Startups have their eyes on kitchens around the country, aiming to add spice to the often bland routine of making dinner.
Their updated dinner recipe for busy Americans goes like this: Order online. Receive an insulated pack of food. Prepare it in 30 minutes or less, with minimal effort.
Meez Meals, Cooked and Madison & Rayne are among the Chicago-area companies catering to those who want interesting meals but don’t want to do too much in the kitchen.
Some services offer fully cooked meals. In others, customers receive the ingredients along with a recipe card, chopping, sauteing and aiming to replicate meals like the ones prepared by the celebrity chefs they watch on TV. Some are subscription-based, delivering meals each week, while others allow consumers to buy meals a la carte. Prices vary, often hovering around $10 per serving.
Dr. Sharon Robinson has been using meal delivery and prep services for about a year.
“I just didn’t have the time or the desire to cook. I hate cooking, I hate it,” said Robinson, a pediatrician and mother of two who lives in Evanston. “I do all of my grocery shopping on Peapod. Basically, I try to outsource everything in my life.”
Using Plated, a New York-based service that Robinson described as “almost gourmet,” and other meal services has enabled her busy family to skip weeknight stops at restaurants such as Chipotle and Noodles & Co.
“It’s a little pricey, if you look at it, but it’s certainly cheaper than doing carryout for a family of four, and it’s healthier. And we’re eating at home, and I like that,” Robinson said.
She also relies on Dream Dinners, a “fix-and-freeze” company that has patrons visit its shops to assemble meals, which rotate monthly. Dream Dinners has one location in Chicago.
The target audience for the services includes everyone from individuals and couples looking for an alternative to takeout, to foodie couples with young kids and empty nesters yearning for more interesting meals after years of preparing family-friendly dishes. They compete with grocery stores such as Standard Market, Mariano’s and Whole Foods, which have beefed up their prepared food sections with everything from sushi to take-home meal kits that go far beyond a deli counter’s traditional fare of fried chicken and macaroni salad.
More than $545 million has been invested in the U.S. food delivery space since April 2013, according to Rosenheim Advisors, a strategic consulting firm focused on the food-related tech industry.
Blue Apron, known as the largest player in the category, started in 2012 and now delivers more than 1 million meals a month, at $9.99 per serving.
Customers “write us love letters … saying things like, ‘You’ve changed my life and you’ve saved my marriage,'” said founder Matt Salzberg.
With a $50 million round of investments earlier this year, Salzberg said, Blue Apron’s unit economics are “really healthy,” but it is “spending that money on expanding.”
Salzberg envisions Blue Apron, named for the blue aprons chefs wear while learning, becoming the largest name in the country for cooking. In November, Blue Apron said it would launch an online store for cooking gear, on top of its existing delivery system and a line of cookbooks.
Blue Apron picks the recipes that are delivered each week based on food preferences, rather than letting customers choose from a variety of meals as some other services do. That way, the company can control its costs, as it knows just how much of each ingredient it plans to ship each week. Its recipes also call for the customer to wash produce, and chop and dice ingredients such as onions, steps some of the other services handle before shipping.
Among the Chicago-area companies, Meez Meals features chopped and diced ingredients and sells only vegetarian food, but gives users suggestions on ways to add meat for carnivores; Cooked delivers ready-to-eat meals that just need to be heated; and Madison & Rayne delivers pre-cut ingredients so customers can create restaurant-quality dinners at home.
“There is absolutely an appetite for this stuff, I’m not sure how big that appetite is,” said Justin Massa, founder and CEO of Food Genius, a firm that works on big data for the food industry. “My concern for some of these companies is if they don’t figure out alternate products to offer something to a more down-market, budget-conscious consumer, that growth is going to plateau fairly soon.”
Meez Meals, which delivers from a prep space in Evanston, takes its name from a play on the French term “mise en place,” or the way a chef has ingredients gathered and in place before cooking, as well as a play on the idea of ease.
Three times a month, a team at Meez Meals tastes items that could be added to the company’s rotating menu. On a recent afternoon, the taste test featured a pizza with a spinach pesto cream sauce, sweet potatoes and cheese; quesadillas with ingredients such as feta and tomato; and desserts including a peanut butter and chocolate pizza and chocolate bread pudding with strawberry sauce. Each person at the tasting gave feedback, including executive chef Max Barajas. Then, he went back to tweak the recipes. Founder Jen Moore wants recipes that are easy yet are things that customers would not think of concocting.
“If it is something people are already making on their own, they probably don’t need us for it,” said Moore, who left a brand management job at Unilever to start Meez Meals after hearing her sister complain about the preparation necessary to cook dinner from scratch.
Madison & Rayne, started in 2013 by Melanie Mityas and Josh Jones, former executive chef at the restaurant Spring, is starting to look for outside investors in the hopes of replicating its model with a local chef, local sourcing and personal delivery in other U.S. cities next year. It says it has thousands of customers in the Chicago area, that most people order two meals per week, and that it is profitable.
“We’re encouraged when we see the competition doing well because it shows that there is demand,” Mityas said. Jones notes that the local aspects of the company, including buying from local farms and delivering themselves, sets them apart from the larger rivals.
Chef Jona Silva and his wife started Cooked this past spring. It has about 300 customers who receive meals that need only to be heated before serving.
“Every month we’ve pretty much doubled,” said Erin Silva Winston, chef Silva’s wife. “There seems to be quite a bit of interest.”
Grocery operators aren’t sitting by, however. The upscale grocer Standard Market, for example, has a “What’s For Dinner Tonight?” meal kit for two, with a rotating menu priced under $20 that typically includes a main dish, sides and a dessert, ready to be heated in an oven and served in less than half an hour.
Grocery delivery firm Peapod is also testing the waters. It just partnered with Barilla “to meet the demand for a family-friendly meal kit solution, which did not exist in the marketplace,” said Tim Knuettel, Barilla’s vice president of sales. The recipes, delivered by Peapod with pre-measured ingredients, cost less than $5 per serving.
“There’s a finite number of people who are willing to pay upward of $10 for a meal they cook themselves,” said Massa, of Food Genius.
Massa said Blue Apron, Plated and HelloFresh “have a massive head start on everyone else” and have figured out many of the challenges of execution in the industry. Still, with several delivery and messenger services popping up, smaller companies with less funding can find ways to deliver to customers’ homes quickly and at a lower cost.
“The winners are going to be the people who can out-execute everyone else,” he said.
Twitter @jessicawohl
