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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Blue Apron Adds Customization, Extra Boxes to Meal Kit Subscriptions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sun Basket launches no-prep meal kits.

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

Refill brings virtual concessions stands to Ohio high schools.

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

Kroger is launching a marketplace strategy.

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

There’s a Dr. Pepper shortage. 

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

Blue Apron Ends Its Jet.com Partnership to Focus on Its ‘Core’ Business

Meal kit company Blue Apron announced this week it is terminating its partnership with e-commerce site Jet.com.

On its August 6 Q2 2019 earnings call, Blue Apron CEO Linda Findley Kozlowski said the company needed to focus on its core business, which is its direct-to-consumer sales of meal kits.

“We have not kept up with the ever evolving needs and preferences of our customers over the past couple of years, and we are behind it,” Kozlowski said on the call, adding that part of the reason for that is because the company “redirected attention of way from innovating in our core offering as we tested alternative distribution channels for the past year and a half.”

Blue Apron made its meal kits available for delivery via the Walmart subsidiary Jet.com in 2018 in NYC. At the time, the company appeared to be looking for ways to revitalize its struggling business through third-party sales channels (the company sold meal kits for a time at Costco stores, too).

But based on this week’s call, that move appears to have been a distraction, and Blue Apron seems to believe stepping away from these third-party sales channels and tapping “unrealized opportunities” within its core business model is the place to invest time and resources at the moment.

To that end Kozlowski outlined a new strategy on the call for the company’s future that includes focusing on fresh food, offering more convenience and flexibility in terms of menu options, making Blue Apron’s various digital touchpoints easier to use, and increasing marketing efforts.

But even if Blue Apron is able to pull its subscription-model business back on track, the company’s long-term viability is still uncertain. Right now, meal kits only account for 21.9 percent of online grocery services used in 2019. NPD recently reported that 93 million adults in the U.S. want to try a meal kit, but the same research also highlighted a shift away from traditional dinner-only mail-order meal kits towards ones that can be found in retail stores and/or cater to other eating times, such as lunch and snacks.

Some meal kit companies have already responded to these trends: Kroger and Home Chef started piloting new meal offerings like “heat and eat” and lunch options, which they sell in Kroger stores. Sun Basket, too, expanded its options to include breakfast, lunch, and snacks, though the company remains a direct-to-consumer subscription service like Blue Apron.

Meanwhile, Blue Apron itself has always had an issue with customer churn, partly because its kits tend to be expensive and time consuming, even for people who love to cook. That means what the company winds up offering customers in terms of more flexibility and convenience in the future will surely give an idea of how successful the company’s renewed focus on its core business will be.

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.

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.

Wirecutter Picks its Best Mail Order Meal Kit

Whenever I need to buy something — well, anything really — the first place I turn is The Wirecutter. From big-screen TVs to blenders, I’ve never been disappointed by something the review site has recommended. So when The Wirecutter ran its meal kit recommendations today, I knew it would be worth reading.

And it was! The site only looked at mail-order meal kits, so nothing you can buy in the store (which is where most meal kits are headed), and they only considered more general meal kits (sorry, vegan-only meal kits). Having said that, it is still a thorough list that was tested over a period of four months, so they got a chance to try an assortment of menus.

What was interesting is that in general, The Wirecutter echoed many of the same concerns about meal kits that we’ve had here at The Spoon: they take a lot of work, they are expensive, and they use a lot of packaging. In their defense, The Wirecutter pointed out that meal kits can help you learn to cook and help you to climb out of your eating ruts.

So, with those caveats in mind, which meal kits made The Wirecutter’s Best Meal Kit Delivery Service? It’s not broken down in a strict first, second and third place, but Blue Apron, Martha & Marley Spoon, Plated and Sun Basket all earned a spot for various reasons.

In what is turning out to be a good week for Blue Apron, The Wirecutter found that it was the best meal kit for getting started. This follows the announcement from earlier this week that Jet.com will be selling Blue Apron’s kits for same day delivery in New York.

You should check out the full list to see why each one was picked. Do you have a favorite meal kit? Tell us which one(s) in the comments.

Meal Kit Startups Target Families with Young Eaters

The home meal kit market is soaring in value, now valued at an estimated $2 billion-plus. With big players like Amazon entering at the top of the opportunity, others are selecting different, large and possibly profitable niches to attack. The hope for companies such as Kidstir, Scrumpt and Kidfresh, targeting parents of young people, is to find a large enough target audience to not only drive revenue but also to make them attractive for possible buyouts.

The kid’s meal market has two parts—kits designed for children to enjoy a cooking experience with their parents and prepared meals for young people to take to school. Of the trio of kid meal companies, Kidfresh is the lone non-subscription company with its frozen, healthy snacks and mains available at such outlets as Walmart and Kroger.  Kidstir’s cook-along-with-adults’ packages and Scumpt’s take-it-to-school full lunches require a subscription which includes home delivery.

Helmed by Ayesha Curry, Homemade is more of a traditional meal kit company with its recipes aimed at families with kids. Ayesha, wife of Golden State Warriors superstar Steph Curry, is a cookbook author and host of a show on Food Network, “Ayesha’s Home Kitchen,” as well as a spokesperson for many organizations aiming to combat childhood hunger.

Ayesha Curry's Homemade Story

Homemade offers subscription and non-subscription plans as well as products such as olive oil and gift cards. Even with all the meal kit companies in the market, Curry told Fortune that she saw a need to target families with children looking for nutritious, easy-to-prepare dinners.

“However, as a busy mom with two young kids, I was having a very difficult time finding a meal kit that my whole family could enjoy,” Curry said. “I needed meals that were beyond the basic humdrum weeknight meal, but were still accessible enough for my daughters. And because I couldn’t find it, I created it.”

Curry and newcomers such as Kidfresh are just a handful of companies eyeing this family-oriented opportunity. Others include:

One Potato--Founded by cookbook author Catherine McCord, the company delivers organics ingredients that can be assembled into a meal in 30 minutes or less.

Sun Basket--Led by celebrity chef/TV host Tyler Florence, Sun Basket is more of a traditional meal kit company, but has a clear focus on families.

Raddish—A subscription service that provides boxes of goodies that children and their parents can cut, chop, bake, broil or grill into homecooked meals.

As the market for meal kits matures with Amazon, Blue Apron and others battling it out for market share, we likely will see even more startups focus on large, lucrative niches. Some of those opportunities could include kits aimed at busy seniors, those on special diets such as diabetics, and even kosher/halal packages.