Easy meals from Target — and vending machines

Bay Area residents who want easy meals have two relatively new and promising sources: vending machines and Target stores.

Chef ’d, a company backed by Campbell Soup Co. and Smithfield Foods, is putting its meals in hundreds of new-age machines across the Bay Area, including the offices of Tesla and Chevron, and on the campus of Stanford University. It’s betting that workers on their way out the door might be in the market for boxes of pre-portioned ingredients that allow them to skip the grocery store on the way home.

Though Chef ’d is a small player in the meal-kit market, it’s been driving growth through sales at grocery stores, an increasingly popular strategy in an industry mostly built on e-commerce subscriptions. About seven months after the company bolstered its retail push, Chef ’d meals are in almost 1,000 U.S. stores. Sales from brick-andmortar locations now generate more than half of revenue.

The partnership with Byte Foods, which operates more than 500 vending machines packed with ahi tuna poke bowls, kale salads and kombucha, gives Chef ’d another outlet to get its meals in front of customers.

“Most people are not looking to be forced into a subscription,” said Chef ’d CEO Kyle Ransford. “You’re seeing people shift to the model we have in place.”

The Chef ’d move into vending machines comes as the meal-kit industry grapples with the online subscription model. It’s expensive to acquire and keep customers that way, leading companies to increasingly look to sell their products in supermarkets. Retail sales of meal kits gained more than 26 percent last year to surpass $150 million, according to Nielsen.

Chef ’d meals are in about 100 vending machines, and the company has plans to expand soon to the more than 500 across the Bay Area that are served by Byte.

The meal kits, generally two portions, sell for about $15 to $20. A Byte Foods fridge at the offices of Bolt, a San Francisco venture capital firm, is currently offering “black truffle butter sirloin steaks,” a meal Chef ’d says can be prepared in 15 minutes.

On another front, Minnesota’s Local Crate is rolling out its locally sourced meal kits to more than 200 Target stores in Minnesota and California.

The expansion comes as many big retailers are trying to incorporate home-delivery meal subscription services that have proliferated in recent years into meal kits they can sell in stores. The in-store versions typically have all of the ingredients and step-bystep cooking instructions to make a single meal (with two servings) instead of multiple meals as is often the case with the delivery services.

Blue Apron, one of the best known and biggest players in this space, has begun testing kits in select Costco stores on the West Coast. Walmart is rolling out its own to thousands of stores. Kroger has been adding more to its lineup and grocer Albertsons bought meal-kit company Plated last year.

Local Crate rolled out last week to 54 Target stores in Minnesota and 142 in California. Local Crate is also expanding its home delivery program to California, where is now employs eight people in San Mateo.