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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

emeals

Mucho Makes Shoppable Meal Planning More Dynamic & Efficient

“You do the cooking. We do the rest.” That’s the tagline of Mucho, a London-based startup which aims to create personalized, convenient meal plans that can be customized a whole slew of ways. And they really do take you pretty much ALLLLL the way through the meal journey.

Customers can use the Mucho app to select recipes based on dietary preferences (low sugar, vegetarian, etc.), budget, and how people they want to feed. The app then builds a customized shopping basket around the recipe(s), which users can either transfer into a printable shopping list or, if they’re in the U.K., they can also have their shopping list delivered through grocery delivery service Ocado. Users can also add on bits and pieces like cleaning products or snacks to their delivery list.

As of now, Mucho has over 1000 recipes in their database, culled from 40 online influencers and 20 brands — most of whom focus on healthy recipes. 

When I first heard of Mucho, I thought “Isn’t this just emeals, but British?” Both services offer personalized recipe selections, both create shopping lists, and both are linked up with grocery delivery companies so users can have their meals’ ingredients delivered straight to their door.

According to their cofounder Shanshan Xu, however, Mucho differs from emeals — and existing shoppable recipe services in general — quite a bit.

First of all, it’s more flexible. “We’ve found that people’s mood changes all the time,” said Xu. While emeals requires a subscription that locks users into a set number of dishes from the get-go, home cooks can use Mucho as much — or as little — as they’d like. They update their dietary profile and the number of people they’ll be cooking for every time they open up the app.

Emeals does allow their users switch between plans, but you can’t customize day-by-by. Which can be a hassle if you’re someone that, say, wants to eat vegan one week and flexitarian the next, or isn’t consistently dining with a partner or family. 

Mucho can also be cheaper — depending on how much you use it. Jenn Marsten reported for The Spoon that prices for emeals vary based on how long you choose to commit, but it costs $29.99 for three months or $59.99 for a full year, not including the cost of ingredients and grocery delivery. Mucho’s app is free to use, and if customers choose to have groceries delivered through the app they add a 5% fee to the final bill.

Do a little high school math, and we can determine that if you’re buying less than $1,200 in groceries per year, Mucho costs less than emeals. While $1,200 isn’t much at all to spend on groceries, especially for families, emeals also requires users to sign up for grocery delivery services (such as Amazon Prime or Instacart) separately, whereas Mucho builds Ocado delivery into the service. Xu told me that they’re hoping to soon shift the price burden away from the consumer and onto the grocery retailer.

To me, Mucho is a good option for people who want a more dynamic meal-planning service than emeals, but who need more hand-holding than is offered by shoppable recipes.

I’m betting the app will be popular with young, single folk (read: millennials) who want to cook more (and more adventurously), but also value the convenience of grocery delivery — and are willing to pay for it. Plus, Mucho’s bright, poppy graphics seem like they were made with this audience in mind.

Speaking of millennials, I tried the app myself; it was fun and easy to use, and while I couldn’t use the delivery capabilities (because I’m in the U.S.), I could definitely see myself incorporating Mucho into my grocery routine, especially when, as Xu reassured me, the delivery option comes over the pond.

The app has over 10,000 downloads so far. The Mucho cofounders put together money themselves to create the beta version of their app, and their roughly 10-person team is working to perfect their product before raising their seed round.

The eMeals/Meredith Partnership Brings Even More Simplicity and Variety to Home Cooking

Busy parents and uncreative chefs alike constantly grapple with the question of what to make for dinner.

Jane DeLaney and Jenny Cochran created eMeals partially to help answer that question in the form of a subscription-based meal planning, budgeting, and shopping service. You tell the app what you want for dinner, and it offers a variety of plans to choose from.

But even us busy folks want to try something new once in a while, and eMeals just made that possible on top of everything else it offers. Just today, the company announced a partnership with publishing powerhouse Meredith Corporation. Together, the two companies will integrate select Meredith brands with the eMeals app by providing users with recipes hand-picked by editors.

Through the partnership, eMeals users will get access to additional recipes curated by editors at Allrecipes, Better Homes & Gardens, and EatingWell. Those recipes will be available through the eMeals platform, just like any other. At the same time, readers of those publications will get a chance to experience the simplicity of the eMeals platform. eMeals CEO Forrest Collier broke it down simply when we spoke on the phone: “[The partnership] gives their users a different way to access the content in a more practical way. And for our users, it gives them even more options.”

That means an eMeals user on the Classic Meals plan could toggle back and forth between those options and the ones from the EatingWell feed. Or a diabetic user could get a much simpler, more streamlined look at Allrecipes (which is enormous) to find new and interesting dishes that also fit within their dietary needs.

Other elements of the eMeals service will remain the same. You’ll still be able to add extra household staples like milk and toothpaste to your orders, and those orders will still be available for delivery or pickup, if you so desire.

As I recently wrote, eMeals is something of a cross between a meal kit and a creating dinner from scratch. Collier calls the company “Meal Kit 2.0,” or “the meal kit alternative.” As he noted during our conversation, a lot of people simply don’t want to pay $10 per person for dinner multiple times a week. He also points to the oft-debated issue of how “convenient” a meal kit actually is: “For a lot of [people], the recipes lean more difficult. Even though someone cut up your garlic cloves, it’s still a lot of steps, a lot of ingredients.”

And sure, with a service like eMeals, no one’s going to measure out your teaspoon of curry powder for you. But with many plans, the recipes can be considerably simpler to put together. For example, this week’s Quick features six dinners that take no more than 30 minutes total, along with one slow-cooker stew. Several recipes repeat ingredients, as well. “We give all the convenience. We solve the affordability, we solve the variety,” says Collier, adding that “everything in the grocery store is a possibility.”

The partnership with Meredith also addresses an entirely different issue, which is curation. For some people, even sitting down to pick through the many plans eMeals offers is a time burden. So editors basically telling you what you can or should eat simplifies the process even more without sacrificing the variety eMeals is known for.

Whether this type of platform becomes the new standard in meal planning is yet to be determined. But seeing as I can use it to choose food, buy ingredients, get them delivered, and get the blessing of Better Homes & Gardens without ever leaving my armchair, I’d say eMeals has taken a big step in ushering in the future of recipes.

This Menu-Planning Service Eliminates the Stress of Deciding What’s for Dinner

Somewhere between meal kits and planning dinner from scratch sit recipe-planning apps—you still cook the food, but you don’t have to create the dish from scratch. It’s cheaper than a meal kit, but you still have to shop for and prep the ingredients.

Two busy moms (who are also sisters) recently took this concept a step further when they created eMeals, a subscription-based menu, budgeting, and shopping plan. It’s basically shoppable recipes on steroids: you tell the app your meal preferences and dietary needs/restrictions; it tells you what to cook for the next seven days and how much the ingredients will cost. If you want to skip the shopping step, you can also choose to have those ingredients delivered or available for pickup at your grocery store.

Users choose the week’s recipes from several different plans: weight management (Paleo, portion control), dietary restrictions (diabetes, gluten intolerance), family meals, and slow cooker meals are just a few of the options.

Once you’ve selected the recipes, the app turns your menu into a shopping list of ingredients. You can also add your odds and ends, like toothpaste or milk, to that list. The rest is easy: select the number of people you want to cook for (up to 6) and your preferred grocery store.

Prices for the service vary based on how long you choose to commit: $29.99 for three months or $59.99 for a full year. (This does not include the cost of ingredients.)

Right now, partner stores include Walmart, Kroger, ALDI, Target, and Whole Foods, among others. With Kroger and Walmart, you can arrange to pick the ingredients up at the store, curbside. eMeals has also partnered with AmazonFresh and Instacart to provide delivery services.

According to one user, the menu plan you choose can affect which stores are available. For example, choosing the all-organic menu means you’ll probably have to buy from Whole Foods or other “health” stores—which usually means spending more money. I imagine your choice of stores is also affected by where you live; someone in San Francisco will probably have a lot more options than someone in Newark, Ohio.

Unlike a meal kit, with eMeals, the cost of ingredients isn’t baked into the overall subscription. For a second I though that rendered a service like eMeals pointless. Then I considered how much trial and error often goes into recipe planning. Unless you’re cooking the same rotation of dishes every single week, you’re probably going to wind up buying things at the grocery store you don’t use. Something like eMeals could save a lot of money on unused ingredients, depending on what you cook.

In his recent 2018 predictions, my colleague Michael Wolf noted that the recipe has become more, not less, important in this age of meal kits and 24/7 delivery services: It’s our “automated shopping list, the instruction set for our appliances, and the content is becoming dynamic, atomized and personalized depending on our personal preference.”

Shoppable recipes are seeing a lot of action as of late. Allrecipes and AmazonFresh partnered last year, as did Kroger and Myxx. Whisk, meanwhile, just joined forces with Amazon to offer shoppable recipes from over 20 publishers.

What’s attractive about a service like eMeals is that it turns the concept of shoppable recipe into an entire plan for the week or month, rather than just offering a set of individual recipes. There’s a wide audience for that kind of service: busy parents, caregivers, those managing significant food restrictions, and lazy, uncreative cooks like yours truly. All we need now is for the service to get integrated with a guided cooking program. Which will probably happen at some point in the very near future.