Restaurants Translate Menus Into Meal Kit Subscriptions as Consumers Opt for At-Home Dining

As consumers eat an increasing number of their meals at home, restaurants ranging from fine dining establishments to large quick-service chains are finding new ways to extend their offerings beyond the dine-in occasion.

At its most basic, this takes the form of offering off-premise digital ordering channels and investing in the development of menu items that travel well. However, some restaurants are going beyond the restaurant meal, extending into new categories to get a foothold in consumers’ home lives.

Recently, fine dining establishment Eleven Madison Park, widely considered one of the top restaurants in the world, which in spring of 2021 reopened with an exclusively plant-based menu to mixed responses, announced a meal kit delivery service.

The subscription offering, Eleven Madison Home, offers a weekly box with plant-based meal and snack items for $150 per person (or $285 for two). In contrast, a meal in the restaurant’s dining room costs $335 per person.

The offering comes as consumers grow increasingly accustomed to consuming restaurant-quality meals at home. In fact, research from PYMNTS’ 2021 How We Eat Playbook, which was created in collaboration with Carat from Fiserv, drawing from a survey of a census-balanced panel of 5,200 U.S. adults, found that consumers now are 31% more likely to buy meals for delivery or pickup than they are to dine on-site. Moreover, 43% of all consumers are ordering home delivery for their restaurant meals or groceries more often now than they did before March 2020.

Read more: Restaurants and Grocers See Path to Picking up 200M New Customers

While Eleven Madison Park may be using the meal kit subscription model to create a more widely available (and therefore more widely saleable) version of its highly exclusive restaurant offerings, other brands that are already accessible are using the meal kit subscription model to offer a new use case and to deepen their relationships with their customers.

For instance, last month, smoothie chain Smoothie King, which has more than 1,300 locations worldwide, announced the launch of its Nourish Daily subscription program, allowing consumers in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, area to order custom ingredient boxes for them to blend their smoothies at home.

Related news: Smoothie King Launches Subscription as Restaurants Leverage Memberships to Drive Loyalty

“There isn’t a company that we talk to today that isn’t thinking about in some way offering a recurring model for products that traditionally had not been purchased that way,” Trace Galloway, chief strategy officer at Vindicia, told PYMNTS in an interview. “A good loyalty or membership or club concept will build brand affinity and loyalty in a way that, long term, will serve those businesses very well.”

See more: Subscription Merchants Challenged to Create ‘Ideal Experience’ to Reduce Customer Churn

Indeed, PYMNTS research finds that restaurant subscribers are more brand loyal than non-subscribers, according to data from PYMNTS’ February/March study “Digital Divide: Restaurant Subscribers and Loyalty Programs,” created in collaboration with Paytronix. The report noted that eight in 10 subscribers are “very” or “extremely” loyal to their favorite restaurants, while only about half of those who are indifferent to restaurant subscriptions said the same.

Read more: Four in 10 Consumers Open to Restaurant Subscription Services