food Innovations, a food technology, CPG and manufacturing company, today announced that it has acquired the assets of meal kit maker, Chef’d, which abruptly shuttered operations earlier this month. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In a statement from the press announcement, Robert T. Jones, President of True Food Innovations — and former SVP of Business Development at Chef’d said:

“We have already developed and are in market with long shelf-life retail meal kits under the brand of True Chef, so we seized the opportunity to acquire the assets and brand of Chef’d as the transaction will be accretive to our business from day one. We believe the retail channel will continue to grow and we will concentrate our efforts on that portion of the Chef’d business.”

According to The Wall Street Journal, Chef’d’s last valuation was $160 million, and the assets being acquired include warehouses in California and New York, as well as deals with two dozen retailers and roughly 200 licensing partnerships.

We named Chef’d as one of our FoodTech 25 earlier this year because of its innovative approach to retail, striking deals to put meal kits in non-traditional food outlets such as drug stores and office fridges.

According to The Journal, True Foods will keep selling meal kits in grocery stores, but “will suspend its sprawling e-commerce offerings while it works to become profitable.”

Chef’d quasi-resurrection is shaping up to be a sort of homecoming. In addition to Robert T. Jones, Sean Butler and Steve Vigilante, two other former Chef’d execs will also play a role in resuscitating the meal kit maker. Butler posted to Linkedin that the duo’s Emerging Brands Studio has partnered with True Foods to “optimize and re-operationlize the assets of Chef’d.” Butler also said that Emerging Brands’ parent company, LIDD Supply Chain Intelligence, helped build many of Chef’d’s key facilities and systems and has Chef’d’s original CTO on its team.

Now we’ll see what these execs can do with with Chef’d when given the reigns. The meal kit space is competitive and with so many grocers already owning their own meal kit companies, Chef’d 2.0 will have to keep innovating to stay alive.

Chef’d Shuts Down, Are Remaining Independent Meal Kit Makers Doomed?

Meal kit maker Chef’d announced last night that it was shutting down and suspending all operations in a surprise move that will reverberate throughout the sector for remaining independent meal kit companies.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the company, which had raised more than $40 million in venture funding, was unable to raise additional cash. Business Insider reports that Chef’d laid off more than 350 workers.

We actually liked Chef’d quite a bit here at The Spoon. We named it as one of our Food Tech 25 because of its diversified approach to meal kits. Chef’d offered them via mail, was one of the first to sell meal kits in-store through a relationship with Costco, and also had a number of high-profile white label partnerships with companies such as Coca-Cola, The New York Times and Campbells (which had invested $10 million in Chef’d).

Additionally, the company was striking really innovative partnerships, even within the past few months. It partnered with Byte Foods to place meal kits inside office fridges, allowing hungry workers to grab them on their way home from work. Chef’d partnered with Innit to provide meal kits through that startup’s guided cooking app. And just last month Chef’d announced a deal to put meal kits in Duane Reade and Walgreens drug stores.

When we spoke with Chef’d execs this past May, they touted how the company had spent less than a million dollars on customer acquisition as well as their packaging technology that added three times the shelf life to their ingredients.

Underneath this patina of excitement and innovation however, you could see trouble brewing for the company as a number of high profile execs such as its senior vice president for retail left the company in recent months.

Anyone who follows the meal kit sector knows that the mail order business is a harsh one. Getting meal kits by mail is expensive, takes too long, limits customer’s flexibility, and still requires a lot of work for the user. The Journal writes that the online subscription part of Chef’d business was a drag on the rest of the company.

Blue Apron, a pioneer in subscription meal kits, suffered through a number of setbacks over the past year including a rocky IPO, layoffs and CEO swaps. They recently initiated plans to sell meal kits at Costco.

The answer for many meal kit companies has been moving more into the grocery aisles. This makes more sense from a customer perspective, as it allows more flexibility and fits in with existing shopping and dinner deciding patterns. But the grocery aisles are filling up fast with meal kits and may no longer be an option for startups in the space looking for a savior. Kroger bought Home Chef, Albertsons owns Plated and Amazon/Whole Foods and Walmart have their own line of meal kits. It’s safe to assume that those retailers will push and market their own meal kits over any third party ones.

For remaining mail order meal kit companies, the future does not look so bright. HelloFresh was smart and went public early, giving it some leeway to adjust to evolving market conditions, and they are making their own retail moves. Perhaps there will be room for highly specific meal kits such as Purple Carrot, which just raised $4 million, and only offers plant-based meals.

A year from now, we could mark Chef’d shutting down as a turning point for the meal kit market — just not the one many had hoped for.

Chef’d Puts Meal Kits in Walgreens and Duane Reade Drugstores

Shoppers can pick up prescriptions and a pre-packed dinner at the drugstore, as meal kit company Chef’d has started selling its meal kits at Walgreens and Duane Reade.

Supermarket News reports that Chef’d and Smithfield Foods have teamed up on a pilot program to offer three different meal kits in 30 Walgreens and Duane Reade stores across New York City and parts of New Jersey. The Chef’d meal kits will retail for $15.99 and serve two or more people.

Grabbing dinner just down the aisle from where you buy Dramamine may seem a bit incongruous at first. But drugstores have long since evolved beyond just aisles of medicine cabinet items and helpful pharmacists in white lab coats to carrying items for just about every room of the house.

It’s even less surprising that Chef’d is the meal kit company expanding into drugstores, as the company has been a vanguard in its sales channels strategy. Unlike its competitors, Chef’d works with a wide range of white label partners including Campbell’s, Good Housekeeping, and Coca Cola.

Chef’d was also an early adopter of a brick-and-mortar retail strategy, selling its meal kits through Costco, and then expanding into more than a dozen retailers last month through a partnership with Smithfield. Just about every other meal kit company since the start of this year has jumped on the retail bandwagon.

But in addition to supermarket shelves, Chef’d, which we named as one of our Top 25 Food Tech Companies Changing the Way We Eat, continues to innovate in other ways. Last month, it partnered with Byte Foods to make meal kits available in office fridges, and Chef’d recently teamed up with Innit in a move that inches us closer to customizeable shoppable recipes.

Diversification into drugstores and other non-traditional sales platforms may actually be necessary for Chef’d, as grocery giants have been gobbling up meal kit companies left and right. Albertsons now owns Plated and Kroger bought Home Chef, not to mention the fact that Amazon/Whole Foods and Walmart are making their own meal kits — which means that Chef’d could be boxed out of those store aisles altogether.

That pressure from the big retailers seems to be pushing Chef’d into different corners of the retail world. I wouldn’t be surprised to see meal kits pop up in convenience stores, gyms or other places you could grab dinner on your way home.

HelloFresh Jumps on Bandwagon to Sell Meal Kits in Grocery Stores

HelloFresh will start selling its meal kits at 600 Giant Food and Stop & Shop locations starting this week, The Wall Street Journal reports, as the meal kit sector’s migration from mail order to brick and mortar continues at a furious pace.

The first half of this year has seen a flurry of activity from meal kit companies going into grocery stores. Chef’d and Blue Apron started selling in Costcos. Plated is rolling out nationwide at Albertsons. And just a couple of weeks ago, Kroger bought Home Chef for $200 million to put that company’s product on store shelves. And that doesn’t even count the meal kits WalMart and Amazon have available in their own stores.

It’s not hard to see why. According to Nielsen, last year in-store meal kits generated $154.6 million in sales, and grew more than 26% year-over-year. It’s a hot sector, and in-store meal kits are something customers want.

Last month, Pat Brown, Albertsons Vice President of strategic business initiatives told CNBC: “Our internal research told us that 80 percent of our customers would love to see a meal kit option in the store. And what was more surprising was that 85 percent of customers that were already subscribing to meal kits wanted to see meal kits in the store.”

Customer churn has been a big issue for meal kits in the past as the cost and inconvenience of waiting for your meals to arrive by mail have been stumbling blocks for maintained meal kit subscriptions. Having meal kits in stores offers customers more convenience and more choice closer to when they actually make meals.

HelloFresh CEO Dominik Richter told The Journal that online subscription will continue to drive sales, and that going into grocery aisles was a way for the company to find new customers. He also said that HelloFresh is in talks with other retail outlets.

HelloFresh recently surpassed Blue Apron as the top meal kit company by market share in the U.S.. The Berlin-based company went public in the fall of last year, and in April the company acquired organic meal kit provider Green Chef.

This is a big and fast retail move for HelloFresh, which will start selling meal kits on store shelves starting this Wednesday. For comparison, Chef’d has done deals with numerous regional chains as well as Costco, Blue Apron is in 17 Costcos, and Plated will be in “hundreds” of Albertsons by the end of the year. Kroger, which had already rolled out meal kits to some of its regional chains such as QFC in Seattle, is planning to put meal kits in most of its 2,800 stores nationwide.

Clearly HelloFresh needs to act fast as the window of opportunity for meal kit companies in grocery stores appears to be closing rapidly. While it may be rolling out judiciously, Albertsons still owns Plated, so that will be its preferred meal kit provider. Same with Kroger and Home Chef. Amazon, of course, has Whole Foods, and WalMart has… itself. To stay alive in retail, and by extension alive as a business, HelloFresh will need to get into a lot more grocery stores.

The Food Tech 25: Twenty Five Companies Changing the Way We Eat

Here at The Spoon, we spend most days writing and thinking about those who are transforming what we eat. No matter whether a startup, big company, inventor, or a cook working on new approaches in the kitchen, we love learning the stories of people changing the future of food. So much so, in fact, that we wanted to share those companies that most excite us with our readers.

And so here it is, The Spoon’s Food Tech 25: Twenty Five Companies Changing the Way We Eat

What exactly is the Food Tech 25? In short, it’s our list of the twenty five companies we think are doing the most interesting things changing the way we create, buy, store, cook and think about food.

As with any list, there are bound to be a few questions about how we got here and why we chose the companies we did. Here are some answers:

How did we create this list?

The editors of the Spoon — myself, Chris Albrecht, Catherine Lamb and Jenn Marston — got together in a room, poured some kombucha (ed note: except for Chris), and listed all the companies we thought were doing interesting and important work in changing food and cooking. From there, we had numerous calls, face-to-face meetings and more glasses of kombucha until we narrowed the list down to those you see here.

Is this an annual list?

No, this is a list of the companies we think are the most interesting people and companies right now, in mid-2018. Things could definitely look different six months from now.

Is this list in a particular order or are the companies ranked?

No, the list is in no particular order and we did not rank the 25 companies.

Why isn’t company X on the list?

If this was your list, company X or Y would most likely be on the list (and that’s ok with us). But this is the Spoon’s list and we’re sticking to it (for now – see above).

And of course, making this list wasn’t easy. There are lots of companies doing interesting things in this space. If we had enough room to create runners-up or honorable mentions, we would. But we don’t (and you don’t have enough time to read a list like that).

So, without further ado, here is the Spoon’s Food Tech 25. If you’re the type that likes your lists all on one page, click here.


EMBER
Ember bills itself as “the world’s first temperature control mug,” which basically means you can dictate a specific temperature for your brew via the corresponding app and keep your coffee (or tea or whatever) hot for as long as you need to. The significance here isn’t so much about coffee as it is about where else we could implement the technology and relatively simple concept powering the Ember mug. The company currently has patents out on other kinds of heated or cooled dishware, and Ember has cited baby bottles and medicine as two areas in which it might apply its technology. And yes, it allows you to finally stop microwaving all that leftover morning coffee.

 


INSTANT POT
The Instant Pot is not the highest-tech gadget around, but its affordability, versatility, and speed have made this new take on the pressure cooker a countertop cooking phenomenon. It also has a large and fanatical community, where enthusiastic users share and reshare their favorite Instant Pot recipes across Facebook groups and online forums. By becoming the first new breakout appliance category of the millennial generation, the Instant Pot has achieved that highly desirable (and rare) position of having its brand synonymous with the name of the category; people don’t go looking for pressure cookers, they go looking for an Instant Pot.

 


DELIVEROO
We chose Deliveroo out of the myriad of food delivery services because of their Editions project, which uses customer data to curate restaurant hubs in areas which have unfulfilled demands for certain chain establishments or cuisine types. This model allows food establishments to set up locations with zero start-up costs, and also gives customers in more restaurant-dry areas a wide variety of delivery food options. Essentially, it’s cloud kitchens meets a food hall, with some heavy analysis to help determine which restaurants or cuisines customers want, and where. These “Rooboxes” (hubs of shipping containers in which the food is prepared) show that Deliveroo is a pioneer in the dark kitchen space, and are doing serious work to shake up the food delivery market.

 

AMAZON GO
There are any number of ways that Amazon could have been included in this list, but its Amazon Go stores are what we think will be the real game changer. The cashierless corner store uses a high-tech combination of cameras and computing power, allowing you to walk in grab what you want — and leave. That’s it. At its first location in Seattle, we were struck by how seamless the experience was. As the locations broaden, this type of quick convenience has the potential to change the way we shop for snacks, (some) groceries and even prepared meal kits.

 


INGEST.AI
Restaurants have more pieces of software to deal with than ever. In addition to all the delivery platforms they are now plugged into, there have to deal with payments systems, HR software, and inventory management software. And right now, none of those applications talk to each other. Created by a former IBM Watson engineer, Ingest.ai promises to extract and connect the data from ALL of those disparate software pieces and tie them together to give restaurant owners a holistic, data-powered view of their business. It also helps them have more precise control over their business and automate tasks like food ordering and staff scheduling.

Want to meet the innovators from the FoodTech 25? Make sure to connect with them at North America’s leading foodtech summit, SKS 2019, on Oct 7-8th in Seattle.

NEXT

Chef’d & Byte Foods Partner to Bring Meal Kits to the Office

Starting today, Byte Foods will place Chef’d meal kits in 100 of their unattended smart fridges throughout the Bay Area.

“Eighty percent of people don’t know what they’re making for dinner at 4 p.m.” Byte’s co-founder Lee Mokri told the Spoon. But with this new partnership, they don’t have to — they can swing by one of Byte’s smart fridges in their office or building lobby, swipe their credit card, and grab a Chef’d meal kit on the way out their door.

Each Chef’d kit contains two (or more) servings of ready-to-cook, pre-portioned ingredients. Mokri said that Byte fridges would have meal kits on 1-2 of their shelves, the remainder of which would feature the same healthy food and drinks they’ve been stocking. They’ll also be debuting two stand-alone Chef’d fridges, which can fit roughly 20 meal kits.

A big gripe of meal kit service users have is that they get locked into a delivery subscription from the get-go. Which is one reason why meal kits are making the move into retail; people get the pre-packaged convenience of a kit, but they can pick them up day-of depending on their mood and schedule. The Chef’d/Byte partnership takes this convenience one step further but cutting out the grocery store stop and bringing the meal kits to them.

Byte isn’t the first to figure out that people want meal kits on-demand, without the subscription strings. Meal kits are the second most popular item at Amazon Go’s cashierless retail store in Seattle (and soon SF and Chicago). Byte basically brings the convenience of Amazon Go right into your office, shortening the retail journey to a few mere feet. “We’re solving for immediate satisfaction,” said Mokri.

Byte’s smart fridge in action.

This partnership is a savvy move by Byte to forge a new revenue channel. We wrote about Byte’s journey to reinvent of the vending machine a few months ago. The San Francisco-based startup launched in 2015 with an aim to bring accessible, fresh, and healthy food into offices. Workers can walk up to a Byte fridge, scan their credit card to unlock the door, then select as many items as they’d like from their offerings (like Blue Bottle coffee and Sunrise Sandwiches). When they close the door, the fridge scans all remaining goods and figures out what was taken, then charges the worker accordingly and sends over a receipt.

Byte’s fridges cost $500/month to rent, which includes the services of them restocking the fridges daily (often in the middle of the night) and taking away any uneaten food for donation at the end of the day. Since Byte absorbs all the risk of food waste, they’ve developed a demand algorithm to optimize their stocking and pricing practices — in fact, Mokri said that they have three patents.

They also license out their fridges and tracking/stocking technology to other companies. The service is completely turnkey; the licenser buys a Byte smart fridge for $5,500, pays a small monthly fee, and is then free to brand it and stock it with their own goods. Partners also have access to Byte’s dashboard and stocking algorithms. So far, Byte has roughly 100 of these licensed fridges, and is piloting more.

It’s also par for the course for Chef’d, a white label meal kit service that seems to be consistently innovating when other meal kit companies are struggling. Last month they partnered with Innit to provided guided cooking for their meal kits, and they capitalized off the slow cooker trend with their recent Campbell’s partnership. Chef’d already offers the option to purchase their meal kits sans subscription, and by teaming up with Byte Foods they’re positioning themselves as even more convenient.

Byte plans to roll out Chef’d kits into all of their 500+ locations over the next six months. They have raised a total of $10 million so far and are beginning to raise their Series A round.

With Chef’d Deal, Innit Moves Closer to Customized Shoppable Recipes

Innit yesterday announced a partnership with Chef’d to provide ordering and guided cooking of meal kits directly through the Innit app. The deal is the first meal commerce offering for Innit and points towards a future for the company where it becomes more of an all-in-one platform that helps users discover, buy and prepare customizeable meals.

In it’s earlier incarnation, Innit allowed users to customize its recipes based on ingredients they already had. Don’t have steak for these fajitas? Here’s how to make it with chicken. The app then serves up short videos to show users exactly how to slice, stir and sear your meal. Since then it has added integration with smart appliances from LG to do more of the work when preparing dinner.

But Innit recognizes that recipes are now actionable discovery and commerce platforms. In a perfect world (at least here at The Spoon), we could be inspired by a recipe, customize it to our taste, order all the ingredients and have them delivered to our house that same day.

The Chef’d deal isn’t there yet, but inches us a little bit closer to that future. Innit users will now notice a new “meal kit” option in the app. Tapping it brings up list of Chef’d meal kits that have been curated and developed in conjunction with Innit. Select your kit, delivery date and choose to pay for it all within the app. Once your Chef’d box arrives, Innit walks you through how to make it.

This kind of guided cooking helps alleviate one of the pain points we’ve found with meal kits — preparation. Sure, it’s easy to receive a box containing all the right ingredients, but doing all the work of cooking is still… work. With Chef’d, Innit helps trim the prep time by providing some ingredients pre-measured (think: herbs and spices), and helps make sure you don’t waste your money by showing you how to make that meal properly.

That’s a good first step, but it still doesn’t help connect my inspiration with immediate action. When I went through the ordering process today, the earliest delivery I could get was about a week out. I may be craving Thai Red Curry Ribs right now — but who knows how I’ll feel in a week? Additionally, you can’t get any Innit recipe as a meal kit, it’s limited to 19 options priced between $8.25 and $21.75 per serving.

Joshua Sigel, Innit COO is aware of this and told me the company is moving towards full commerce capabilities. “The goal is to make more of our meals purchasable as a meal kit, or as a shopping list to get from a local grocery store.” Sigel wouldn’t provide specifics but said we could look forward to more retail and other partnerships in the future.

For it’s part, Chef’d now adds another partner arrow to its quiver. Chef’d has been focused on becoming a platform to enable meal kits for the likes of Coca-Cola, Hershey’s, and Campbell’s. The company is also rolling out its own branded meal kits at Costco. Hooking up with Innit opens up Chef’d to an additional early adopter market (though Innit won’t say how many people are using its app), and with a company actively looking to innovate meal kits.

I may be over meal kits, but I’m intrigued by this partnership and want to see how it goes. If Innit’s platform can prove flexible enough, and it can secure the right partnerships, it’s easy to see this evolving from pre-fab meal kits right now, to truly customized shopping and guided cooking kits in the near future.

Innit Launches its Connected Cooking App

Innit, the connected food platform, today released its iOS app, which the company hopes will become a GPS in the kitchen by letting users control different smart appliances and customize the meals they prepare.

The Innit app is a Swiss army knife of sorts, with tools to help you through the entire cooking process: automatically create shopping lists, get instructional videos for how to prepare each meal and control smart appliances directly from your phone.

A big selling point for the app is that it works with multiple connected kitchen platforms. Innit currently works with GE Appliances and Bosch Home Connect devices, and says it has partnerships with Philips Kitchen Appliances, Perfect Company and Chef’d, though details of those deals won’t be made available until early next year.

Innit also partnered with celebrity chef Tyler Florence to create content for the platform. Florence declared at our recent Smart Kitchen Summit that he had written his last cookbook and that the recipe is dead. Those old school forms of instruction, Florence said, will be replaced by the types of micro-content that the Innit App provides.

So it’s a little surprising when you open the app and are greeted by a list of recipes. Though tapping on them reveals what Florence was talking about. I selected a chicken wrap recipe and was immediately given the option to customize various elements, presumably based on what items I already had in my kitchen. This chicken wrap could, for example, be made with flank steak or fish.

From there, Innit walks you through the prep with the ingredients you’ll need (which can be turned into a shopping list), as well as phone-friendly, narrator-less, close up videos of how to chop, mix and cook each ingredient.

We’ll be providing a more in-depth look at the app in a future post. For the curious, Innit for iOS is available today, though at the time of this writing, you could only access by visiting innit.com and receiving a texted link.

Coca-Cola Jumps On Meal Kit Bandwagon With Chef’d Beverage Pairing

Amazon entered the meal kit delivery game and Blue Apron’s stock doesn’t look great, but that hasn’t stopped other competitors from continuing to diversify their offerings and partner with big names. The newest brand to jump into the fray is Coca-Cola, partnering with self-described “online gourmet meal kit provider” Chef’d to send consumers meal kits that include pairings of Coke or another Coca-Cola owned product with the meal.

According to an interview with Beverage Daily, Coca-Cola has dipped its toes into the dinner space before but the partnership with Chef’d is the first official commercial activity. The meal kits, called “Daily Meal Inspirations” include meals like Beef Short Ribs paired with a bottle of Coke to roasted chicken with Dasani sparkling water. The meals range from $27-$42 for two people (not the cheapest meal kit offering out there) and can be ordered on the Chef’d site.

Given a number of meal kit companies trying to capture consumer mindshare, it’s not surprising to see brands like Coca-Cola try to capitalize. But this partnership isn’t the most robust in terms of delivering something truly unique – and do consumers want a can of soda sent with their meal for a premium price? Maybe. It seems like Coke and Chef’d are trying to recreate the convenience of a restaurant experience – a meal and a drink – but instead of being delivered, fully prepared and cooked, by a waiter, it’s being shipped in a box in ingredient form to your front door.

Chef’d’s big claim to meal kit fame is their lack of a subscription model, allowing consumers to choose from over 300 online recipes and have them shipped to their doorstep as soon as the next day. The meals come portioned for two or four people and the company has offerings from gluten-free to vegan.

They do offer a meal plan – aka a subscription service – for customers who want a regular box delivered, but the on-demand style gives people who don’t want the commitment but do like the convenience or variety a meal kit service offers. So the new Coke meals will be available to consumers without a subscription attached, which may be one of the reasons the brand chose Chef’d as its first meal kit partner.

Chef’d has attracted other name brands in Big Food, including receiving a recent Series B investment round from Campbell’s for $10 million. Their total funding raised to date is just over $27 million.