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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

meal kits

Amazon Prime has More Than 100M Members, Set to Devour… Everything?

For the first time, Amazon has provided specific numbers around its Prime Membership business, and in the immortal words of Velma, Scooby-Doo’s smartest sidekick — “JINKIES!” In its letter to shareholders, the retail giant disclosed that it has amassed more than 100 million Prime subscribers worldwide since launching the service 13 years ago.

Geekwire did the math and on it’s face, this means that Amazon is pulling in at minimum $9.9 billion a year (5.5 percent of total 2017 revenue) just from membership fees. What started as a way to get faster shipping of your ordered items has transmogrified into a multi-headed beast that includes streaming video, music, and same day grocery and restaurant delivery (in select cities).

The company is also increasing Prime synergies at Whole Foods, which it purchased last year. It’s expanding free two-hour grocery delivery from select Whole Foods, and is using those real world locations to sell more Echo and Alexa devices (which begets more voice shopping), as well as pick up spots for Amazon Lockers.

Additionally, Marketwatch reports that Amazon is folding the Whole Foods loyalty program into Prime, and if all that weren’t enough, the same shareholder letter says that “[Amazon has] also begun the technical work needed to recognize Prime members at the point of sale and look forward to offering more Prime benefits to Whole Foods shoppers once that work is completed.”

This suggests, as industry watchers have predicted, that the company is looking at implementing Amazon Go-like functionality at Whole Foods — perhaps a TSA-like pre-check for fast lane service. In the shareholder letter Amazon seems pretty high on the early results of Go and its cashier-less, “just walk out” shopping. Amazon said top sellers at the Seattle Go location are things like caffeinated beverages and water but went on to add that customers “love” the Chicken Bahn Mi sandwich and Amazon Meal Kits.

Now, this could just be Bezos putting some heavy self-promoting spin on customer reactions to the Go store. However, one of the things we’ve written about here at The Spoon is the power of Amazon’s same day delivery and meal kits. The ability to order prepared ingredients and have it delivered before you get home (perhaps delivered inside your home) has the potential to fundamentally change how we shop and cook.

While we don’t know Prime’s specific U.S. numbers, with 100 million around the world, a good chunk of that is here domestically. Amazon has the audience and all the pieces in place to own the way we discover, buy, and eat all of our meals.

Jinkies.

Food Tech News Roundup: SmartPlate Updates, Localized Meal Kits, & Food Alternatives

Forget the crossword and stack of pancakes — get ready for the best part of your weekend. We’ve rounded up the food tech and innovation-related stories that caught our eye around the web this week for your perusing pleasure. From plant-based sliders at White Castle to (maybe) smart plates, get ready for your weekly dose of news.

Photo: Kitchen 1883

Kroger to expand in-store restaurant chain

Kroger recently announced that it will open a second in-store restaurant in the Greater Cincinnati area. Dubbed Kitchen 1883, its menu features new American comfort food. Kroger launched the first Kitchen 1883 restaurant last November in Kentucky.

As grocery sales move online, this is a bid from Kroger to get shoppers to physically go to their stores, and to stay awhile. It’s a similar concept to this frozen yogurt kiosk or Ikea’s beloved meatballs and cinnamon rolls; keep people around, and they’ll buy more.

 

Photo: Smartplate.com

Smartplate (Might Be) About to Finally Ship

A few days ago Anthony Ortiz, founder of Smartplate, the plate/app combo that tracks the nutrition of what you’re eating, posted an update on their IndieGo page stating that they had built the first 15 production-grade Smartplate TopViews. These new plates are flatter, with updated software.

We’ve covered Smartplate before on the Spoon, with some healthily skepticism. Their update claims they’ll be ready to ship by July 2018, but they’ve already missed a few ship dates. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if Smartplate is finally ready for the real world — but in the mean time, you can go ahead and download the Smartplate app.

 

Photo: Soylent

Soylent at Walmart!

Soylent, the powdered meal replacement drink aimed at busy millennials, became available at Walmart this week. The beverage made the leap into brick-and-mortar retail last year when it launched in 2,500 7-Eleven stores. Previously it was only available online.

Rosa Foods, the maker of Soylent, announced that it will be available in 450 Walmart stores across 14 states. This latest expansion signifies that the beverage, which had a few ups and downs over the past few years, is becoming more mainstream. It also indicates a strong market for meal replacements aimed not at people who want to weight loss, but who want to save time and brainspace.

 

Photo: Local Crate

Local Crate Raises $1.4M for Fresh Food Delivery

Minnesota-based meal kit service Local Crate raised $1.4 million this week. The startup focuses on sourcing local ingredients from smallholder farmers and local producers, which they pre-portion and deliver in their meal kits, along with chef-inspired recipes. With this new fundraise, they plan to expand into Wisconsin and Iowa. They also want to develop their brick and mortar presence, following recent announcements by Weight Watchers, Walmart, Plated and others who also placed their meal kits on supermarket shelves.

 

Photo: White Castle

White Castle Now Offering Impossible Burgers at Affordable Price

On Thursday, April 12th, White Castle, the fast-food chain known for its tiny, square hamburgers, will offer a version of its sliders made with Impossible Foods’ plant-based patties. The sliders will come with smoked cheddar, pickles, and onions, but customers can nix the cheese to make it vegan.

White Castle is rolling out the plant-based sliders in 140 locations and will eventually offer them nationally. We tried the patties last month and decided that while they tasted pretty good, their high price point could be a barrier to widespread acceptance. This partnership will make Impossible’s “bleeding” burgers much more widely available — and more affordable, too. White Castle’s Impossible sliders will cost only $1.99 each. It will be interesting to see how the bleeding burgers fare in a fast food environment, instead of the fast casual and high end restaurants where they have been offered up until now.

Plated and Albertsons go Nationwide as Meal Kits Move from Mailbox to Grocery Aisle

In 2007 a woman in Sweden launched the meal kit concept under the company name Middagsfrid, which roughly translates to “dinnertime bliss.” I don’t know how many working parents would classify any kind of cooking as “bliss” after a long day, but the basic sentiment worked in selling meal kits as a more convenient way to make dinner and even learn some new cooking techniques and recipes.

Trouble is, meal kits—particularly in the U.S.—haven’t exactly lived up to their original promise. As we’ve pointed out before, many have discovered along the way that “[Meal kits] are a huge departure from the way we have been taught to shop for and purchase our food – and while they might be more convenient in some ways, they are inconvenient in others.”

Around the time of Blue Apron’s grocery store announcement, the longtime U.S. leader in the meal kit sector had just seen its subscribers drop from 1 million in 2017 to 750,000 in February 2018, after laying off 6 percent of its staff just a few months earlier.

Blue Apron’s response was to head back to the place where we as consumers have been taught to shop: the grocery store. And now it seems going into grocers is all the rage in meal kit fashion. Chef’d and Walmart have done so, as has Weight Watchers and, now Plated has jumped aboard the in-store meal kit wagon.

Plated announced yesterday that it plans to have its meal kits in hundreds of Albertsons-owned grocery stores by the end of this year.

Albertsons acquired Plated last year, and according to the latter’s co-founder and CEO, Josh Hix, getting kits in stores was the point of the deal in the first place. “From day one, we wanted to use their stores and their assets to build this omnichannel experience.”

Right now the kits are available in 40 stores—20 in Northern California Safeway stores and 20 in Jewel-Osco stores in Chicago. In addition to the planned nationwide expansion, the kits will also be available for on-demand delivery through Instacart. The available range of kits in stores is less expansive than Plated’s online choices, though that’ll probably change if the idea is a hit.

Hix noted in a press release that, “This is the next big step in our journey to enable everyone to enjoy fresh, delicious meals.” It’s unclear if that step was always in the works or if it’s just a a nice way of saying, “We’ve had to pivot and try something new.” Not that it matters. With in-store sales of meal kits reaching $154.6 million in sales over the last year, according to recent numbers, it seems that those who want to stay in the meal kit game need to rethink the merits offering just subscription-based packages.

Whether going from the mailbox to the center of the grocery store is the answer remains to be seen. There are definitely some pluses: no commitment beyond the first purchase and freedom to choose on impulse, to name just a couple.

But if the original goal of the meal kit was to provide an enjoyable — dare I say blissful —experience in the kitchen, I’d say the eventual winners will be those brands who can tailor those original sentiments to the needs of today’s consumers. Whether that means through the mail or in the store may not even matter in the end.

Do you think the in-store meal kit will thrive, or is the whole concept one big dud? Feel free to share your thought sin the comments.

With Chef’d Deal, Innit Moves Closer to Customized Shoppable Recipes

Innit yesterday announced a partnership with Chef’d to provide ordering and guided cooking of meal kits directly through the Innit app. The deal is the first meal commerce offering for Innit and points towards a future for the company where it becomes more of an all-in-one platform that helps users discover, buy and prepare customizeable meals.

In it’s earlier incarnation, Innit allowed users to customize its recipes based on ingredients they already had. Don’t have steak for these fajitas? Here’s how to make it with chicken. The app then serves up short videos to show users exactly how to slice, stir and sear your meal. Since then it has added integration with smart appliances from LG to do more of the work when preparing dinner.

But Innit recognizes that recipes are now actionable discovery and commerce platforms. In a perfect world (at least here at The Spoon), we could be inspired by a recipe, customize it to our taste, order all the ingredients and have them delivered to our house that same day.

The Chef’d deal isn’t there yet, but inches us a little bit closer to that future. Innit users will now notice a new “meal kit” option in the app. Tapping it brings up list of Chef’d meal kits that have been curated and developed in conjunction with Innit. Select your kit, delivery date and choose to pay for it all within the app. Once your Chef’d box arrives, Innit walks you through how to make it.

This kind of guided cooking helps alleviate one of the pain points we’ve found with meal kits — preparation. Sure, it’s easy to receive a box containing all the right ingredients, but doing all the work of cooking is still… work. With Chef’d, Innit helps trim the prep time by providing some ingredients pre-measured (think: herbs and spices), and helps make sure you don’t waste your money by showing you how to make that meal properly.

That’s a good first step, but it still doesn’t help connect my inspiration with immediate action. When I went through the ordering process today, the earliest delivery I could get was about a week out. I may be craving Thai Red Curry Ribs right now — but who knows how I’ll feel in a week? Additionally, you can’t get any Innit recipe as a meal kit, it’s limited to 19 options priced between $8.25 and $21.75 per serving.

Joshua Sigel, Innit COO is aware of this and told me the company is moving towards full commerce capabilities. “The goal is to make more of our meals purchasable as a meal kit, or as a shopping list to get from a local grocery store.” Sigel wouldn’t provide specifics but said we could look forward to more retail and other partnerships in the future.

For it’s part, Chef’d now adds another partner arrow to its quiver. Chef’d has been focused on becoming a platform to enable meal kits for the likes of Coca-Cola, Hershey’s, and Campbell’s. The company is also rolling out its own branded meal kits at Costco. Hooking up with Innit opens up Chef’d to an additional early adopter market (though Innit won’t say how many people are using its app), and with a company actively looking to innovate meal kits.

I may be over meal kits, but I’m intrigued by this partnership and want to see how it goes. If Innit’s platform can prove flexible enough, and it can secure the right partnerships, it’s easy to see this evolving from pre-fab meal kits right now, to truly customized shopping and guided cooking kits in the near future.

HelloFresh Acquires Green Chef to Bolster Meal Kit Menus

Meal kit delivery company, HelloFresh, announced today that it has acquired Green Chef, which offers certified organic meal kits. The move will help diversify HelloFresh’s meal catalog with organic, vegan and gluten-free menus. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition comes at an interesting time for the entire meal kit by mail space. Just last week Blue Apron, which has had a rough year after pioneering meal kit subscriptions, said they will start selling meal kits in stores in a bid to move beyond just mail order.

But the health of Blue Apron almost doesn’t matter anymore. HelloFresh may well be able to offer specialized meals like Paleo and Keto with this acquisition, but there are a lot of companies providing specialized meal services: Purple Carrot is vegetarian, First Chop only sends meat, Little Spoon does baby food, to name a few.

In addition to variety, customers also want convenience. The hard part with mail order meal kits is that you still have to do a lot of work to actually make the meal, and you’re locked into a meal choice that you might not still want in between the time you clicked send and the time it arrives.

HelloFresh faces convenience competition on two big fronts. First, there are the up-and-coming smart appliance makers like Mealhero, Tovala and Suvie. They offer meal kits plus a way to automatically cook everything all at once, in one device, drastically reducing the amount of work required.

Then HelloFresh has to contend with the growing wave of prepared meal kits provided directly in stores. Amazon, Walmart, and even Weight Watchers offer their own lines of meal kits that you can pick up at a store or that you can have delivered same day. These kits do a lot of the prep work for you, and allow you more freedom to choose the meal you’re in the mood for at that moment.

Meeting consumers where they are at is a smart move, and that’s what HelloFresh is doing with Green Chef. The trick for the company will be to increase the convenience as it expands its variety.

The eMeals/Meredith Partnership Brings Even More Simplicity and Variety to Home Cooking

Busy parents and uncreative chefs alike constantly grapple with the question of what to make for dinner.

Jane DeLaney and Jenny Cochran created eMeals partially to help answer that question in the form of a subscription-based meal planning, budgeting, and shopping service. You tell the app what you want for dinner, and it offers a variety of plans to choose from.

But even us busy folks want to try something new once in a while, and eMeals just made that possible on top of everything else it offers. Just today, the company announced a partnership with publishing powerhouse Meredith Corporation. Together, the two companies will integrate select Meredith brands with the eMeals app by providing users with recipes hand-picked by editors.

Through the partnership, eMeals users will get access to additional recipes curated by editors at Allrecipes, Better Homes & Gardens, and EatingWell. Those recipes will be available through the eMeals platform, just like any other. At the same time, readers of those publications will get a chance to experience the simplicity of the eMeals platform. eMeals CEO Forrest Collier broke it down simply when we spoke on the phone: “[The partnership] gives their users a different way to access the content in a more practical way. And for our users, it gives them even more options.”

That means an eMeals user on the Classic Meals plan could toggle back and forth between those options and the ones from the EatingWell feed. Or a diabetic user could get a much simpler, more streamlined look at Allrecipes (which is enormous) to find new and interesting dishes that also fit within their dietary needs.

Other elements of the eMeals service will remain the same. You’ll still be able to add extra household staples like milk and toothpaste to your orders, and those orders will still be available for delivery or pickup, if you so desire.

As I recently wrote, eMeals is something of a cross between a meal kit and a creating dinner from scratch. Collier calls the company “Meal Kit 2.0,” or “the meal kit alternative.” As he noted during our conversation, a lot of people simply don’t want to pay $10 per person for dinner multiple times a week. He also points to the oft-debated issue of how “convenient” a meal kit actually is: “For a lot of [people], the recipes lean more difficult. Even though someone cut up your garlic cloves, it’s still a lot of steps, a lot of ingredients.”

And sure, with a service like eMeals, no one’s going to measure out your teaspoon of curry powder for you. But with many plans, the recipes can be considerably simpler to put together. For example, this week’s Quick features six dinners that take no more than 30 minutes total, along with one slow-cooker stew. Several recipes repeat ingredients, as well. “We give all the convenience. We solve the affordability, we solve the variety,” says Collier, adding that “everything in the grocery store is a possibility.”

The partnership with Meredith also addresses an entirely different issue, which is curation. For some people, even sitting down to pick through the many plans eMeals offers is a time burden. So editors basically telling you what you can or should eat simplifies the process even more without sacrificing the variety eMeals is known for.

Whether this type of platform becomes the new standard in meal planning is yet to be determined. But seeing as I can use it to choose food, buy ingredients, get them delivered, and get the blessing of Better Homes & Gardens without ever leaving my armchair, I’d say eMeals has taken a big step in ushering in the future of recipes.

Do Blue Apron’s In-Store Plans Mean Death for Mail Delivery Meals?

Blue Apron will start selling meal kits in stores, in a move that isn’t just a reflection of the company’s continued troubles, but could be a bellwether for the overall health of the meal-kit-by-mail sector.

Blue Apron helped kick off the whole meal kit delivery boom, promising a variety of fresh ingredients delivered right to your door. But since launching in 2012, the company has faced increased external competition and internal troubles.

After Blue Apron, the meal kit delivery space quickly filled up with other mail order players like HelloFresh, Plated and SunBasket–all vying for your dinner table. Then companies sprouted up and started to specialize, offering things like only proteins, or kids meals or meal services tied to specific appliances.

But as we wrote last year, mail order meal kits all faced the same basic issues:

“The other challenge that the entire meal kit industry faces is the stickiness of their basic product. Meal kits are often easy for consumers to try – companies make it simple to sign up and offer quick delivery and attractive new customer promotions. But they are a huge departure from the way we have been taught to shop for and purchase our food – and while they might be more convenient in some ways, they are inconvenient in others.”

It was convenient to get a box of ingredients delivered to your door, but you still had to do all the work of cooking whatever was sent. And you had to cook whatever you received before it went bad, whether you wanted it or not.

All of these external pressures have taken a toll on Blue Apron. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company reported 750,000 subscribers last month, which is down from a high of 1 million last year. Blue Apron’s stock price has tumbled since it went public last summer, laid off six percent of its staff in October and replaced its CEO in December.

Blue Apron was light on details about the forthcoming in-store meals to the Journal and didn’t provide pricing, saying only that they hoped to have their kits in stores by the end of this year. But by then will it be too late?

You can see why they’d want in on the in-store action. According to recent Nielsen research, “in the year ended 2017, in-store meal kits generated $154.6 million in sales, posting growth of more than 26% year-over-year. For context, total brick-and-mortar sales for center store edibles (grocery, dairy, frozen foods) dipped 0.1% last year to $374 billion.”

Retailers like Amazon and Walmart are already in the meal kit game. Amazon, with its logistical superpowers, provides same day meal kit delivery, and owns Whole Foods, which can serve as another sales channel. Additionally, at its model Amazon Go store here in Seattle, meal kits were displayed prominently, and Amazon is set to add more Go stores, all of which are aimed at making shopping convenient and frictionless.

Walmart partnered with meal kit services at the end of last year and earlier this month announced their own line of Walmart meal kits available for purchase in store. Even Weight Watchers is rolling out a line branded in-store meal kits.

Shifting to in-store provides a number of efficiencies for both the businesses and consumers. First, setting up and running external centers to prepare, process and ship meals to individual houses around the country is expensive. Partnering with a grocer reduces the shipping complexities, and if you’re a grocer, you can prepare meals at your own store.

Being able to prep food in stores can also translate into less work for the consumer. Having chopped vegetables in a kit reduces their shelf life, but also decreases the amount of work home cooks need to do. The less work consumers need to do increases the attractiveness of a meal kit. And they can pick up that meal kit as an impulse to suit their mood during their existing schedule of going to the grocery store (or have it delivered same day).

Not everyone sees it this way, however. Forrester analyst, Sucharita Kodali, told AdWeek that Walmart is three years too late entering the meal kit market, and thinks the meal kit industry isn’t that attractive as a segment. “Everyone in that grocery industry is terrified, and the investment banks and VCs are all goading these poor retailers to do things they’d never do otherwise,” Kodali said to AdWeek.

Meal kits aren’t entirely dead. Venture Capitalists invested $273.9 million in the space last year. And startups like Suvie and Tovala are using unique hardware/meal kit combos to make preparing meal kits easier.

But that may not mean much to Blue Apron. We’ll have to wait and see what’s in store for their in-store plans.

This Menu-Planning Service Eliminates the Stress of Deciding What’s for Dinner

Somewhere between meal kits and planning dinner from scratch sit recipe-planning apps—you still cook the food, but you don’t have to create the dish from scratch. It’s cheaper than a meal kit, but you still have to shop for and prep the ingredients.

Two busy moms (who are also sisters) recently took this concept a step further when they created eMeals, a subscription-based menu, budgeting, and shopping plan. It’s basically shoppable recipes on steroids: you tell the app your meal preferences and dietary needs/restrictions; it tells you what to cook for the next seven days and how much the ingredients will cost. If you want to skip the shopping step, you can also choose to have those ingredients delivered or available for pickup at your grocery store.

Users choose the week’s recipes from several different plans: weight management (Paleo, portion control), dietary restrictions (diabetes, gluten intolerance), family meals, and slow cooker meals are just a few of the options.

Once you’ve selected the recipes, the app turns your menu into a shopping list of ingredients. You can also add your odds and ends, like toothpaste or milk, to that list. The rest is easy: select the number of people you want to cook for (up to 6) and your preferred grocery store.

Prices for the service vary based on how long you choose to commit: $29.99 for three months or $59.99 for a full year. (This does not include the cost of ingredients.)

Right now, partner stores include Walmart, Kroger, ALDI, Target, and Whole Foods, among others. With Kroger and Walmart, you can arrange to pick the ingredients up at the store, curbside. eMeals has also partnered with AmazonFresh and Instacart to provide delivery services.

According to one user, the menu plan you choose can affect which stores are available. For example, choosing the all-organic menu means you’ll probably have to buy from Whole Foods or other “health” stores—which usually means spending more money. I imagine your choice of stores is also affected by where you live; someone in San Francisco will probably have a lot more options than someone in Newark, Ohio.

Unlike a meal kit, with eMeals, the cost of ingredients isn’t baked into the overall subscription. For a second I though that rendered a service like eMeals pointless. Then I considered how much trial and error often goes into recipe planning. Unless you’re cooking the same rotation of dishes every single week, you’re probably going to wind up buying things at the grocery store you don’t use. Something like eMeals could save a lot of money on unused ingredients, depending on what you cook.

In his recent 2018 predictions, my colleague Michael Wolf noted that the recipe has become more, not less, important in this age of meal kits and 24/7 delivery services: It’s our “automated shopping list, the instruction set for our appliances, and the content is becoming dynamic, atomized and personalized depending on our personal preference.”

Shoppable recipes are seeing a lot of action as of late. Allrecipes and AmazonFresh partnered last year, as did Kroger and Myxx. Whisk, meanwhile, just joined forces with Amazon to offer shoppable recipes from over 20 publishers.

What’s attractive about a service like eMeals is that it turns the concept of shoppable recipe into an entire plan for the week or month, rather than just offering a set of individual recipes. There’s a wide audience for that kind of service: busy parents, caregivers, those managing significant food restrictions, and lazy, uncreative cooks like yours truly. All we need now is for the service to get integrated with a guided cooking program. Which will probably happen at some point in the very near future.

Weight Watchers Unveils In-Store Meal Kits—and Possibly a New Approach

Weight Watchers is trying to carve out a space in the meal kit market—they’re just skipping the whole delivery bit.

Instead, the weight management company announced last week that it is working with California-based FreshRealm to get a line of healthy meal kits on grocery shelves. The launch, slated for the second half of this year, could indicate a shift in the meal kit sphere—away from online ordering and delivery and towards brick and mortar stores.

WW’s meal kits will offer healthy ingredients and recipes that fit into the company’s points system. However, since they are coming pretty soon after CEO Mindy Grossman’s attempt to rebrand Weight Watchers as a healthy lifestyle brand, they are most likely also meant to appeal to people who just want to find quick, healthy meals.

WW already has a partnership with non-subscription meal kit delivery service Chef’d, offering healthy meals that range from 150 to 250 calories per portion. But placing their “quick-prep” kits in supermarket aisles instead of offering them exclusively via delivery turns these meals into potential impulse purchases for shoppers who want something healthy to cook but don’t already have a recipe in mind when they go to the store. And we all know the grocery store is a prime location for impulse-purchase-driven sales.

This shift towards putting meal kits in grocery aisles could be a trend to watch. Just a few days after WW announced the news, Walmart announced that they’ll also be launching meal kits in their stores. Both services will be available without the subscription requirement that comes with many other meal kits. However, while Walmart’s meals will only be available at Walmart, WW will presumably be in a wider variety of supermarkets. After all, their frozen Smart Ones meals are available in most grocery stores (including Walmart).

We don’t know how much the WW meal kits will cost, but price will no doubt be a big factor in whether or not they succeed. After all, high cost was the biggest reason people dropped their meal kit subscriptions in 2017.

It’s not news that the meal kit game is a competitive, uber-crowded one. As of last year, there were over 150 companies vying to get you halfway to dinner. It makes sense for WW, a company that is all about eating particular foods to reach and maintain a healthy weight, would want to take a piece of the (low-sugar) pie. It will be interesting to follow their progress and see how successful their decision to sell in supermarkets will be. I’m betting it scores them some serious points—and saves points for their customers.

Chef’d Partners with Campbell’s to (Slow) Cook Up a New Range of Meal Kits

What do you get when you take a meal kit marketplace, cover it with the contents of a can of Cream of Mushroom, and let the two simmer over low? Probably something like this new partnership between Chef’d and Campbell’s.

Chef’d, the self-described “online gourmet meal kit provider,” has teamed up with Campbell’s to offer customers a selection of slow-cooker recipes featuring the canned soup giant’s products. This announcement comes 9 months after Campbell’s invested $10 million in Chef’d, making Campbell’s their largest strategic partner. 

As of now, Chef’d offers 12 meal options with their “Campbell’s Kitchen” series. Recipes range from Slow Cooker Pulled Pork Sliders to Slow Cooker Short Ribs—certainly an upgrade from green bean casseroles of yore (no disrespect). The meal kits come packed with preportioned ingredients: fresh protein, produce, dairy, seasonings, and any necessary pantry goods. Basically all that the customer has to provide is salt, pepper, and maybe olive oil (sadly, the slow cooker not included). A few meals, like the Slow Cooker Chicken Tortilla Soup, do include a can of Campbell’s soup, while others require Campbell’s products like Prego tomato sauce or Swanson’s broth.

If speed is your aim, this is not the meal kit selection for you. Many of the recipes take quite a while to come together, some requiring an extensive 7 hour cook time. This, however, is made easy by the inclusion of the slow cooker: one of the strongest selling points of the Chef’d-Campbell’s partnership. Of the 12 recipes on offer, half of them are made in the much-beloved appliance. (I should note that the recipes not made with a slow cooker take only 30 minutes to make.)

Slow cooker chicken cacciatore from Chef’d + Campbell’s.

The emphasis on the slow cooker is, at least in my mind, is what makes this partnership intriguing; Campbell’s and Chef’d are trying to carve out a niche in the claustrophobically crowded meal kit delivery sector by capitalizing on the almost cult-like popularity of the Crock Pot and Instant Pot. Slow cookers make it possible for home cooks, even those with limited cooking skills, to produce complex, tender dishes on a tight schedule.

Surprisingly enough, Campbell’s and Chef’d are the first meal kit operation to fully capitalize on the slow cooker’s popularity. Other meal kit services have recipes that can be made in the appliance, but no line of products intended to be paired with a Crock Pot or the like. Speaking of Crock Pot, that company offers their own line of delivery meal kits, but requires the customer to buy any meat or dairy. This is markedly less convenient than a Chef’d meal kit, which includes fresh, pre-portioned ingredients so that the customer has to do little more than open, dump, and (slow)cook.

So will this partnership boost sales for Chef’d? It’s tough to say. Meal prices range from $27 to $30 for two servings up to $61 for six servings, which, when compared with other meal kits (such as Blue Apron, whose meals average $10 per serving), isn’t exactly a bargain. It’s also tough for vegetarians and vegans, with only one meatless recipe on offer: a Skillet Vegetable Lasagna with Herbed Cheese, which isn’t even made in the slow cooker.

If it is popular, however, it would probably say more about the ingrained popularity of Crock Pots (and the like) than about either Chef’d or Campbell’s. Success would indicate that slow cookers aren’t going anywhere—not quickly, anyway.

You can hear about Ched’d in our daily spoon podcast.  You can also subscribe in Apple podcasts or through our Amazon Alexa skill. 

Blue Apron Swaps Out CEOs. Founder Salzberg Replaced by CFO Dickerson

Blue Apron announced yesterday that its board of directors has replaced Co-Founder Matt Salzberg as President and CEO with Brad Dickerson, the company’s CFO.

Dickinson joined Blue Apron in February of 2016 after spending 11 years at UnderArmor, including time as that company’s CFO. In an interview with Recode, Dickinson said that Salzberg was the “driver” of the decision to switch up CEOs at the company, as Salzberg wanted to focus on longer-term ideas.

Maybe.

But yesterday’s move move caps off what has been a tumultuous year for the prepared meal kit delivery service, which has seen its stock price tumble since going public earlier this year, and layoffs of six percent of its staff last month.

As we’ve written before, the whole prepared meal kit space is experiencing growing pains. Companies are increasingly specializing, and Amazon threatens to upend the whole industry with customizable same-day meal kits.

A Startup Is Using Meal Kits To Get Healthier Goods Into Food-Insecure Households

You can get a meal kit for just about anything these days: unusual flavors, new cooking techniques, strictly vegan dishes. But despite the variety, meal-kit services tend to all wind up in the same category: they’re a luxury. Sometimes it’s the cost; sometimes it’s time required to create a recipe. Often it’s both, which means if you don’t have disposable hours or income, a meal kit will not make your life easier the way companies claim it can.

But now, a startup in Chicago called KitcheNet wants to drive—literally—the meal kit in a new direction by combining it with the buyer-club concept to get fresher, healthier food into food-insecure areas. It’s estimated that 42.2 million Americans live in these areas—also called food deserts—where access to food is inconsistent and uncertain, to say nothing of the quality. (This handy map has more information about where and why this happens.)

Even those not living in food deserts see cost as a barrier. In a recent Nielsen survey, 46 percent of respondents said they would be “more likely to purchase a meal kit if it were less expensive.”

Clearly there’s a market for fresher, more convenient food at affordable prices, and there are some startups putting price before exotic side dishes. Dinnerly, for example, calls itself “the most affordable meal service delivery,” and it is—for some. But asking many families to drop around $70 on three meals per week remains unrealistic. These are the people KitcheNet wants to reach.

KitcheNet began as a delivery service for prepared foods in 2016, winning third place in the University of Chicago’s New Venture Challenges contest that year. The team of entrepreneurs behind the project soon realized a meal-kit-like service was a more efficient way to get food into the hands of folks living in food deserts. At the moment, you can purchase meal kits via regular payment methods. At some point in the future, the company wants to be able to accept payments from those using SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) and other assistance programs. Ultimately, those are the people KitcheNet wants to reach most.

Consumers can choose from one of three kits each week: $22 for a single adult, $38 for two adults and two children, and $62 for a five-person family. Each kit is constructed based on the USDA MyPlate portion. The goal is to make those staples cheaper than they would be at the local shop.

One difference from other meal kit services is that KitcheNet uses pickup locations, rather than delivering to doorsteps. “We have noticed that in communities like Englewood, many families spend a significant amount of time at the community centers,” cofounder and CEO Trista Li explained to me. “Bringing our KitcheNet kit to locations where they already go could save [those people] time, as well as simplify our logistics to support the affordable price of our product.”

Right now, KitcheNet operates in parts of Chicago’s Southside, and its immediate focus for growth is throughout that part of the city. From there, the service will head to the west side of Chicago.

“The meal/grocery kit delivery market is still a very new market in general, and there are definitely gaps that could be filled,” says Li.

We can only hope that means an eventual KitcheNet expansion will unfold across the country, leading the new wave of meal services and getting real food to the folks who need it most.

Update: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated KitcheNet offers subscription services. KitcheNet does not and has never provided such services.