Meal Kit Delivery Services in the U.S.

Meal Kit Delivery Services in the U.S.

Meant to solve the perennial problem of “what’s for dinner?”, meal kit delivery services offer consumers a convenient way to cook at home without having to do the meal planning and grocery shopping. Online portals let consumers order meals ahead from picture menus showing gorgeous photos of the finished dish, and the services deliver the pre-measured fresh ingredients along with recipes to their doorstep to help them cook chef-quality meals at home. Marketers are aiming for—and finding—a “sweet spot” with consumers who do not have the time, inclination, or know-how to shop for individual ingredients, navigate a recipe, and cook from scratch, yet do not want to eat yet another heat-and-eat prepared meal, order takeout food, or dine out. No wonder then that participants across the entire food spectrum—from grocery home delivery services like Peapod and FreshDirect, to packaged foods marketers like Barilla, to meal-kits-only grocery store Pantry—are climbing aboard the burgeoning meal kits bandwagon.

Scope and Methodology

Packaged Facts’ first-edition report, Meal Kit Delivery Services in the U.S., opens with an Overview chapter presenting a thorough introduction to this new and exciting business, exploring its history, the changing eating trends that are making it viable, how meal kit delivery services work, and attractions and criticisms of these services. The next chapter, The Consumer, concentrates primarily on analyzing data from a proprietary Packaged Facts National Consumer Survey conducted in February 2016 that delves into the scope and demographics of users of meal kit delivery services. Next, “The Marketers” profiles more than two dozen competitors and their strategies, including Ahold USA, Blue Apron, Chef’d, Cooking Simplified, Din, Foodstirs, FreshDirect, Gobble, Green Blender, Green Chef, Handpick, HelloFresh, Home Chef, Hungryroot, Just Add Cooking, Markey Spoon, Munchery, Pantry, PeachDish, Plated, The Purple Carrot, Saffron Fix, Sun Basket, Terra’s Kitchen, and Tyson Foods. The closing chapter, Trends & Opportunities, springboards off the past and current state of the market to explore the future of this market.

In addition to the Packaged Facts consumer survey, primary research for Meal Kit Delivery Services in the U.S. includes telephone and email interviews with executives at meal kit delivery services, with secondary research encompassing more than 300 articles in consumer and industry publications, websites, and blogs, as well as other reports by Packaged Facts, along with websites and literature from individual meal kit marketers.