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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Kroger

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 Partners with Microsoft for Smarter Grocery Stores

It looks like Kroger isn’t taking its foot off the innovation pedal anytime soon. The grocery giant announced today that it has partnered with Microsoft to create a smarter, tech-enabled store with solutions that can be packaged and sold to other retailers.

Two pilot store locations — one in Microsoft’s hometown of Redmond, WA, and one in Monroe, OH, near Kroger’s HQ — will be outfitted with an array of IoT sensors and digital displays powered by Azure, Microsoft’s answer to Amazon Web Services.

These high-tech stores will feature the Enhanced Display for Grocery Environment (EDGE) advanced shelving system that uses digital displays to show prices, sales and nutritional information. But the digital displays also act like electronic guides for in-store shoppers using Krogers self-checkout app. Consumers can assign a particular icon to an item (a banana, for instance), and the EDGE display will show that icon so the shopper can identify it quickly. These displays can also be used for Kroger employees collecting items for online orders. The smart displays could also be a source of revenue as in-store advertisements.

Elsewhere in these smart stores will be an array of sensors and cameras which can keep track of inventory for faster re-stocking, and monitor temperatures in cold cases to prevent spoilage.

What’s also interesting about this partnership is that the two companies plan on packaging this smart system and selling it to other retailers. Grocery giants like Kroger and Albertsons have been investing heavily in technology in an attempt to prevent Amazon/Whole Foods from gobbling up the entire sector. So Kroger and Microsoft offering up a turnkey solution could be attractive to smaller and mid-level grocery chains.

Worth noting are the things not mentioned in this press release. There’s no mention of cashierless checkout, which we only bring up since it’s been rumored that Microsoft is working on that technology with Walmart. Additionally, and this is more out there, Monroe is also where Kroger is building out its first robot-powered smart distribution warehouse. Kroger spent last year investing heavily in technology like the smart warehouse, self-driving delivery vehicles and an innovation lab. This year, we may get more insight into how all these pieces will come together and integrate with one another.

Kroger Shifts Driverless Delivery Program into Higher Gear

Kroger announced today that it is ejecting humans from its autonomous delivery vehicle pilot, and going full-on, self-driving car with expanded availability.

Since August, the grocery retailer has been working with robotics company Nuro, testing grocery delivery via autonomous vehicles in Scottsdale, AZ. The initial test run completed close to one thousand deliveries. However, those were all done in self-driving Toyota Priuses, which still had a human in the car, presumably for safety reasons.

Today, Kroger is kicking the people to the curb and kicking the self-driving delivery into a higher gear as it adds Nuro’s autonomous R1. The R1 is a pod-looking vehicle that can only carry cargo with literally no place for a driver.

The two companies are calling this pilot expansion “the first-ever unmanned delivery service available to the general public,” which appears to be true, but it’s certainly not the only self-driving delivery service tests being run right now. Online grocer Farmstead has been running autonomous delivery in the Bay Area with Udelv. And in San Jose, CA, AutoX has been running its own driverless delivery test.

Kroger and Nuro’s approach is a little different as it lies somewhere between traditional delivery cars and the newer, smaller-scale rover-style robots. As noted earlier, the R1 is a completely unmanned vehicle and only transports goods. It travels at less than 25 miles per hour and is half the width of a regular car. This means it can be more nimble than a traditional full-size car when navigating traffic and pedestrians, but it also can’t travel as fast, limiting the delivery radius.

Kroger and Nuro are still in the midst of testing, and full autonomous delivery vehicles are still a ways off as the technology needs to improve and city and state regulations need to be developed to keep up with the technology. However, if you’re in the Scottsdale area, and want to experience a driverless vehicle pulling up to your house delivering your groceries, here’s how you can try it out:

Where: Fry’s Food Stores (single location): 7770 East McDowell Road, Scottsdale, AZ 85257
When: Customers can place delivery orders immediately, for delivery 7 days a week
How: Customers shop via frysfood.com or the Fry’s Food Stores mobile app and place their order based on slot availability
What: Grocery orders can be scheduled for same-day or next-day delivery by Nuro’s fleet of self-driving vehicles
Price: $5.95 flat fee; no minimum order

If you do order, let us know how it goes!

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.

Kroger Selects Cincinnati Area for First Ocado-Robo “Shed”

Baby, if you ever wondered, wondered where grocery giant Kroger was going to build its first Ocado-powered automated robot warehouse, then get ready because it will be in…. Cincinnati. Well, a suburb north of the city, but it’s basically in Cincinnati-based Kroger’s backyard.

Kroger today announced that the first Ocado-powered customer fulfillment centers (CFC) will be in the suburb of Monroe, OH. Kroger says it will spend $55 million on this automated warehouse, which the company is referring to as a “shed” (ed. note: we don’t know why they call it a shed, they don’t explain it in the release, perhaps it’s a holdover from U.K.-based Ocado’s home country?).

Earlier this year, Kroger upped its investment in Ocado, taking a 6 percent stake in the company. As part of that deal, Kroger and Ocado will build twenty such automated warehouse facilities across the U.S. over the next three years. If the original timetable still holds, Kroger could announce two more CFC locations before the end of this year.

Grocery logistics has been a hot topic this year, especially as giants like Amazon, Walmart, Target and Kroger are all investing in infrastructure to get your goods to you super fast.

Kroger specifically has been on a tear lately. In addition to Ocado, the company started piloting deliveries via self-driving cars, launched Ship, its direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform, and expanded its deal with Instacart.

In addition to all that investment, in August, Kroger teamed up with the University of Cininnati to create an innovation lab, which makes the Monroe CFC location make even more sense. Having a high-tech fulfillment center just miles from your innovation lab can breed a lot of, well, innovation. Given that it’s almost Thanksgiving, perhaps they can find a way to finally make turkeys fly.

Online Grocery Delivery Still has a Produce Problem

Despite writing about food technology (and the evolution of food retail in particular), I held off on getting my groceries online. I live close enough to a grocery store that going isn’t a hassle, and I actually like seeing and touching the fruits and veggies and proteins before I buy them.

And I’m not alone. Consumer surveys show that the inability to see items like produce before purchasing is a big barrier to online grocery shopping adoption. An eMarketer survey earlier this year found the 96 percent of U.S. internet users still primarily shop for groceries in store.

But friends of mine told me how much money they had saved by switching to online shopping (fewer impulse purchases). Saving money is always intriguing, so that got me thinking about making the switch myself.

This decision was bolstered when I spoke with a grocery startup CEO who told me that based on his experience, the produce ordered online was actually better because the pickers who work at the store actually knew how to pick the freshest fruits and vegetables. They were professionals and what I was giving up by shopping in person would be made up by their experience.

So I figured now was a good a time as any to get my groceries online. A Safeway near me offered delivery, so I logged on and mostly stuck to the basics: milk, eggs, bread — and threw in a bunch of bananas (well, “six” since the amount had to be precise).

The order was placed, the delivery window set. The truck arrived on-time and the driver was professional. Everything I ordered was there, even the six bananas, which…were emerald. I’m not talking about just up by the stem; they were forest green from top to bottom. The picture above is of the bunch I received after putting them in a paper bag to hasten the ripening overnight.

If I was ordering by mail, shipping underripe fruit would make more sense. You don’t want it bruised during the shipment and it will take a couple days to reach its destination. But Safeway is just up the road, the time in transit is hours (at most, depending on the delivery route), not days.

This isn’t meant as a screed against Safeway, but what it told me was that my order was just a series of boxes for its employees to check as it was fulfilled. Milk? Check. Eggs? Check. Bananas? Check — no matter what kind of shape they were in. At no point in the fulfillment did someone go “Hey, these bananas look inedible” and swap them out.

I realize this is a very small sample size, and perhaps my delivery was an outlier. But if this is my first experience, it could the same for other n00bs. And it’s worth bringing up because a lot of money is being poured into food delivery startups, and companies like Kroger are investing heavily in automating grocery delivery. But what good is flawless last mile logistics when what’s being delivered can’t be eaten?

Perhaps a better way to go is ordering online and doing curbside pickup. At least then I can get out, inspect the produce and return anything that doesn’t look good.

What’s your experience with grocery delivery? Do you do it regularly? Have you had any issues? Let us know in the comments below!

Kroger Begins Roll Out of Home Chef Meal Kits

Kroger announced yesterday that it has started the nationwide roll out of Home Chef meal kits on its grocery shelves.

Kroger purchased Home Chef in May of this year for $200 million, and as we wrote at the time of the acquisition:

By acquiring Home Chef, Kroger can meaningfully jump into the meal kit space and scale up quickly. Home Chef brings with it national prep and distribution systems already in place, and lots of data from existing paying customers to maximize how meal kits are rolled out in stores.

Home Chef also brought with it valuable data about what meals its customers order. Together, Kroger and Home Chef can figure out where to target particular meals for different regions and demographics.

The Home Chef meal kits will first be offered at select Kroger locations across the Midwest, with further rollout happening in 2019. Each location will have four menu options that will rotate weekly. Meal kits in store serve two people and start at $17.

As part of the announcement, Kroger also said that it is testing a new Home Chef Express product. Express is a quick-cook meal kit that promises to take only 15 minutes to make.

We’ve been talking about meal kits moving to retail for a good chunk of this year, and soon we’ll start seeing concrete data as to how well they are faring. Last year Albertsons bought Plated and this past April started the nationwide rollout of its meal kits in stores. Blue Apron started selling its meal kits at Costco. Amazon/Whole Foods has its own meal kit option. And HelloFresh signed a deal with Giant Food and Stop & Shop.

Will in-store convenience convert people en masse to meal kits? And if adoption rates increase, how will meal kits evolve? Will something like the new “Express” version of Home Chef’s meal kits, with their 15 minute make time, prove more popular than the full version?

The convenience question is actually worth examining further with Kroger, as the company recently expanded its Easy For You! line of almost-customizeable meal kits. Easy For You! is sort of like a frozen food buffet line. Customers bundle together different proteins and sides and pay by the pound to simply reheat at home. Will this level of convenience cannibalize Kroger’s other, more traditional meal kits?

It’s worth it for Kroger to experiment to see what consumers gravitate towards. The concept of in-store meal kits is relatively new, now, where shoppers take them remains to be seen.

Kroger’s “Easy For You!” Line Gets Closer to Customizeable Meal Kits

Kroger appears to be inching towards what we at The Spoon consider something of a holy grail: The convenient, customizable meal kit.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the grocery giant’s Easy For You! program now (in select stores) lets customers bundle together frozen entrees and sides into a package that can be taken home and heated up. Selections include prime rib strips with mushroom and gravy, gumbo and mac and cheese among others. There are even videos at the display to show customers how to prepare their food. All meals are sold by weight at $7.99 a pound.

Technically, this may not be a “meal kit” in the strictest sense of the word. It seems to fall somewhere between a meal kit and the hot, prepared buffet food section found in so many supermarkets. It’s also an expansion of Kroger’s existing Easy For You! program which packages together seafood and seasonings into an oven-ready bag that you can cook at home.

But you can see where Kroger is heading–letting people curate and assemble their own meal kits, essentially. Right now, you have to go in person to pile up your meal. Shoppers can put together a frozen meal and eat it that night, or stock up on a few and have them throughout the week. All you have to do is heat them up and you’re ready to go.

Convenience is a benefit of the meal kit industry migrating away from mail order and into retail. Most shoppers have shunned mail order meal kits. When you can include a meal kit in your everyday shopping and align it more with what you’re craving in the moment, you don’t have to wait around for delivery and there’s less packaging waste.

Earlier this year, Kroger bought Home Chef to accelerate its move into supermarket meal kits. With that ordering and logistic infrastructure, it’s not hard to imagine Kroger adding the ability for people to create their own meal kits from a list of items that are assembled that day in the store and then picked up during errands or delivered.

Kroger has been investing all year in initiatives that maximize convenience for consumers. In addition to the Home Chef acquisition, it upped its investment in Ocado and will build robot-run smart warehouses for speedier delivery. Kroger expanded its relationship with Instacart for same-day delivery and is now piloting a test program where autonomous vehicles deliver your groceries.

Frozen foods may not have the same glitz as robots, but convenience will always be cool.

Kroger Continues Aggressive Delivery Moves with Expanded Instacart Deal

Kroger announced yesterday that it is expanding its same-day home grocery delivery service through a renewed partnership with Instacart. The move will make Instacart’s service available in more than 1,600 Kroger stores by the end of October.

The deal builds on an existing relationship between Kroger and Instacart that started in the fall of 2017 and subsequently expanded in March of this year. For Kroger, the partnership is also another step in what has been a year of consistent, forward-looking steps the company has taken to get groceries to your front door.

To recap, so far this year Kroger has:

That doesn’t even cover the non-delivery moves Kroger has made with shoppable recipes, in-store meal kits and the innovation lab it just formed with the University of Cincinnati.

When you take a step back, it looks like Kroger’s expanded relationship with Instacart is almost like spackle, filling in the gaps and covering its bases until some of these other technologies Kroger is working on come to fruition. Grocery delivery is a ruthless business right now, and Kroger has to remain aggressive to fend off rivals like Walmart, Amazon/Whole Foods, Albertsons and Target — all of whom are ratcheting up their own home delivery plans. Expanding with Instacart keeps Kroger in the game while they work out robot warehouses and autonomous vehicles, ideally without losing market share.

Instacart, on the other hand, seems to be going more broad than deep. Last year it signed a big deal with Albertsons, and a quick Google News search for Instacart shows the startup is rapidly rolling out new partnerships across the country with a bevy of retailers. What you don’t see is any type of innovation, at least publicly announced innovation. Peruse the Instacart corporate blog and you see there’s no update since April (which was about making tipping easier). This horizontal thinking could wind up hurting the company.

Instacart has raised $1 billion in funding, including a fresh $150 million in April. They are hopefully working behind the scenes to create some differentiating technology, because it will need it. Delivery competitor DoorDash raised $250 million of its own this month. It’s also expanded its grocery delivery business with Walmart, is using robots and is actively working on moonshot projects. Additionally, giants like Amazon and Walmart are expanding how grocery can be delivered, including to your car trunk or inside your home when you aren’t there (with permission, of course).

For its part, Kroger is playing the long game, and there’s still a full quarter of the year left for it to make even more announcements. While 2018 has been a busy year for Kroger, look for 2019 to be even more action-packed as the moves its making now roll out for real.

Kroger and Nuro Launch First Pilot for Self-Driving Grocery Delivery Cars in Arizona

Starting today, if you shop at Fry’s Food Store onEast McDowell Road in Scottsdale, Arizona, you can get your groceries delivered via self-driving car.

This is the first such pilot to come from the previously announced partnership between Fry’s parent company, Kroger, and autonomous driving startup Nuro.

According to the press announcement, customers can shop via frysfood.com or the Fry’s Food Stores mobile app, and place their order based on available time slots. Grocery orders can be scheduled for same-day or next-day delivery by Nuro’s fleet of self-driving vehicles for a flat $5.95 fee with no minimum order.

The only bummer about this pilot is that for now, the two companies are using a self-driving Toyota Prius fleet — not the cute li’l R1 robot delivery pod/vehicles (seen in the picture above). The R1s will begin rolling out this fall. A Nuro spokesperson explained the Prius move, telling TechCrunch “The Priuses share many software and hardware systems with the R1 custom vehicle, so while we compete final certification and testing of the R1, the Prius will begin delivering groceries and help us improve the overall service and customer experience.”

What’s not spelled out in the press release is the role of humans in this pilot. As these are tests to learn about consumers’ acceptance of autonomous vehicles for delivery, I assume that there will be a human in the car for safety reasons. But is that a Kroger or a Nuro person? And will they bring the groceries in or just sit in the car while people come out to pick up their food? The R1s don’t have drivers, so those will presumably present an entirely different experience for the customer when those roll out.

Regardless, this self-driving delivery pilot is among the many tech moves Kroger is making in its ongoing grocery delivery battles with the likes of Amazon, Walmart and Albertsons. Earlier this year, Kroger increased its investment in U.K.-based Ocado, and will bring that company’s robotic, smart warehouses and last-mile logistics platform to the U.S. for faster, more efficient delivery.

When all these programs run for real, you’ll have robots packing your groceries, which will be loaded into autonomous vehicles that will deliver them to your door any time of day or night. If you’re in Scottsdale and shop at Fry’s, let us know if you use the new autonomous driving delivery and how well it goes.

Kroger Ship Adds Another Online Ordering Platform for the Grocer

Grocery giant Kroger announced today that it has launched Kroger Ship, a direct to consumer e-commerce platform.

At launch, Kroger Ship is available in four markets: Cincinnati, Houston, Louisville and Nashville, but the company said it will expand to additional markets over the next few months. The service promises “fast and free” home delivery on orders over $35, otherwise shipping is $4.99 per order. However, during the launch phase customers will get free shipping with no minimum purchase required.

Kroger Ship is not to be confused with Kroger Delivery; the grocer’s partnership with Instacart, which offers two-hour delivery from local stores. Kroger Ship is meant for more non-perishable items like cereal, canned goods, cleaning supplies, etc..

The announcement today isn’t a tectonic one in the fiercely competitive battle of grocery delivery currently being waged by Kroger, Amazon, Walmart, Albertsons, Target and just about every other grocer. But it does give shoppers another option when purchasing from Kroger and helps broaden the company’s delivery strategy.

Earlier this year, Kroger increased its investment in UK company Ocado, which powers robotic smart warehouses and last mile logistics. Through an exclusive partnership, Kroger plans to build similar automated fulfillment centers here in the U.S., and has already begun identifying locations. In June, Kroger also partnered up with robotics startup Nuro to create a self-driving grocery delivery car pilot program, which will launch this fall.