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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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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.

Market Map: Booze Tech in 2019

From countertop devices used in the home kitchen to delivery services, the number of avenues in which companies can get booze to customers has expanded in recent years. And since it’s still the time of year when drinking on patios is a popular sport, we decided to focus our latest market map on all the tech out there currently changing the alcohol space.

In the U.S., alcohol consumption has actually stagnated, according to IWSR, but part of this is due to consumers now seeking quality over quantity when it comes to their drinking. Which might explain the rise in the number of companies offering recommendations apps that rate beers, wines, and spirits as well as at-home devices for the kitchen countertop that give the user a little more control over the quality of their drinks.

For The Spoon’s Booze Tech in 2019 market map, we divvied the market up into several categories where technology is making the biggest impact on the way people get, create, and consume beer, wine, and spirits. That’s everything from apps that update you on the best craft beers available to at-home bartending devices that let you release your inner mixologist to the many ways in which companies are making it possible to get the booze delivered right to your doorstep. We’ve narrowed the companies down to a collection of startups and major corporations alike. As with any post that outlines a market, this list isn’t exhaustive. So if you have thoughts and tips for who else you’d like to see here, feel free to drop us a line.

While we’re on the subject of maps, be sure to check out our 2019 Food Robotics market map and our Food Waste Innovation in 2019 map.

Booze Tech in 2019

Sun Basket’s Menu Expansion Suggests Dinner-Only Meal Kits Are a Thing of the Past

Sun Basket, the subscription-based meal kit service that specializes in clean, organic ingredients users cook at home, announced today it is expanding beyond the traditional dinner lineup and will offer other meals.

The expansion comes on the heels of the San Francisco-based company’s $30 million Series E fund in May of 2019. At the time of that announcement, Sun Basket said the funding would in part go towards including breakfast, lunch, and snack options as part of users’ weekly menu choices.

In keeping with the company’s health-focused offerings, breakfast and lunch kits offer recipes and ingredients for granolas, salads, noodle bowls, and gluten-free snacks. Breakfast and lunch items will fall under the normal pricing plan, which offers 18 meals per week for two or four people, or six family recipes per week.

While expanding to include granola butter or superfood cereal might seem like a small move, it’s a hugely important one right now for meal kit companies. An NPD survey from earlier this year found that 93 million U.S. adults haven’t yet tried a meal kit but want to. The same study noted that users and would-be users are looking for more than just dinner in a meal kit.

Several parties have already responded to that desire with expanded choice for customers. The Purple Carrot, who is probably Sun Basket’s most direct competitor in terms of food types, also offers breakfast and lunch options. Kroger and Home Chef, meanwhile, are piloting a new range of kits tailored to meet different lifestyle needs, among them a lunch-specific kit that features grain bowls, sandwiches, and salads that can be quickly thrown together.

As the meal kit sector continues to find footing after a long period of struggle, diversifying their offerings to appeal to a wider range of consumer appetites appears to be what companies need to do in order to survive.

Kroger and Common Sense Robotics Each Announce New Grocery Robotic Fulfillment Centers

I get that it’s supposed to be three of something to make a trend, but the fact that two different companies a world apart made robot-fulfillment center opening announcements on the same day is totally indicative of a broader move towards grocery automation.

Here in the U.S., Kroger announced that Forest Park, GA, just outside of Atlanta, will be the next home of its Ocado-powered customer fulfillment center. Kroger will spend $55 million on this “shed,” as Kroger calls the centers, which will feature automated, robot-driven fulfillment of grocery orders. This is the third such shed of a planned 20 that the company plans to build. Other announced sheds are in Monroe, OH and Groveland, FL, with another one coming to the Mid-Atlantic region.

Over in Tel Aviv, Venture Beat reports that Common Sense Robotics has broken ground on a completely underground automated fulfillment center for an unnamed grocer. The new facility will be in a parking structure under the Shalom Meir Tower and will be 18,000 sq. feet. One of Common Sense’s selling points is that its vertically-oriented systems can better maximize available space and thus deliver full grocery store levels of product fulfillment in a fraction of the space.

That both of these stories happened on the same day is a coincidence, but it also highlights the moves grocery stores are making towards automation. Robotic fulfillment centers like these use totes on rails to quickly assemble items from online orders and hand them off to a human who puts them into bags for pickup or delivery. Robots can move faster than humans, they don’t get tired or need breaks, all of which can reduce the order fulfillment time down from hours to as little as a half hour for some systems.

This faster fulfillment is why so many grocery retailers are trying out robots. Takeoff Technologies has partnered with Ahold Delhaize and Albertsons, and Walmart is testing out automatic fulfillment through Alert Innovation. In each of those cases, robot-powered fulfillment centers are being built into the back of existing stores rather than off-site locations like Kroger and Common Sense’s.

These robotic fulfillment centers are very much in the early stages, but you can expect to see more of them over the next year as more grocers test and implement automation to get you your groceries faster.

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.

Walmart, Target and Kroger Make Moves to Deliver Your Groceries Faster

Ever since Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017, grocery chains big and small have upped their technology game to make sure they aren’t crushed by Bezos’ behemoth. The result has been more options than ever for grocery shopping, pickup and delivery.

This battle is far from over, and in the last week alone, grocery giants Walmart, Target and Kroger have made moves suggesting the fight has only just warmed up.

At the end of last week, TechCrunch uncovered Walmart’s Delivery Unlimited subscription service. For $98 a year, customers can order groceries for delivery without having to pay the $9.95 delivery fee.

Meanwhile, Target last week announced it was expanding same-day delivery for more than 65,000 items on Target.com for a flat fee of $9.99 per order. Customers must have a Shipt account (Target owns Shipt), which costs $99 per year.

Not to be outdone, Supermarket News reports Kroger has been quietly testing out a new service in its hometown of Cincinnati, OH called Kroger Rush that will deliver groceries in a half hour. Users must download the Kroger Rush app and pay a $5.95 fee per order, and the service seems to be aimed at people who want to order lunch or dinner online at the last minute. If that weren’t enough Kroger also broke ground on its first Ocado-powered smart shed, also in Cincinnati, which will use robots to facilitate faster grocery fulfillment and delivery.

For its part, Amazon has been relatively quiet lately in terms of hard announcements (well, if you don’t count its plans to launch a drone delivery service “within months”). The latest grocery rumblings we heard from the Seattle tech giant were around a possible Amazon-branded grocery store chain, though nothing official has been announced.

The bigger point in all of this is that grocery retailers are pushing innovation faster than ever. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that both Walmart and Kroger made our list of Food Tech 25 list of Companies Creating the Future of Food in 2019.

Perhaps things are heating up because it’s the start of summer (pardon the pun), and with kids home from school, more groceries are needed around the house. Whatever the reason, the big players are accelerating their friction-free shopping experiences that will bring food to your front door faster than ever.

The Loop Launches Reusable Packaging Program in the U.S., Adds Kroger and Walgreens as Partners

We were excited when The Loop announced its re-useable packaging program in January of this year, as a number of big name CPG companies like Pepsi, Nestlé and Unilever had hopped on board. Today, The Loop announced that its waste reducing program has now launched here in the U.S., and added Kroger and Walgreens to its roster of partners.

As a refresher, The Loop (an initiative of waste management company Terracycle) sells name-brand CPG products in a way that harkens back to the milkman of yore. Products like ice cream, pancake mix and orange juice are sold in re-useable containers made from materials like metal or glass. These products ship directly to consumers who, after using them, put the empty containers back into the tote they arrived in, and The Loop picks everything back up to be sterilized, re-filled and re-sold.

While our plastic waste problem is huge in this country right now, sadly, The Loop’s availability is not. It’s initial pilot programs will only be available in the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S., specifically New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Washington, D.C.

If you are lucky enough to live in one of the select areas, you can visit loopstore.com, thekrogerco.com/loop or walgreens.com/loop to place an order. Though the press release didn’t mention it, CNN reports that customers will be able to pick up their Loop orders and drop off the empties at Kroger and Walgreens. And while all purchases happen exclusively online right now, Loop’s press release did say that down the road, there may be an option to purchase Loop products in stores at select Kroger and Walgreens markets.

The Loop is launching at the right time as companies across the food industry are looking at ways to reduce their plastic use. Earlier this week, Whole Foods announced it was getting rid of plastic straws, reducing the size of its plastic produce bags, and is no longer using hard plastic containers for its rotisserie chickens. And on a much broader scale, the EU voted to ban single-use plastics by 2021.

Today’s move by Kroger also reaffirms why we put them on The Spoon’s Food Tech 25: Companies Creating the Future of Food list this week. While we don’t know how U.S. consumers will react to The Loop’s re-packaging program, at least Kroger (and The Loop and Walgreens) is recognizing the issue of plastic waste and experimenting with a way to help reduce it.

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.

Kroger Selects Groveland, Fla. for its Next Robotic Warehouse

Florida is becoming a hotbed for grocery robots as Kroger announced yesterday that it has selected Groveland, Fla. as the location for its second automated warehouse using Ocado’s technology.

These smart warehouses use a series of crate robots on rails that zip around assembling items to speed up the fulfillment of grocery orders. Kroger has plans to build out 20 such robot warehouses, with the first being built in Monroe, OH, just outside Kroger’s hometown of Cincinnati. In addition to Monroe and Groveland, Kroger has announced a third automated warehouse will be built somewhere in the Mid-Atlantic region.

But Groveland isn’t the only place in Florida where groceries are going robotic. Further south, down in Miami, Takeoff launched its first robotic grocery fulfillment center for the Sedano’s supermarket chain last year. Sedano’s has locations in Orlando, and should the Takeoff partnership expand, it would set up a bit of a grocery robot battle royale, as Groveland is only 45 minutes away from Orlando.

Automated warehouses are just one part of a big investment Kroger is making in logistics and fulfillment. The Cincinnati shed alone is costing the grocery giant $55 million to build, and as noted earlier, Kroger has plans for 20 of them. Additionally, Kroger has been testing self-driving delivery vehicles in Scottsdale, AZ and recently expanded those tests to Houston, TX.

It’s not hard to connect the dots between a Kroger robot fulfillment center packing your grocery orders and loading them into a Kroger autonomous vehicle that brings them to your door. That’s still a ways off, but Kroger is laying the groundwork for it all right now.

Automation throughout the grocery chain is something we’ll be discussing at our upcoming ArticulATE food robot summit in San Francisco on April 16th. We’ll have speakers from Albertsons, Robomart and more talking about all the big issues around robots at grocery retail and how they will transform the shopping experience. Tickets are limited, get yours today!

Kroger and Nuro Expand Self-Driving Grocery Delivery to Houston

They say everything is bigger in Texas, but soon, diminutive electric vehicles will be autonomously shuttling around Houston, as Kroger announced today it is expanding its self-driving grocery pilot with Nuro to Texas’ largest city.

Kroger began its self-driving partnership with Nuro in Scottsdale, AZ in August last year and in that time has made thousands of deliveries, according to today’s press announcement. The expansion into Houston will involve two Kroger stores serving four zip codes:

  • Store One: 10306 South Post Oak Road, Houston, TX, servicing 77401 and 77096
  • Store Two: 5150 Buffalo Speedway, Houston, TX, servicing 77005 and 77025

Today’s news comes a little over a month since SoftBank invested $940 million in Nuro, which makes the R1, a pod-like, electric low-speed vehicle. They are about half the size of a traditional car and have a top speed of 25 mph. But Houstonians won’t see those pods on the street quite yet. Similar to the Scottsdale program, the Houston roll out will initially use self-driving Toyota Priuses, before shifting to Nuro’s R1s next year.

While the pilot in Scottsdale has evidently generated enough positive results to expand the program to a more populated city like Houston, there is still a bigger question over whether people want self-driving vehicles for grocery delivery. Part of the value in grocery delivery is the delivery person, who lugs heavy bags from the curb to your front door (or up your steps). This is one reason Nuro’s self-driving rival, AutoX, is putting more emphasis on its restaurant food delivery business.

Kroger didn’t provide a specific launch date for its Houston delivery, only saying that it will start this Spring.

Autonomous grocery delivery is definitely something we will be talking about at our upcoming ArticulATE food robot conference next month in San Francisco. AutoX’s COO, Jewel Li will be speaking as well as Ali Ahmed, the CEO of Robomart, which also uses pod-like vehicles to get you your food. Get your tickets today!

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.

Kroger and Ocado Begin to Roll Out Automated Fulfillment Centers

If you’re as fascinated as we are with the idea of robots scurrying around and doing your weekly grocery shop, Kroger and Ocado have some good news for you.

Today the grocery giant announced it would roll out two new Ocado-powered customer fulfillment centers (CFCs) — also called “sheds” — in the Central Florida and Mid-Atlantic regions. This news comes just a few months after Kroger named Monroe, OH (outside of Cincinnati) the location for its first automated robot warehouse.

In May of 2018 Kroger entered into an exclusive partnership with U.K.-based online grocer Ocado, nabbing a 6 percent stake in the company and promising to build twenty automated warehouse facilities across the U.S. over the following three years. We’re seeing that promise come to life.

As resident robo-expert Chris Albrecht pointed out, grocery logistics is hot hot hot right now and big players like Walmart, Target, Amazon, and Kroger are all racing to deliver your groceries as fast as possible.

To beat out its competitors, Kroger has invested not just in robotic fulfillment centers but also in self-driving cars, a direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform, and an expanded deal with Instacart.

And that’s just for grocery delivery and curbside pickup. In-store, Kroger also has a number of developments in the works. In this month alone, they partnered with Microsoft to launch two tech-enabled grocery stores (their answer to Amazon Go), and also unveiled new Customize It personalized meal kits. With the company’s brand new innovation lab, which it launched in August in tandem with the University of Cincinnati, Kroger doesn’t seem like it will stop reinventing the grocery space anytime soon.

Curious about how robotics and automation will reshape the grocery business? Join the conversation at ArticulATE, our food robotics summit in San Francisco on April 16th! Early Bird tickets are available now.