Why Major Meal Kit Companies Lose 90% of Customers in a Year | WSJ The Economics Of

They’re nice, but the only step you really skip with meal kits is deciding what to make. It’s not like you’ll never go to the grocery store again- you’re still going, and you can’t help but notice that it would be a looooot cheaper to just buy the ingredients yourself 😂

The issue I found with meal kit companies (have tried a few), was that the recipes were always the same with minor changes. So I got bored quickly. I remember I even wrote them a feedback about this and their response was a bit passive aggressive😅 it’s only good for short-term. They really need to do proper customer research if they wish to keep going. Also think better about the price - I can still get it cheaper at a grocery store.

with men u can have standards with women you have the opposite of standards

Adding a middleman will absolutely increase costs…

Just buy your groceries at your local store or grocery-stand,
get an instant-pot,
cook at home,
divide weeks food portions into glass-Tupperware and
put in frig/freezer for lunch/dinner at work…

Skip all this Nonsense….

Meal kits or pre made meals only work in a local scale, there is a very big one in my city that only works here, the food is delicious and they deliver to you daily

Maybe I missed it but why is Hellofresh profitable and Blue apron isn’t?

Meal Kits are good for first-timers who is learning how to cook, just buy a recipe kit once, keep the recipe then go buy your own grocery later for self-customized/modified dishes.

What a scam.

Why why too expensive. Just go to the store and get a TV dinner.

Holy shed.. this vid is sub-9 minutes yet it feels like half of it is just beating around the bush -_-

Or I just failed to realize this is a children's channel.

It was the plastic wrap that made me cancel

Meals started good then changed to very cheap ingredients. Just some bits of veg and 2 chicken breasts. Wasnt cheaper once the change happened and the meals were very boring. Portion sizes were small. No left overs. Its not a good product.

The reason I don't buy meal kit is because it would be too easy for my enemies to poison my food. All a computer hacker would have to do is telephone an employee at a meal kit company and manipulate him to poison my meal kit. Meal kit employees could be manipulated with bribes, threats, or if they are really stupid just with words. Believe it or not I have been criminally harassed several times before and poisoning my meal kit would just be another opportunity for those criminals to victimize me again. Sorry, I am not interested in a meal kit. Too dangerous.

It wasn't mentioned in this video, but a lot of us are gaming the system. I cancel one service once the promotional window isn't a good enough discount for me, and re-subscribe to another service that has given me a "come back" promo. I'm almost never paying full price for meal kits unless the menu is particularly interesting on a full cost week (which isn't often, these kits get really repetitive). If I'm between windows I just buy frozen meals from walmart or takeout until I get another promo.

I wonder if there are any meal boxes that don’t crush unions or is that part of the business model?

Factor Meals seems like an updated Hungry Man's meal.

I can't afford any of these services, but Factor would probably be one I would try out. I don't like cooking all that much, and when I do, it's usually something very simple (a protein, a starchy side like rice, pasta or potatoes, and some veggies, either canned or steamed). I somtimes might make a bread related item, but most times, I don't. I now live alone ever since my roommate sibling moved out, so I don't cook as much. But I'd like some variety and something already made but isn't daily delivery (those fees and the gun-to-your-head expectancy of tipping is frickin insane). If my money gets right, I might try Factor for a bit to see how I like it, if it's offered in my area.

I cannot bear the amount of waste generated in a meal kit packaging. I simply can't justify it for the convenience.

mayyyybe its just a bad idea and people stop using it as a result. startup culture is so toxic.

The time consuming part of cooking is the prepping, chopping & afterwards cleaning. Buying the ingredients is not the issue.

They want to "disrupt" grocery stores? You mean put them out of business. Meal delivery is one of the most greenwashed industries in existence, and it's unhealthy for anyone on a restricted diet. And it may be inherently unsafe. They have to somehow get small amounts of non-frozen food to millions of homes without using refrigerated delivery trucks. They could use refrigerated trucks, but that would drive the price way up, and release tons of extra CO2. It's a business model that's surviving by ducking food safety laws, and would really only be successful in a food desert. Manages to be dumb, cruel, and potentially lethal all at the same time.

I can tell you why I quit, the recipes are not very depression friendly. I can manage to open a container and dump it into a pot or pan and move it around with a spatula, but the amount of prep work was too much for me. I still get constant coupons from Hello Fresh in the mail. 🙄

I loved ButcherBox, but had to cancel due to finances. Not to mention I often didnt go through it fast enough, even on their slowest plan.

I would have kept my subscription if I could have selected favorite meals to be delivered regularly. I was shocked that this wasn't an option.

what an extraordinary way to create even more waste by packaging everything for shipping in individual portion sizes... it boggles the mind.

The moment an startup says it's model is economy of scale, that is a huge red flag

Yah because people cancel after the initial subscription deal is up, because the price per meal is too much.

You didn’t even mention hello fresh treating its workers like pieces of disposable trash, or sending rotting vegetables or the absurdly small portion sizes. People don’t like anti-human behavior. There won’t always be new people to fool for a few months

The best “meal kit”: ButcherBox. I actually never go to the store now. The meal kits are just inconvenient; if i wanted to put 5 things together i would just buy them. Sun basket is at least pre-made, it’s just too expensive.

I'm sorry but their "affordability" is a lie. I can get a family pack of chicken for like $12, and as one person, that shakes out to about a dollar a chicken breast. The meals in meal plans are not that big and are significantly higher priced than that after the "welcome" coupons and savings. It's not cheaper.

It doesn't work for a family. After cooking the kit, I have to cook sepereate meals for my kids... If I order familg kit, the pirce jumped so much 😮

I subscribed to Hello Fresh because the person who cooks in our house (not me) was going on an extended 4-week trip, and I didn't want to eat out or try to learn to cook in such a short time. I considered keeping the plan after the person who cooks returned so that he wouldn't have to cook all the time, but I canceled for one reason only: poor quality ingredients, especially the meats. The secondary reason, way secondary, was that the recipes were too complicated for what the end result was, which I believe is because they were trying to make the meals look more interesting than they actually were.

I dropped Daily Harvest after two years because the quality went downhill. Towards the end of my subscription, some of my meals would come poorly sealed, with some of the bowls spilled in the box. Sometimes the products were clearly thawed and refrozen during some step of the process.

Meal kits are so expensive but we still need to cook 😢

Yeah, $12,50 a meal when I can get a full 1400 kcal dinner that includes meat for 1,55 Euro from the grocery store. I'm sure HelloFresh tries to compete, but I don't think they do really. They are at least 4x as expensive as shopping smart and well at the grocery store in my country. So yeah, not a good deal at all, plus the visual inspection on the ingredients is left to someone else and I'm kind of SOL if I get something partially rotten or insect affected (which was a real problem for HelloFresh early in their life in the Netherlands). So yeah, no thanks on the price and the quality control.

I never bothered with these because, as the video failed to mention, the grocery stores themselves offer meal kits!

I think that lady with the premium version was right. It really is a lifestyle choice.

Cooking simple meals doesn't take that long. Even the portioning can be done in sections throughout the day.

It's just not worth it.

"Meal kit is cheaper than grocery store." this conclusion is made from an assumption: we firstly determine what to cook, and then buy what we need.

but it's mostly not the case. instead, we firstly see what's in our freezer, take out some random ingredients, and thinking what's missing, and what to cook.

we are more likely to cook easy recipes, instead of these fancy complex recipes on hellofresh.

For me it was how wasteful it all felt when I got a giant box of cardboard with giant recyclable ice packs coming every single week and I had to figure out how to properly dispose of it all. Completely negated any convenience I benefited from otherwise.

Meal plans offer the price of eating out combined with the work of cooking yourself. There are certain people it works for but it is way more of a niche service than the companies would like you to assume.

Also spoiler, meal kits are like never cheaper than shopping yourself

It's not even about convenience. I like subscribing to Hello Fresh every now and then for a month to do up some new meal inspiration. It's just so expensive without discounts that it financially doesn't make sense to keep it, rather than going to the supermarket.

It's worth it when they give you a discount for your first couple of orders, but not at the normal prices. Simple as that.

Am I the only one who always ended up hungry after a Hello Fresh meal? The portions are ridiculously small for the price you pay, especially the ones containing meat

I am just mad that hello fresh charge extra for premium choice like steaks. Those standard meals are always so similar. You want to try something new they charge extra. So I said goodbye to hello fresh. They should give some free premium choice once every so often.

If the meal kit companies understood better that they should be competing with expensive take out, eating out, DoorDash etc., they would set up the plans and products to be much more appealing for that purpose and win there vs. over grocery stores. They’d have to make the minimum number of meals per week lower, have mostly prepared food, easy to skip weeks, etc.

its way too expense

Having never tried meal kits myself, I must ask what the difference between having a meal kit delivered to you and just purchasing one at the grocery store in terms of learning to cook? You have sushi making kits, fajita and taco kits, baking kits etc already available to you in most supermarkets. For me learning how to make the kind I stuff I liked to order at home, or try new spices and somehow exotic ingredients was a great motivator to get me cooking and eating healthy, and helped me a lot in terms of learning how to source the cheapest and fresh ingredients from local markets as a fun experience.

I started going to chinese supermarkets just to buy ramen, and before I knew it I was making gyozas and lotus chips at home; and freezing the excedent. Even if I skipped grocery shopping for a few days, I would be able to put together a nice miso soup with seaweed salad in minutes, or make a rissoto with frozen fungui. Dried and preserved vegetables are not so bad in terms of convenience and nutritional value. Of course seasonal fresh food is best; but if you are trying to cut back on takeout and processed foods I think the most important part is adding fun and novelty to you cooking routine.

Meal kits can certainly add novelty, but they don't look very fun to me. I think they root their model more in the idea of catering to a sense of beign responsible and disciplined with food. But the very idea of constant delivery and buying portions of staples instead of bulk; is not very enviromentally friendly or financially responsible. Not to mention that "outsourcing" your dietary needs is not very responsible or empowering in the first place.

My pet peeve with these companies is the trash. I was left with a big box, gel packs, small boxes for each meal, and a number of smaller trash items for each meal. It got to be ridiculous the amount of trash I was setting out each week

I just buy the fresh meal kits on the day that i want to cook them from the store. You get it more fresh, more freedom and for a fraction of the price. The store is only a 15 minute trip including the travel and shopping.