Chef’d Brings Meal Kits Into Smart Fridges

As it continues expanding into retail, Chef’d has partnered with Byte Foods to bring its meal kits into one hundred of Byte’s unattended retail locations in California. Over the next six months, Chef’d plans to expand to all of Byte’s locations, Chef’d said in an announcement.

“At Chef’d, our goal is to provide a rotating assortment of high-quality meal kits to more consumers in more places,” Chef’d Chief Executive Officer Kyle Ransford said in the announcement. “By partnering with Byte Foods, we are able to bring our meal kits to a new channel, beyond our current direct-to-consumer and traditional retail distribution, and provide an innovative solution for grabbing dinner just before you leave work.”

Chef’d joins a lineup of products currently offered in Byte’s smart refrigerators from sandwiches to salads and drinks. The machines, which allow consumers to buy items through credit card purchases day and night, are placed in workplaces, hospitals and apartments. With the partnership, Chef’d gains a new sales channel — adding to its distribution strategy of shipping pre-portioned ingredients to consumers’ doors.

Taking its cue from the grocery and in-home prep experience, the company offers roughly 2,000 recipes with 150 partners currently in place to help develop those recipes. The firm’s kitchens test roughly 100 recipes each month.

“We generally have seven or eight things that we eat at home or make at home, and we have a few things we do [besides cooking],” Ransford has told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in terms of the company’s general consumer meal experience. “We get takeout, we go to restaurants, and usually we go back to the same restaurants and the same food again because we like it. [Chef’d is] making it cheaper to buy the exact same ingredients that you want, and making it more convenient by sending it to your house.”

According to Ransford, the average amount spent in person at the grocery for the ingredients needed to make a number of meals stands at $119, while the average expenditure for a Chef’d customer comes in at $82 – for the same building blocks.