So I watched a couple of videos about Meal Kit services
Why major meal kit companies lose 90% of customers in a year
- Americans only cook an average of 4.5 meals per week at home.
- Over the course of a decade, America went from 13 to 382 meal kit companies.
- Most lost 90 percent of new subscribers by the end of their first year and many struggle to be profitable.
- Most meal kits are aiming for a price point of $8 to $15 per meal without discounts, but many of them can't retain customers once the initial steep discount (down to around $4 per meal) runs out.
Methodology seems to have a more solid business model and was profitable from year two. Their target audience is men who make well above $100,000 annually who essentially live on takeout food.
The takeout meals they typically purchase average $35 per meal and Methodology meals cost about $17 to $30 per meal. So they aren't trying to be "the cheap option" but are still cheaper than what their target audience typically spends.
Methodology also only offers an initial 10 percent discount. People who sign up are already willing to spend about as much as the "typical" price they will have later, so their retention rates are generally better.
Services that offer an initial price of $4 per meal or less and then expect you to pay more like $12 per meal later may be losing customers because they are feeding people who simply can't afford those prices at all. It's potentially like an alternative to applying for food stamps to get people through a short-term cash crunch rather than a matter of "convenience" or "variety."
I felt the video really didn't live up to the title. I felt it didn't actually tell me WHY meal kit companies lose up to 90 percent of new subscribers within a year, so I began wondering how else I might get insights into why consumers do what they do and that led to me watching THIS video:
- He ordered a couple of meal kit meals and then bought enough ingredients to recreate some meal kit meals from scratch.
- He spent similar amounts of money but cooking from scratch yielded about 6 meals worth of food instead of four, so fifty percent more. This is a big deal if you live on a tight budget.
I'm not likely to ever subscribe to a meal kit service anyway because I have a lot of dietary restrictions. Their idea that we will entice people with "variety" for me is a bug, not a feature.
I need to know what is in my food and I go to the same eateries over and over and get the same staples over and over and frankly I think my tendency to eat the same stuff a LOT is probably much more the norm than people wanting "variety."
I need more variety of vegetables and such than my sons. My sons are even worse than I am about eating a limited diet and I genuinely think that's incredibly normal.
The bulk of our sales are in only three products: Hamburgers, french fries and soft drinks. 87 percnet.Similarly, the business model for Little Caesar's is that during lunch hour you can walk in, order either a pepperoni pizza or a cheese pizza plus bread sticks, pay and walk out because they have those frequently purchased items premade in a warming oven for part of the day.
-- Scene from The Founder
There are more than 50,000 edible plants in the world, but just 15 of them provide 90 percent of the world's food energy intake. Rice, corn (maize) and wheat make up two-thirds of this.So while for me the real heart-stopper was watching the wasteful individual packaging get opened, I also found the cooking stressful to watch.
I was a homemaker who cooked for a family of four very regularly -- more than just 4.5 meals per week -- for call it fifteen years or more and I was spazzing at how complicated this looked to me, the amount of kitchen equipment involved and what felt like just a LOT of individual moving parts that, sorry, I probably cannot cope with following in a recipe the first time you mail it to me with instructions.
I grew up with the following typical pattern of meals:
- A carb, such as mashed potatoes or noodles.
- A fresh meat dish with some kind of sauce or gravy, such as Roulade or spaghetti sauce.
- Fresh bread or at least one other side, such as garlic salt and butter on bread toasted in the oven to pair with spaghetti and noodles.
Can you make spaghetti sauce by buying fresh tomatoes and assorted other veggies and making it completely from scratch? Absolutely.
You can also buy any number of different flavors of sauce, pour it over browned beef and let it simmer while you make noodles and garlic toast. Grab the parmesan or romano cheese from the fridge to top it off after setting up a plate for everyone and this was always fancy enough for my family.
I served this once when my mother-in-law was visiting. I don't recall the details but somehow this led to my husband telling me I was a better cook than his mother and he was generally pretty stingy with the compliments.
I am always baffled by commercials that show people doing these meal kits and pouring some kind of sauce of some sort over the meat that was prepared separately. In the family I grew up in, making the meat dish is how the gravy or sauce got made.
I never thought that was anything special. Italian food is one of the most popular cuisines on the planet and they basically imported the concept of noodles from China and then invented a zillion sauces with which to top a zillion shapes of noodles.
If you make something like Roulade, you do the prep work for that dish, stick it in a pot two hours or more before you expect to eat and then go do other things. You come back later and peel potatoes to make your mashed potatoes.
If you are making something quick like breakfast steaks to go with your mashed potatoes, you peel potatoes and start them boiling, then start cooking your steaks. About the time the potatoes are done, you should have enough steaks to feed your family.
My sons are not big veggie eaters and because we get food poisoning easily, I rarely eat leftovers. We try hard to prepare only as much as will be eaten at that meal.
Such constraints have made it challenging for ME to get the variety I need while keeping things simple enough, cheap enough, fresh enough, etc.
I have done things like bought black bean and corn salsa or made a supply of my own corn salsa and used it to top things like mashed potatoes as a simple way to add more vegetables and variety to my meal without a lot of hassle.
We also developed a beef stew recipe for the express purpose of adding veggies to my meal while my sons ate a giant of pile of steak and bread or potato chips or something like that.
Homemade pizza has long been an exercise in customizing the pizza so each family member got the toppings they wanted. This can be done either by making individual pizzas on flat bread or just sectioning off parts of a single pizza filling a pan.
Some were cheese only, some got pepperoni added and for me I would pre-chop little baggies of onions and peppers on Sunday, plus have diced pepperoni and fresh pre-cut pineapple on hand. So I got my variety of veggies without a lot of hassle even when making pizza at home.
One year, I was bedridden for about 3.5 months from early January to mid April. That Thanksgiving dinner was a disaster. I couldn't get the timing right to have everything ready at the same time, having done so little cooking all year and also still very sick and impaired.
When my son took over the cooking, he told me upfront he would NEVER do the meat, two veggies, gravy, potatoes and fresh bread meals I used to make. He's a better cook than I am and over time he got more willing to do things that were a little more complicated than what he initially did the first few months, but we still generally eat both simpler meals and higher quality meals than we used to do.
Even the guy in the second video above who reviewed Hello Fresh meal kits sort of casually mentioned he was bad at following their written instructions and he apparently runs a site called Pro Home Cooks. Still, he acted like this was a personal failing and didn't conclude that maybe if most Americans only cook 4.5 meals per week whereas this is apparently his profession in some sense, maybe the meal kits are just generally too complicated for MOST people.
I'm not surprised Americans cook so little. I have remarked for years on what a madhouse the grocery stores are the day before things close for Thanksgiving or Christmas and had people tell me "Well, yeah, Americans don't really cook anymore. They need to buy EVERYTHING because they have nothing at home. They eat takeout."
I'm not readily finding any data blurbs that make me happy about the average cost of, say, a fast food meal. For starters, costs vary by state for such things.
But I also kind of wonder if home cooking is really as much cheaper as articles like to suggest. Those articles compare the cost of the FOOD and I have never once seen an article that admitted "This assumes you already have access to a full kitchen and own a LOT of cooking equipment."
People don't necessarily have convenient access to a full kitchen (such as people living in dorms or renting just a room somewhere) and even if they have one at home, they likely can't go home to cook lunch from scratch and then go back to work. Some people travel a lot for their job and live out of their vehicle or out of hotel rooms.
It CAN be cheaper, IF you stick to inexpensive staples and limited equipment for the most part. Meal kits seem to do neither of those things.
I think the real issue with meal kits is they try to solve the problem mostly the wrong way.
I think the real problem is we have a lot more households with one to three members, so most people no longer have a full-time wife and mom preparing big meals for a big family.
Even in families with kids, mom and dad freqently both work (at paid jobs -- rest assured, "women's work" is WORK) or it's a single-parent household, no one is dedicating themselves to "the women's work" and this style of meal preparation attempts to capture something that worked for Americans when "mom" was cooking for a big family.
It's long been known that cooking from scratch for just one person or two people takes about as much time as cooking for a family so it's extremely inefficient. Time-stressed Americans need ways to eat well that take less time, less skill and are generally simpler.
The existence of so many meal kit companies, plus meal delivery services and similar, is strong evidence that Americans have a need of solutions. The fact that so many such services aren't really doing well financially and often cannot retain subscribers suggests this is not really the right answer for most people.
Footnote
On the off chance any meal kit company execs ever read this:- If you need to discount your product 75 percent to get new sign ups AND 90 percent leave within a year, you probably need to tweak something ELSE, not PRICE.
- I heard "meal KIT companies" and imagined some more hand-holdy version of some of the things I talk about here, like PRECUT veggies, premeasured everything, just fry up your meat, toss in your veggies and add our sauce. I would NEVER buy a "meal KIT" that gives me an individually packaged single zuchini and expects ME to UNWRAP and chop it.
- Most people are not doing a lot of cooking, they aren't experienced cooks, they only do about 4.5 homecooked meals per week. You are creating fancy meals they would buy in a restaurant and missing the fact that they GO buy this in a restaurant precisely because someone ELSE will cook it for them. They don't have these skills.