Why meal kits are the future of food,

How meal delivery kits represent ‘an exciting prospect for the future of food’

‘What’s for dinner?”

The question is asked in households across the continent and around the world. More often than not, it comes from the younger member of a family. “What’s for dinner?” they interrogate, as if parents and guardians are simply vessels to conjure a preordained meal composed of ingredients that refrigerators grow themselves.

It doesn’t take l ong f or adulthood to strip us of such delusions.

As it turns out, preparing dinner can be an onerous task. After fielding rush hour grocery store lines of lifeless shoppers who, like you, just want to get dinner on the table, one must face the grating routine of vegetable chopping, raw meat fondling and dish scrubbing just to concoct yet another half- hearted stir-fry. It’s easy to understand the appeal of forcing the entire chaotic equation onto someone else. And when there is no one to resign the job to, paying a service to assume the role becomes an increasingly attractive option.

Enter, the meal delivery kit: a service that takes the entire mess of dinner and squishes it down into a single cardboard box. There is an anecdote that marketers love to share about Betty Crocker’s first instant cake mix. Initially, the company produced a mix that included powdered eggs, so that all customers had to do was add water. When sales failed to meet expectations, General Mills, who owns Betty Crocker, looked to business psychologists Dr. Burleigh Gardner and Dr. Ernet Dichter for advice based on their market research. The pair’s suggestion, according to Finding Betty Crocker by Susan Marks, was to allow women to add fresh eggs into the batter, “giving them a sense of creative contribution.”

According to legend, the company followed the advice of the marketing duo and sales went through the roof. While there is some dispute over the details of this tale, the lesson remains that people are more likely to buy into an experience than they are to purchase a product designed solely for efficiency.

Inside a meal delivery kit, beyond the ingredients and instructions, awaits an experience. The to- be- assembled meals require just enough effort to satisfy the feeling of creative contribution that comes from cooking. Armed with corner- cutting instructions, subscribers are promised an image of the elusive nuclear family blissfully communing around the table to enjoy a home- cooked meal. With the ability to prepare dinner in minutes instead of hours, anyone can provide their families with the most universal symbol of goodness: nightly wholesome homemade meals.

Instead of seeing the unadulterated joy that these services can provide, many have accused their paintby- numbers instructions of being more closely aligned with cheating than cooking. Others have criticized the services for generating enormous amounts of waste due to their tendency to pack everything in plastic, right down to single cloves of peeled garlic that arrive in custom dime bags.

It’s true that Blue Apron, the most prominent of the meal kit programs, delivers recipes that are the opposite of a chef-approved ode to the artistic nature of cuisine. Dishes like chicken with farro and green bean salad, and whole grain pasta with summer vegetables are injected with just enough novelty in the form of lesserknown farro and promising “summer vegetables” to land on the exciting side of boring.

In their current form, meal delivery kits can seem both patronizing and wasteful. After unearthing individual sprigs of parsley from their respective caskets of saran wrap, subscribers are supplied with cooking instructions written on thick, glossy cue cards that look like they have been stolen from a fourth- grade classroom. In most delivery

kits, each recipe gets its own cue card, forcing a stack of used cards to quickly pile up in the recycling bin. The instructions may be helpful for those who don’t know how to grill a chicken breast, but given an eco- friendly alternative, any self- respecting adult would likely choose simple black and white or downloadable instructions instead.

In its quest to package and repackage every inch of food in plastic, Blue Apron has also been known to pre- cut raw chicken breasts and reassemble individual pieces into vacuum- sealed bags in the shape of real chicken breasts, allowing for easier meal prep. The pre-cut slabs of meat are a great bonus for anyone deterred by the prospect of salmonella, but they are also the antithesis of cooking from scratch.

Nevertheless, Blue Apron’s slogan boasts: “Food is better when you start from scratch.” Montreal- based Cook It, a smaller competitor that delivers to households in Quebec, evokes a sense of déja vu with the exact same slogan. The advertising copy of both companies, even if it is wellintentioned, embellishes that which doesn’t need to be exaggerated. The most appealing aspect of a meal kit delivery service is that it offers a customer the ability to half-cook and write it off as their own. The companies are inadvertently suggesting that food is better when you abandon delivery services and cook meals made from ingredients you buy and prepare yourself.

If the wasteful packaging and misleading slogans don’t deter budding home cooks, the subscription process likely will. Most delivery services require potential customers to subscribe to their program of three meals a week before they can try a meal. Although the cancellation process for Blue Apron is surprisingly painless, a lack of transparency makes the prospect of getting out reminiscent of escaping a gym membership.

Electing a stranger to ensure your bag of apples is unbruised, or milk is far from its expiration date, also requires the exchange of control for convenience. While we are increasingly comfortable buying everything from shoes to vacations online, a barrier between online grocery shopping remains. Data from a 2017 Nielsen survey indicated 54 per cent of North Americans will not consider buying groceries online and prefer to buy them from a physical store. Yet, as digital natives – Millennials and Generation Z – mature, Nielsen predicts many of these hesitations will dissipate.

Despite a current hesitation to trust strangers with our grocery carts, similar qualms do not extend to prepared foods or eating out. Restaurants Canada has reported that our country’s restaurant industry generates $80 billion in annual sales, proving that we value the act of cooking.

However, research by NPD Group suggests we don’t like to spend a whole lot of time doing it. According to their study, 75 per cent of Canadians prefer to make a meal in 15 minutes. Most meal kit dishes take an average of 30 minutes, but unlike allegedly speedy recipes such as Jamie Oliver’s 15 Minute Meals (which can take an hour of prep work to organize), kit recipes almost never surprise home cooks with 45 minutes of onion and carrotchopping before dinner.

Not surprisingly, preparing food at home has been proven to be healthier than dining out. Researchers from the University of Washington School of Public Health found that home- cooked dinners meet more of the federal guidelines for a healthy diet than restaurant meals. A paper published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine confirmed the study’s findings. After surveying over 400 adults, researchers noted that those who cooked at home had a better diet and spent fewer dollars achieving it.

The average meal kit service has a fixed cost of $8.99 to $13.99 per dish, placing these meals on the higher end of home-cooking. Yet when compared to delivery or takeout, the price is still lower than what most restaurants offer. For those who can overcome the all- or- nothing mentality where the space between inexpensive home- cooking and costly dining out is a nonexistent wasteland, kits provide a rare meeting ground where the ability to eat wholesome food is married to many of the conveniences of takeout without the steep price.

Most of the complaints against meal kits assume that the alternative involves lovingly crafting suppers made from fresh, farmer’s market produce that has never seen an ounce of plastic in its life. This, of course, would render meal delivery kits a pitiful substitute. But those drawn to services like Blue Apron are unlikely to have the time or passion to assemble nightly artisanal feasts out of a seasonal selection of heirloom vegetables. When the choice is between takeout and home- cooking, even if that cooking is coming out of a box, it’s hard to not see meal kits as the better option.

While offering the ability to cook for an enjoyable but not excessive amount of time, predetermined menus also force home cooks to experiment with ingredients they may not pick out themselves. It’s not difficult to imagine the arrival of a pack of Ahi tuna steaks turning a customer onto the joys of pan-seared seafood on a night that would have otherwise involved a lackluster plate of takeout.

Cooking with pre-measured ingredients is also a foolproof way of ensuring portion control, a healthy benefit on which everyone from the strictest vegans to the most vehement carnivores will agree. This simple portion control solution also helps with food waste management, as every ingredient included in the dinner packs has a purpose.

Beyond the time-saving and health-enhancing advantages of cooking out of a box delivered to you, entering the kitchen is also an important political act. Cooking at home discourages the development of an industrialized food system that loves nothing more than to inject our meals with processed sugars and fats, making it an important protest in the fight against commercialized fast food. Advertisements for new, ultra- convenient takeout and delivery services like Ritual, JustEAT and UberEats bombard us daily, but no one is forcing our hand into the kitchen, which is why we have to remember to do it ourselves.

Falling for the temptation of convenient takeout feels unavoidable when you’re starving and pressed for time. Yet meal kits lift many of the barriers that make the prospect of a home-cooked meal seem nauseatingly romantic to even the most passionate of gourmands.

Meal kits are not a better way to cook, but they do offer an alternative that has the power to encourage more people to actually prepare their own food. While the firm and detailed instructions offer little room for culinary experimentation, they make cooking accessible and simultaneously eliminate food waste and lengthy prep times. Meal kits prove that there can be a peaceful middle ground between greasy and expensive takeout and elbowing shoppers at the grocery store just to spend hours in the kitchen.

This newfound culinary correspondence is not cheating; it is an exciting prospect for the future of food. Finally, someone else has offered an answer to the question, “What’s for dinner?” while letting us take all the credit. We did, after all, cook the meal ourselves.