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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

meal kits

Blue Apron Gives Time-Crunched Customers New Option With Heat & Eat Meals

For six months, I was an enthusiastic Blue Apron subscriber.

Each week I’d go on the website, eagerly choose my meals, and then spend an hour or so a couple of nights a week preparing dinner for my family by following Blue Apron’s cook-by-number instruction cards.

I liked it. The food was good, I learned new recipes, and it was fun.

But I still canceled. The reason? Life got busy, and it all seemed like just too much work.

As it turns out, I’m not the only one who doesn’t have 45 minutes a night to cook, which is why Blue Apron is debuting a new line of Heat & Eat meals that subscribers can microwave and have on the table in five minutes.

The company announced that the new ready-to-eat meals are available to most customers this week and will be available nationwide by November 1st.

From the release:

Heat & Eat meals were crafted to seamlessly complement customers’ Blue Apron Signature weekly recipes, providing them with more choice and flexibility in their weekly routine. Whether they are cooking for one, seeking a quick dinner option or an easy weekday lunch, Heat & Eat meals were designed to make meal decisions a bit easier. Heat & Eat meals are based on some of the company’s most ordered and top-rated dishes, and designed to be warmed in a microwave.

The new Heat & Eat meals will also come in single portions, a departure from the company’s traditional 2 or 4 person serving sizes for their cook-from-recipe meals.

It’s no secret that meal kit companies have long struggled with customer churn; just last year, Blue Apron explored strategic options as it ran short on cash due to high churn. However, the company saw an increase in customers in 2020 as people stayed home and cooked more, and early indications are some of the behavior changes may be permanent.

And now, by expanding their menu of options to include ready-to-eat meals (and adding single-serve portions), there’s a good chance the company will be able to reduce churn. I also suspect they’ll widen their addressable market to the time-crunched professional who cooks for themselves (Tovala’s sweet spot).

Had they had ready-to-eat meals when I was a subscriber, I might have stuck around. And who knows? With their expanded meal options, I might have to give them a second chance.

Vegano Launches an All-Vegan E-Commerce Grocery Marketplace in Canada

Vancouver, Canada-based startup Vegano launched an online vegan marketplace today that will function as an e-commerce grocery-delivery storefront for plant-based food items.

For now, the service operates in the Metro Vancouver area as well as Squamish and Whistler. The company said it plans to expand to Toronto and Montreal by the end of this year in addition to heading Stateside and launching in Los Angeles. 

As its name suggests, Vegano sells 100 percent vegan foods sourced locally to each area the company serves. Up to now, this has been primarily through the Vegano’s meal kit service. Each week, users can pick three meal kits, which are delivered with pre-portioned ingredients and cooking instructions. Vegano says meals can be prepared in 30 to 45 minutes. 

The new online marketplace currently sells around 500 items from brands like No Whey Foods, Very Good Butchers, Field Roast, and others. The company said it plans to bump that number of products up to 10,000 by the end of 201. While shoppers don’t have to be existing Vegano meal kit subscribers to order from the marketplace, there is a $9.99 delivery fee for non-members. Members, meanwhile, can choose marketplace items and arrange to have them delivered on the same day as their meal kit.

Vegano says it has experienced a 150 percent growth in sales since January 2021. And little wonder, given the rise in sales of plant-based proteins around the world. Canada, specifically, got a major boost in this area last year when one of its own plant-based food producers, Merit Functional Foods, nabbed a $100 million investment from the government. Additionally, companies like Impossible and Eat Just have expanded their product lines to Canadian restaurants and retail shelves. The overall market for plant-based protein in Canada is expected to grow 14 percent annually by 2024.

Vegano closed a $4.2 oversubscribed round of Series A funding in March of this year. Funds are going towards scaling the company, and growing its marketplace and CPG offerings, in addition to accelerating product development. The company also plans to launch its own line of products to its marketplace by the end of this year.

Dishpatch Raises £10M for ‘Finish at Home’ Meal Delivery Service

Dishpatch, a finish-at-home meal kit service based in the U.K., has raised £10 million (~$14 million USD) in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz and LocalGlobe, who co-led the round. Other participants to the round include Stride, Entree Capital, Entrepreneur First, and several angel investors.

The Dishpatch service is a cross between a meal kit company and a restaurant delivery service. The company works with local restaurants to offer consumers a pick of weekly meals that are delivered on Fridays. All food is fully cooked at the restaurant but arrives to customers’ homes cold. Customers themselves handle the final heating and preparation, aided by detailed instructions that accompany that food. 

Dishpatch, which has called itself “the antithesis of Deliveroo,” launched during the pandemic as an in-between option for off-premises restaurant meals that’s not quite restaurant delivery but not a box of raw ingredients a la HelloFresh, either.  

The finish-at-home meal kit concept as a whole became popular in 2020 during the pandemic. For many restaurants, particularly higher end ones, throwing a fully prepped hot meal into a takeout box and handing it over to a delivery courier was less than ideal. However, with dining rooms closed for the majority of 2020, businesses had to make revenue from other channels. Finish-at-home meal kits provided a way for restaurants to participate in delivery without compromising the integrity of their food concepts. Many of the restaurants now on Dishpatch’s platform started working with the company, which was founded in 2020, for exactly this reason. 

Dishpatch currently has 25 restaurant signed to its platform that delivery to the London area — over 50 miles from the city center in some cases. Funds from this seed round will allow 20 more restaurants to join the by the end of the year. The company will also further develop its tech, marketing, distribution, and customer service.  

Meal Prep Startup Meallogix Raises $1.7 Pre-Series A Round of Funding

Meallogix, an enterprise resource planning startup focusing on the meal prep sector, announced today via emailed press release that it has closed a $1.7 pre-series A round of funding. The round was led by Tech Coast Angels, with participation from Spark Growth Ventures. This brings the total amount raised by the company to $3 million.

Meallogix provides a software platform that helps take over the more administrative tasks associated with running a meal prep or meal kit company. The Meallogix software handles things such as shopping lists, prep lists, recipe management, meal planning, food labeling, supply costs and meal delivery logistics.

Meal kit companies experienced a resurgence during the pandemic last year. Unable to dine out and forced to eat at home more often, people turned to meal kit and meal prep companies to mix things up. During the height of the pandemic’s first wave in 2020, sales of meal kits doubled year-over-year.

But the question now is how much of the audience that flocked to meal kits will stay with them now that vaccines are aggressively rolling out. When restaurants are re-opened fully and people are able to move about more freely (not to mention the warm months of summer encouraging outdoor activities), will they still be interested in a meal kit subscription?

Meallogix is obviously still bullish on the meal kit and prep sector. In its press announcement today, the referred to a Nielsen statistic saying that 50 million people participate in meal kit and meal prep subscription, and that the market is projected to double to $11.6 billion by 2022.

Meallogix says it will be using its new funds to build out the front and back end of its software, expand its reach here in the U.S., and launch an online learning platform specific to the meal prep sector.

Sunbasket Transitions from Meal Kit Player to ‘Full-Service Meal Delivery Company’

Sunbasket, best known for its meal-kit subscription service, announced today it is broadening its product line and evolving to become “a full-service food delivery company.” The newly revamped service will offer a range of different food items to consumers, from full meals to snacks and pantry staples.

Reaching more potential customers, including those who need something more convenient than a full-on meal kit, seems to be at the heart of this transition. “The onset of COVID-19 forced consumers to quickly adopt new habits when it came to food, and Sunbasket was inspired to reflect on our company’s values to better serve our customers,” said Don Barnett, CEO, Sunbasket, said in a statement. Barnett added that he believes the company’s “refreshed emphasis on convenience will be appealing to even more people.”

To that end, the Sunbasket site now carries a mix of meal kits, heat-and-serve meals, meats (plant-based and traditional), dairy products, pantry staples, and snacks.

What is not completely clear from Sunbasket’s revamped website is whether a user still has to sign up for a subscription in order to get the pantry staples. From the looks of it, you would still need to sign up for a meal plan (either a meal kit or the heat-and-serve option), at which point you could add other staples onto your existing order. As has always been the case with Sunbasket, the commitment is month to month.

Today may be the official announcement for Sunbasket’s expanded roster of foods, but the company has dropped hints of such a transition for some time. In 2019, it expanded its dinner-only lineup to include breakfast and lunch meals, as well as add ons like granola butter and single-serving snacks.

And while the traditional meal kit is seeing some resurgence because of the pandemic (everyone’s eating at home), the sector’s ongoing struggles are well-documented. Most meal kit companies, including Kroger-owned HomeChef, Purple Carrot, and Blue Apron, have added a wider variety of food items as well as some customization features.

Sunbasket’s move to offer grocery items is a first in the meal kit sector, but it’s one of many examples of previously narrowly focused food companies expanding to incorporate online grocery into their wares. Misfits Market and Imperfect Foods, both companies that originally focused on rescuing cosmetically “ugly” fruits and veggies, have since expanded their services to include online marketplaces where all manner of pantry goods and food supplies can be bought. As a meal kit company, Sunbasket’s core business differs from these two companies, but it’s newly announced expansion appears to be similar.

With online grocery shopping expected to hit $250 billion and account for 21.5 percent of all grocery sales by 2025, it wouldn’t be surprising if other meal kit companies soon follow Sunbasket’s lead.

Just Salad Debuts Meal Kit Brand to Fight Food Waste, Plastic Packaging

Fast-casual chain Just Salad has launched a meal kit brand it is calling the “next generation of meal kits.” Dubbed Housemade, the line is available now exclusively via Grubhub, according to a blog post from Just Salad.

The standout feature of the new meal kit line (which launched very, very quietly this month), is its purportedly waste-free packaging. Anyone who has ever ordered a traditional meal kit knows that you’re typically left with a mound of plastic, cardboard, and dry ice after the food is prepped.

In contrast, Just Salad says the Housemade line uses “zero plastic packaging.” Instead, meals arrive in curbside recyclable or compostable packaging, and labels on the packages are water soluble. Recipe cards contain disposal instructions for the packaging.

In terms of what actually arrives in a kit, it’s a bit of a cross between a prepared meal delivery and a more traditional kit. For example, the Housemade Mediterranean Chicken Salad comes with uncooked chicken, rice, vegetables, and other ingredients. Items are pre-portioned out, so that the customer just has to put them into single pan and cook for 15 minutes. Since Just Salad won’t be using dry ice or other cold storage materials for its packages, meals are meant to be delivered within an hour. There is no subscription to purchase the Housemade kits, which start at $10.49 for a single serving. Users can simply head over to Just Salad’s page on the Grubhub app or website.

Meal kits as a category has long been championed as a potential avenue for fighting food waste because ingredients are pre-portioned and users get exactly what they need for each meal. The tradeoff for that convenience up to now has been excess amounts of packaging waste, which rather nullifies any other sustainable aspects of the meal kit.

Just Salad said in its blog post that its Housemade kits have “91 percent less packaging by weight than the average meal kit.” Again, the reason that is possible is because kits are have few ingredients, are available in single-serving sizes, and are meant to be delivered within an hour. Traditional meal kits, on the other hand, serve entire families, usually require a subscription, and are shipped across the country. All of those factors require more protective packaging (insulating, shipping, etc.) for any given order. Just Salad’s tactic of using its own locations to fulfill orders and delivering those orders within an hour automatically removes some of the packaging problem from the process.

In its blog post, Just Salad said meal kits “have a crucial redeeming feature,” which is fighting food waste, but that the industry must “rethink the meal kit concept” in order to effectively cut down on packaging waste.

Thistle Raises $10.3M to Expand Its Plant-Forward Meal Delivery Service

San Francisco-based prepared meal service Thistle announced this week it has raised a $10.3 million Series B round to expand its plant-based meal delivery operation. The round was led by PowerPlant Ventures, with participation from Siddhi Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, and the venture arm of Rich Products Corporation. The new financing brings Thistle’s total funding to date to $17 million. 

The company will use the new funds to widen its geographical reach. Currently, Thistle’s service is available in many parts of California, including the San Francisco Bay Area, the North Bay, Sacramento, Davis County, Orange County, and Los Angeles. It also recently added Las Vegas, Nevada to its roster, and also ships to other parts of Arizona, Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and Washington.

According to today’s press release, the new expansion will push the company towards having “a bi-coastal footprint” at some point in 2021 as well as a new production facility most likely to be located on the East Coast. 

Thistle’s service itself offers ready-made plant-based meals delivered to customers doorsteps via a weekly subscription that can be customized based on the number of days a user needs the food. Meals include breakfast, lunch, and dinner items as well as snacks and juices.

The company said in today’s press release that part of the new Series B funding will go towards launching new features for customers, including a complimentary virtual consultation with an in-house dietician.

Meal delivery, whether ready-made meals a la Thistle or more traditional kits from the likes of Blue Apron, have enjoyed an uptick in demand because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has limited options for consumers in terms of eating out or finding prepared foods. As it expands, Thistle’s chief competition will be other companies that delivery ready-made healthy meals. That includes Factor75, which was recently acquired by HelloFresh, and FreshlyFit, the healthy meal line by Nestlé-owned Freshly.  

 

HelloFresh Buys Prepared Meal Delivery Service Factor75 for $277M

Meal kit company HelloFresh announced today that it is acquiring prepared meal delivery service Factor75. The deal is being done through Berlin-based HelloFresh’s U.S. subsidiaries and has the company paying up to $277 million in cash (up to $100 million is in the form of an earn-out and management incentives) for Factor75.

Factor75’s revenue is projected to reach $100 million for the full year 2020. HelloFresh is using the acquisition to expand its presence and market reach here in the U.S. Through the Factor75 purchase, HelloFresh will gain a Chicago office along with four production and fulfillment facilities. There is also a forthcoming facility that, according to the press announcement, will provide enough capacity to deliver more than $500 million worth of prepared meals annually.

This the second big acquisition of a prepared meal delivery service is as many months. At the end of October, Nestlé acquired Freshly in a deal that valued Freshly at $950 million (actual purchase price and deal structure details were not disclosed).

Both these acquisitions come against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has more people eating at home. Prepared meal kit companies like Factor75 and Freshly offer a convenient way to mix up home dining because meals are already cooked and just need to be re-heated. There’s no extensive preparation or lengthy cooking times like there is with traditional meal kits that just send ingredients.

Given that there are now three promising COVID vaccines on the horizon, one has to wonder if Factor75 is exiting at the right time. Obviously there is still a mountain of regulatory and logistical work that needs to be done before any vaccine becomes widely available. But if vaccines start to roll out over the next six to 12 months and consumers feel more free to venture out to restaurants and grocery stores whenever they want, will consumers still have an appetite for meal kits and prepared meal services?

Everytable Raises $16M to Fight Food Insecurity With Delivery

Social-enterprise-meets-restaurant-business Everytable announced this week it had closed a $16 million Series B funding round to continue its fight against food insecurity. The round was led by Creadev with participation from Kaiser Permanente Ventures, Candide Group, Gratitude Railroad Ventures, Desert Bloom Food Ventures, and Kimball Musk. This round brings Everytable’s total funding to $18.5 million. 

Company founder Sam Polk started Everytable in 2015, after leaving Wall Street, with the idea of selling grab-and-go meals priced according to the neighborhoods in which they were sold. Everytable’s main mission was — and still is — to make nutritious meals accessible to everyone, regardless of their socio-economic bracket.

The Los Angeles-based company has since added a meal subscription service where users choose meals from a rotating menu. Everytable chefs prep the food in a central commissary kitchen, while the company’s delivery team delivers the food. Like grab-and-go items, meals are priced according to the area in which they are headed, so that affluent customers will pay a little more than those facing food insecurity.

Customers an also get meals from a number of Everytable’s own brick-and-mortar stores around Los Angeles.

That food insecurity affects one in eight Americans, according to data from Feeding America. Unsurprisingly, this lack of access to nutritious food has become an even more urgent issue since the pandemic hit. In response, and in addition to its retail efforts, Everytable has also been delivering meals to those most in need, including homebound elderly people, the homeless, and community college students who would ordinarily rely on their schools’ meal plans. The company said in today’s press release it has donated more than 4 million meals to Los Angeles residents, which has also led to the company’s scaling production from about 30,000 meals per week to 180,000.

Everytable says the new funding will help it expand throughout Southern California via new grab-and-go stores, partnerships with institutional foodservice outlets, and new postal codes eligible for the company’s subscription service.

For the holidays, the company is also currently running its Pay It Forward program, done in partnership with YWCA Greater Los Angeles and Genesis Motors, both of whom will match donations. Individuals can donate a meal for $6.50 or a care package with five meals for $29.00. The cost of delivering the food is included in the donation. 

Eat Just Is Offering a Plant-Based Take on Meal Kit Deliveries for NYC

Two things we’ve seen increase during the pandemic: online food deliveries and demand for plant-based protein. Alt-protein company Eat Just is bundling those two ideas together with a new delivery offering that’s looks to be part meal kit and part virtual cooking session for homebound NYCers in need of brunch. The company is giving away free “Brunch in a Box” kits to residents of the Big Apple via a hotline users can text to get their meals.

Each kit contains ingredients for one of three recipes developed by Eat Just: eggs Florentine, eggnog French toast, and buckwheat crêpes. To get one, users text BrunchNYC to 35344, designating which of the above three meals they would like to cook. A spokesperson from Eat Just said all kits include every ingredient needed to create the recipe. The kits will be fulfilled by Amazon Prime Now.

An accompanying series of online cooking tutorials led by Chef Bec shows users exactly how to prep and cook the meals.

The idea is to help consumers recreate brunch at home, which I suspect will be happening a lot now that cold weather is here and the pandemic continues to restrict restaurant dining rooms. Bringing brunch indoors via delivery is one way to do that. “Our team wanted to help make the transition back indoors easier by sharing some new recipes featuring seasonal ingredients and healthier twists on brunch classics,” Eat Just’s spokesperson said of the new program.

The “Brunch in a Box” kits will be available for a limited time for free. Adding another virtual layer to the project, the company is working with local influencers to get the word out. Those include Priyanka Naik, NYC food blogger Dominek, and Vegan in the Hood.

The company’s most recent NYC outreach isn’t strictly limited to the online realm, though. Last week, Eat Just along with a handful of other alt-protein companies announced their Plantega project. Through it, the collective will offer grab-and-go options at the local bodega, with the goal of getting plant-based foods to areas of the city where they might otherwise be harder to access. 

“Everyone, regardless of their zip code, should have the opportunity to enjoy food that is good for their bodies and good for the planet,” Eat Just founder and CEO Josh Tetrick said in a statement emailed to The Spoon. “Growing up in the South, eating meals that were convenient and cheap but bad for my health, is what motivated me to start a company that could help bring meaningful change to the food system.” 

Plantega will include offerings from Eat Just as well as Beyond Meat, No Evil Foods, Miyoko’s Creamery, Good Catch, and several others. Goods are available now in Brooklyn at the Don Polo Meat Market and Gourmet Deli, as well as at My Deli Gourmet & Grill in the Bronx. 

Eat Just said it that the success of these initial locations will depend on whether the Plantega project expands to locations in the future, in both NYC and beyond. 

Blue Apron Adds Customization, Extra Boxes to Meal Kit Subscriptions

Blue Apron announced today it has expanded its product line to introduce more flexibility into its meal kit subscription plans, likely in a bid to reach a wider number of homebound customers. To do this, Blue Apron unveiled three new features: recipe customization, the ability to get multiple meal kit boxes per week, and more meals per week for the two-person box.

Recipe customization is the most intriguing of these options. Customers will be able to “customize select recipes” by swapping out choice of protein, switching a veggie for a starch, increasing portion size, and replace a meat portion with a plant-based protein. (Blue Apron has maintained a partnership with Beyond Meat since 2019.) 

Blue Apron subscribers will also have the option to receive multiple boxes per week. Subscribers normally get one box per week that contains all ingredients for Blue Apron meals for that week. This new feature gives customers the option for two boxes per week, for a total of eight different recipes that can be delivered at staggered times. 

Finally, Blue Apron has added an extra meal to its Two-Person Signature box for a total of four meals per week. 

That the extra features are all about customization and flexibility makes sense, given the uncertainty of the restaurant dining room and the fact that more consumers are eating in these days. Adding more choice to its offerings potentially allows Blue Apron to reach a wider audience. 

Blue Apron has struggled for the last few years, along with the entire meal kit sector. Of late, though, the company has seen something of a resurgence. On its most recent earnings call, Blue Apron said its customer base grew by 20,000, and average revenue per customer increased 25 percent year over year.

Other meal kit companies, including Sun Basket, Purple Carrot, and HelloFresh, have also reported an uptick in demand.

In today’s press release, Blue Apron said its new features will be available to all subscribers by the end of the year.

Food Tech News: New Meals from Sun Basket, a Dr. Pepper Shortage, and Virtual Concession Stands

These days, food tech news is flying by at breakneck speed — sort of like how I’ll be doing this weekend on my paddle board. Before that can happen, though, here are a few last bits of intel from the past week to keep you up to date on your food tech, whether you’re spending the weekend lakeside, curbside, or on your couch. Just don’t plan on a Dr. Pepper to go with it.

Sun Basket launches no-prep meal kits.

Meal kit company Sun Basket this week launched its Fresh & Ready line of products, which the company says can go straight into the microwave or oven and be ready in as little as six minutes. This new line is available as part of Sun Basket’s weekly meal plan subscription, and maintain the company’s focus on fresh, organic ingredients sourced from family-owned farms.  

Refill brings virtual concessions stands to Ohio high schools.

Refill, a company that makes virtual concession stand technology for things like sporting events, announced this week it is testing out its platform in Ohio high schools. The system uses features like contactless ordering and payments to make the process of grabbing grub during a ballgame more efficient and socially distanced.

Kroger is launching a marketplace strategy.

Kroger will double its online grocery inventory through a new digital marketplace strategy. The move, which is an obvious bid to compete with Target, Amazon, and other online heavyweights, will initially focus specialty retailers with natural, organic, and international products. The launch will also include housewares, toys, and other items.

There’s a Dr. Pepper shortage. 

Hang tight, soda lovers. Dr. Pepper had to reassure fans this week that its products would be back on store shelves in full force soon. “We’re doing everything we can to get it back into your hands,” the company tweeted, adding that it’s working with distributors to do so.