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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

meal prep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meallogix Raises $1.25 Million for its Meal Prep Software Platform

Meallogix, an enterprise resource planning software company focused on the meal prep market, announced today that it has closed a $1.25 million Seed round of funding.

Meallogix promises to take care of the more administrative tasks associated with running a meal prep or meal kit company. According to press materials emailed to The Spoon, Meallogix digitizes a company’s supply chain, handles nutrition label creation, shopping list creation, recipe costing, delivery options and more. The Meallogix dashboard also gives meal prep companies analytics around financials and menu performance.

Meal prep and meal kits have seen a bit of a resurgence during the pandemic. With restaurants shut down and more people eating at home, services that provide such pre-fab meals help consumers break out of their habitual eating ruts and discover something new. Even the beleaguered godfather of meal kit companies, Blue Apron, got a profitable boost thanks to shifting eating patterns during the pandemic. One also has to wonder if there is a burgeoning market in the home chef space, where home cooks could assemble prepped meals.

Meallogix is providing the picks-and-shovels to those types of meal prep companies, and allows them to focus more on the food by digitizing the day-to-day operations that go into prepping the kits. The company’s Seed raise shows that at least some investors think the meal prep and meal kit categories are robust enough to continue as the pandemic recedes.

The Meallogix platform costs $149 a month. The company says it will use the new funds to build out its platform, scale its operations, hire additional people and expand partnerships.

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

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

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

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

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

Blue Apron’s meal prep kits

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

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

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

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

Making Traditional Food Prep Smarter With Vitamix

Vitamix is a household name is the kitchen; in 1949, founder William G. Barnard demonstrated the Vitamix blender in the first U.S. infomercial in the early days of television. Since then, Vitamix has worked to uphold William’s mission, developing kitchen food preparation tools as technology continues to mature and provide new capabilities. As COO, much of Tony Ciepiel’s work is thinking about how the market is evolving and how Vitamix can lead in bringing new technology to traditional kitchen prep devices like the Vitamix Ascent Series.

The company’s smart blender series builds on the traditional Vitamix blender and adds emerging technology and capabilities such as built-in timers and wireless connectivity. “As we began designing and planning for the launch of the Ascent Series, we asked ourselves how we might add value for our customers through intuitive design and maximum ease of use,” said Ciepiel. “Among other things, that line of thought drove us to incorporate Near Field Communication (NFC) technology into the containers for our Ascent Series blenders.”

Through NFC, the blender can detect what size container has been placed onto the base and will change blending program parameters accordingly. Those parameters include ramp-up times and blade speeds as well as the overall length of a blending program. “That was really a breakthrough moment that brought us to the forefront of intelligent technology within the blending space. We intend to remain there.”

In addition to the Ascent Series product, Vitamix has plans to launch an app that gives customers control over their blenders and what they can make. The app includes the ability to design blending programs that can then be uploaded to the blender to provide users the ability to customize programs to meet their needs. The app pairs those programs with recipes that go directly to the blender. Vitamix allows users to access those recipes but also works with their Perfect Blend Smart Scale, to let the user know exactly – down to a fraction of an ounce – how much of each ingredient to load into the blender container, and can scale the recipe to desired volume or calorie count.

“When you combine that level of automation, product intelligence and connectivity, you impart the expertise of professional chefs to the novice user, which in turn creates unparalleled joy of use and a real feeling of accomplishment,” said Ciepiel of the app.

But how are consumers reacting to this kind of technology? Tony sees it as both an opportunity and a challenge. “One of the interesting challenges we face as an industry is giving consumers a compelling reason to invest their time and money into learning how to integrate “Internet of Things” features into their daily lives,” said Ciepiel. “We’re in a unique position to evolve a product that people already love for its convenience and reliability…. we need to help our customers understand why we’re integrating new, connected technology into our products, and why it’s more than worth their time to come along for the journey.”

Vitamix recognizes that a unique approach is needed when addressing the future of kitchen technology and communicating its benefits. Through in-depth research, they’ve been able to gain a better grasp on the voice of their customer and from that research, are working to develop products that can be woven seamlessly into customers lives.

“It’s not just creating technology for the sake of technology, but rather creating products that directly fulfill what customers want and help them achieve their personal goals, whatever those may be. This will inevitably include more connected, high-tech products in the kitchen as time goes by,” Ciepiel acknowledged. “The industry needs to create and agree upon technical communication standards sooner rather than later.”

The Smart Kitchen Summit is the first event to tackle the future of food, cooking and the kitchen with leaders across food, tech, commerce, design, delivery and appliances. This series will highlight panelists and partners for the 2017 event, being held on October 10-11 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

Don’t miss Tony Ciepiel of Vitamix at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit. Check out the full list of speakers and register for the Summit, using code VITAMIX to get 25% off ticket prices.