Meal kits are boxes of premeasured ingredients for completing full recipes that get sent to your home along with recipes and tips. From there, you make some of the easiest (and often most delicious) dinners without having to hit the grocery store. If you picking an easy recipe meal kit, Hello Fresh is a brainer but if you want more options then check out the top 10 meal kits available in the US.
Top 10 Meal Kits available in the US:
1. Fresh N' Lean
2. Freshly
3. Trifecta
4. EveryPlate
5. Home Chief
6. Sun Basket (For Environmental Conscious)
7. Blue Apron
8. Factor 75
9. Green Chef
10. Amazon Meal Kit
Price Comparison
Subscriptions for meal kits from companies such as Blue Apron, Green Chef, and Sunbasket aren't new, but most of them are on the pricey side, with recipes costing as much as $12 or $13 per serving. EveryPlate is the cheapest meal kit service, with recipes starting at $5 a serving -- sometimes less if you snag a sign-up offer. Dinnerly and EveryPlate, both of which clock in at $5 a serving, are the most budget-friendly outfits.
What Is A Meal Kit?
As the name suggests, meal kit is a subscription-based food service that provides pre-portioned and even partially ready food ingredients to its customers for cooking homemade food items.
A person can now get all the ingredients and items required for cooking without going to the supermarket. The subscription process is also very simple, customers need to sign up and pay a specific amount for ordering the meal per week. Subscription is very flexible and a customer can easily cancel it without any cancellation fees.
Reasons Behind the Popularity
Healthy: Meal-kit foods, first of all, l come with less sodium and fats compared to normal fast foods. Food services like HelloFresh use fresh ingredients and all those can be customized according to the needs of the customer.
Perfect Customized Size For Food: As the title suggests meal kit services come with the perfect size of food as demanded by the customers.
The food is so perfectly packed that the customer will not have to worry, as the food will not be wasted. As a result, customers need to spend less and also get to eat healthy foods.
Good Service: Meal-kit services provide good servings to its customers for making their stomachs full and also enough energy to survive the day.
For those customers who are worried about their calorie intake, meal kit services provide all the nutritional information. With this, anyone can have an idea about the total calories they are intake.
Pros And Cons Of Meal kits
Pros:
Saves time
Less wastage of food
It is cheap
Customers are provided with varieties of food
It provides better nutrition
Cons:
Cost may vary, sometimes it may be higher than the customer is expecting.
Even after ordering from a meal kit, customers sometimes still need to go to the grocery store or any other supermarket.
There is a lot of packaging.
Customers need to keep on checking their order lists.
Growth During COVID
Covid has given a significant boost to the growth of the Meal kit industry. And the main reason behind this is that people couldn't go out and at the same time wanted healthy food. Meal kit services could satisfy both the demands of their customers.
They provide home delivery of healthy foods to their customers at a very affordable price. This simple step gains a lot of trust from the customers.
Leader Of The Meal Kit Market
HelloFresh is growing rapidly. Recently it has acquired Green Chef which has made them the largest meal kit service across the U.S. HelloFresh has also beaten Blue Apron.
According to the latest reports, the sales of HelloFresh and Green Chef combined have reached 35%, which is followed by Blue Apron at 31%. The number suggests that HelloFresh is the new market head, as the rest of the 7 competitors are way behind.
Conclusion
It can be concluded that the meal kit market has been there for a long but got a boost during the pandemic. It provides good service along with healthy food with full details about the ingredients and nutrition.
Customers can easily fill their empty stomachs by ordering any meal kit services at a much more affordable cost compared to fast foods which are much costlier and unhealthy.
But it is also important to know that meal kits also have some cons. But overall it can be said that the meal kit industry is good and the new leader in this market is HelloFresh.
