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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Home Chef

Impossible Goes the Meal Kit Route With Home Chef Partnership

Meal kit company Home Chef announced today it is partnering with Impossible Foods to offer the latter’s plant-based burgers in its kits. This is the first time Impossible has shown up in the meal kit realm, and it comes at a point when consumer demand for plant-based meat is rapidly growing.

Home Chef will offer multiple recipes that give customers the option to swap out regular ol’ protein for Impossible’s burger, which will come as a 12-oz, package of ground meat for use in a range of recipes that would ordinarily call for beef.

The addition of Impossible to the Home Chef roster is part of the meal kit company’s new “Customize It” feature, which lets users adjust their weekly order to fit their needs, whether that’s extra protein, more veggies, or additional servings. Think Chipotle for meal kits. It’s also the latest way in which the Kroger-owned meal kit company is trying to diversify its offerings to meet different consumers’ lifestyles.

Meal kits are just the latest expansion for Impossible, which up until recently had only been available in restaurants. The company launched its direct-to-consumer online store in June. Those in the lower 48 states can buy bulk orders of Impossible products through it.

But while Impossible may be ahead of its rival Beyond in terms of D2C (Beyond has announced but not yet launched its own e-commerce site), it lags behind in meal kits. Beyond has been available in Blue Apron and HelloFresh kits for some time.

Since the start of the pandemic, Impossible has grown its grocery store footprint by more than 30x and its products are now in about 5,000 grocery stores. Meal kits are another road into consumers’ homes, an important destination seeing as how a lot more people are staying home these days. It doesn’t hurt, either, that the long-struggling meal kit market is actually making something of a comeback.

Food Tech News: Nestlé Opens Plant-based Meat Factory in China, Home Chef Data Breach

It’s certainly an odd Memorial Day weekend, what with most of us unable to travel or gather on beaches or rooftops or invite our friends over to grill. But hopefully it’s a relaxing one for you, nonetheless.

Did you know that a proven way to make any holiday weekend better is to kick it off with some food tech news? This edition has stories on Home Chef’s data breach, Nestlé’s first plant-based meat factory in China, and some new celebrity investors for vegan tuna company Good Catch. Enjoy!

Home Chef confirms data breach
Meal delivery service Home Chef confirmed this week that it had indeed suffered a data breach (h/t Techcrunch). The company stated that the names, email addresses, phone numbers, mailing addresses of some of its customers were hacked, along with the last four digits of their credit cards. Not all of its users were affected. The stolen information was published online, along with other hacked data from 10 other companies.

Photo: Nestlé

Nestlé to open plant-based meat factory in China
CPG giant Nestlé announced plans this week to build a new plant-based meat manufacturing site in Tianjin, roughly 72 miles outside of Beijing (h/t Fortune). This will be Nestlé’s first production facility for plant-based products in Asia. The company noted that the food sector has undergone a “quiet revolution” over the past few years, as consumers turn to more environmentally friendly foods — like plant-based meat.

Photo: Good Catch Foods

Plant-based seafood company reveals celebrity investors
Gathered Foods, the company behind plant-based seafood company Good Catch, announced a new group of celebrity investors this week. The list includes big names like Woody Harrelson, Paris Hilton and Lance Bass. Good Catch’s vegan tuna is available at 4,500 retailers in the US and UK, and the company plans to expand to more international locations in 2020. The celebrity investment news comes four months after Good Catch announced a $36.8 million Series B financing round with investors including General Mills.

Could the COVID-19 Outbreak Save Meal Kits?

When I get anxious or stressed out, my natural response is to cook elaborate meals for myself. Following complex recipes soothes me.

But I understand that that is absolutely not the case for many folks out there. Nonetheless, in a time where we’re not supposed to be leaving the house, there’s only so much delivery you can order in — and so many meals of spaghetti you can make.

That’s where meal kits could come in handy. They’re delivered to your door (no venturing out to grocery stores!), contain ingredients for a balanced meal, and give folks who might not be super comfortable in the kitchen some training wheels to get them cooking. On top of that, most meal kit services are at least slightly cheaper than ordering delivery, especially when you factor in tip.

I reached out to a few meal kit companies to see how the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent social distancing is affecting them. And the news was uniformly positive! Unlike many food-related companies, meal kits are actually seeing a boost in sales.

Purple Carrot’s founder and CEO Andy Levitt told me that the company had seen a “sharp increase in demand for our plant-based meal kits since COVID-19 has been shifting consumer behavior.” A representative from HomeChef emailed me that the company was seeing an “unprecedented increase in orders” with “more people cooking at home.” Over email, Blue Apron’s CEO Linda Findley Kozlowski also noted that the company had seen “a sharp increase in consumer demand.” No one would disclose exact numbers.

All of the companies I contacted emphasized that their employees were following CDC guidelines to ensure food safety during sourcing and packing. One benefit of meal kits is that the ingredients are packed in a warehouse, which means there are also fewer people touching your food and less chance of contamination than in a supermarket.

As we’ve written about time and again on The Spoon, the meal kit industry has been struggling for quite a while. Will this recent boost in subscribers be enough to sustain meal kits? Levitt is optimistic; he anticipated that the demand would continue even after the COVID-19 pandemic dies down.

I’m perhaps less so. The basic problems for meal kits — managing disparate supply chains, encouraging customer stickiness, making recipes easy enough for anyone to cook, and competing against food delivery — will still be present in our post-coronavirus future.

True, maybe some folks who are trying out meal kits now will get hooked and decide to continue on that path. But overall, if meal kit companies want to survive I think they’ll have to continue to innovate to cater to shifting consumer needs by focusing on retail, enabling more customization, and creating easier, faster recipes.

But for now, meal kits are filling an important need for consumers who want to cook more at home, but aren’t sure how. It’s a small but noteworthy silver lining in the time of COVID-19.

Blue Apron Ends Its Jet.com Partnership to Focus on Its ‘Core’ Business

Meal kit company Blue Apron announced this week it is terminating its partnership with e-commerce site Jet.com.

On its August 6 Q2 2019 earnings call, Blue Apron CEO Linda Findley Kozlowski said the company needed to focus on its core business, which is its direct-to-consumer sales of meal kits.

“We have not kept up with the ever evolving needs and preferences of our customers over the past couple of years, and we are behind it,” Kozlowski said on the call, adding that part of the reason for that is because the company “redirected attention of way from innovating in our core offering as we tested alternative distribution channels for the past year and a half.”

Blue Apron made its meal kits available for delivery via the Walmart subsidiary Jet.com in 2018 in NYC. At the time, the company appeared to be looking for ways to revitalize its struggling business through third-party sales channels (the company sold meal kits for a time at Costco stores, too).

But based on this week’s call, that move appears to have been a distraction, and Blue Apron seems to believe stepping away from these third-party sales channels and tapping “unrealized opportunities” within its core business model is the place to invest time and resources at the moment.

To that end Kozlowski outlined a new strategy on the call for the company’s future that includes focusing on fresh food, offering more convenience and flexibility in terms of menu options, making Blue Apron’s various digital touchpoints easier to use, and increasing marketing efforts.

But even if Blue Apron is able to pull its subscription-model business back on track, the company’s long-term viability is still uncertain. Right now, meal kits only account for 21.9 percent of online grocery services used in 2019. NPD recently reported that 93 million adults in the U.S. want to try a meal kit, but the same research also highlighted a shift away from traditional dinner-only mail-order meal kits towards ones that can be found in retail stores and/or cater to other eating times, such as lunch and snacks.

Some meal kit companies have already responded to these trends: Kroger and Home Chef started piloting new meal offerings like “heat and eat” and lunch options, which they sell in Kroger stores. Sun Basket, too, expanded its options to include breakfast, lunch, and snacks, though the company remains a direct-to-consumer subscription service like Blue Apron.

Meanwhile, Blue Apron itself has always had an issue with customer churn, partly because its kits tend to be expensive and time consuming, even for people who love to cook. That means what the company winds up offering customers in terms of more flexibility and convenience in the future will surely give an idea of how successful the company’s renewed focus on its core business will be.

Snap Kitchen Expands Prepared Meal Delivery to 15 Cities

Austin, TX-based Snap Kitchen has doubled-down on its e-commerce goals and expanded to 15 U.S. cities, the Houston Chronicle reports.

Snap Kitchen, who sells fresh, healthy grab-and-go meals, started out as a retail company in 2010 and operates 34 brick-and-mortar locations across Austin, Philadelphia, Houston, and the Dallas/Ft. Worth area.

But the company’s model of late has been to focus on growing the e-commerce side of its business, hence the recent expansion of its direct-to-consumer meal delivery subscription service, which is now available in Baltimore, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma City, Pittsburgh, San Antonio, and Washington, D.C., to name a few. Snap Kitchen Chief Executive Jon Carter told the Houston Chronicle that the company wouldn’t be opening any new retail stores for now, adding that “our model moving forward is to be asset light in our retail presence.”

On its website, Snap Kitchen touts itself as a service for healthy eating, and all of its ready-to-eat meals are free of antibiotics, hormones, artificial preservatives, and gluten. Customers can choose from a number of “lifestyle plans” on the menu that include vegetarian, keto, and low carb. Customers use the Snap Kitchen website or iOS app to pick and manage their subscriptions. All foods are shipped chilled rather than frozen and are ready to eat upon arrival.

Price-wise, Snap Kitchen offers six- to 12-meal boxes that cost between $3.99 to $12.99 per meal. That’s about on par with Kettlebell Kitchen, who also delivers prepared meals, but higher than Icon Meals, whose service ranges from about $7 to $11 per prepared meal.

And those are just a couple of the competitors Snap Kitchen will face as it further expands into the meal delivery market. With the future of traditional meal kits — that is, ingredient kits where customers actually prep and cook the food themselves a la Blue Apron — still uncertain, many companies are starting to offer options for prepared meals. Sun Basket recently added new products that can be quickly assembled for meals like lunch, where there’s often less time to prep food. Kroger and Home Chef are piloting a program for new heat-and-serve meals as well as lunch options, and while the latter’s offerings are only available in retail stores at the moment, the speak to recent findings from NPD: that opportunities in meal delivery are no longer just about providing dinner options.

When it comes to Snap Kitchen’s expansion, Carter told the Houston Chronicle that his company is “prepared to increase its kitchen production by 50 percent to 100 percent” and to “make production more predictable and reduce waste.” Now we’ll see if those goals plus a wider footprint across the U.S. will be enough to keep the company competitive in the meal delivery market.

Kroger’s Q1 Earnings Call Highlights the Growth and Challenges of Supermarket Delivery

There was quite a bit of buzz this week around Kroger. Much of it came from the supermarket giant’s Q1 2029 earnings call, which took place yesterday. While fiscal results were somewhat mixed, right off the bat, Kroger chairman and CEO W. Rodney McMullen highlighted growth of what he called “an omnichannel platform to serve customers with anything, anytime, anywhere.”

In other words, right now is all about doubling down on delivery efforts for Kroger.

On the call, McMullen noted that digital sales grew 42 percent over the quarter, making delivery and/or pickup options available to 93 percent of Kroger’s customers. Online grocery delivery is now available at 2,126 Kroger locations and pickup at 1,685 locations. The company plans to have those options available to “everyone in America” by the end of this year, according to McMullen.

“Our customers don’t distinguish between an in-store and online experience. Rather they typically have a food-related need or a problem to solve and want the easiest, most seamless solution,” said McMullen.

Pieces of that solution include a growing list of companies Kroger partners with to not just expand shopping options for customers but also improve the logistics around doing so. To that end, Kroger has been leveraging a number of partnerships with companies over the last quarter, including Nuro, Microsoft, meal kit company Home Chef, Walgreens, and Ocado, with whom Kroger is piloting smart sheds that use robots to fulfill grocery orders.

The Kroger/Ocado partnership just broke ground on the first of 20 of these automated warehouses that the supermarket chain plans to open over the next couple years. McMullen said that this initial warehouse, located in the grocery store’s hometown of Cincinnati, OH, “introduced transformative format of e-commerce fulfillment and logistics technology in America. This in turn means Kroger customers will get fresher food faster than ever before.”

Speaking of faster than ever before: Kroger made good on that promise a few days before the call, when it started quietly testing 30-minute grocery delivery in Cincinnati via a new program called Kroger Rush. Users download a specific app, also called Kroger Rush, to order items and have them delivered. As The Spoon’s Chris Albrecht pointed out, that service seems to be aimed more at delivering last-minute lunch or dinner, though it’s not hard to imagine a point where Kroger might digitally replicate the “express lane” concept at brick-and-mortar stores, which speed up the checkout process for customers getting just a few last-minute items.

Kroger’s delivery-centric Q1 underscores something else Chris highlighted in his post from earlier this week: grocery retailers across the board are pushing the innovation envelope harder than ever as they compete with one another to deliver the fastest, most frictionless shopping experience to the customer. The race for the virtual grocery store aisle has really just begun.

Kroger and HomeChef Are Piloting New Meal Kits to Meet Different Lifestyle Needs

Yesterday, Kroger and Home Chef announced a pilot program that will add options to their existing meal kit line, which are sold in Kroger stores around the U.S. According to a press release, the new pilot will be tested in 68 Kroger stores.

The new meals offerings target different people’s cooking and eating needs based on their lifestyles. This is an important factor in the evolution of meal kits, since one of the concerns around meal kits is the amount of time it takes to prepare a recipe, even when ingredients were pre-portioned.

As such, Home Chef’s new meal offerings fall into three different categories:

Oven-Ready: Home Chef Oven-Ready meals come in oven-safe packaging and require less than five minutes of prep time. Meals are designed for two people and start at $8.50 per serving. Given that you don’t have to use pots or pans to cook the food, this one seems perfect for those who just want to heat some food in the oven and chow down.

Heat and Eat: The Home Chef Heat and Eat line is kind of like Oven-Ready, except that items can be heated in a microwave, too. More interesting about this line is the mix and match option: customers can buy full meals, just the proteins, or a bunch of sides. So if you’re a master of making side dishes but laughably bad at cooking meat (like I am), you can pick and choose what to cook and what to just heat based on your level of culinary skill. Kits go for $6.50 per serving.

Lunch Kits: Who doesn’t love a grain bowl? Home Chef’s new Lunch Kits offering has plenty of those, along with salads, sandwiches, tacos, all with fully cooked proteins. You just have to toss the items together, which can be done at home quickly or even at work. At $6.00 per serving, this is quite a bit cheaper than buying a big salad or grain bowl from a lot of fast-casual places, especially in bigger cities, where said offerings can go as high as $15.

Kroger purchased Home Chef a little less than one year ago and started rolling out the latter’s meal kits to stores at the end of 2018.

However, focusing on retail isn’t a guarantee for the meal kit category. Albertsons bought meal kit company Plated in 2017 but just recently laid off 10 percent of its staff to cut back on expenses, though, as my colleague Chris Albrecht pointed out when he reported the news, it’s hard to imagine Albertsons giving up on meal kits altogether.

Rather, future growth from meal kits could come from providing new categories of meals and snacks. A recent study by NPD found that 93 million adults in the U.S. want to try meal kits and, more importantly, that meal kits can be more than just dinner. The new Home Chef offerings seem to be in line with this argument, particularly Heat and Eat’s mix-and-match options and the Lunch Kits offering. All of which is to say the savior of the meal kit might just be more meals, tailored towards different times of day and a wider variety of needs.

The new meal “solutions,” as Home Chef calls them, will be available at Kroger locations (including subsidiary stores) first in Illinois and Ohio starting in May. In the press release, Kroger said it plans to expand to additional markets over the rest of 2019.

91 Year Old Grandma is a Hit on FoodCloud’s Home Chef Marketplace in India

When it comes to cooking, grandmas might just be the killer app. At least, that’s what FoodCloud has potentially uncovered.

Based and operating in New Delhi, India, FoodCloud is an online marketplace where home chefs can sell food they prepare in their kitchen. Customers order from menus from more than 3,000 home cooks on the FoodCloud platform, and meals are then delivered via different third-party delivery services. Founded in 2015, FoodCloud has served 450,000 meals to date.

“Homemade food is held in great esteem in India,” FoodCloud Co-Founder and CEO, Vendant Kanoi told me by phone, “It is looked at as healthier.”

To participate, Chefs go through a rigorous on-boarding process, according to Kanoi. First, each home chef must be registered with the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), which is the country’s equivalent of the USDA, for kitchen inspection and hygiene regulation. After that, a home cook’s food is taste-tested by not just FoodCloud employees, but also local food bloggers and critics.

“It’s not just employees tasting food,” Kanoi said, “It’s not just about what we like, it’s about getting independent views from knowledgeable people.”

Kanoi said that 80 percent of the home cooks on the platform are stay-at-home moms. Among the most popular is a 91-year-old who sells gujurati-style “Nani’s Nasta,” which translates as “grandmother’s snacks.” Customers are pretty evenly split between busy families ordering a homemade meal for delivery and corporate customers getting food for meetings and events.

FoodCloud generates revenue by taking a 20 – 35 percent commission on the total value of an order placed. Taking up to a third seems pretty steep, but then FoodCloud is delivering the audience and facilitating the transactions and delivery. DishDivvy, a similar service in California, charges just 15 percent, but things like cost of living are different in India so the economics play out differently.

Kanoi said that roughly 15 home cooks on FoodCloud make $20,000 USD per year, and roughly 100 make $2,000 USD. That too, doesn’t sound like a lot (California’s AB-626 law caps the yearly income generated by home cooking at $50,000). But consider that the average per capita income in Delhi is just a little over $5,300.

FoodCloud is also diversifying both its product line and its geography. Last year the company introduced its own line of homemade CPG snacks, and FoodCloud is expanding its marketplace to both Calcutta and Mumbai.

Kanoi said FoodCloud is not profitable yet, but is “close” to being breaking even operationally. FoodCloud has sixteen employees and has raised roughly $500,000 in angel funding as part of the FoodX accelerator.

The concept of home-chef-as-a-business is just taking off here in the U.S., and is at the beginning of its regulatory journey. I asked Kanoi if there were any cultural differences between the U.S. and India when it comes to buying food from someone else’s kitchen. He didn’t think so, saying “It’s global trend now. People are moving towards healthier food and people view homemade food as a better option. And you get something while supporting an entrepreneur.”

While home cooking as a business is just taking off here in the U.S., a positive outlook like that may be enough to convert skeptics, and make any grandmother proud.

Nielsen: Move Into Retail Making Moola for Meal Kits

The move into retail has been a smart one for the meal kit industry, as the new sales channel helped drive meal kit growth in 2018, according to a report out this week from Nielsen (h/t Grocery Dive).

Overall, Nielsen found that meal kit users (both online and offline) have increased 36 percent throughout 2018 and that 14.3 million households purchased meal kits in the last six months of 2018 (up from 3.8 million household from the end of 2017). And Nielsen says there’s more room to grow, with 23 percent of American households saying they would consider purchasing a meal kit within the next six months.

Nielsen points out that the majority of meal kit sales still happened online in 2018, but growth came from in-store sales, which makes sense as meal kits made their debut in grocery aisles last year: Kroger purchased Home Chef, Albertsons rolled out Plated meal kits, and HelloFresh made a deal with Giant and Stop & Shop. Nielsen says that 187 new meal kit items were introduced at retail outlets last year, and that in-store meal kit sales generated $93 million over the course of 2018 with the number of in-store meal kit purchasers increasing by 2.2 million households in less than a year. This jump accounted for a 60 percent growth in meal kit users.

So who’s buying meal kits? In a blog post, Nielsen writes:

Overall, affluent consumers earning an income of more than $100k drove meal kit growth across online and in-store in 2018. Compared to 2017, these consumers increased their online meal kit purchases by 6 points and their in-store purchases by 9 points. Across both outlets, growth is also being led by consumers between the ages of 35-44, who showed a 4.3 point increase in meal kit purchases online and a 9.2 point increase in those bought in-store. Meanwhile, meal kit purchases from older consumers aged 45-54 declined 2.8 points online and 7 points in-store over the past year.

We are typically pretty bearish on the future of mail-order meal kits here at The Spoon. A lot of that sourness is driven by our own experiences with the product. Mail-order meal kits are expensive, they generate a lot of packaging waste, they are a lot of work to make, and because the ingredients are fresh, you pretty much have to make them as soon as they arrive (whether you still want that recipe or not) or else they spoil.

Meal kits in grocery stores, however, can still offer the same benefits of meal kits — pre-portioned fresh ingredients, introduction to new types of cuisine — but do it in a way that is more convenient and fits into a consumer’s existing daily flow.

And we’re really just at the beginning of what is possible for meal kits at retail as they only started rolling out last year. There is tons of head room for experimentation and innovation, whether that comes in the form of frozen foods, meal kits sold in new retail outlets like drug stores, offices, or even customized meal kits created in stores and brought out to you curbside so they can be made that night.

Home Chef Launches Customizable Meal Kits, Expands to 500 More Kroger Stores

The customizable meal kit is sort of a white whale for The Spoon. The idea that you could pick and choose your ingredients and have them assembled and delivered to you in a timely fashion is something we’ve been watching, waiting (and writing) on for the past couple of years. Today we got one step closer to that reality when Home Chef and its parent company, Kroger, announced a new Customize It feature for its meal kits.

According to the press release, The Customize It feature is available to customers shopping for meal kits online at Home Chef, where they can now swap, double or upgrade ingredients on “many of their favorite recipes.”

Kroger claims the move makes Home Chef the first “leading meal kit company” to introduce this type of customization. We haven’t seen anything similar from other meal kit companies, so this seems to mark a milestone for the meal kit sector.

Depending on how much of it is allowed, adding customization features gives more power to the consumer and could help fend off issues mail order meal kits have with customer retention. If you have a particular allergy or taste preference, being able to swap out an ingredient means shoppers can choose from a broader selection of meal kit menus rather than abandoning the service entirely. And the ability to double ingredients makes a lot of sense for people throwing a dinner party — everything you need arrives in the box ready to go.

Now we’ll see if this customization will trickle down into the meal kits Home Chef sells through Kroger. The companies also announced today that Home Chef meal kits will be available in an additional 500 Kroger stores, bringing the total number of Home Chef retail locations to more than 700.

We’ve already seen some signs of meal kit customization with Kroger’s “Easy for You!” frozen buffet. Easy for You! allows customers to assemble various frozen ingredients together into an oven-ready bag they can cook at home. Broadening that customization to fresh food in Home Chef meal kits could allow for customers to create a bespoke meal kit online with the pre-portioned ingredients they want, and have that packaged meal either ready for pick-up at the store or delivered to their home same day.

This is the reason we’re waiting so intently for customized meal kits, this combination of choice and convenience could drastically alter the way we shop and eat.

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.

Kroger Expands Home Chef Meal Kit Sales in Walgreens Drug Stores

Kroger and Walgreens announced today that the two companies are building on a pilot program launched in October that has Kroger selling both grocery items and its Home Chef meal kits in Walgreens drug stores.

Walgreens will carve out floor space for a new “Kroger Express” section in select stores that will sell 2,300 curated items including meat, dairy, produce, CPG products as well as Home Chef meal kits. Kroger purchased Home Chef earlier this year for $200 million. The first such Kroger Express is already up and running in Florence, Kentucky (near Kroger’s Cincinnati headquarters) with twelve more pilot stores also across Northern Kentucky opening early next year.

At the same time, Kroger said that today it launched sales of Home Chef Express meal kits across 65 Walgreens in the Chicago area. The Home Chef Express meal kits serve two, promise to take only 15 minutes to prepare, will feature a rotating menu and will cost roughly ~$17.00.

For Spoon readers, what’s noteworthy about this news is the continuation of a trend that has meal kits moving to new and non-traditional retail outlets. Chef’d was a pioneer in this and had actually partnered with Walgreen’s as a meal kit sales channel in June of this year… before it abruptly shut down. According to The Wall Street Journal, Albertsons was going to sell Plated meal kits in Rite-Aid stores as part of their planned merger, but that merger fell through.

Kroger’s agreement with Walgreens is still just a pilot, so we’ll see if consumers want to grab a Hickory Seasoned Salmon and when they stock up on exfoliating cream. But it reinforces how Kroger continues to be nimble in its bid to fight off Amazon from swallowing up the grocery industry. In addition to this deal, the grocery giant is also experimenting with self-driving delivery vehicles, established an innovation lab, and is building out robot-driven warehouse fulfillment centers.