In 2023, the Meal Kit Category Lines Blurred

Increasingly throughout this past year, meal kits have begun to be not so much their own discrete category as an integrated piece of a larger food eCommerce system.

Take, for instance, Blue Apron. In late September, omnichannel food hall company Wonder, founded and led by Jet.com founder Marc Lore, announced the acquisition of the meal kit subscription company for $103 million. In an accompanying statement, Lore noted that the move came as part of Wonder’s efforts to create “the mealtime super app,” with meal kits serving as just one piece of this puzzle.

Additionally, Blue Apron has also been expanding beyond the traditional meal kit occasion. Earlier this month, the direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription service announced the expansion of its ready-to-eat category with the launch of Prepared & Ready meals — single-serving, non-frozen prepared meals that recipients reheat in the microwave.

Blue Apron is not the only meal kit company looking to gain share by adding more convenient options. Leading meal kit company HelloFresh predicted early in the year that its ready-to-eat business would be its “biggest source of order growth in 2023,” per Chief Financial Officer Christian Gartner, and the company has continued to tout the category’s rapid growth on subsequent earnings calls.

Plus, HelloFresh has also been expanding its vision beyond human meals entirely, announcing in August the launch of its new dog food subscription, The Pets Table, broadening the company’s scope and redefining its goal as a push to be the largest “fully integrated food solutions group” in the world.

Meanwhile, Kroger, the United States’ leading pure-play grocer, has been expanding its D2C meals subscription business beyond Home Chef’s meal kits, launching in October its new heat-and-eat meal delivery service, Tempo, selling subscriptions for single-serve, microwaveable meals.

For now, the D2C meal delivery space is relatively small. PYMNTS Intelligence’s study “Connected Dining: Ready-to-Eat Meals Are Eating Restaurants’ Lunch,” which drew from a survey of more than 2,300 U.S. consumers, revealed that 1 in 10 people order ready-to-eat meals to be delivered to their homes every month.

In an interview with PYMNTS, Scott Payne, chief product officer at Home Chef and Tempo, spoke of these low-effort meal options’ potential to gain share from more traditional categories.

“There are certainly going to be some people where this is replacing grocery,” Payne said. “There are some people who haven’t traditionally cooked in the past, so that might be replacing takeout, and there might even be traditional meal kits subscribers who are looking for something more convenient.”

Meal kits at least are already gaining share from brick-and-mortar grocers. The report “The Replenish Economy: A Household Supply Deep Dive,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and sticky.io collaboration drawing from a survey of more than 2,000 U.S. consumers in September, found that 47% of HelloFresh subscribers have reduced their visits to brick-and-mortar stores, significantly higher than the 42% that said the same across retail subscriptions included in the survey.

From “mealtime super apps” to “fully integrated food solutions,” meal kits are increasingly becoming not their own, siloed category but a piece in businesses’ broader efforts to capture more of consumers’ food occasions.