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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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CookUnity Raises $15.5M to Expand ‘Chef-to-Consumer’ Meal Service

Meal subscription service CookUnity announced today it has raised $15.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Fuel Venture Capital with participation from new and existing investors, including IDC Ventures, which led CookUnity’s seed round of funding. The Series A round brings CookUnity’s total funding to date to $23 million. 

The Brooklyn, NY-based company said it plans to use the new funds to expand its service across North America, grow its marketing efforts, and open two new kitchens, in California and Texas, to support the expansion.

CookUnity bills itself as a “chef-to-consumer platform.” Its subscription service, which currently serves New York City, offers users weekly choices of meals made by a wide range of local chefs, from those with Michelin stars to up-and-coming ones. Pricing starts at $10.49 per meal, with food options serving a fairly wide range of dietary needs and preferences. Meals arrive fully prepared, with instructions for heating and plating. 

For chefs, both established and up and coming, CookUnity’s platform provides another way to reach potential customers. This is especially important at a time when most restaurants are still operating under capacity restrictions. Consumers over the last several months have turned to other means of getting dinner on the table. One of those ways has been meal kits and subscription services, a sector that’s seen something of a resurgence in recent months. Bringing chefs, many of which have been out of work because of the pandemic, to the meal kit sector seems an obvious way to create new food options for consumers and opportunities for those making the food.

To that end, CookUnity says it plans to expand its roster of chefs in the coming months. The company currently has 32 chefs participating and says it will aggressively expand that number to around 150 by mid-2022. The new kitchen locations opening in Los Angeles and Texas will also expand CookUnity’s chef roster beyond local NYC chefs. 

Will Blue Apron’s New Meal Prep Kits Help The Company Get Out of Its Rut?

Beleaguered meal kit company Blue Apron is making yet another attempt to boost declining sales with a new service: meal prep kits.

The new kits come with everything you need to prepare four meals for two people (so eight meals in total). It takes 1.5 to 2 hours to make the components of all the meals, which are meant to be packed away into containers to be reheated or eaten chilled throughout the week.

Blue Apron has four prep kit options: Signature, Carb Conscious, Pescetarian and Multi-Cooker. They shake out to around $72 per box, or $8.99 per serving. The kits don’t come with containers, and the website notes that you’ll need 16 storage vessels to hold your food and sauces (eight large, eight small).

The prep kits are already available to people in select states on the East Coast with a planned delivery date for February 24. Blue Apron will expand their availability nationwide later this year.

Blue Apron’s meal prep kits

You have to give Blue Apron kudos — it’s experimented tirelessly to come up with ways to revitalize its struggling business. So far the company has teamed up with Beyond Meat and Weight Watchers, and last year it even started offering same-day delivery. So far, none of these have done too much to jump start sales for Blue Apron, which reported a 35 percent slump in Q3 of 2019.

So could these meal prep kits finally be a win for the company? I actually think it has a better chance than, say, incorporating Beyond Meat into their menus. Meal prepping is a growing trend and it’s definitely more convenient to get all the ingredients to make four different meals send right to your door.

But even with the prep kits, Blue Apron will still face two big issues: inconvenience and price. Setting aside two full hours to prep four days’ worth of meals may be a smart time investment, but it’s still kind of a long time — especially for those who aren’t very cooking-savvy. And what if you end up going out for lunch or don’t want to reheat that salmon you cooked four days ago? The prepped meals will also cost around $8 per serving, which is not markedly less than grabbing a sandwich or deli salad.

Long story short, while the meal prep kits are an interesting bid, I don’t think they’re enough to entice new consumers to try Blue Apron — or keep them coming back. Then again, 93 million Americans are meal kit curious, so there’s definitely a market out there. If they want to tap into those potential customers, I think Blue Apron would be better off following in the footsteps of other meal kit companies and selling its kits (meal prep or otherwise) in retail, instead.

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.

Real Talk: Who Should Buy Blue Apron?

Blue Apron’s stock price has dropped below $1, losing 90 percent of its value since going public last year. The company keeps missing revenue targets, laying off people and a recent retail partnership with Costco was halted for the holidays.

It seems increasingly unlikely that Blue Apron will be able to pull itself out of this tailspin, and a sub-one dollar share price certainly won’t help. All this could make Blue Apron an attractive and affordable acquisition target. Grocery Dive laid out a few options for Blue Apron, but I feel like we can go a little deeper: Who should or would buy Blue Apron?

WHAT WOULD A COMPANY BE BUYING?
So what does Blue Apron have to offer? According to its Q3 results, the company has 646,000 customers who generate an average of $233 in revenue, with sales of $150.6 million. Blue Apron also has an active, nationwide logistics and mail order fulfillment operation as well as a supply chain in place. It also presumably has a fair amount of consumer data around when, where and what people are buying.

RETAILERS
There aren’t many retailers left who need a meal kit solution. Albertsons owns Plated. Kroger owns HomeChef. Amazon makes its own meal kits. Maybe Walmart? They are making their own meal kits, but Bentonville loves a bargain, perhaps it could jumpstart that offering with a Blue Apron buy. Or maybe Target could jump into the game. Adding meal kits to its groceries would make sense, and is on-brand for the store where you can pick up everything for your house.

OTHER MEAL KIT COMPANIES
The remaining independent meal kit companies don’t have the money to afford Blue Apron, even at a discount. HelloFresh is the market leader and done some acquisitions, but it seems to be redundant for a company with HelloFresh’s existing reach and business. True Food Innovation acquired Chef’d earlier this year, but is focused more on the retail experience–not mail order.

CPG COMPANIES
I’ve asked before whether the future of meal kits is frozen dinners. Nestlé owns Stouffer’s, which has rolled out a frozen dinner meal kits in grocery stores. Tyson has their own frozen meal kits as well. Perhaps there’s a brand extension into either mailing frozen meal kits direct or extending into fresh food.

DARK HORSES
Maybe Uber? Hear me out! Uber Eats is a growing part of that company’s business, and it’s already invested in ghost kitchens to make the food it delivers. Maybe an acquisition could ditch Blue Apron’s existing mail order and turn it into more of a same day meal kit delivery to your door service.

Or perhaps this is an opportunity for a more old school company like Schwan’s. They are already have robust lines of consumer and retail food delivery, and the company has bought into new meal kit businesses before with an investment in baby food meal kit company, Raised Real.

PRIVATE EQUITY
It seems like there’s always a private equity deal to be had. Maybe Blackstone or the Carlyle Group could come in and sell it for parts or combine it with some other of their portfolio companies.

But what do you think? Is there a good fit out there for Blue Apron not on this list? Leave a comment and let me know!

Presto Eats May Be the Most On-Trend Meal Kit Company Yet. But Will It Succeed?

Whenever I get word about a new meal kit company, it’s hard not to be immediately skeptical.

It’s no secret that meal kits are struggling: Chef’d surprised everyone when it shut down abruptly earlier this year. Boston hyper-local meal kit Just Add Cooking ceased operations this fall. And Blue Apron’s stock continues to underwhelm. And with complicated supply chain logistics and the challenge of customer loyalty, and its no wonder why. To fight back, meal kit companies are turning towards new sales channels (i.e. drug stores), targeting specific audiences (i.e. kids) and are experimenting with customizeable and frozen ingredients.

But one Canadian company seems undeterred by the bleak, overcrowded meal kit landscape. Based in Vancouver and Calgary, soon-to-launch Presto Eats makes meal kits that can be cooked in a pressure cooker or slow cooker.

“I started Presto Eats because I fell in love with the new wave of kitchen appliances,” CEO Connie Chong told me in a phone conversation. She found that she could get a flavorful meal out of her pressure cooker in 30 minutes, but it still took her over an hour to shop for and prep ingredients. So she decided to create a meal kit specifically targeted at the Instant Pot crowd: millennials and busy professionals who like to cook at home and aren’t afraid of new kitchen technology.

Earlier this year Campbell’s tried a slow cooker meal partnership with Chef’d. The meal kit company shuttered only four months later so it’s hard to get a sense of how successful the partnership was. But it also only offered slow cooker meals, which took 6-ish hours; it didn’t capitalize on the wild popularity of the quick-cooking Instant Pot.

Presto Eats is smart to take advantage of the pressure cooker’s cult-like status. While many meal kit companies advertise ready-to-eat meals in 30 minutes, you still usually have to actually do the whole cooking thing. Presto Eats takes the same amount of time but it’s all hands-off. “The convenience factor is huge,” said Chong. Plus it’s all done in one (Instant)pot, which means fewer dishes.

Since Presto Eats’ meals are destined for a pressure cooker, they can be sold frozen. Which means that consumers can buy them in bulk and cook them on their own time. Frozen meal kits make a lot of sense, from both a business and consumer perspective, and Presto Eats is one of several companies taking advantage of the frozen food renaissance. It could also mean more packaging waste (ice, cold packs, etc.), which is something Presto Eats should be conscious of.

While it’s a smart move to capitalize off of Instant Pot’s widespread and loyal fan base, there are a few potential drawbacks to Presto Eats’ offering. Firstly, some people get meal kits because they actually like cooking — just not the minutiae of, say, shopping for, peeling and grating a ginger root. To them, meal kits are a way to experiment with new meals that they might not otherwise be bold enough to try and cook. Dumping a bunch of ingredients into an Instant Pot and pressing a button means there’s significantly lower chance of failure, but there’s also not much of a cooking “experience.” And at $10 per serving, some people may want to shell out a few bucks more and order in delivery.

Secondly, the fact that all of Presto Eats’ meals are cooked in a pressure cooker limits their variety. Chong listed menu choices like salmon risotto with vegetables, lentil bolognese pasta, and Thai curry, all of which sound delicious but reside in the same sort of warm, soupy comfort meal category. You can’t make seared steak or crunch roasted cauliflower in an Instant Pot, after all.

Presto Eats is cashing in on yet another dining trend: local food. It will partner with local farmers and suppliers to source ingredients for their meal kits. Which may attract eco-conscious consumers, but also means they will no doubt have to pay more to stock their kits. In an industry where margins are razor-thin, this is a risk. Just Add Cooking also sourced local ingredients for their meal kits, and ended up folding because they couldn’t make the economics work. Chong told me that they will create rotating menus featuring farmers’ surplus food, which could help keep costs down — but it’s still probably more expensive than buying from a mega produce supplier.

As of now, Presto Eats has a team of three and is bootstrapped. They will partner with food delivery companies to get their meal kits to consumers, and Chong said that down the road they hope to partner with grocery chains to get on retail shelves. They plan to launch their meal kits at the end of January in Calgary, and soon after that in Vancouver.

There they’ll have to duke it out with several local competitors. Earlier this week Chris wrote about Fresh Prep, a Vancouver, Canada-based direct-to-consumer meal kit company which raised $3.3 million. And in October Hello Fresh, the biggest meal kit company in the U.S., acquired meal kit company Chefs Plate, which also has a fulfillment center in Vancouver.

By combining three consumer dining trends — frozen food, Instant Pot, and local ingredients — Presto Eats has developed a very appealing product. The question is whether those value-adds will help it attract enough customers to carve out a spot in the crowded meal kit space. I’m optimistic that they have a shot, mostly because of how much people love their Instant Pots. But first, they’ll have to nail down a supply chain and scale up: two things that plague even the biggest meal kit companies.

Meal Kit Startup Just Add Cooking Ceases Operations

Just Add Cooking (JAC), the Boston-based meal kit company specializing in locally-sourced meals from the New England area, has ceased operations.

The news went out today via an email to customers from company founder Jan Leife. According to the email, the company had been in search of financing over the past few months and, not surprisingly, investor appetites for meal kit startups has soured in the wake of Chef’d’s sudden shut down and Blue Apron’s struggles.

From the email:

Over the past several months, we’ve been focused on finding a long term financing solution. As meal kit companies have shuttered and others have been bought by large companies, the market hasn’t played in our favor, and unfortunately we have not succeeded in finding a viable solution for long-term financing.

The effort to find funding included a Wefunder equity crowdfunding campaign less than a month ago to raise up to $300 thousand, but the effort fell far short with only $7.7 thousand in funds coming in. According to the Wefunder page, the company has taken in a total of $1.48 million from 32 investors over its five-year lifespan.

The news is yet another sign that startups are having trouble making the economics of meal kits work even while sales rise.  JAC saw its revenue grow 19% year over year, fueled in large part by sales of their meal kits in grocery store locations around New England. According to the company, overall revenue was on track to hit $1.9 million by the end of the year.

Based on the email, it’s not immediately clear if JAC will continue to look for a strategic option such as selling the company. We’ve reached out to Leife for a comment and will update this post when we hear more.

UPDATE 11/6/18: Jan Leife responded to our question about what’s next for Just Add Cooking with the following statement:

“Currently we are seeking a company who could continue to serve our customers or meet their needs in a different way.

In our six years of operation, we have built a community of thousands of loyal customers passionate about local food. A recipe database with hundreds of recipes that utilize local ingredients and are created with the financial and logistical restraints of meal kits in mind. We enjoy a strong brand recognition in New England and been awarded Best of Boston 2018 by Boston Magazine.”

Hat tip to Spoon reader Elina for the head’s up on this news.

The full email is below:

Dearest Customer,

As of today November 5th Just Add Cooking will be ceasing operations in Boston. We are so sorry to bring you this news, and want to explain why we have come to this decision.

We set out six years ago with a big idea about a new local food delivery service and an ambition to create a new food system in New England helping busy customers reclaim their kitchen. Since then, we’ve accomplished many things we’re incredibly proud of. We built a brand and a supply chain with many of the finest farms and food companies there are in the region. We’ve created hundreds of amazing and delicious recipes and we built some truly exceptional relationships with engaged and loyal customers such as you. Last but not least we manage to gather an exceptional group of people who made Just Add Cooking great, every week.

That said, Just Add Cooking today still has many challenges to overcome. Over the past several months, we’ve been focused on finding a long term financing solution.

As meal kit companies have shuttered and others have been bought by large companies, the market hasn’t played in our favor, and unfortunately we have not succeeded in finding a viable solution for long-term financing.

We wanted to close by thanking all of you one last time for ordering, for telling your friends to order, for rating us, and for telling us how we were doing. We hope you enjoyed the journey as much as we did.

Sincerely,
Jan Leife and the Just Add Cooking Team

Will Jet.com Help Blue Apron Meal Kits Take Off?

Blue Apron announced today that its meal kits will be made available for delivery in the New York area through a new partnership with Walmart-owned Jet.com. For Blue Apron, which has seen its stock price tumble since it went public last year, the Jet partnership marks another way the company is looking to revitalize its business through new and different retail avenues.

According to the press announcement, starting today, households across “most of” New York City, Jersey City and Hoboken can get Blue Apron meal kits delivered same or next day. The inclusion of Blue Apron’s meal kits is part of Jet.com’s recent site revamp and enhanced shopping experience for New Yorkers.

Blue Apron pretty much kicked off the mail order meal kit craze a few years back, but that particular business model is tough to sustain — for consumers, it’s not particularly convenient, it’s still a lot of work to prepare, and for companies, it’s logistically expensive. Blue Apron’s competition has pretty much all moved into grocery store aisles. Home Chef was acquired by Kroger. Plated was acquired by Albertsons. And while HelloFresh had it’s own IPO, it too is now selling through grocery stores.

For its part, Blue Apron began selling its kits in Costco earlier this year. Earlier this month, Blue Apron also started offering meal kits through food delivery service GrubHub (also only in New York). Now on Jet, Blue Apron will feature a rotating menu of two-serving recipes that range in price from $16.99 to $22.99.

With its stock price hovering at little more than a dollar, Blue Apron is able (or perhaps forced) to experiment more wildly with different approaches to moving more of its meal kits. Blue Apron’s recent moves are reminiscent of Chef’d, which we lauded here at The Spoon for its uninhibited approach to retail. Chef’d struck deals to put its meal kits in drug stores and office fridges… before it shut down. But its assets were picked up and Chef’d was re-born without the mail business to focus on retail outlets.

Along those lines, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Blue Apron announce even more partnerships across even more retail outlets before the end of the year.

Mealhero Raises €900,000 for its Frozen Meal Kit and Smart Cooker Service

Mealhero, the European meal kit delivery startup, announced at the end of last week that it has raised a €900,000 (~$1.04 million) seed round of funding.

According to Dutch publication datanews (translated via Google Translate) roughly one-third of the €900k comes from loans, another third from subsidies from the Flemish Enterprise Agency and the final third from IMEC and an investment angel.

The Belgium-based Mealhero differentiates itself from other meal kit services on the market through its combination of frozen food and a dedicated connected cooking appliance. As we wrote about the company last year:

The mealhero service is comprised of three parts: a box of frozen ingredients delivered to your home, an app to help you assemble your ingredients into a recipe, and a connected three-container steamer to cook them automatically.

The app knows what [Mealhero] ingredients you have and can suggest a recipe, or you can assemble a combination of foods how you like. The frozen ingredients include vegetables, starches, and meats and come in their own containers, each with an RFID label. Once selected, you scan each container on the steamer and place the ingredient in its own compartment. The steamer knows how long to cook each individual component, so you don’t have to actually do any cooking.

One of the benefits of Mealhero’s approach is that since it ships frozen food, the ingredients will last longer, so you can make them when you like. More traditional meal kit companies send fresh ingredients that spoil more quickly, so you have to make them relatively quickly, whether you want to eat that meal or not.

This new seed funding adds to the €79,151 Mealhero raised on Kickstarter last year as well as an undisclosed amount of funding the company had prior to Kickstarter. The Mealhero device is available for purchase (the company’s website says 100 smart steamers are available for delivery at the end of Sept.), with the Starter Pack costing €299 (~$350 USD).

Mealhero was also a finalist at the Startup Showcase at our first Smart Kitchen Summit: Europe earlier this year. Be the first to see the next generation of food tech startups at our flagship Smart Kitchen Summit: North America event in Seattle next month!

Food Tech News Roundup: Recyclable Meal Kits, KFC Goes Vegan(ish), and a Dairy App

Time for this week’s food tech news roundup! This week on the Spoon we covered self-heating beverage cans, beer made from surplus bread, and indoor smart grow system Ava’s (one of the Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase finalists of 2017!) seed funding. We also launched a new podcast episode discussing how machine learning can help dairy farmers.

But enough about us — here are some of the food tech news stories that caught our eye this week:

Photo: Marley Spoon

Marley Spoon files IPO in Australia
Meal kit subscription service Marley Spoon filed for an initial public offering (IPO) this week in Australia, according to TechCrunch. The company is headquartered in Berlin, but decided to list on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) because Down Under is one of its biggest markets. Marley Spoon has tried to distinguish itself from competing services like Blue Apron and Hello Fresh through its paid partnership with Martha Stewart and its launch of budget-friendly line Dinnerly. The IPO is expected to give Marley Spoon a market capitalization of $152 million — but we’ll see if it can overcome challenges others like Blue Apron faced post-IPO, and whether Marley Spoon will make the move into retail stores like Hello Fresh, Plated and Home Chef.

Photo: Purple Carrot

Purple Carrot unveils 100% curbside recyclable packaging
Marley Spoon wasn’t the only meal kit company with an announcement this week. Purple Carrot, the plant-based meal kit service, sent out a press release to tell the world about their “new 100% curbside recyclable packaging.” Meal kits may cut down on food waste, but they’re notorious for their packaging waste; even if many elements are technically recyclable they often require a good deal of effort on the consumer’s part to break them down or drive them to a facility capable of processing them. Purple Carrot promises that its new packaging will be 100% fit for at-home recycling — which could be a huge step towards mitigating plastic packaging waste.

 

Photo: Stellapps

Gates Foundation invests $14M in dairy tech app
Last week Stellapps Technologies, the India-based IoT and data analysis stack for the dairy supply chain, raised a $14 million Series B round, as reported by AgFunder News. The round was led by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and IndusAge Partners. Founded in 2011, Stellapps uses sensors, machine learning, and automation to optimize the entire dairy supply chain: from production to shipping to distribution. Technology has unlocked a new era of cow and dairy management, with startups like SomaDetect and Connecterra allowing farmers to make more data-driven decisions.

 

Pixabay

KFC to test vegetarian fried “chicken” in U.K.
KFC UK has made promises to cut their calorie content by 20 percent over the next 7 years, and one of the ways they’re working towards this goal is by developing a vegetarian version of their iconic fried chicken. Apparently, the new menu offering will still use the secret blend of 11 herbs and spices that made the Colonel famous, and will debut some time in 2019. This comes on the heels of the plant-based Impossible burger’s launch at White Castle.

 

Photo: Beyond Meat

Beyond Meat doubles production to meet increased demand
This week, plant-based protein company Beyond Meat announced that it would double their production to sate the growing hunger for their plant-based burgers. According to Plant Based News, Beyond burgers are outselling beef burgers in some stores in California, and Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown has said that the company is ahead of their sales targets. All of which means that the demand for meat-like vegan burgers is there, and is growing — the question now becomes if Beyond Meat can keep up with demand, especially as it rolls out in 50 countries this summer.

Did we miss anything? Tweet us @TheSpoonTech!

Kroger Buys Home Chef for $200M as Meal Kits Continue March into Grocery Stores

Kroger announced today that it’s acquiring meal kit company Home Chef for $200 million in a move that illustrates the continued transition of meal kits from a mail-order business to a must-have in-store grocery item.

Home Chef will operate as subsidiary of Kroger, maintaining its e-commerce business at homechef.com while it takes over responsibility for Kroger’s “meal solutions portfolio.” Kroger will start offering Home Chef’s meal kits online once the deal closes, and, according to The Chicago Tribune, the two companies will crunch consumer data numbers to figure out where to stock meal kits among Kroger’s 2,800 nationwide stores.

Home Chef, which is the third largest meal kit company in the U.S., has 1,000 employees, has raised $57 million in venture funding and had sales of $250 million last year. Kroger’s final purchase price could hit $500 million over the next five years if certain milestones are hit, including, according to the press announcement, “significant growth of in-store and online meal kit sales.”

Depending on expectation, those milestones could be tough to hit; almost every grocer is getting into the meal kit game. Albertsons acquired Plated and is going national with their meal kits this year. Blue Apron and Chef’d are selling meal kits in Costco. Weight Watchers has put their meal kits on supermarket shelves. Then, of course, there are the meal kits Walmart is rolling out to 2,000 of its stores, not to mention the offerings from Amazon/Whole Foods.

And you can see why everyone’s diving in. As we’ve covered before: According to Nielsen research, “in the year ended 2017, in-store meal kits generated $154.6 million in sales, posting growth of more than 26% year-over-year. For context, total brick-and-mortar sales for center store edibles (grocery, dairy, frozen foods) dipped 0.1% last year to $374 billion.”

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.

But the acquisition also shows that Kroger is hitting the gas to stay technologically relevant. The Home Chef acquisition comes just days after Kroger invested more money in UK-based online grocer, Ocado. As part of that deal, Kroger will be building out 20 robot-driven smart warehouses and take advantage of Ocado’s fast delivery logistics.

Now it looks like meal kits will definitely be among those fast deliveries.

Want to learn about the future of meal kits and food delivery from the leaders of companies like Chef’d and DoorDash? Come to the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle on Oct 8-9th. 

Mucho Makes Shoppable Meal Planning More Dynamic & Efficient

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Kickstarter Backer’s Review of Tovala’s New Smart Oven and Meal Service

Some people buy the latest new kitchen gadgets because they’re into cooking and want to exploit new technology for a better culinary experience. Others because they’re into the technology itself. Still others don’t really enjoy cooking, and this is the camp I fall into. So last Spring, armed with a lack of interest and time for kitchen adventures, I found myself an early backer of the Tovala oven.

Tovala launched in early 2016 with a Kickstarter campaign. The “smart oven that makes home cooking easy” sounded perfect for me—not just because it might enable me to escape the unhealthy Lean Cuisine rut I’d been in for workday lunching but because part of the Tovala equation is a subscription service for fresh, prepared meals, shipped weekly. They had me at “prepared.”

Tovala’s campaign funded in under 24 hours. Following just a few months’ delay, the ovens shipped to early backers roughly a year after launch (not bad by Kickstarter standards), and now it’s available for the public to order.

Unpacking

After negotiating for counter space [“but I’m writing a review of it…”], I excitedly unpacked and set up my new magical cooking box. The oven arrived with no documentation other than a small card instructing me to download and install the Tovala app, which was at the time also devoid of anything even remotely resembling operating instructions beyond some onboarding panels. Tovala has since added a multi-page quick start guide to the package and significantly bolstered its knowledgebase content, optimized for mobile as an in-app “user guide.” Including a QR code that directs consumers to the app in Apple’s and Google’s respective stores would be a nice addition to the standard packaging.

The oven shipped with a rack that’s a little tricky to slide into place around an extrusion that’s designed to keep the rack from falling out, a tray (which I still don’t really know where to place in the oven, a detached water reservoir, and a branded pot holder as a gift for the Kickstarter backers.

A look inside the Tovala oven.

The water reservoir is a unique and important component of the oven, since this is technically a countertop combi-oven that can cook with heat, air, and steam. The reservoir lets you easily add water to produce steam by filling it at the sink then sliding it into your oven. Unfortunately, a number of the reservoirs shipped to early backers have leaky valve stops, so I discovered I was trailing water across the kitchen as I took mine over the oven. The flaw does not impede proper operations, since it doesn’t leak once it’s seated in the oven, and Tovala’s co-founder and CEO, David Rabie, indicates that new reservoirs will be sent to customers experiencing this issue.

A leaky valve.

The oven is sizable—it fits fine on a standard-depth kitchen counter, but it slides under my upper cabinets with just four inches to spare and sticks out beyond the 12” cabinets above it. Adding to this depth, the oven has a heavy cable that terminates at a standard 3-prong plug, sticking straight out from the wall outlet. A flat plug with a side-angled cord would allow you to push the oven closer to the backsplash and hide the plug.

The Tovala sitting on my counter

The design of the oven is fairly contemporary. Its sturdy door encompasses the entire front face of the oven, surfaced in black glass with a window into the oven. A curved stainless handle spans the front, and a plastic control panel is literally bolted onto the front surface of the door. This is a change introduced after the Kickstarter launch, both to address usability concerns and to protect the electronics from excessive heat exposure (original designs had the readout and touch controls built onto the top edge of the door). Extremely bright LEDs on this panel indicate connection status, mode, progress, and water level. Three buttons and a knob give you some limited control of the oven locally—anything else requires the app.

Connecting

Like many “smart” appliances, the Tovala oven connects to your Wi-Fi network, and getting it connected is easy enough. You need to set up an account, which, if you subscribed to Tovala’s food service, you’d have already done. Like some other Tovala customers, I either didn’t remember already setting up an account or didn’t realize they were the same until the app wouldn’t let me set up a new account with my email address.

The app easily found my wireless home network and connected with my oven after prompting for my wireless password and sending network info to the oven. A green LED network indicator on the front panel of the oven lets you know it’s connected.

The Tovala oven uses its connectivity for a few key functions—updates, recipe programming, control, and notifications among them. I’d argue that one of the greatest benefits of device connectivity is the ability for companies to improve or change product functionality over time. Already, Tovala has delivered two over-the-air updates to early customers to change the behavior of some of the front panel controls, indicators, and cook cycles.

One of the things that makes Tovala’s solution so simple is the ability to automatically program the oven for Tovala’s own meals by scanning a QR code on each meal pack using a scanner hidden under the front panel. A typical cook cycle might go through four or five bake/broil/steam phases, but all you have to do is scan the code to start it all. The oven gets the proper cooking program over the air and does the rest for you.

Tovala’s app also has some (few—very few) recipes built in and allows you to build and save your own. Co-founder Rabie says more pre-defined recipes are coming, and you’ll soon be able to share recipes with the Tovala community.

The app can also send notifications to your phone when cooking is complete and when the oven encounters any problems. In my testing, the notifications have been inconsistent. After encountering a bug in the initial app release, I uninstalled the app and re-installed, but I still don’t get most notifications when cooking is complete.

Eating

The gem in the Tovala solution is the prepared meal subscription plans. Tovala offers two meal plans—one that allows you to pick three meals a week and another that doubles your selected order so you can prepare meals for two. Each week, you make your meal selections online or in the Tovala app from around half a dozen offerings that are constantly changing (perhaps with the exception of Miso-glazed Salmon, which doesn’t ever seem to fall off the menu).

Most meals comprise a protein, or main dish, with vegetable and grain sides. The mains are commonly boneless chicken, fish, or tofu, while the sides are typically a vegetable or green paired with some sort of whole-grain rice. This past week’s ordering options included Teriyaki Chicken with Fried Rice Pilaf, Roasted Pineapple & Sesame Coleslaw and Sunflower Satay Tofu Steak with Sesame Ginger Brown Rice & Garlic Green Beans; and this week’s Miso-glazed Salmon sides are Edamame Brown Rice and Charred Citrus Broccoli. You’re not going to find traditional starches like white rice and mashed potatoes (although they’ve occasionally offered fingerlings).

Tovala’s food is fresh—not frozen—and meals are shipped out to customers each Tuesday, arriving the next day. They’re bundled together in packets that are then packed in foam-and-mylar-lined boxes containing ice packs. It’s a lot of packaging, intended (but not always succeeding) to keep the meals protected and adequately chilled until you can properly refrigerate them.

A look inside the Tovala shipment

A Tovala meal pack

An unpacked Tovala meal pack

Meal preparation is quite simple. Each pack contains one or two plastic-covered foil trays and a caddy containing garnishes and accompaniments clearly labeled to add before or after cooking. Tear off the plastic; sprinkle, spread, or pour the “before” items (often oils or Miso glaze) as directed on the meal pack, scan the QR code, put the trays in the oven, and push the knob to start. In 15-20 minutes you may or may not get a device notification to let you know that your meal is ready. You may want to ask Alexa to set a timer for you, because you likely won’t hear the nearly-inaudible electronic chirps the oven makes when the cooking cycle completes.

Tovala mealpack ready to cook

The meals are delicious, and the portions are generous. I’ve ordered chicken, fish, turkey, pasta, and vegetable meals, and every single one of them has been flavorful and filling. Rabie says their intent is to provide clean ingredients with bold flavors and no preservatives. Meals are typically 400-800 calories and are high in protein. I’ve never been able to plate a meal to look anything like a professional chef would intend, but it typically looks colorful and appetizing. My plates don’t look as beautiful as in Tovala’s photos, but the food tastes as good as (often better than) I’d expect. Tovala plans to eventually expand the menu, offering plans to accommodate different palates and diets.

A plated meal cooked by Tovala

Meatballs cooked by Tovala

As with other food delivery services, Tovala’s early backers have reported a number of common shipping problems that the company is still working to resolve. Some packages have arrived damaged. Some customers have reported that the ice packs are fully melted on warmer days, and the delivered food is no longer cold. Some shipments have arrived after the FedEx delivery window for standard overnight service, which is already 8:00 p.m. And a combination of breached ice packs and condensation has caused many meal packs to arrive soaking wet. Unfortunately, I have experienced all of these issues. Happily, Tovala’s customer support, available by phone, email, and chat, is extremely friendly and helpful. They’ll promptly credit your account if your food arrives damaged or spoiled.

The company’s also had some packaging and labeling issues over these initial few months, including three separate labeling “mix-ups” on meal nutrition information, garnish instructions, and even one regarding an expiration date. They’ve followed each of these up with email correspondence to customers, but these problems suggest a highly manual process with quality review and control issues that are concerning when we’re talking about perishable food packaging.

Cooking

OK, so the Tovala oven does a great job cooking Tovala meals. Perhaps that’s not a surprise; arguably, it’s a necessity. But how is the Tovala oven at cooking other stuff? It turns out that’s a little more complicated—both figuratively and literally.

Tovala’s oven features two built-in cooking cycles—Toast and Heat—and they both have issues. Let’s look at Toast first. Since the Tovala product is a countertop oven, you might expect that this oven might take the place of your toaster or toaster oven. I did…that seems reasonable (and it was part of my argument for putting this thing on our kitchen counter). Not so fast.

Tovala offers a Toast cycle, but even after recent updates (again automatically delivered over the air), this oven doesn’t toast bread anywhere near as evenly, quickly, or consistently as pretty much any toaster I’ve ever used. I’ve spoken with David Rabie about making toast more than I’ve probably ever discussed toast with anyone. He’s explained the complexity of carmelization across bread types and temperatures, stepped through their multi-phase toasting cycle, and patiently listened to my complaints. I just want to make toast, and it strikes me that companies have made products that can do this successfully for years.

Initially, my Tovala oven overcooked (burned) the top side and undercooked the bottom of nearly any bread product I tried to toast. The recent update refines the toasting process, offering five toast settings (expanded from the original three). While I’m no longer burning toast, I’m no less disappointed with the results. The browning is still uneven between the top and bottom sides, with the bottom remaining undercooked. And now it all takes longer—anywhere from five to nearly ten minutes. My partner put our toaster back on the counter.

The toaster is back

Tovala’s other built-in function, Heat, is a timed cycle with a mixture of broil, steam, and convection bake, cooking at a range of temperatures between 400°–475° F. It seems specifically designed for reheating. You don’t need to adjust the temperature—it handles all that for you. Just press the Heat button, turn the front knob to select the desired cooking time, and press the knob to start. Tovala recommends 9:15 as a good starting point to reheat a meal and 15 minutes to cook something frozen. While it’s convenient and somewhat magical, the black-box nature of the cycle can be a bit frustrating. It’s all about experimenting to find the right cook time, but you can’t just add time to a heating cycle in progress, and you can’t pause the cycle if you open the oven to inspect your food.

For anything more specific or complicated than these slightly flawed Toast and Heat functions, you need to pull out your phone and use Tovala’s app.

…to use your oven.

If you want to, say, broil something for 6 minutes, you need to use the app. If someone in your household wants to heat something at 375° for 25 minutes, they’ll need to use the app. If your house-sitter or visiting in-laws want to cook someth—oh, let’s face it…they’re out of luck.

This is where it all falls apart for me. And to make matters worse, the app doesn’t just let you set the temp/time and go. To start cooking at a particular temperature, you need to select an existing or create a new cook cycle…or meal…or recipe—the same thing has different names depending what screen you’re on. Adding time or increasing the temperature while the oven is already in use is equally cumbersome. You can’t just change it from the cooking status screen. Instead, you have to find the recipe in use and edit the appropriate steps, which changes your saved recipe, too. And like the Heat function, you can’t pause the cycle if you open the oven to check on things.

Tovala app “cook cycle”

Tovala app recipes/my meals

Tovala app “Bake” cook step

 

There are also some preset recipes you can choose from in the app that give you pre-programmed cook cycles for a select few proteins and vegetables (five when it first shipped; eight at the time of this writing). Tovala plans to expand this library over time, but this feels like a huge missed opportunity and gap, particularly considering this type of combination cooking is likely new to most consumers and how otherwise tedious it is to just set it like a plain, old oven.

How do you cook baked potatoes, tater tots, or other foods you might heat in a traditional oven? What’s the best way to reheat pizza, rolls, or croissants? I find it hard to imagine that the folks working at Tovala don’t already have some of these cycles pre-programmed for their own ovens. Even Tovala’s Kickstarter campaign featured example cook cycles for some popular foods, but most of them aren’t yet in the app.

I’d also like to see some assistance with cooking packaged foods. Imagine if the scanner could read the bar code on select packaged products and set the oven accordingly. Now that would be useful.

If you’ve never cooked with steam before, there are some aspects of the Tovala oven that may surprise you. For example, I wasn’t expecting the water drippings that form in the oven during and after cooking. I’m also constantly forgetting to keep my hands and face away when I open the oven door after cooking, as a waft of hot steam usually needs to escape before you can grab your food. I’m forgetful enough about it that I kind of wish the device had CAUTION: Hot Steam! permanently printed on the top edge of the door frame. I’m also concerned about the long-term effects the steam may have on the finish of the cabinets above my oven.

Finally, while this isn’t an issue that appears to affect functionality, the oven seems to have some engineering or manufacturing flaws that cause it to make occasional unsettling noises. Several Tovala customers, including me, have reported that as the oven is heating, it occasionally makes a loud bang as the interior oven wall buckles. As the oven cools, it bangs itself back into place. Additionally, there’s an occasional whistle inside the oven when it’s heating—usually on longer cook cycles. Rabie acknowledges these as known issues but notes that they don’t impact the oven performance or pose any danger (short of, perhaps, startling you). Still…how did that get through testing?

A slightly warped oven wall

Cleaning

Like all ovens, this thing is going to get dirty. Crumbs from bread products and splatter from meals create a soupy mess on the bottom as it mixes with residual water condensation. But unlike a toaster with a removable bottom panel or a microwave oven with smooth surfaces, this box has permanently attached top-and-bottom heating coils that you need to clean around. It’s kind of a pain. I’ve sadly given up on maintaining an always-shiny oven interior.

Inside the Tovala, pre-cleaning

Tovala recommends wiping down the interior of the oven when it’s cool with soapy water and traditional oven cleaner. The oven has a clean cycle you can run it through after the cleaner has been sitting for a while. You run that using the app, of course.

Reflecting

So how much does all of this cost? Meals are $12 apiece, including shipping, and you can subscribe to receive either 3 meals a week for $36 or 6 meals a week (two each of the 3 selected meals) for $72. That’s a lot—slightly more than other food delivery services, but Tovala has the added benefit of the meals being already prepared for you (if, like me, you want that added convenience). And if you like Miso-glazed Salmon as part of your weekly diet, that regular offering alone may be worth it to you.

The oven itself costs $399. That’s $70 higher than the estimated retail price projected during the Kickstarter campaign. For now, you can only order it online, but Rabie says they’ll be considering retail channels in the future.

As a stand-alone countertop oven, Tovala promises a lot but doesn’t yet live up to its full potential. Toasting bread is still problematic, even after recent updates, so it’s not going to replace your toaster yet. Heating food is more reliable, but in that mode your oven is literally a black box that you just have to trust. If you want more control, you’re relegated to using the app, which only supports iOS and Android phones, isn’t optimized yet for tablets, and can’t be controlled through voice assistants like the Echo or Google Home (all of which, according to Rabie, are under consideration for Tovala’s roadmap).

The Tovala app has not been optimized for tablets yet

Tovala makes no bones about the fact that the company’s focus has been on using the oven to cook Tovala meals—and clearly they’ve spent significant time and effort making that convenient and reliable. In my opinion, the Tovala meals are the best part of the offering, but that’s marred somewhat by a still imperfect fulfillment process. The company needs to further improve the reliability of its meal packaging and delivery, perhaps even offering an “express” option for customers in warmer climates who can receive packages earlier in the day.

That focus on the meal subscription service is also the likely reason Tovala’s industrial designers ultimately felt they could delegate basic function and temperature control to an app, but that’s a potential liability for both Tovala and its customers. Tovala oven owners are taking a bet on this company, trusting it to maintain and update the apps and services that control the oven long after purchase.

What happens if smartphones no longer rule our lives in 5 years? What happens if Tovala abandons or degrades support for this first-generation oven when its focus moves to newer models. What happens if Tovala isn’t successful, or gets acquired, or pivots? Well…then you could be left with a large, not-so-great-at-toasting toaster oven. This clearly isn’t an issue specific to Tovala, but it’s one that we, as consumers, will need to consider as more products abandon physical controls and rely on third-party devices and cloud services.

As an early backer on Kickstarter, I paid about half the current retail price, and I’m happy with that price. I don’t know that I would have gone in at $399. I’m also very pleased with the meals and the convenience—I’m eating better now. I recognize that my oven is likely one of the first batch produced and shipped, and Tovala will refine the hardware and experience over time. But in its current form, I’m frustrated by the product’s quirks like the toasting, the banging and whistling, and the heavy app dependency.

Bottom line: this product is about convenience. If you’re interested in eating good, prepared meals at a premium price, then Tovala is worth your consideration. If you consider yourself an amateur chef, and you’re more interested in control and precision, then you’re in luck because this space is heating up [sorry…it was really unavoidable]. If you’re in that group, though, you may be better served by June’s or Anova’s anticipated offering. Either way, get out your wallets. This convenience and control doesn’t come cheap.

About the Author: Richard Gunther is the Director of Client Experience at Universal Mind, a digital agency in Denver, CO. He’s also the Editor of the Digital Media Zone and hosts Home: On, a podcast about DIY home automation products and technology.