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> That’s where making one-off meal kits available at retail locations like grocery stores and membership clubs comes in; according to Seifer, moving beyond the

> That’s where making one-off meal kits available at retail locations like grocery stores and membership clubs comes in; according to Seifer, moving beyond the mail-order subscription model seems pivotal to meal kits’ long-term viability. This is the money quote. The people who subscribe to these things and figure out cooking is not hard and just requires a bit of initial guidance are almost certainly going to keep recipes and do their own shopping. And now that it's proven viable and so many supermarkets deliver groceries, they're going to swoop in and eat mail-order kits' collective lunches.

hvs 8y ago
Just wait until these people discover that these "recipes" are available in things called "cookbooks" that they can purchase without subscribing to a meal service.
- robodale 8y ago
  ...and then they discover they can get "recipes" from any number of "websites", for free, and without even buying a cookbook!
- jerkstate 8y ago
  the main thing that meal kit services did for me was automate shopping and variety. Now I use a non-kit shopping list/recipe service that lets me pick from a recipe list at the beginning of the week and puts a shopping list together for me, and shop once a week. We have very little food waste (compared to shopping for ingredients then needing to fit them into a recipe) and it's very time-efficient (compared to choosing recipes and manually compiling a shopping list from recipes in a cookbook).
- untog 8y ago
  That's not really the point. Shopping for a dozen individual ingredients for a recipe is time consuming, and is one reason why people are more inclined to try these meal kit boxes. Selling a pre-packaged meal kit in a store still keeps the time-saving benefits, and removes the shipping difficulty.
  - bhandziuk 8y ago
    Usually those dozen ingredients are things like spices which you might only buy once every 6 months+ (so next time you make that recipe there are only 4 ingredients) or they're staples (flour, pasta) or fresh consumables which are shared between many recipes (onion, garlic, cheese). So if you're cooking at home a lot your grocery list is often the same thing every time plus a few odd items periodically even if you make different things every week.
- nahh_bro 8y ago
  That's a load of shit, because prep work is a bitch, and clean up is a bitch. It's not just the part about the shopping list of commodity raw materials. But, most eating habits are incidental to immediate cravings, when faced with a wide variety of choices. So put a full catalogue of menu items in front of a person, and ask them what they'll really want two Friday's from now. If you had to choose now, what you'll eat in exactly two weeks, on the dot, between sushi and green tea, or hamburgers and milkshakes, or soup and a sandwich, how do you know you'll even want it when it arrives? And when it does, and you don't, how hard will it be to not eat it, toss it in the fridge, and go get the food you really want at that moment? And then, what was all that planning effort for?
- munchbunny 8y ago
  Recipe curation is a genuinely hard problem. I often go diving into cookbooks for recipes, and I've noticed that in general I will try 2-3 recipes for each one I might add to my repertoire. I think cookbooks are often just making stuff up to fill pages, and as a result the many of the recipes are just mediocre, with a few good ones sprinkled in.
  - groby_b 8y ago
    Serious recommendation - trash recipe books, unless you're interested in recreating a specific kind of flavor. Then, learn about proper ratios. (Best book I've found so far is "Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking"). And then get yourself a copy of the flavor bible, which makes it easy to create excellent flavor combinations. You're set for life. (You might at some point add cooking chemistry into the mix, too. But the point is, learn to make recipes yourself, so you know they're tailored to what you like. Instead of having to try them one by one)
    - grawprog 8y ago
      I can't remember the last time I actually cooked using a recipe. The only thing I use them for these days is a quick glance at the general ingredients in a dish for something i've never made before, or any special cooking instructions. Cooking is more about knowing the properties and flavours of your ingredients and knowing which work well together. Once you know that, you can make pretty much anything. Baking though i'd say is an exception. The ratios of ingredients and the orser you combine and the methods you use are fairly important to get exact. Baking is a lot like chemistry. I've also been lucky enough to have a copy of this book lying around. https://www.amazon.ca/Cooking-Textbook-Culinary-Fundamentals-5th/dp/013715576X https://www.amazon.ca/Cooking-Textbook-Culinary-Fundamentals... I wouldn't necessarily recommend it unless you want to work in a kitchen, but it's pretty awesome.
    - munchbunny 8y ago
      That's great advice, but I'd like to add another consideration: cooking advice is often specific to cultural context. I can't speak for your specific recommendations because I haven't read them, but other books in the category do have this issue. I primarily cook Chinese food, and as a result general technique guidance coming from Western techniques tends to work to the extent that green beans are green beans, but tends to translate imperfectly to the extent that a cast iron skillet is not a wok, dumpling dough and pasta dough are made differently and handled differently, etc. As a result, I sort of have two different kitchens in my kitchen, there's a set of tools, ingredients, and techniques for Chinese food (and often other Asian cuisines), and there's a set of tools, ingredients, and techniques for when I make Western dishes.
- deadmetheny 8y ago
  I'd be willing to bet that a lot of the people who jump into these things never really had a parent who cooked, or if they did were never really all that interested in learning until later in life and these kits may have helped them along in that regard. This isn't meant to be passing judgement on anyone, btw, just an observation in general of how people seem to progress from these things. Either they do their own shopping and learn to cook for real, or they go back to mostly eating out.
  - will123195 8y ago
    A year of Blue Apron elevated my cooking game from zero to quite good actually. Now that I've learned some technique, I prefer buying groceries instead of getting the ridiculous single serve vinegar/ketchup/mayo bottles and not-quite-as-fresh protein they send you.
    - pessimizer 8y ago
      I feel this is the real curse for these meal services: the customers they're most successful with will get better at cooking fairly quickly and eventually start shopping for themselves.
      - ghaff 8y ago
        Businesses can certainly work servicing customers who graduate from needing them. Think, well, universities. Or dating services. Or anything catering to a particular age group. But the churn economics need to work.
- skywhopper 8y ago
  It's clear you don't understand the value people find in the service.
davis_m 8y ago
I have long thought that there is an opening for local grocery stores to take a lot of this market. Many of my local supermarkets (HyVee, Walmart) allow for online ordering, but they all require the user to input items one-by-one. If they added a feature to add entire recipes in a single click, I think they would do very well for themselves. The additional cost of adding a recipe card would be negligible. The customer's cost isn't increased over regular online ordering, and there isn't the issue of increased packaging. The food is fresh from the local supermarket and doesn't have to be shipped, beyond at most a local delivery.
- brandonscott 8y ago
  H-E-B does exactly this in Texas. They have packed-daily boxes for $12 - $30 depending on the serving size.
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    H-E-B is a truly remarkable grocery phenomenon that I can't really quite describe, and I was hoping to see someone mention it here. But also, yes their packaged dinner meals have saved several of my nights as a night-owl student at Baylor, studying for hours and looking up to realize it's suddenly 1am and everything's closed.
    - MandieD 8y ago
      H-E-B: similar quality and better prices than Whole Foods on specialty items, similar prices and better quality than Walmart on commodities. Consistently good groceries, physically and financially accessible by just about everyone in Central Texas.
      - dvtrn 8y ago
        I Thought it was a statewide story not just localized to Centex?
- solarkraft 8y ago
  > If they added a feature to add entire recipes in a single click, I think they would do very well for themselves. German recipe website Chefkoch.de uses Whisk to do exactly this.
burke 8y ago
I use one of these services because I find myself less likely to order in when I have fewer decisions to make about dinner. I don't mind cooking at the end of the work day, but I hate having to decide what to cook and try to figure out whether there's anything I need to buy in order to make it. I'd be happy to buy kits from a supermarket rather than by mail though, if they were able to stock a good selection.
the-pigeon 8y ago
Personally what I'd like to see is speciality ingredients. Stuff that isn't normally sold in my region and if I order those ingredients online they I would need to spend way more because they aren't sold in small amounts. But instead when I look at these services it's almost all ingredients you can get at almost any US grocery store.
eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
Grocery stores could also put on cooking classes. Bring in a local chef and it’s also a good way to meet people, could make it a singles night.
- CobrastanJorji 8y ago
  If you'd be interested, this is very much already a thing. I'll bet you your local fancy grocery store has a big calendar on its wall advertising exactly this.
  - eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
    I'll have to look out for this, thanks. I know my local fancy market has friday evening wine tastings, but I've never seen anything like this for cooking. And I know group cooking classes exist, but I've just never seen it as part of the grocery store offering or something they publicize.
- mc32 8y ago
  Where do they find the space to do something like this? They typically try to use their space judiciously to have as much product on thd floor as possible. Guess around slow times they could rearrange certain areas, like the delikatessen/hot food/bakery areas.
  - eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
    A lot of grocery stores have kitchens inside of them, especially the larger ones, so maybe that is a possibility? Could easily start off small to gauge interest before expanding. Or you could market the product inside of grocery stores, but do the actual cooking at the local chef's restaurant? Or yep like you said, rearrange some areas temporarily during off-hours.
endorphone 8y ago
I'm an avid cook and a regular grocery shopper but I also get meals occasionally from a couple of services here in Canada. Getting together all of the ingredients for a meal -- many of which can only be bought in quantity, but might only be needed in very small amounts -- is much more of a nuisance and expensive than many estimate. And in the end the meal kit costs me around $40CAD for a 4 serving meal which is entirely reasonable. Which is why I think these services are doomed. I don't see how they can do it as inexpensively as they do. Really it's a remarkable value. And to many of the comments, one of the services here now has a selection of meals each week that are only available if you pick it up at a large grocery chain, that partnership being presumably how they're trying to reduce costs.
habosa 8y ago
The Safeway near my house started selling Plated meal boxes and I love it! They're cheaper than the ones in the mail (by $1-2) and I don't have to worry about when they will arrive and if they'll spoil on the doorstep because I left town or something. I don't know why the grocery stores don't just make their own boxes though.
analog31 8y ago
Perhaps getting kids through the first six weeks of living on their own isn't such a bad business model. Not necessarily unicorn material, but it could sustain a modest business. There will always be a supply of new customers. The service could teach them a bit of home economics and ease them into home cooking.

hvs 8y ago

Just wait until these people discover that these "recipes" are available in things called "cookbooks" that they can purchase without subscribing to a meal service.

robodale 8y ago
...and then they discover they can get "recipes" from any number of "websites", for free, and without even buying a cookbook!
jerkstate 8y ago
the main thing that meal kit services did for me was automate shopping and variety. Now I use a non-kit shopping list/recipe service that lets me pick from a recipe list at the beginning of the week and puts a shopping list together for me, and shop once a week. We have very little food waste (compared to shopping for ingredients then needing to fit them into a recipe) and it's very time-efficient (compared to choosing recipes and manually compiling a shopping list from recipes in a cookbook).
untog 8y ago
That's not really the point. Shopping for a dozen individual ingredients for a recipe is time consuming, and is one reason why people are more inclined to try these meal kit boxes. Selling a pre-packaged meal kit in a store still keeps the time-saving benefits, and removes the shipping difficulty.
- bhandziuk 8y ago
  Usually those dozen ingredients are things like spices which you might only buy once every 6 months+ (so next time you make that recipe there are only 4 ingredients) or they're staples (flour, pasta) or fresh consumables which are shared between many recipes (onion, garlic, cheese). So if you're cooking at home a lot your grocery list is often the same thing every time plus a few odd items periodically even if you make different things every week.
nahh_bro 8y ago
That's a load of shit, because prep work is a bitch, and clean up is a bitch. It's not just the part about the shopping list of commodity raw materials. But, most eating habits are incidental to immediate cravings, when faced with a wide variety of choices. So put a full catalogue of menu items in front of a person, and ask them what they'll really want two Friday's from now. If you had to choose now, what you'll eat in exactly two weeks, on the dot, between sushi and green tea, or hamburgers and milkshakes, or soup and a sandwich, how do you know you'll even want it when it arrives? And when it does, and you don't, how hard will it be to not eat it, toss it in the fridge, and go get the food you really want at that moment? And then, what was all that planning effort for?
munchbunny 8y ago
Recipe curation is a genuinely hard problem. I often go diving into cookbooks for recipes, and I've noticed that in general I will try 2-3 recipes for each one I might add to my repertoire. I think cookbooks are often just making stuff up to fill pages, and as a result the many of the recipes are just mediocre, with a few good ones sprinkled in.
- groby_b 8y ago
  Serious recommendation - trash recipe books, unless you're interested in recreating a specific kind of flavor. Then, learn about proper ratios. (Best book I've found so far is "Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking"). And then get yourself a copy of the flavor bible, which makes it easy to create excellent flavor combinations. You're set for life. (You might at some point add cooking chemistry into the mix, too. But the point is, learn to make recipes yourself, so you know they're tailored to what you like. Instead of having to try them one by one)
  - grawprog 8y ago
    I can't remember the last time I actually cooked using a recipe. The only thing I use them for these days is a quick glance at the general ingredients in a dish for something i've never made before, or any special cooking instructions. Cooking is more about knowing the properties and flavours of your ingredients and knowing which work well together. Once you know that, you can make pretty much anything. Baking though i'd say is an exception. The ratios of ingredients and the orser you combine and the methods you use are fairly important to get exact. Baking is a lot like chemistry. I've also been lucky enough to have a copy of this book lying around. https://www.amazon.ca/Cooking-Textbook-Culinary-Fundamentals-5th/dp/013715576X https://www.amazon.ca/Cooking-Textbook-Culinary-Fundamentals... I wouldn't necessarily recommend it unless you want to work in a kitchen, but it's pretty awesome.
  - munchbunny 8y ago
    That's great advice, but I'd like to add another consideration: cooking advice is often specific to cultural context. I can't speak for your specific recommendations because I haven't read them, but other books in the category do have this issue. I primarily cook Chinese food, and as a result general technique guidance coming from Western techniques tends to work to the extent that green beans are green beans, but tends to translate imperfectly to the extent that a cast iron skillet is not a wok, dumpling dough and pasta dough are made differently and handled differently, etc. As a result, I sort of have two different kitchens in my kitchen, there's a set of tools, ingredients, and techniques for Chinese food (and often other Asian cuisines), and there's a set of tools, ingredients, and techniques for when I make Western dishes.
deadmetheny 8y ago
I'd be willing to bet that a lot of the people who jump into these things never really had a parent who cooked, or if they did were never really all that interested in learning until later in life and these kits may have helped them along in that regard. This isn't meant to be passing judgement on anyone, btw, just an observation in general of how people seem to progress from these things. Either they do their own shopping and learn to cook for real, or they go back to mostly eating out.
- will123195 8y ago
  A year of Blue Apron elevated my cooking game from zero to quite good actually. Now that I've learned some technique, I prefer buying groceries instead of getting the ridiculous single serve vinegar/ketchup/mayo bottles and not-quite-as-fresh protein they send you.
  - pessimizer 8y ago
    I feel this is the real curse for these meal services: the customers they're most successful with will get better at cooking fairly quickly and eventually start shopping for themselves.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      Businesses can certainly work servicing customers who graduate from needing them. Think, well, universities. Or dating services. Or anything catering to a particular age group. But the churn economics need to work.
skywhopper 8y ago
It's clear you don't understand the value people find in the service.

davis_m 8y ago

I have long thought that there is an opening for local grocery stores to take a lot of this market. Many of my local supermarkets (HyVee, Walmart) allow for online ordering, but they all require the user to input items one-by-one. If they added a feature to add entire recipes in a single click, I think they would do very well for themselves. The additional cost of adding a recipe card would be negligible. The customer's cost isn't increased over regular online ordering, and there isn't the issue of increased packaging. The food is fresh from the local supermarket and doesn't have to be shipped, beyond at most a local delivery.

brandonscott 8y ago
H-E-B does exactly this in Texas. They have packed-daily boxes for $12 - $30 depending on the serving size.
- dvtrn 8y ago
  H-E-B is a truly remarkable grocery phenomenon that I can't really quite describe, and I was hoping to see someone mention it here. But also, yes their packaged dinner meals have saved several of my nights as a night-owl student at Baylor, studying for hours and looking up to realize it's suddenly 1am and everything's closed.
  - MandieD 8y ago
    H-E-B: similar quality and better prices than Whole Foods on specialty items, similar prices and better quality than Walmart on commodities. Consistently good groceries, physically and financially accessible by just about everyone in Central Texas.
    - dvtrn 8y ago
      I Thought it was a statewide story not just localized to Centex?
solarkraft 8y ago
> If they added a feature to add entire recipes in a single click, I think they would do very well for themselves. German recipe website Chefkoch.de uses Whisk to do exactly this.

burke 8y ago

I use one of these services because I find myself less likely to order in when I have fewer decisions to make about dinner. I don't mind cooking at the end of the work day, but I hate having to decide what to cook and try to figure out whether there's anything I need to buy in order to make it. I'd be happy to buy kits from a supermarket rather than by mail though, if they were able to stock a good selection.

the-pigeon 8y ago

Personally what I'd like to see is speciality ingredients. Stuff that isn't normally sold in my region and if I order those ingredients online they I would need to spend way more because they aren't sold in small amounts. But instead when I look at these services it's almost all ingredients you can get at almost any US grocery store.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago

Grocery stores could also put on cooking classes. Bring in a local chef and it’s also a good way to meet people, could make it a singles night.

CobrastanJorji 8y ago
If you'd be interested, this is very much already a thing. I'll bet you your local fancy grocery store has a big calendar on its wall advertising exactly this.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  I'll have to look out for this, thanks. I know my local fancy market has friday evening wine tastings, but I've never seen anything like this for cooking. And I know group cooking classes exist, but I've just never seen it as part of the grocery store offering or something they publicize.
mc32 8y ago
Where do they find the space to do something like this? They typically try to use their space judiciously to have as much product on thd floor as possible. Guess around slow times they could rearrange certain areas, like the delikatessen/hot food/bakery areas.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  A lot of grocery stores have kitchens inside of them, especially the larger ones, so maybe that is a possibility? Could easily start off small to gauge interest before expanding. Or you could market the product inside of grocery stores, but do the actual cooking at the local chef's restaurant? Or yep like you said, rearrange some areas temporarily during off-hours.

endorphone 8y ago

I'm an avid cook and a regular grocery shopper but I also get meals occasionally from a couple of services here in Canada. Getting together all of the ingredients for a meal -- many of which can only be bought in quantity, but might only be needed in very small amounts -- is much more of a nuisance and expensive than many estimate. And in the end the meal kit costs me around $40CAD for a 4 serving meal which is entirely reasonable. Which is why I think these services are doomed. I don't see how they can do it as inexpensively as they do. Really it's a remarkable value. And to many of the comments, one of the services here now has a selection of meals each week that are only available if you pick it up at a large grocery chain, that partnership being presumably how they're trying to reduce costs.

habosa 8y ago

The Safeway near my house started selling Plated meal boxes and I love it! They're cheaper than the ones in the mail (by $1-2) and I don't have to worry about when they will arrive and if they'll spoil on the doorstep because I left town or something. I don't know why the grocery stores don't just make their own boxes though.

analog31 8y ago

Perhaps getting kids through the first six weeks of living on their own isn't such a bad business model. Not necessarily unicorn material, but it could sustain a modest business. There will always be a supply of new customers. The service could teach them a bit of home economics and ease them into home cooking.