Are meal kits the answer for time-stressed families?
Meal kit companies duke it out to deliver time in a box, Liane Faulder writes
It is, on one level, the most basic of tasks. Yet people in this timesqueezed culture find it increasingly difficult to simply feed themselves.
Just ask Edmonton’s Leanne Bramm. Though Bramm likes to cook, both she and her husband Colin work full time. With girls age five and seven, their lives mirror the stressful juggling act playing out in households across the western world. The witching hour — that pressure cooker between 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. when everyone arrives home tired and hungry — was an ongoing source of anxiety.
Bramm used to cope with the demands of working and feeding a family by picking up a lot of prepared meals at the grocery store or taking the whole family to Swiss Chalet. But all that changed in September when the Bramms began ordering meal kits of fresh, premeasured ingredients complete with recipes from Chefs Plate.
“We wanted to cut down on the amountofeatingoutwedoasafamily, and the amount of ‘What’s for dinner tonight?’ That’s the hardest part,” Bramm said. “Working and trying to think of something to eat. We wanted to eat better food and not go out all the time.”
Chefs Plate, launched in 2014 in Toronto, was the first player in the meal kit delivery business in Canada, a relatively new space on the $118-billion-a-year groceryand-restaurant landscape. The Montreal-based Goodfood (which only delivers in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes) joined the fray in 2015, followed in 2016 by HelloFresh, a German-based international food technology company. Together, they have identified what modern consumers seem to want most, and that’s convenience.
“Canadians are more timepressed,” said Robert Carter, a food industry specialist at Toronto’s NPD group, a market research organization. “When we look at Canadian consumption, in home, 75 per cent of our meals are prepared in 15 minutes or less. So that really speaks to that need for convenience.”
Consumers are looking for a way to eat quickly to squeeze more activities into their lives. That behaviour is reflected in other food marketplaces, where speed-based services such as drive-thru or digital delivery of restaurant food, such as through Skip the Dishes or Uber Eats, continue to grow, Carter said. Even though meal kit delivery services are relatively new in Canada, Carter said they ’re seeing “dramatic” growth. NPD research estimates that 600,000 meals are delivered monthly in Canada.
Meal kits compress several different units of time. They reduce hours spent at the grocery store, time spent planning the week’s meals, and the actual toil of measuring and chopping. The kits also save mental strain, because just deciding what to eat can be stressful, too. Meal delivery kits offer an astounding variety of recipes, and consumers say they learn new culinary techniques and sample foods they may not have considered.
Even people who don’t need to learn any new tricks find meal kits helpful. Tracy Zizek, an Edmonton chef at Kitchen by Brad who has the skills to make anything she wants, used Chefs Plate over the Christmas season. She was so busy at work, she didn’t have time to feed herself and didn’t mind spending about $66 weekly for three meals for two over a six-week period.
“It had a decent choice of recipe options and the nutritional information and ingredient breakdown was there if you are watching what you are eating,” Zizek said. “Truly it was convenience, 100 per cent, and being able to have it on my doorstep on Friday, I made the meals on Sunday and then was done cooking for the week — and I had extra for lunches.”
But some critics, like Kaelin Whittaker of The Ruby Apron, say meal kits are a convoluted solution to a simple problem.
“Although it does promote getting people into the kitchen, I don’t think it promotes that in the right way,” said Whittaker, a chef and cooking class instructor.
The services tout meals ready in 30 to 40 minutes (although Chefs Plate, which delivers 400,000 meal kits a month covering every province in Canada, has recently launched a more expensive meal kit option ready in 15 minutes). Whittaker says a well-stocked home pantry can ensure a delicious meal is on the table in 20 minutes, suggesting a chicken pasta dish or a grain bowl are easy and nutritious dishes.
“(Meal kits) are a great philosophy, but is it really cutting down your meal prep time?” Whittaker asked. “I don’t think so. If you have a good recipe, it just takes planning.
“We are in this whole mindset of: ‘We don’t have time. We don’t have time.’ But why don’t we have time? Food is one of the most important things in our lives, and yet our groceries are so cheap and we spend money on everything else.”
Meal kit delivery services are betting they can change the behaviour of Canadians, encouraging healthy eating at home with a minimum of fuss while siphoning dollars from fast-food outlets and grocery stores alike. But they couldn’t exist without a major cultural change already in place — the modern predilection for doing everything online, or with an app.
But Canadians have lagged in the use of online technology in the food space. That’s what drew Chefs Plate co-founder Jamie Shea to fill that niche. Shea said less than two per cent of the Canadian grocery business is done online, compared to four to five per cent in the United States, and 10 per cent in Europe and Asia.
“That migration from the traditional brick-and-mortar to moving online was something we hadn’t seen in the Canadian food space,” he said. “It was shocking to me that Canadians had been shopping for food in the same way as our grandparents for the last 50 years. We saw the marketplace as an opportunity to introduce some technology and digital innovation that allows consumers to connect and have fresh food delivered directly to their doors.”
Both HelloFresh and Chefs Plate play up the local food purchases in those deliveries. Ian Brooks, the Canadian founder and CEO of HelloFresh, said the “vast majority of what we source in any market is local to that market.”
Edmonton HelloFresh consumers may even get greens grown at Sustainitech, a nearby vertical farming innovator.
Chefs Plate’s mandate is to source Canadian first. It has two major distribution hubs in Canada, with kits delivered in B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan coming from the West Coast. Shea mentioned a local supplier, The Little Potato Company, as an example of food innovation. The Edmonton-based producer works directly with Chefs Plate to grow different kinds of potatoes for the kits, products that typically aren’t found in grocery stores.
There is, however, a downside to the novelty of having delicious and unusual products dropped on your doorstep. St. Albert’s Bekki Hall, who recently used the HelloFresh for a week, found the price of the kits took too great a chunk out of her family of four’s $200-aweek grocery budget. (HelloFresh charges $130 a week for three meals serving four people each.)
Plus, Hall said the meals, which took up to 40 minutes to prepare, didn’t save much time, either. She finds her three-year-old and fiveyear-old sons need to eat quickly after she gets home from work.
“Because my kids are so young, we just feel like it’s so important to get dinner on the table right away. They ’re hungry and we don’t want them to snack,” said Hall, a communications specialist at NAIT.
Packaging waste is an issue among customers of meal kit services. When I ordered HelloFresh’s two-person, three-meal weekly option (normally $80, but free through a promotional deal), it arrived in a large box lined with foil-backed insulated panels, and three paper bags containing plastic-encased ingredients. Although the boxes are made from recycled cardboard and can be recycled again, remember: The NPD group estimates 600,000 meal kits are being delivered to households across Canada each month. That’s a lot of boxes that must be disposed of, one way or another.
Carter said long term, the packaging issue may become a problem for the delivery services. There has been a backlash against singleserve coffee machines using nonrecyclable pods, once the darling of convenience culture.
“Based on our research, if (meal kit companies) don’t address the recycling issues, they’ll have a much harder time getting consumers to buy into it,” Carter said.
The people who run HelloFresh and Chefs Plate are more than aware of this, and have developed smooth responses to packaging questions.
Ian Brooks of HelloFresh Canada pivots directly to the reduction of food waste when queried about the extravagant number of boxes, bags and plastic in meal kits.
“Packing matters, but so does food waste,” he said.
Brooks said 30 to 50 per cent of food grown in North America never makes it to the table, and much of that waste is in the home. Because meal kits are precisely portioned, and the food comes directly from producers — skipping the middleman and reducing travel time from farm to fork — less food is wasted in transit, or left to rot in the fridge.
HelloFresh, which delivered 39.5 million meals in 10 countries worldwide between October and December 2017, is the only company in Canada that operates an ice-pack return system, making it possible for consumers to ship plastic ice packs back for free to HelloFresh. The program has proven so popular that HelloFresh has had to suspend the program in Western Canada while it figures out logistics.
“The demand is such that we have to make sure it’s sustainable,” Brooks said. Brooks said reusing other parts of the packaging, such as the insulated liners, could have implications for food safety, and so they don’t do it. He said the boxes are made from recycled cardboard, and are recyclable. More than 90 per cent of packaging is diverted from landfills in the United Kingdom, and numbers in Canada are similar, he said.
Chefs Plate’s Shea said packaging “isanareaoffocusforus.
“The meal kit category didn’t even exist four years ago and a lot of suppliers are catching up with the market and we’re seeing great innovation,” he said. “Our boxes are biodegradable and recyclable. The more we continue to grow the category, we’ll see more innovation to reduce packing.”
Packaging was one reason Edmonton native Hannah Vance stopped subscribing to Chefs Plate, although she used the service for more than a year. Vance, now living in Toronto, wrote to the company to ask if there was any way they could reduce the number of boxes, plastic bags and other containers. The answer was no.
Packaging wasn’t the only issue. Though Vance and her boyfriend loved the service and didn’t object to the $10-per-plate cost, they tired of that dinner routine. They missed barbecuing. Vance likes to experiment with cooking and was bored using a recipe. They quit the service in January.
Indeed, though neither HelloFresh nor Chefs Plate would reveal details on retention, American reports indicate hanging onto clients is a big challenge for meal kit operators. Some offer deep discounts to entice customers, who disappear when they have to pay the full price. A 2016 article from Mother Jones magazine said only half of customers of the American industry leader, Blue Apron, are still there after the first week of service, and only 10 per cent still subscribe within six months of starting. A 2017 story in Business Insider, an online news outlet, said Blue Apron is losing money on 70 per cent of its customers.
Meal kit services deserve credit for being able to change the behaviour of consumers, Carter said, which may lead to long-term success in this sector. But consumers are a fickle bunch, easily distracted by the next new idea.
“You have to give consumers a reason to increase their spending … what you are buying is your time,” he said. “Does the time/value equation make sense? That’s what consumers will be thinking about.”
There will never be a perfect solution to the witching hour, but families continue to evolve their approach. These days, Bekki and Doug Hall make meals on weekends and freeze them for later use. They have also reduced their expectations, because they find their children are content with simple dishes, such as chili served several different ways.
Bekki Hall said she turned to her mom for ideas, and she delivered something practical, healthy and inexpensive.
“My mom said try making scrambled eggs and toast, and if everyone likes that, go with it.”