From Pantry to Plate: The Rise of New Age Meal Services
What’s for dinner tonight? It’s a question heard in nearly every household each week. The stress of meeting work and lifestyle demands means it’s a question that often gets answered haphazardly. You take a peek in the pantry or fridge, throw together some easy, quick-to-fix ingredients, and hope for the best. Singles, too, find coming up with new meal ideas challenging.
There’s temptation to switch it up, try interesting recipes, and order out. Consumers want everything from convenience to indulgence wrapped into one. But affordability is also a top concern, given the sharp increase in food prices since 2020. These combined forces are driving the rise of new-age meal services, otherwise known as meal kits.
Kits come in varieties. There are the classic boxes filled with pre-portioned ingredients for weekly recipes. At the other end of the spectrum, there’s pre-packaged, pre-portioned, ready-to-heat meals. And in between there are the hybrid versions where you can purchase groceries to use across multiple, pre-planned weekly meals. From pantry to plate, new-age meal services are meeting the nutritional needs of an increasingly discerning market.
What’s Driving Popularity?
Whether you have a daily commute or work in a home office, your day is usually jam-packed. You don’t have much time to think about what you’re going to eat three times a day. You tend to reach for whatever’s the most convenient, including the snacks in the hall vending machine. At the same time, you’re keenly aware of the desire to eat healthy and save money.
Solutions like healthy food delivery meet these dynamic needs while reducing food waste. How many times do you find yourself throwing out food you haven’t used? Whether it’s because you’ve overbought or didn’t get to everything in time doesn’t matter. You’re wasting money as well as items you planned on enjoying.
Another factor behind the rising popularity of meal services is dietary preferences. People want their meals customized to choices such as plant-based lifestyles and restrictions related to food allergies. Meal kits and delivery services are hassle-free ways to ensure the food on your plate doesn’t contain ingredients you can’t eat.
Types of Services
New-age meal services aren’t one-size-fits-all. This would negate the point of serving the multi-layered reasons people use home meal delivery. What you might not realize is how the market is segmented or split.
The overall projected market size is expected to grow to $64.27 billion by 2030. Within this larger landscape are kits with pre-portioned ingredients involving some meal prep. This is the type you might be most familiar with. A box arrives with your weekly ingredients and recipes. You follow the instructions, which take about 30 minutes.
You’re responsible for having some extras on hand, such as cooking oils and salt. However, some people don’t want to mess with meal prep at all. They prefer their food ready to go. This is where heat-and-serve meal services step in. You get a box of pre-cooked meals, similar to frozen TV dinners. You heat them, but the difference is that the ingredients are usually of higher quality than supermarket frozen entrees.
Hybrid meal services deliver a combination of groceries you can use to prepare your own meals alongside ready-to-serve items. For instance, you might get hummus and veggies alongside ready-to-drink smoothies. Within these larger categories are services focusing on specific dietary needs, such as 100% plant-based foods. Other services cover a wider range of customizations from pescatarian to dairy-free.
Where Are Meal Services Headed?
If you’ve subscribed to a meal service in the past, you may have noticed the introduction of a few enhancements. Add-ons are one of them. Maybe one week you want to include breakfast to shake up your routine. On another delivery, you include a dessert or an extra meal that looks too good to pass up.
Add-ons are rising in popularity because of the ability to customize as you go. It’s like going to the grocery store, buying your regular staples, and trying something different. Personalization is another rising trend in meal kit delivery. More services are expanding into a higher degree of customization. Examples include lower-calorie, high-protein, and low-sugar options.
Besides supporting specific health goals, meal kit distribution is expanding into grocery stores. You may have noticed some popular meal kit brand names in the frozen food aisle lately. This gives a wider market the chance to try out the kit’s more popular recipes before committing to a subscription.
Some supermarket chains are also introducing a non-subscription-based form of meal kits. You can find them as meal planning services in the chains’ mobile apps. Grab-and-go meals and groceries available for purchase in the store are suggested as part of the app’s generated recipes. Some apps break the meals down by popularity, new arrivals, and budget-friendly dinners. You’ll also find suggestions geared towards simple creations and meal types like stir-fries and BBQs.
Dining at Home
There’s a certain appeal to eating out. You don’t have to cook, and you get to treat your taste buds to a meal you haven’t tried before. But regularly ordering takeout from restaurants can do damage to your budget and waistline. Fast food, while sometimes cheaper than restaurant takeout, isn’t as affordable as it used to be.
The need for convenient, cost-conscious, and healthy meals is driving the growing popularity of meal kit services. People are more interested in trying new recipes catered to their dietary preferences at home. There’s something for everybody, whether they’re interested in doing a bit of meal prep or none at all. With high-quality, personalized ingredients, new-age meal services are becoming the clear choice for healthy eating in a time-strapped world.
