Those meal kit ads look good don’t they?

There seems to be an increase of companies offering  boxes of all the ingredients for chosen meals delivered to your home. Well at least that’s what it appears, with all the ads on TV.

The idea is that you go to a website or app and choose a selection of meals you would like and enter the number of serves you need and after you pay the fee, a box with all the exact ingredients and amounts appear on your doorstep All you need to do then is follow the provided recipes and serve “home cooked” and quick delicious meals.

The ads looks good on the TV and provide lots of good reasons why people should take up this food preparation option.

It saves all the hassle of having to go to the supermarket and makes the whole preparing  of meals quicker and much more convenient.

The problem is that although  it does make the whole meal preparation more convenient, it may well be more expensive than the traditional method involving the shopping step.

So if there are more companies getting into this market, it would be logical to assume that the market is increasing , right?

In a recent pilot study by The NPD Group, it seems that 75 percent of Australians are eating a home cooked meal on any given day and that in  four week period 90 percent of us are making and eating a meal made from store bought ingredients.

So where does this leave the meal kit / plan companies?

Ciara Clancy, Executive Director, Foodservice at The NPD Group said; “Today, convenience, health and the search for quality, local ingredients are all entwined, and many options have launched in the market to suit the time-strapped consumer. However, whilst our data reveals that millennials are driving the meal kit and meal plan trend, their impact is still low when compared to consumers choosing to prepare meals from start to finish using fresh ingredients purchased in store.”

It would seem that it is one market segment, the Milennials, which is driving this increase in meal kit / plan companies but for whatever reason the market is not yet popular generally. As soon as one of the meal kit / plan companies can work out what those reasons are and can address them, this is obviously a market which will see a rapid growth in sales and usage.

This is a market well worth keeping an eye on.