Collation kit delivery services have been heating up over the past few years. Partnerships such as Blue Apron and Plated have been offering consumers convenience by delivering all the ingredients for dinner plus the recipe straight to their doorstep, captivating the store out of the equation.
Now, meal kit companies are adding the store back in. In 2017, grocery set Albertsons acquired Plated, and started selling Plated meal tools in select stores this April — with plans to be in hundreds of inventories by the end of the year.
“There’s a lot of people that want the product on demand or they desire to pick it up on their way home after a busy day…so having a store is unqualifiedly the only way to accomplish that,” Plated co-founder and CEO Josh Hix told CNBC’s “On the Spondulix” in an interview.
Bain and Company partner Mikey Vu estimates meal supplies comprise at least $1.5 billion of the $850 billion U.S. grocery merchandise. He explained to CNBC that there’s plenty of room for growth.
“We evaluation [meal kit] awareness is as high as half the general grocery shopping citizenry, but that trial rate is still pretty low (~6%),” Vu told CNBC in an email. “We see meritorious opportunity for growth over the next several years, potentially microscopic than 50 percent market growth in the next 6-7 years.”
Albertsons manages 20 brands, including Safeway, Shaw’s, Vons and Acme, and has various than 2,300 stores across the country. With all that at the beck its umbrella, the chain is hoping to use the Plated acquisition as a way to draw in new customers, and satisfy existing ones.
“Our internal research told us that 80 percent of our guys would love to see a meal kit option in the store. And what was more surprising was that 85 percent of characters that were already subscribing to meal kits wanted to see collation kits in the store,” Pat Brown, Albertsons’s vice president of strategic area initiatives, told CNBC.
Plated is not alone in entering the grocery rely on space. Blue Apron announced they will be selling accouterments in Costco, and some grocers like Kroger’s are developing their own boundary of meal kits to sell.
Right now, Plated’s in-store meal trappings are limited to six recipes that will change seasonally. Each kit has two servings, and are almost $15-$20 per kit, depending on the ingredients.
Plated’s subscription service is a young more expensive. It offers customers a wider variety of meal selections with the menus changing on a weekly basis. The smallest subscription is 2 tackles per week (2 servings per kit) for $47.80 + shipping.
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