The food& drink issue
Fancy a Kiwi Christmas dinner delivered in a box? As the convenience meals market grows to more than $120m in annual revenues, business and supermarkets are vying for a slice of the pye. By Catherine Harris.
Meals subscription business Woop is getting ready to deliver an entire Kiwi Christmas dinner in a box this festive season.
The one-year-old firm says the pre-prepared feast will feed a 12-strong gathering for around $360, leaving the table groaning with ham, turkey and all the trimmings topped off with a traditional fruit pavlova.
Buyers will be able to shun the stress of crowded supermarkets and have all their cooking timings worked out, Woop owner Thomas Dietz said.
‘‘Christmas lunch will be sorted in half the time,’’ said Dietz.
‘‘Plenty of food for everyone in the extended family, and no chance that you’ll have to make a lastminute panic dash to the supermarket for forgotten ingredients. It’s a Kiwi Christmas without the stress.’’
Auckland-based Woop – which stands for World On Our Plate – is one of the newcomers to the pre-prepared food and grocery delivery sector which is thought to be worth around $100m.
According to Neilson’s March Consumer Media Index survey, 113,000 shoppers were having gourmet meals, recipes and ingredients delivered to their homes.
Venture capital investment into the sector generally is running at around $500m per quarter, and Woop itself is about to launch a round of capital raising for another $600k.
Dietz said: ‘‘We need the capital to grow and perhaps move into other areas of New Zealand.’’
Woop’s business is based on home delivery, but since the success of My Food Bag, supermarkets and restaurants have been trying out similar ideas to carve a slice of the home delivery pie for themselves.
Meals subscription services are growing far faster than the fresh, ‘‘ready-to-eat’’ meals market which is worth around $16m by comparison.
But New Zealand is at ‘‘a tipping point’’ when it comes to ready-made meals, a supermarket expert believes.
‘‘As New Zealanders, we’ve got a very strong culture of scratch cooking,’’ Emily Blumenthal, Foodstuff’s head of insights, says.
‘‘I think that’s why we haven’t seen as much innovation in that frozen and pre-packaged meals, ready to throw in the microwave segment.’’
However, that’s changing, she says, as time-poor workers search for solutions that don’t involve putting takeaways on the table.
‘‘We’re juggling both parents working or busy professionals and families and traffic challenges, and at Foodstuffs we’re at the point now where certainly we’re getting a lot of feedback around ‘Can you please just help us with dinner . . . particularly during the week’?’’
Foodstuffs’ response is the ‘‘Love Food Box,’’ a box of fresh and measured ingredients for a meal which still requires cooking, in a style not dissimilar to My Food Bag.
It’s being trialled in certain South Island New Worlds, and so far,
Blumenthal says the feedback has been great.
Individual supermarkets within the co-op are also taking the initiative, beefing up their delis and offering grab-and-go meals like roast pork and hot curries.
‘‘But really good quality, much more like a home-cooked meal,’’ she says.
Expect also in future a better class of salads, more packaged meats, stuffed chicken breasts and other foods ready to throw in the oven.
‘‘That’s where we’re seeing a lot of the growth, where we’ve kind of taken the prep work out and made it much easier to throw that meal in the oven and have it ready in 25 minutes.’’
There is another reason why prepackaged meals have taken so long to take off here: the sheer scale of production.
‘‘The thing about convenience foods such as seen in Britain is that they require scale, both in terms of population and the huge factories that make them. Whole factories making sandwiches,’’ Chris Wilkinson of retail consultancy First Retail Group, says.
William Scarlett, managing director of Woodward Group, which makes ready-to-eat meals under the Wishbone, Daisy and Kopi labels, agrees.
Even though he employs 165 people, and runs 20 stores, the company is still ‘‘a cottage industry’’ by world standards.
‘‘If we were in the US we’d probably be only making a couple of sandwiches for 300 million people,’’ he says.
But big machinery isn’t economic here.
‘‘You’ve got to make them by hand still because you’ve only got a small population buying them.’’
Woodward was hit hard by the global financial crisis, as people returned to making their own lunches.
But sales are steadily recovering now.
‘‘It’s definitely picking up, and as people get more time-scarce they are reaching out for such products,’’ Scarlett says.
Blumenthal believes that ultimately, like their British counterparts, New Zealand supermarkets will dedicate a lot more space to this kind of food.
‘‘The consumer trends that are coming through are really strongly centred around meal solutions, and I think, in our market, it’s time for a shift in focus to meet consumer need.’’
Foodstuff’s rival, Countdown, says the ‘‘fast-growing’’ ready-toeat market is a space it is also moving into.
‘‘Most of our stores provide meals to go,’’ says Countdown spokesman James Walker.
‘‘We have eight stores to date with dedicated ‘ready food’ sections.’’
In a nation obsessed with MasterChef, the irony of New Zealanders wanting to buy their dinners doesn’t escape Blumenthal.
She puts it down to the ‘‘weekend cook thing’’.
‘‘When people have got the time, they absolutely love sitting down and making a beautiful meal.
‘‘It’s just during the week, people are just so time poor, and they still want to eat really well but it needs to be super-fast. So I think that’s the tension.’’