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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

meal kits

Snap Kitchen Expands Prepared Meal Delivery to 15 Cities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tech-centric Meal Kit Company Gousto Raises £30M in Fresh Funds

London, UK-based meal kit company Gousto announced this week it has raised a £30 million ($37.6 million USD) Series F funding round led by UK private equity investment firm Perwyn, with participation from existing investors BGF Ventures, MMC Ventures, Canaccord Genuity, and Unilever Ventures. The round also includes investment from British Instagram star Joe Wicks, better known as The Body Coach. This round brings Gousto’s total funding to $137.7 million.

Gousto’s meal kits — or “recipe boxes,” as they’re called in the UK — focus on healthy ingredients and more sustainable eating habits (hence Joe Wicks’ involvement). The service offers subscription plans for everything from vegetarian and plant-based diets to boxes for those who just want a healthier take on standard comfort foods. Users sign up via the app or website, choose a plan, and get pre-portioned ingredients delivered to their door with corresponding recipes each week. The company claims to be delivering 1.5 million meals per month in the UK. Price-wise, the service is actually a little cheaper than its main UK competitor HelloFresh: a four-person box with four recipes per week breaks down to £2.98 per serving, compared to £3.44 per serving from HelloFresh.

The company is also intensely focused on using tech to make meal kit logistics more efficient and also offer customers more choice. The company uses a public-facing, AI-powered personalization tool to make more relevant recommendations to individual customers. “We have been using the technology since our founding, and it powers everything from the recipes that customers see on our website to how boxes are prepared in our Picking Hub,” company CEO, Timo Boldt, wrote in a blog post last year. He also claimed, in a separate interview, that that 40 percent of the meals Gousto sells are recommended by AI. The company also uses AI on its back end, to automate the supply chain, as well as a forecasting.

Sustainability is the company’s other major focus area. On its website the company says most of its packaging is fully recyclable, and that it is looking for more sustainable ways to replace the few plastics it uses in the subscription boxes. That’s particularly important in the UK, where new controls are being introduced in an effort to drastically cut down on single-use plastics.

Unlike other meal kit companies, Gousto won’t head to the grocery aisle any time soon. Last year, HelloFresh started selling meal kits in grocery stores in addition to offering a subscription business. But Boldt has been vocal about his desire for Gousto to be an alternative to the grocery store, rather than another piece of its inventory.

Gousto told AgFunder this latest investment round will go towards further building out its technology side of the business, including hiring over 100 tech employees by 2020.

Can a Beyond Meat Partnership Help Blue Apron Spike Orders? (Probably Not.)

Today Blue Apron announced it would begin selling Beyond Meat products in its meal kits next month. According to CNBC, this news caused the struggling meal kit company’s stock to rise 33 percent during morning trading.

Blue Apron x Beyond Meat kits will be available starting this August. The kits will feature Beyond’s new “meatier” burger patties. The recipes are basically tricked-up beyond burgers (Caramelized Onion & Cheddar, Jalapeno & Goat Cheese, etc) with a vegetable side.

The choice to add Beyond Meat to their meal kits seems to be Blue Apron’s attempt to appeal to a flexitarian audience. It’s also a way to capitalize on the booming alternative protein market: data released today by the Good Food Institute shows that sales of plant-based foods rose 11 percent in last year alone and that the plant-based meat category is worth $801 million.

But this is also an attempt by Blue Apron to draft off of some of Beyond Meat’s viral success, especially after the plant-based meat company’s news-grabbing IPO boom earlier this year. It’s no secret that Blue Apron has been on a downward spiral lately, struggling to grow and keep a subscriber base. Last month the company had to split its stock to keep it above $1 in order to avoid being delisted on the New York Stock Exchange. It makes sense that they would want to hitch their horse to Beyond, which has had the biggest IPO pop since the 2008 financial crisis — and whose shares are still soaring at a whopping $172 bucks per share (at the time of this writing).

Lately it seems like Blue Apron has been trying everything to stay afloat. It recently partnered with WW (formerly Weight Watchers) and has also tried to follow other meal kit companies into retail with a Costco partnership, which stopped abruptly at the end of last year. They currently have a Jet.com partnership for next-day meal kit delivery (though it’s only in NYC for now).

On Beyond’s part, the Blue Apron partnership seems like a low-risk way to get into more households. This is the plant-based meat company’s second meal delivery partnership. The first is with Trifecta, the pre-made meal delivery service geared towards health-conscious consumers. Seeing as Beyond is trying to do everything and anything it can to grow revenues in the wake of going public, and other meal kits likely want in on this meatless action, I’m guessing we’ll see them entering into more meal kit partnerships coming down the road.

Long-term, the deal might not work out as well for Blue Apron. Despite today’s stock surge, I doubt all the trendy partnerships in the world will save the struggling meal kit company. As my colleague Jenn Marston wrote, if Blue Apron wants to dig itself out from its hole, it needs to make some fundamental shifts to address its core problem: customer acquisition and retention. Adding trendy plant-based meats is one way to draw attention to the service and pick up a few more flexitarian customers, but it won’t solve any underlying issues.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chefs’ Menu and So Yummy Partner Up for Multimedia Meal Kits

One of the reasons we at The Spoon became bearish on meal kits was that while they promise convenience, they’re still a lot of work. And you never know how much work would go into making a meal kit until after you open the box and read through the instructions.

A new partnership between meal kit company Chefs’ Menu and media brand So Yummy is looking to remove that surprise with a little video help. The two companies announced today that they are working together to create So Yummy meal kits with QR codes on the label that when scanned, bring up So Yummy-created videos that show how to prepare the meal. Since the meal kits will be sold at retail, this means that before someone buys one, they can pull out their phone in the grocery store aisle, scan the code and watch a short video to see exactly what it will take to prepare it.

The video content will be the same type of top-down, short form videos that are de rigeur nowadays (think: BuzzFeed Tasty). So Yummy, a division of First Media, says its target demographic is moms aged 18 – 49 and that it reaches roughly 40 million millennials a month across Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and other social channels. In addition to videos that instruct on how to make the Chefs Menu meals, So Yummy will also include videos that show how to hack the meal, such as julienning a vegetable, to give it a more professional look.

The So Yummy-branded meal kits will be priced from $12.99 to $18.99 and will have seven varieties: Teriyaki Chicken Stir Fry, Korean BBQ Steak, Chicken Marsala, Basil Alfredo Chicken Penne, Lemongrass Chicken, Cilantro Lime Steak and Thai Coconut Chicken. In a phone interview, Kevin McCray, Chief Operating Officer at Innov8 Partners (which owns the Chefs’ Menu brand) told me that because of the company’s sous vide preparation of ingredients, Chefs’ Menu meal kits have a 28-day shelf life without synthetic preservatives.

The meal kits are due out this September, but specific retail outlets and geographic availability have not been announced yet.

The meal kit sector as a whole is going through an ongoing evolution. While mail order meal kit pioneer Blue Apron faces getting delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, and Albertsons laid off staff at Plated, there is still projected growth for meal kits at retail.

The partnership between Chefs’ Menu and So Yummy seems to be a smart one. By giving people insight and–depending on the quality of the videos and hacks presented–inspiration right there in the grocery aisle, people could be prodded into buying those meal kits over others where prep is more of a mystery.

Updated: Plant-Based Meal Kit Company Purple Carrot Acquired by Japanese Grocer Oisix Last Month

UPDATE: Purple Carrot sent out a press release officially announcing the deal, though the numbers they provide are different. From that announcement:

Purple Carrot, the plant-based meal kit company with operations in the U.S., today announced that it will be acquired by Tokyo-based Oisix ra daichi Inc. (Oisix), Japan’s largest meal kit and organic food delivery service…

Purple Carrot’s corporate headquarters will remain in Massachusetts, and the entire executive leadership team will maintain their roles in the organization. Terms of the deal include an upfront payment of $12.8 million, with an earn-out potential of an additional $17.2 million through 2021, creating a total deal value of up to $30 million.

This runs counter to the financial document that Oisix released on April 25, which listed a $4 million upfront payment. Additionally a representative of Purple Carrot told The Spoon that the ownership numbers listed in that document were incorrect.

We are still looking into this and will update as more information becomes available.

OUR ORIGINAL POST FROM 5/21/19 FOLLOWS:
Evidently, plant-based meal kit company Purple Carrot was acquired by Japanese online grocer Oisix last month. It happened quietly, at least here in the U.S.; there’s no mention of the acquisition on the company’s blog or press page, and the only press release for the acquisition appears to be in Japanese from Oisix.

We learned about it from a Linkedin post today by Sean Butler, Managing Director, Demand Chain for LIDD (and former SVP at Chef’d). From that post:

Well-known meal kit company Purple Carrot has entered into an agreement to sell itself to Japanese online grocer Oisix ra daichi, according to documents published on the grocer’s website. Oisix ra daichi will pay a mere $4 million USD for Purple Carrot, with a further maximum payout of $17 million due if Purple Carrot fully achieves its three-year earn-out goals.

From the Oisix press release (in Japanese), the acquisition was announced on April 25, 2019. Purple Carrot had raised $10 million so far, including a $4 million investment from fruit company, Del Monte last year. Oisix released a financial document on April 25, outlining more specifics about the deal, including that Purple Carrot had sales of more than $40 million in 2018, and had losses of more than $4 million in 2017 and 2108. Additionally, CEO Andy Levitt and President Brian Greenfield held a combined 80.4 percent of the shares in the company. As Butler writes, this initial $4 million purchase price leaves just $784,000 total for all the investors.

Purple Carrot’s low exit is emblematic of what has been a tough year for meal kit companies. Albertsons laid off ten percent of Plated’s corporate staff and Blue Apron announced this week it could get delisted from the New York Stock Exchange because it’s share price had remained below a dollar since May.

Despite all this sturm and drang, there are still some signs of life in the meal kit market. Kroger is piloting a new line of Home Chef meal kits, and Amazon debuted its meal kits at Whole Foods. Additionally, according to research from Nielsen, meal kits are still growing, driven mostly by their move into retail.

In addition to the straight-up plant-based meal kits, Purple Carrot also created TB12 meal kits in partnership with New England Patriots quarterback, Tom Brady. Wonder if that Super Bowl champion lost anything on that deal with this news.

We reached out to Purple Carrot and will update this story when we hear back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Albertsons Lays Off 10 Percent of Plated’s Corporate Staff

Albertsons-owned meal kit service Plated laid off roughly 10 percent of its corporate staff, according to Bloomberg. The cost-cutting move follows news from last month that Albertsons was scaling back Plated’s availability at its retail stores and the abrupt departure of Plated’s CEO in January.

Albertsons bought Plated in September of 2017 for $200 million, and started rolling out meal kits to Albertsons retail locations in April of 2018. The plan was to expand Plated’s meal kits out to 650 stores by the end of last year.

The layoffs amount to 25 employees in the New York City office, and Bloomberg reports that “The cuts will allow Plated to reduce expenses and better utilize the larger company’s operations structure already in place.”

After launching in 20 stores in California and 20 stores in Chicago, a recent search by The Idaho Statesman found Plated meal kits only available in 19 California stores and two stores in Texas.

An Albertsons spokesperson told Grocery Dive that the company remained committed to meal kits and that it is innovating in the space for future meal kits expansion. Albertsons said this innovation could include moving beyond the core offering of dinner and into other meals or snacks as well as wine pairings.

It’s hard to imagine Albertsons giving up on meal kits entirely, as a recent Nielsen survey showed retail outlets is where most of the growth in meal kits is coming from. Additionally, an NPD study found that 93 million U.S. adults want to try meal kits and that broadened meal categories (breakfast, etc.) were a big opportunity for meal kit companies.

Plus, Albertsons surely doesn’t want to be left behind as rivals such as Amazon now sells meal kits in its Whole Foods stores, and Kroger, which owns meal kit company Home Chef, rolls out customizeable meal kits, and has expanded meal kit sales into drug stores.

Will Liviri’s Reusable Packaging Help Retain Mail Order Meal Kit Subscribers?

When you order a meal kit online, you actually get two things: the meal itself and a huge pile of containers and packaging that you are now responsible for, and not all of it is recyclable. Dealing with all this excessive waste can give consumers pause when deciding whether or not to re-order.

To help combat this packaging problem, yesterday Otter Products debuted the Liviri container system that can be used — and re-used — to ship meal kits, groceries or other perishables ordered for delivery. The plastic container has vacuum-insulated panels to keep food cold, reusable ice packs, and moveable dividers to separate food or create different climate zones within the box.

Once a customer removes their food, they place a return label on the container to go back to a sanitization facility, where it is cleaned and sent out for another use. According to the company a Liviri Fresh box can be re-used up to 75 times.

Liviri’s website claims its box keeps perishables at properly chilled temperatures for longer than the existing, leading insulated cardboard box solutions. This extended cooling helps prevent food spoilage and, the company says, can increase customer satisfaction.

Jim Parke, CEO of Otter told Fast Company that the company’s container system costs more up front than traditional packaging, but since it’s re-usable there is a cost savings. Plus, he said that Liviri’s eco-friendly and high-performance packaging approach will help meal kit companies reduce their customer churn because consumers can feel better about their less-wasteful orders and experience less spoilage (i.e. food going bad on a front porch).

Liviri is launching at either the best or the worst time, depending on how you look at it. It’s a great time because companies across the food stack are re-examining how they package their products in response to customers’ growing concerns around waste. Veestro switched to 100 percent recyclable packaging for its plant-based meal delivery, WoolCool offers a line of wool-based packaging insulation, and Imperfect Produce started a pilot where it picks up and donates used customer boxes to food banks and charities.

But Liviri is also launching at a time when most of the growth in meal kits is coming from retail, not mail order. Packaging is just one of the issues making customers move away from mail order meal kits. There’s still having to do a lot of work to make the meal, and there is always the problem of a meal sounding good when you click to order it, and little desire to eat it a week or so later when it arrives.

That’s not to say Liviri’s move is a bad one, quite the contrary. The container system can be used for groceries and other perishables, so there is a potential market, well, at the market. And any packaging that is re-useable in the meal journey is welcome in our waste-filled world.

With Whole Foods Debut, Amazon Meal Kits Are Just Getting Warmed Up

It was no real surprise to read that Amazon brand meal kits are surfacing in select Whole Foods. I was honestly wondering what was taking Bezos and co. so long to get there. But Amazon pushing its own meal kits in the high-end grocery chain comes at a time when in-store retail is driving growth in the meal kit sector, and also as Amazon reportedly looks to create its own supermarket chain.

Grocery Dive was first to report on Amazon’s meal kits out in the wild, confirming with the company that they are available in select locations in the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California, Nevada and Arizona. Previously, the meal kits had been sold through other Amazon outlets like Amazon Prime and Fresh, as well as through its Go convenience stores.

Retail outlets such as Go and Whole Foods is where all the action is in meal kits. A recent Nielsen report showed that the majority of growth in the meal kit sector came from in-store sales, generating $93 million in revenue across 2018. That number is could climb even higher as NPD found that nearly 100 million American adults still haven’t tried meal kits, but want to. NPD also found that consumers are not tied to a particular brand of meal kit yet, so there is room for a company like Amazon to come in and grab marketshare without having to fight set-in habits.

So there is burgeoning demand for meal kits, and Amazon is ready to get you one in just about any way imaginable. You can buy them online when you’re planning ahead, at a Go store when you’re, well, on the go, and at a Whole Foods for either of those occasions.

But Whole Foods isn’t just another sales channel for Amazon. It also provides the company with more of what it hungers for the most: data. Selling Amazon meal kits in Whole Foods gives the mothership more insight into where, what, when and how people purchase meal kits. This data can then be used to refine all its meal kits processes for when the company opens up its own grocery stores.

That’s right: if you missed it, Amazon is supposedly eyeballing its own grocery store chain. The Wall Street Journal broke the news earlier this month that Amazon is planning to build up to a dozen, 35,000 sq. ft. retail outlets. Connecting meal kits with its own stores and with delivery is a no brainer and something The Spoon’s Mike Wolf saw coming awhile back when he wrote:


The bottom line is [Amazon] want[s] to make feeding yourself through an Amazon platform so easy and friction-free you almost have no choice. While Amazon Go is just the latest and most visible sign of Amazon strategy, the company has clearly been positioning themselves to capture as much of the $5 trillion food retail marketplace for the last decade, and now they have all the pieces to be there at every step along the meal journey.

Meal kits are also the perfect form factor for Amazon to deliver to your door or office. They are already packaged up into their own stackable boxes (no irregular shapes) that can be shipped out same day via Amazon drivers or Scout delivery robots.

That Amazon is looking to expand its meal kits presence as part of the reinvention of the meal journey shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone paying attention.

NPD: 93 Million American Adults are Meal Kit Curious

The potential market for meal kits isn’t tapped out, as new research from NPD finds that 93 million adults in the U.S. still haven’t tried meal kits, but want to.

NPD said that the move from mail order to retail is attracting new customers, and the research firm lists three reasons why meal kits present a big opportunity:

  1. Users are highly satisfied with their meal kit purchases both online and in-store.
  2. Users are still experimenting with brands and formats, so their habits aren’t set yet.
  3. Meal kits can be more than just dinner, providing an opportunity for new categories and brands.

NPD also outlined who is buying meal kits:

Meal kit users are more likely to be Millennials, have households with kids, and higher incomes. Online and in-store meal kits appeal to similar demographic groups although in-store kits skew to households with children less than 13 years old and higher income levels.

NPD’s numbers mirror and reinforce a recent Nielsen survey that found that retail outlets have been the main source of growth for the meal kit industry, and that 23 percent of US households would consider purchasing a meal kit in the next six months. Nielsen also found that meal kits were being purchased by more affluent households.

All of this is to say that meal kits are–to paraphrase Monty Python–not dead yet, and in fact have the potential to be very much alive and thrive. The move into retail has been a shot in the arm for the meal kit sector and the shift is just getting underway. Kroger, which owns Home Chef, and Albertsons, which owns Plated, just started the nationwide rollout of meal kits in earnest last year.

With this much headroom to grow, we can expect to see more of a marketing push to parlay shoppers’ store loyalty into meal kit loyalty.

Chef’d Meal Kits Get Into Gelson’s Markets

Chef’d, the meal kit company that came back from the dead, is available once again at retail. Supermartket News reports that Gelson’s will be stocking Chef’d meal kits at its 27 California locations.

True Foods had announced its return to retail back in January of this year, and to be honest, we kind of expected its first foray back to be a little more… non-traditional. In 2018, The Spoon had named Chef’d to our Food Tech 25 list of companies because of its innovative approach to selling meal kits, which included using drug stores and smart fridges as sales channels and partnering with big CPG names for branded meal kits. The company abruptly shut down soon thereafter, and its assets were purchased by True Food Innovation, which said it would drop the mail order business and offer meal kits only through retail.

But this news marks a bit of a homecoming for Chef’d which, in its first incarnation, launched at Gelson’s in 2017. In this go ’round, Gelson’s will carry all 8 menu options from both the Chef’d and True Chef brands.

Unlike the last time Chef’d launched, however, retail is lousy with meal kit providers. Kroger bought Home Chef and Albertsons owns Plated, both of which have been rolling out their own meal kits nationwide. But as my colleague, Jenn Marston, wrote in January, True Foods believes it has a product differentiator:

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.

One of the drawbacks to mail order meal kits was the fact that they locked you into eating whatever arrived, regardless of whether you were in the mood for it or not (an admittedly first world problem). If true, the 55 day flexibility of Chef’d meal kits could be a nice way to add an attractive layer of convenience for consumers.

Gelson’s customers will get a chance to see if that claim holds true. Whether it does or doesn’t, drop us a line and let us know.