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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

frozen

COVID Could Usher in a New Trend: Frozen Food as Medicine

It seems that Americans are turning to frozen food during the coronavirus pandemic. Last month, the American Frozen Food Institute (AFFI) reported that sales of frozen food jumped 94 percent in March of 2020 compared to a year before, and continued to rise by 30 percent in April.

Granted, considering the source it’s best to take the report’s numbers with a grain of salt. But this growth actually makes a lot of sense. Frozen food keeps for a long time. Americans are wary of grocery stores and worried about feeding their families, so it follows that they’d stock up on staples that can last for months and be ready when needed.

Curious to see if this was an opportunity for more curated frozen meals, this week I spoke to Christine Day, CEO of healthy frozen meal company Performance Kitchen, about how COVID has affected their sales.

“Every week the volume is picking up,” Day told me. While they had to halt their business with Delta Airlines, for whom they provided some meals for first-class passengers, she said that their online business is up over 200 percent.

Day said that when the pandemic first hit, consumers were stocking up with lots of bulk food. Then there was a phase of over-indulgence: there was “a lot of lasagnas,” she said. Now, Day thinks we’re at a phase when consumers are shifting away from bulk and comfort food to seek out healthier choices.

At the same time, consumers are still looking for convenience. Meal kits can offer that to some degree, but they require preparation and also have a relatively short lifespan in terms of how long it takes for the food to go bad. Frozen meals offer more flexibility. “When you buy a frozen meal you have a choice if your plans change,” said Day.

Performance Kitchen has two branches: Performance Kitchen and Performance Crafted (formerly called Eat Local). Both focus on providing nutritionally balanced frozen meals for specific dietary needs: keto, maternity, vegan, etc. Performance Kitchen makes wholesale meals for sale in 10,000 grocery stores nationally and online. Performance Kitchen Crafted, on the other hand, is a physical store where consumers can come and shop for branded frozen meals. It has six brick and mortar locations in Seattle.

Since COVID has forced those stores to shut their doors, Day said that Eat Local has pivoted to D2C sales and curbside pickup. Before the pandemic they only delivered to the West Coast, but they rolled out national shipping three weeks ago.

Performance Kitchen is not only positioned to tap into the rise in frozen food demand, but also new interest in a burgeoning trend: food as medicine. “People are really focused on immunity health, recognizing that issues like diabetes, hypertension, etc. increase our risk,” Day said. She credited this focus with one of the reasons they were seeing so many more sales during the COVID pandemic.

What’s remains to be seen is if the success of frozen meals, specifically those offering a food as medicine angle, will continue post-coronavirus.

Nestlé is Launching Stouffer’s and Digiorno Products made with Awesome Plant-Based Beef Grounds

Today Nestlé announced it would launch two new products featuring its Sweet Earth Awesome Grounds plant-based beef. The Digiorno Rising Crust Meatless Supreme and Stouffer’s Meatless Lasagna come from two brands in Nestlé’s portfolio.

Sweet Earth was acquired by Nestlé in 2017. The company’s plant-based Awesome Burger and Awesome Grounds, both made with pea protein, launched in U.S. supermarkets this October. Now it seems Nestlé is experimenting with where else it can put Awesome to work.

Honestly, I’m surprised this sort of vertical integration hasn’t happened earlier with alternative protein. It’s a win-win for Nestlé. The Swiss CPG giant can leverage the popularity of its frozen products to give its newer plant-based meat brand a wider audience. In turn, it can use its new meat-free products to tap into the flexitarian market and attract new vegetarian consumers.

Considering how crowded retail shelves are becoming with plant-based burgers — with startups, grocery stores, and major corporations all launching their own alt-meat products — Nestlé is smart to cross-pollinate to try and give the Sweet Earth brand a leg up.

I wouldn’t be surprised if other Big Food brands follow suit. For example, Kellogg’s could put its Morningstar Incogmeato ground “meat” in a new line of breakfast sandwiches. Similarly, Unilever could add plant-based offerings from the Vegetarian Butcher, which the corporation bought last year, into any number of its food brands.

Both the frozen pizza and lasagna will be available on Amazon Fresh in Spring 2020. If that seems too long to wait to get your mitts on some meatless microwaveable lasagna, you can visit TryItMeatless.com tomorrow (Dec. 5) and enter to win a chance to try them before they hit the market.

I Tried Daily Harvest, The Pre-Made Frozen Meal Delivery Service For Millennials

I’ve always wanted to be a smoothie person: someone who starts the day on a healthy note with a cup of blended vegetables. Instead I usually settle for toast.

But all that changed this week when I worked my way through a box of Daily Harvest’s smoothie and meal cups. The company is a subscription service that sends pre-portioned cups of frozen healthy food to your door, from smoothies to overnight oats, matcha lattés, grain bowls, and even soups.

Photo: Catherine Lamb

How it works
To get Daily Harvest delivered to your door, you first have to select your subscription level: either weekly (6, 9, 12, or 24 (!!!) cups per week) or monthly (24 cups per month). Next, you select your cups from Daily Harvest’s selection of sweet and savory pre-prepped options.

Subscriptions can be an issue when it applies to food that can go bad (case in point: meal kits). However, this issue doesn’t really apply to Daily Harvest since all their food is frozen, so consumers can choose exactly when they want to make their kale smoothie or harvest bowl. They can also stop or pause their subscription whenever their freezer gets full or they want to take a break. Bonus: pre-frozen ingredients means you don’t have to dilute your smoothie with ice.

The pros
When the order arrived at my door I was initially concerned about the excessive packaging — a blight for many meal delivery services. But, at least according to Daily Harvest’s website, the cardboard delivery box is recyclable, as are the meal cups themselves. The liner holding the dry ice is biodegradable and purportedly made of recycled denim, which is pretty cool. So props to Daily Harvest on the packaging front!

My box had a mixture of sweet and savory options, including:

  • Matcha + Lemongrass Latte
  • Cacao + Avocado Smoothie
  • Ginger + Greens Smoothie
  • Sweet Potato + Wild Rice Hash
  • Cauliflower Rice + Pesto
  • Brussels Sprouts + Lime Pad Thai

The preparation itself couldn’t be easier. For the smoothies, you fill the cups of pre-chopped ingredients to the top with the liquid of your choice, dump the whole thing into a blender, and blitz into oblivion. My one small critique is that I found a few smoothies too thick and had to eventually add more liquid to thin them out.

The savory bowl options were even simpler: just dump the cup into a bowl, microwave, and eat.

Another benefit is that you can pour the smoothies/bowls right back into their cup container for transport or on-the-go consumption. There’s even a little opening on the lid for a straw.

I was pleasantly surprised by the taste. The smoothies taste “healthy,” but not in an undrinkable way. The ingredients were clearly fresh-frozen and the caliber was about as good as I’d get at an artisanal smoothie bar. There were a few misses in the savory options — undercooked sweet potatoes or mushy cauliflower rice — but overall the flavors there were also pretty delicious.

The cons
My biggest qualm with Daily Harvest was the size of some of the portions. The smoothies were pretty hearty, filled with good fats from avocados and almonds, and always kept me full throughout the morning. However, the savory cups usually only filled up half a bowl at most topped out around 300 calories. If I ate one for lunch, I typically ended up hunting for a snack by 3pm.

Daily Harvest’s pricing is also pretty high. Weekly delivery shakes out between $7.49 and $7.99 per cup, while monthly delivery will set you back $167.76 ($6.99 per cup).

That said, if you buy a smoothie at a fancy-pants juice bar it’ll likely cost you around 10 bucks, so Daily Harvest’s options are actually slightly cheaper. And since you don’t have to shop or prep any of the ingredients yourself, you’re certainly paying a premium for convenience and flexibility. But it still feels pretty expensive to me, especially since you can buy pre-chopped frozen fruits and veggies at the supermarket on the cheap. For the savory bowls, the cost doesn’t seem worth what you got.

Conclusions
Though Daily Harvest probably isn’t for me — I like doing my own shopping and cooking too much, and am a real cheapskate — I think it merges a few trends we’ve been seeing a lot of lately.

First and foremost, Daily Harvest nails it on convenience from every aspect. Its meals are pre-prepped, pre-cooked, and ship directly to your door. The company also capitalizes off of the recent boom in frozen food, which gives consumers access to healthy food with flexibility around when and what they want to eat. Lastly, with its bright hues and prominent avocado imagery, Daily Harvest really pops on Instagram and other social media sales channels.

Then again, the cost aspect is a real issue. I can’t be the only person who would balk at the thought of spending that kind of money for someone else to chop my vegetables and assemble them into smoothie-ready packages.

In the end, I think Daily Harvest’s pre-prepped meals are a smart offering. By combining ease and convenience, they’re sure to attract a contingent of busy millennials who wants to take the guesswork out of healthy eating. The question is if those customers will stick to their Daily Harvest subscription plan even as the costs add up, especially if the offerings don’t alway satisfy.

Me? I’m sticking with toast.

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