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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

meal kits

Yumble Raises $7M for Kids Meal Delivery Service

Yumble, the startup that ships kids meals directly to your door, announced today that it has closed a $7 million Series A round of funding led by Sonoma Brands. This brings the total amount raised by the company to $8.5 million.

As we wrote about Yumble a little more than a year ago:

“With its kid-friendly prepared meal kit service, Yumble is targeting busy parents who still want to feed their kids nutritious lunches and dinners, but may lack the time to do so every day of the week.

One way Yumble does this is by sending meals that are already cooked, so all you have to do is re-heat them. Portions are kid appropriate, and menu items include Pretzel Chicken (with green beans and brown rice), Egg ‘Wich (with sweet potato fries), and Caprese Wheel (with carrots and grapes). They also offer snacks as well as options such as gluten free or vegetarian.”

Though the specific food items we listed then are no longer available, the same types of playful, healthy meals remain with the current menu options. After a special introductory rate, pricing is just under $50 for 6 meals per week for one kid, roughly $90 for 12 meals for 1 – 2 kids, and about $168 for 24 meals for 2 -3 kids. Right now, Yumble is only available on the East Coast.

According to the funding announcement, Yumble will use this new money to invest in marketing, hire people and expand nationally.

Yumble isn’t technically a “meal kit” as we typically define them around here since there isn’t anything to cook in a Yumble box. That ready-to-go aspect — and the company’s specific focus on kids — could be what helped them raise new money in a turbulent time for meal kits. Meal kits by mail are giving way to meal kits in the supermarket aisle, convenience store, office fridge and even restaurant drive-through window.

But opening up new sales channels is where Sonoma Brands as a lead investor could make an even bigger impact for Yumble. Sonoma’s portfolio of brands includes KRAVE jerky, Guayaki yerba mate beverages, and Dang foods. Yumble could leverage that experience to get into retail and open up more direct sales.

Denmark’s Simple Feast Grabs $12M for Plant-based Meal Delivery

Today Danish meal delivery service Simple Feast raised a $12 million Series A. As TechCrunch first reported, the funding round was led by London’s Balderton Capital with participation from 14W and existing investors Sweet Capital and ByFounders.

Founded in 2015, Simple Feast’s website boasts that the company is working to create the most sustainable meal service on the planet. How exactly? By eliminating meat from their meals and skipping plastic and styrofoam in their packaging. But the main thing is meat, or lack thereof: after all, avoiding animal products is the single biggest action you can take to reduce negative environmental impact. Simple Feast wants to help people do that by delivering premade, plant-based meals to their doorstep.

They offer two plans: Green Feast, which is vegetarian, and Vegan Feast. Each is 63 DKK ($9.77) per portion if you order for 4-5 people, and features three meals per week. You can also order their “Comfort Food” set of three vegan stews for 69 DKK ($10.70), each of which have two servings. While we can’t access full pricing on the site because we are in the U.S., it seems like the three meal minimum would make ordering Simple Feast pretty expensive pretty fast.

Simple Feast, however, is very clearly not a meal kit. It’s actually more akin to microwaveable Indian food company Buttermilk Co. (also vegetarian!), or a Tovala or Suvie, minus the connected cooking appliance. The boxes come almost completely premade; all customers have to do is heat the food for 10 minutes and add dressing or sauces.

However, Simple Feast might still run into some of the same difficulties meal kit companies face. Customers might not like being locked into a subscription plan, forced to eat the Falafel with Herbs and Pitabread that they ordered last week and no longer crave.

Simple Feast is working to get around these pitfalls by offering customers the option to skip meals or forego the subscription altogether. The plant-based meals also come chilled, so if you have last-minute dinner plans you can always leave them for another night.

A bigger challenge they will face is variety. Each box contains three preset meals, with no option to change if you, say, don’t like oyster mushrooms. Also, when I looked on their website, the Vegan Feast and the Green Feast boxes were exactly the same — which isn’t really a problem, but does make me wonder about their breadth and creativity.

Regardless, Simple Feast seems like a good way to help (at least Danish) people who want to eat less meat but don’t want to put in a ton of (or any) time or effort. If they put some of their funding towards more meal options and ordering customization, they might be able to do just that.

Walmart to Sell Gobble Meal Kits — but Only Online

Gobble announced a partnership today to sell its meal kits through Walmart’s e-commerce site (via Fortune). The move will get Gobble’s meal kits in front of Walmart’s vast online audience. However, it looks like it won’t put them physically in stores, which has been the trajectory for most remaining meal kit companies.

Gobble‘s hook in the crowded meal kit delivery space is that its meals only take 15 minutes — and one pan — to prepare. The company par cooks sauces, grains and pasta, and pre-slices vegetables and meat, to take some of the work out of meal preparation and shorten the cook time.

As we’ve seen, the logistics of providing fresh food for delivery by mail are complicated and expensive. Just last month, meal kit company Chef’d abruptly shut down because of exactly this issue. Its assets were acquired and going forward the company will foresake mail order to focus on retail opportunities.

Just about every meal kit company is jumping into the grocery aisle pool. Blue Apron is selling kits in Costcos, HelloFresh kits will be sold in Giant Food and Stop & Shop locations. Not to mention grocers like Kroger and Albertsons, who doubled down on meal kits and acquired Home Chef and Plated respectively. Even smaller supermarket chains like New Seasons are launching their own meal kits.

Founded in 2010, Gobble has raised nearly $30 million in venture funding, and Fortune estimated that the company brought in between $25 and $50 million in revenue last year, but has still not made money. An interesting footnote to this Gobble/Walmart deal is that Gobble’s VP of Supply Chain and Operations used to be the VP of Supply Chain at Walmart.

While this is undoubtedly a good step in the right direction for Gobble, it seems like just that — a step. Part of the issue we’ve had with mail order meal kits here at The Spoon is their inflexibility. Parmesean chicken and brown sugar salmon may sound good at the time I click to purchase them online, but by the time the meal kits arrive, my palate may have moved on — and I’m stuck with a box of food that I have to make before it goes bad.

Convenience makes meal kits in the retail aisles a much better play. The ability to select and grab a meal kit for that evening while you’re already out running errands (or even from the office fridge on your way home) better aligns your preferences and your actual meal.

You also have to wonder how this fits in with Walmart’s overall meal kit plans. As of June this year, Business Insider reported that the retailer was selling individual and small meal kits from Home Chef, Sun Basket and Takeout kit online — but those specific Walmart links in the story no longer work.

Perhaps more importantly, Walmart is working on its own meal kits, which will be available in more than 2,000 of its stores this year. On the surface, it seems like Walmart is leaving the logistical hard parts of meal kits to someone else (read: Gobble), and keeping the retail aisles for itself.

Now we just have to wait and see if Walmart shoppers want to gobble up Gobble’s meal kits.

Chick-Fil-A’s Uncanny Valley Problem with Meal Kits

When popular fast food chain, Chick-Fil-A announced it would be experimenting with meal kits next month, I agreed with my colleague, Catherine Lamb, that this could pave the way for a new meal kit sales channel. But in the days since the announcement I’ve soured on the notion. Now, I think consumers will have certain expectations of what a Chick-Fil-A meal kit should taste like, but will instead experience the uncanny valley.

For the uninitiated, here’s a pretty good definition of the uncanny valley from Wikipedia:

“The concept of the uncanny valley suggests humanoid objects which appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit uncanny, or strangely familiar, feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers.”

The uncanny valley is often associated with a lot with computer graphics and animation. We forgive all the flaws of a stick figure because it looks nothing like a human. But as drawings or 3D rendering of a human get more realistic, small flaws (soulless eyes, odd molars, etc.) create bigger distractions to the point where these facsimiles become less lifelike, and the effect can be off-putting.

People buying a meal kit from a service like Blue Apron don’t have an expectation of what that meal should taste like. Part of the allure of those meal kits is the option to try new kinds of dishes. There wasn’t anything else to compare it to.

People who order a meal kit from Chick-Fil-A (or any restaurant) will want a Chick-Fil-A meal. But people can’t recreate Chick-Fil-A at home because they don’t have precision industrial fryers filled with oil and a finely tuned army of employees trained to make chicken-based meals in the exact same way each time.

I should note here that I have never eaten at a Chick-Fil-A. Not out of spite or protest, but just on account of geography. But it’s kind of like when you try to make homemade Oreos. They kinda look and taste like Oreos, but they aren’t the real thing. Or when you try to make your own In-N-Out Burger, or recreate a Starbucks latté at home — it’s just not the same, even when it tastes good.

In a smart move, Chick-Fil-A has initially found a workaround for this uncanny valley problem. The company is not offering its signature chicken sandwiches as part of a meal kit, only chicken-adjacent items like enchiladas, flatbread and pan roasted chicken. These recipes are probably easier for people to make at home, and people will still want to go to a Chick-fil-A for when they want a chicken sandwich (which the restaurant will make for you!). It also gives Chick-Fil-A an opportunity to expand without having to open up more locations as you’ll take the Chick-Fil-A experience with you.

But in doing so, people will want that Chick-Fil-A experience, and chances are good that they won’t be able to recreate it at home. It might be tasty, but it’s not Chick-Fil-Asty.

Despite these inherent issue, I still think Chick-Fil-A’s meal kit experiment is a worthy one (even if it might just be a publicity stunt). Fast food chains are experimenting with all kinds of innovation, from robots to a whole new drive-thru experience. Conducting a targeted experiment like this will at least push traditional boundaries around both meal kits and fast food. And if it works, who knows? Perhaps people will drive through an uncanny valley to make and eat Chick-Fil-A at home.

Chef’d Assets Acquired by True Food Innovations, to Focus on Retail

True Food Innovations, a food technology, CPG and manufacturing company, today announced that it has acquired the assets of meal kit maker, Chef’d, which abruptly shuttered operations earlier this month. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In a statement from the press announcement, Robert T. Jones, President of True Food Innovations — and former SVP of Business Development at Chef’d said:

“We have already developed and are in market with long shelf-life retail meal kits under the brand of True Chef, so we seized the opportunity to acquire the assets and brand of Chef’d as the transaction will be accretive to our business from day one. We believe the retail channel will continue to grow and we will concentrate our efforts on that portion of the Chef’d business.”

According to The Wall Street Journal, Chef’d’s last valuation was $160 million, and the assets being acquired include warehouses in California and New York, as well as deals with two dozen retailers and roughly 200 licensing partnerships.

We named Chef’d as one of our FoodTech 25 earlier this year because of its innovative approach to retail, striking deals to put meal kits in non-traditional food outlets such as drug stores and office fridges.

According to The Journal, True Foods will keep selling meal kits in grocery stores, but “will suspend its sprawling e-commerce offerings while it works to become profitable.”

Chef’d quasi-resurrection is shaping up to be a sort of homecoming. In addition to Robert T. Jones, Sean Butler and Steve Vigilante, two other former Chef’d execs will also play a role in resuscitating the meal kit maker. Butler posted to Linkedin that the duo’s Emerging Brands Studio has partnered with True Foods to “optimize and re-operationlize the assets of Chef’d.” Butler also said that Emerging Brands’ parent company, LIDD Supply Chain Intelligence, helped build many of Chef’d’s key facilities and systems and has Chef’d’s original CTO on its team.

Now we’ll see what these execs can do with with Chef’d when given the reigns. The meal kit space is competitive and with so many grocers already owning their own meal kit companies, Chef’d 2.0 will have to keep innovating to stay alive.

Chick-fil-A is Paving the Way for Fast Food Meal Kits

Today Chick-fil-A announced that they would roll out “Mealtime Kits” in 150 Atlanta area locations this August, making them the first fast-food company to enter the crowded meal kit market.

Each Chick-fil-A box will contain fresh, pre-measured ingredients to make one of five meals, from chicken enchiladas to chicken flatbread to pan-roasted chicken. (Sense a theme here?) The kits will cost $15.89, feed two people, and can be prepared in 30 minutes or less.

The key differentiator here isn’t what’s in the meal kits, but where you can buy them: they’ll be available Chick-fil-A drive-thrus, indoor ordering counters, or through the company’s app. The company claims they’ll sell them until mid-November, though they might extend or expand the run if it’s successful.

This move will be an interesting test case to see if restaurants — specifically fast food restaurants — will get into the meal kit space. On one hand, it seems counter-intuitive to buy a meal kit from a drive-thru window when you could buy ready-to-eat food from the same place for a comparable price. At the same time, it’s hard to beat the convenience; as soon as you decide you want to make chicken enchiladas for dinner, all you have to do is swing by your local Chick-fil-A and grab one.

As Chris Albrecht mused last week, white label meal kit startup Chef’d’s abrupt shut down last week might be a death knell for independent meal kit companies. Those that remain seem to be trying everything they can think of to gain a foothold: Blue Apron has tried branding kits with celebrities, Purple Carrot debuted 100% recyclable packaging, and other companies are offering doctor-recommended options.

Meal kit point of sale is also in flux. Lots of companies are moving away from the at-home delivery model and transitioning into selling kits in grocery stores, drugstores, and beyond. Chick-fil-A could start offering their boxes at third-party retailers too, of course, though they’ll have to compete for shelf space with other meal kit companies. By selling their kits in drive-thrus, Chick-fil-A brings the sale one step closer to the consumer — they don’t even have to get out of their car.

If Chick-fil-A’s experiment is successful, we’ll no doubt see other fast food joints, from Arby’s to Zaxby’s, rolling out branded meal kits of their own.

Chef’d Shuts Down, Are Remaining Independent Meal Kit Makers Doomed?

Meal kit maker Chef’d announced last night that it was shutting down and suspending all operations in a surprise move that will reverberate throughout the sector for remaining independent meal kit companies.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the company, which had raised more than $40 million in venture funding, was unable to raise additional cash. Business Insider reports that Chef’d laid off more than 350 workers.

We actually liked Chef’d quite a bit here at The Spoon. We named it as one of our Food Tech 25 because of its diversified approach to meal kits. Chef’d offered them via mail, was one of the first to sell meal kits in-store through a relationship with Costco, and also had a number of high-profile white label partnerships with companies such as Coca-Cola, The New York Times and Campbells (which had invested $10 million in Chef’d).

Additionally, the company was striking really innovative partnerships, even within the past few months. It partnered with Byte Foods to place meal kits inside office fridges, allowing hungry workers to grab them on their way home from work. Chef’d partnered with Innit to provide meal kits through that startup’s guided cooking app. And just last month Chef’d announced a deal to put meal kits in Duane Reade and Walgreens drug stores.

When we spoke with Chef’d execs this past May, they touted how the company had spent less than a million dollars on customer acquisition as well as their packaging technology that added three times the shelf life to their ingredients.

Underneath this patina of excitement and innovation however, you could see trouble brewing for the company as a number of high profile execs such as its senior vice president for retail left the company in recent months.

Anyone who follows the meal kit sector knows that the mail order business is a harsh one. Getting meal kits by mail is expensive, takes too long, limits customer’s flexibility, and still requires a lot of work for the user. The Journal writes that the online subscription part of Chef’d business was a drag on the rest of the company.

Blue Apron, a pioneer in subscription meal kits, suffered through a number of setbacks over the past year including a rocky IPO, layoffs and CEO swaps. They recently initiated plans to sell meal kits at Costco.

The answer for many meal kit companies has been moving more into the grocery aisles. This makes more sense from a customer perspective, as it allows more flexibility and fits in with existing shopping and dinner deciding patterns. But the grocery aisles are filling up fast with meal kits and may no longer be an option for startups in the space looking for a savior. Kroger bought Home Chef, Albertsons owns Plated and Amazon/Whole Foods and Walmart have their own line of meal kits. It’s safe to assume that those retailers will push and market their own meal kits over any third party ones.

For remaining mail order meal kit companies, the future does not look so bright. HelloFresh was smart and went public early, giving it some leeway to adjust to evolving market conditions, and they are making their own retail moves. Perhaps there will be room for highly specific meal kits such as Purple Carrot, which just raised $4 million, and only offers plant-based meals.

A year from now, we could mark Chef’d shutting down as a turning point for the meal kit market — just not the one many had hoped for.

From the Newsletter: The Kitchen is Dead? Robot Baristas! Meal Kits and Medicine!

People love our newsletter, so every Friday we’ll be sharing it on the site. If you want to get the Weekly Spoon in your inbox, just subscribe here. 

Good morning and happy Friday! Chris Albrecht, Managing Editor of The Spoon here. You may have noticed we added a second newsletter to the week. In addition to Mike Wolf’s analysis, you’ll be hearing from myself and my colleague Catherine Lamb on a regular basis because food tech is thriving and we don’t want you to miss any important news.

And with food tech alive and kicking, what better way to kick off my first newsletter than with a Monty Python “I’m not dead yet!” reference?

Not just for the nerds among us, the Holy Grail joke is apt given what we’ve been hearing about the future of the kitchen. Is it on it’s deathbed, slain by a deadly cocktail of easy food delivery and those menacing millennials? A UBS report literally titled “Is the Kitchen Dead?” last month painted that pretty grim picture.

But not, so fast! This week, the NPD Group released a rebuttal of sorts basically asking people to chill out, saying the kitchen isn’t dead, but it will evolve to accommodate the changes delivery will bring.

So what’s the answer? Is the kitchen dead, dying, on life support? It’s a question I dive into in a longer post on the site that also gets into the coming wave of convenience driven appliances like Tovala and Suvie.

What do you think? Leave a comment on the story and add to the discussion. And, if you’ll pardon a little log-rollling, do one better and attend our Smart Kitchen Summit: North America in October to hear the industry’s smartest executives outline their thoughts on the future of the kitchen.

Now to switch from Monty Python to Spinal Tap: But enough of my yakkin’, whaddya say, let’s boogie.

Here’s the rest of this week’s food tech news.

Robo-baristas are here. No, this isn’t some dystopian vision of the future, the coffee robots are already among us, and they are pretty rad. Briggo announced that its Coffee Haus kiosk will start slinging craft coffees at the Austin Airport next Tuesday. This comes just a few weeks after Cafe X put its first barista-in-a-box on San Francisco sidewalks.

Both Briggo and Cafe X are going after high-traffic areas where people don’t necessarily want to sit down and luxuriate with their Americano. These robots are meant to operate at high-volume without taking breaks and, importantly, while making a delicious cup of coffee.

That first cup of coffee is certainly life-giving to many bleary-eyed folks early in the morning, but as Jenn Marston notes, meal kits are getting downright medicinal. As she points out, companies like Be Well Eats and Platejoy are using doctors and dieticians to craft meals that boost nutrition and even feature plans specifically for diabetes and menopause. Even better, Spoon readers have been contributing to the conversation by pointing out other options in our comments section.

But let’s not have my inaugural email be all questions of dying and medicine. For something more out of left field, Catherine Lamb uncovered TimberFish’s IndieGoGo campaign to raise trout on brewery waste and wood chips. It’s a fun read.

And finally, The Smart Kitchen Summit is returning to Japan next month. The lineup of speakers includes Winnie Leung of Bits x Bites, a Chinese food tech accelerator; Kevin Yu, the CEO of smart cooking startup SideChef; and SKS favorite Jon Jenkins of Hestan Cue. Spots are limited, so get yours soon.

Thanks for reading. Be well!

-Chris

P.S. As I mentioned before, our flagship Smart Kitchen Summit event coming up in October, so if you haven’t already purchased your ticket, do it today by using discount code NEWSLETTER for 25% off the full ticket price (use this link which has the discount already applied).

P.S. Want to get our stories before everyone else? Join our food tech Slack already!

In the 07/13/2018 edition:

Smart Kitchen Summit Returns to Japan This August

By Catherine Lamb on Jul 13, 2018 07:00 am
Last year, we took the Smart Kitchen Summit abroad for the first time — to none other than Tokyo, Japan! In SKS founder Michael Wolf’s words: “As we have grown SKS, I also realized early on that each region’s story is different, impacted by a unique mix of culture, business dynamics, and consumer tastes.

Research Confirms: The Kitchen is Dying. Unless it’s not.

By Chris Albrecht on Jul 13, 2018 06:00 am
The Spoon was borne out of The Smart Kitchen Summit, our annual conference about the future of the kitchen. But analysts seem unclear as to what exactly the future of the kitchen is. Are millennials and delivery killing off the kitchen? Or is the kitchen staying put and evolving into something different?

Albertsons Launches Virtual Market for Its O Organics Brand

By Jennifer Marston on Jul 12, 2018 07:00 pm
Today, mega grocery chain Albertsons announced the launch of O Organics Market, a virtual store powered by Instacart and specializing in organic and natural grocery items. The store is currently available to customers in San Francisco and Washington D.C. via the usual Instacart interface.

TimberFish Launches IndieGoGo to Raise Trout on Brewery Waste and Wood Chips

By Catherine Lamb on Jul 12, 2018 01:00 pm
It’s no secret that wild-caught seafood is fraught, what with its declining supply and associations with inhumane labor practices. Many tout farmed fish as a more ethical and sustainable (not to mention cheaper) way to satisfy our seafood cravings, which is why aquaculture is the fastest growing food-producing sector.

Our Robot Coffee Future is Nigh: Briggo Barista Taking Off at Austin Airport

By Chris Albrecht on Jul 12, 2018 11:13 am
Austin, TX will get a little more hip (as if that were possible) next week as Briggo’s robotic Coffee Haus will land at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport on July 17th.

Video: Convenience Is the Future of Food Retail

By Catherine Lamb on Jul 11, 2018 05:00 pm
After Christian Lane‘s first business, which he built at the age of 19, folded, he got the idea to launch a new endeavor in the smart kitchen field. Which, as he’ll tell you, was not always easy going.

Cricket-starter: Seek Food Crowdfunds Bug-based Baking Flour

By Chris Albrecht on Jul 11, 2018 03:02 pm
We don’t mean to bug you, but we thought you might like to know that Seek Food launched a Kickstarter campaign today for its cricket baking flour and accompanying cookbook. Adventurous eaters can choose from four bug-based powders: All-Purpose, Paleo, Gluten-Free and 100 percent pure cricket.

It’s Sorta Silly How Much I Heart My Stainless Steel Straws

By Chris Albrecht on Jul 11, 2018 11:01 am
OK. Look. When you are a blogger covering any beat 24/7, there comes a time when your brain needs to stop providing analysis and context to news events and just write about something small and yet totally satisfyingly cool.

Olio, Luckin Coffee and Eat All Raise New Funding

By Chris Albrecht on Jul 11, 2018 08:59 am
Food tech startups continue to raise money around the world, and the first half of this week has already seen a bunch of funding news: Olio, a UK-based food waste startup, raised a $6 million Series A round led by Octopus Ventures.

Are Meal Kits a New Form of Medicine?

By Jennifer Marston on Jul 10, 2018 05:00 pm
A reported 30.3 million Americans had diabetes in 2015, according to the most recent numbers. Obesity, high blood pressure, lots of sodium and sugar, and, of course, a lack of fruits and vegetables are all culprits in the growing number of chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease.

Chef’d Puts Meal Kits in Walgreens and Duane Reade Drugstores

Shoppers can pick up prescriptions and a pre-packed dinner at the drugstore, as meal kit company Chef’d has started selling its meal kits at Walgreens and Duane Reade.

Supermarket News reports that Chef’d and Smithfield Foods have teamed up on a pilot program to offer three different meal kits in 30 Walgreens and Duane Reade stores across New York City and parts of New Jersey. The Chef’d meal kits will retail for $15.99 and serve two or more people.

Grabbing dinner just down the aisle from where you buy Dramamine may seem a bit incongruous at first. But drugstores have long since evolved beyond just aisles of medicine cabinet items and helpful pharmacists in white lab coats to carrying items for just about every room of the house.

It’s even less surprising that Chef’d is the meal kit company expanding into drugstores, as the company has been a vanguard in its sales channels strategy. Unlike its competitors, Chef’d works with a wide range of white label partners including Campbell’s, Good Housekeeping, and Coca Cola.

Chef’d was also an early adopter of a brick-and-mortar retail strategy, selling its meal kits through Costco, and then expanding into more than a dozen retailers last month through a partnership with Smithfield. Just about every other meal kit company since the start of this year has jumped on the retail bandwagon.

But in addition to supermarket shelves, Chef’d, which we named as one of our Top 25 Food Tech Companies Changing the Way We Eat, continues to innovate in other ways. Last month, it partnered with Byte Foods to make meal kits available in office fridges, and Chef’d recently teamed up with Innit in a move that inches us closer to customizeable shoppable recipes.

Diversification into drugstores and other non-traditional sales platforms may actually be necessary for Chef’d, as grocery giants have been gobbling up meal kit companies left and right. Albertsons now owns Plated and Kroger bought Home Chef, not to mention the fact that Amazon/Whole Foods and Walmart are making their own meal kits — which means that Chef’d could be boxed out of those store aisles altogether.

That pressure from the big retailers seems to be pushing Chef’d into different corners of the retail world. I wouldn’t be surprised to see meal kits pop up in convenience stores, gyms or other places you could grab dinner on your way home.

HelloFresh Jumps on Bandwagon to Sell Meal Kits in Grocery Stores

HelloFresh will start selling its meal kits at 600 Giant Food and Stop & Shop locations starting this week, The Wall Street Journal reports, as the meal kit sector’s migration from mail order to brick and mortar continues at a furious pace.

The first half of this year has seen a flurry of activity from meal kit companies going into grocery stores. Chef’d and Blue Apron started selling in Costcos. Plated is rolling out nationwide at Albertsons. And just a couple of weeks ago, Kroger bought Home Chef for $200 million to put that company’s product on store shelves. And that doesn’t even count the meal kits WalMart and Amazon have available in their own stores.

It’s not hard to see why. According to Nielsen, last year in-store meal kits generated $154.6 million in sales, and grew more than 26% year-over-year. It’s a hot sector, and in-store meal kits are something customers want.

Last month, Pat Brown, Albertsons Vice President of strategic business initiatives told CNBC: “Our internal research told us that 80 percent of our customers would love to see a meal kit option in the store. And what was more surprising was that 85 percent of customers that were already subscribing to meal kits wanted to see meal kits in the store.”

Customer churn has been a big issue for meal kits in the past as the cost and inconvenience of waiting for your meals to arrive by mail have been stumbling blocks for maintained meal kit subscriptions. Having meal kits in stores offers customers more convenience and more choice closer to when they actually make meals.

HelloFresh CEO Dominik Richter told The Journal that online subscription will continue to drive sales, and that going into grocery aisles was a way for the company to find new customers. He also said that HelloFresh is in talks with other retail outlets.

HelloFresh recently surpassed Blue Apron as the top meal kit company by market share in the U.S.. The Berlin-based company went public in the fall of last year, and in April the company acquired organic meal kit provider Green Chef.

This is a big and fast retail move for HelloFresh, which will start selling meal kits on store shelves starting this Wednesday. For comparison, Chef’d has done deals with numerous regional chains as well as Costco, Blue Apron is in 17 Costcos, and Plated will be in “hundreds” of Albertsons by the end of the year. Kroger, which had already rolled out meal kits to some of its regional chains such as QFC in Seattle, is planning to put meal kits in most of its 2,800 stores nationwide.

Clearly HelloFresh needs to act fast as the window of opportunity for meal kit companies in grocery stores appears to be closing rapidly. While it may be rolling out judiciously, Albertsons still owns Plated, so that will be its preferred meal kit provider. Same with Kroger and Home Chef. Amazon, of course, has Whole Foods, and WalMart has… itself. To stay alive in retail, and by extension alive as a business, HelloFresh will need to get into a lot more grocery stores.

Food Tech News Roundup: Meal Kits, Produce Initiatives, and Cookie Dough

This week’s food tech news was all about two things: meal kits and food (and grocery) delivery. From Kroger’s acquisition of Ocado’s technology to Good Eggs’ $50 million fundraise to Chef’d’s partnership with Byte, they kind of dominated the news cycle.

So it’s only fitting we have a few of those stories in our weekly roundup as well! We’ve got the download on Munchery’s downsizing and Blue Apron’s brick-and-mortar stores, as well as a new fresh produce purchasing incentive. And, to round it out, cookie dough.

Blue Apron goes brick-and-mortar

Meal kit company Blue Apron announced a series of pop-up events across seven cities. They’ll have an experiential retail location in NYC, as well as mobile pop-ups (food trucks?) in L.A., San Francisco, and Seattle and movie nights (???) in Austin, Dallas, and Minneapolis. At the NYC pop-up, open May 29th until the end of June, shoppers can check out Blue Apron’s latest products, listen in on panel discussions, and pay a small fee for cooking classes (proceeds are donated to City Harvest). Meal kits are transitioning from a delivery model to retail, and Blue Apron seems to be taking this trend one step further with these pop-up experiences. We’ll try to check it out when they come to Seattle and let you know if the experiment is paying off.

 


JUST Foods debuts new vegan cookie dough

From lab-grown meat to egg-free scrambled eggs, JUST Foods is working to create vegan versions of our favorite foods. Next up: cookie dough. In flavors like Birthday Cake, Chocolate Mint, and classic Chocolate Chip, this egg-free, butter-free dough will be sold in 14 oz jars, as well as single-serve cups and 5 lb tubs for foodservice. Just Cookie Dough first launched in 2016, but JUST Foods (then Hampton Creek) had difficulty keeping up with demand. They’re hoping their new co-manufacturer will help them meet customers’ growing appetites for plant-based foods. Bonus: You can eat it raw, no salmonella qualms!

 

Munchery cuts staff in 3 cities

Online meal delivery company Munchery has stopped operations in Seattle, New York, and L.A. They’ll still operate in San Francisco, their first and largest market, but are cutting around 30% of their staff, according to GeekWire. Unlike other food delivery services which partner with local restaurants, Munchery cooked their packaged meal offerings in their own kitchens, and also gave customers the option to order for multiple days.

 


Non-profit increases access to produce for low-income families

Wholesome Wave, a nonprofit which aims to increase underserved communities’ access to fresh produce, is launching a Reward Card to incentivize fruit and vegetable purchases. Low-income families in NYC will receive cards preloaded with $20, and if they spend it on produce at one of six participating supermarkets, they’ll receive more money put back on the card. Participants can get up to a total of $180 on their card through December 31st, 2018. Wholesome Wave has focused chiefly on doubling SNAP (food stamps) benefits at farmers markets since its launch, but their cards will help them reach a larger audience.

Did we miss any food tech news stories? Tell us in the comments, or tweet us @TheSpoonTech. 

Chef’d & Byte Foods Partner to Bring Meal Kits to the Office

Starting today, Byte Foods will place Chef’d meal kits in 100 of their unattended smart fridges throughout the Bay Area.

“Eighty percent of people don’t know what they’re making for dinner at 4 p.m.” Byte’s co-founder Lee Mokri told the Spoon. But with this new partnership, they don’t have to — they can swing by one of Byte’s smart fridges in their office or building lobby, swipe their credit card, and grab a Chef’d meal kit on the way out their door.

Each Chef’d kit contains two (or more) servings of ready-to-cook, pre-portioned ingredients. Mokri said that Byte fridges would have meal kits on 1-2 of their shelves, the remainder of which would feature the same healthy food and drinks they’ve been stocking. They’ll also be debuting two stand-alone Chef’d fridges, which can fit roughly 20 meal kits.

A big gripe of meal kit service users have is that they get locked into a delivery subscription from the get-go. Which is one reason why meal kits are making the move into retail; people get the pre-packaged convenience of a kit, but they can pick them up day-of depending on their mood and schedule. The Chef’d/Byte partnership takes this convenience one step further but cutting out the grocery store stop and bringing the meal kits to them.

Byte isn’t the first to figure out that people want meal kits on-demand, without the subscription strings. Meal kits are the second most popular item at Amazon Go’s cashierless retail store in Seattle (and soon SF and Chicago). Byte basically brings the convenience of Amazon Go right into your office, shortening the retail journey to a few mere feet. “We’re solving for immediate satisfaction,” said Mokri.

Byte’s smart fridge in action.

This partnership is a savvy move by Byte to forge a new revenue channel. We wrote about Byte’s journey to reinvent of the vending machine a few months ago. The San Francisco-based startup launched in 2015 with an aim to bring accessible, fresh, and healthy food into offices. Workers can walk up to a Byte fridge, scan their credit card to unlock the door, then select as many items as they’d like from their offerings (like Blue Bottle coffee and Sunrise Sandwiches). When they close the door, the fridge scans all remaining goods and figures out what was taken, then charges the worker accordingly and sends over a receipt.

Byte’s fridges cost $500/month to rent, which includes the services of them restocking the fridges daily (often in the middle of the night) and taking away any uneaten food for donation at the end of the day. Since Byte absorbs all the risk of food waste, they’ve developed a demand algorithm to optimize their stocking and pricing practices — in fact, Mokri said that they have three patents.

They also license out their fridges and tracking/stocking technology to other companies. The service is completely turnkey; the licenser buys a Byte smart fridge for $5,500, pays a small monthly fee, and is then free to brand it and stock it with their own goods. Partners also have access to Byte’s dashboard and stocking algorithms. So far, Byte has roughly 100 of these licensed fridges, and is piloting more.

It’s also par for the course for Chef’d, a white label meal kit service that seems to be consistently innovating when other meal kit companies are struggling. Last month they partnered with Innit to provided guided cooking for their meal kits, and they capitalized off the slow cooker trend with their recent Campbell’s partnership. Chef’d already offers the option to purchase their meal kits sans subscription, and by teaming up with Byte Foods they’re positioning themselves as even more convenient.

Byte plans to roll out Chef’d kits into all of their 500+ locations over the next six months. They have raised a total of $10 million so far and are beginning to raise their Series A round.