I'm always surprised there aren't more kits like what you would find in Blue Apron/Plated/Home Chef/etc in grocery stores.
I would buy A LOT more, and probably even overpay because of convenience if I could walk into my local Harris Teeter/Krogers/Food Lion and just pick up a 3 meal/2 person box with most of what I need.
Given the amount of semi-prepared food (chopped up veggies and so forth) that most supermarkets already stock, it's surprising how slow most of them have been to jump on this bandwagon. I have a pretty well-stocked pantry at home, but there are lots of times I'd be willing to cook something up quickly if I could just swing by the store and pick up a couple of meal kits.
My problem with the mail order kits is that I have to plan the week before and I have to commit to multiple meals over the course of a week, neither of which are really a fit for me.
I have noticed a distinct improvement and selection in recent years if not just the past six months. I too am surprised at how stores haven't made the leap. There seems to be resistance to combine the items and instead they want customers to visit each department separately. This can work if the store develops a kiosk or such which gives customers suggestions and quick path to the selections.
Good signage could path customers quickly through the store without the appearance of too much diversion. Perhaps Kroger realized that to break the dominance of each department within the storm that a 3rd party was needed
I think it is just a tough needle to thread. They can't charge all that much of a premium over unprepared foods and then they have to balance demand and waste and so on.
I’ve seen occasional store-branded ones at supermarkets in upstate NY, so it looks like the tide is at least starting to shift. I agree with you that it’s surprising it didn’t happen sooner, Blue Apron has been around for years now.
Frankly, the typical supermarket probably already has most of the pieces to assemble--perhaps with the addition of some spices and other add-ons like salad toppings. There are tons of marinated kabob sticks and the like, pre-made salads, chopped veggies for stir fries, etc.
This is more prepared than a lot of meal kits are but, for a lot of scenarios, that may be a feature rather than a bug. The fact that it's probably easier to get 75% prepped meals at a supermarket rather than shipped to you may be an advantage. One of the common complaints about meal kits is that they can still be fairly time consuming. I know that's one reason I don't use them. If I'm going to cook a full meal, it's really not that hard for me to just do it from the base ingredients.
The Kroger in my area already has two options for this. When you walk in, you can choose a 2 person box that is all ready to go. They normally have 2-3 options available. The other option is more akin to the frozen meals-ready-to-heat (like those from Bertolli). These are stored in a frozen case where you have 8-10 different options. You can get a pre-measured serving or mix/match by the pound.
Granted, this is a very new store in the Kroger home of Cincinnati and used for a lot of testing, but it's something they have been working on.
The problem for these bigger companies is that they are big companies. What works for large, urban markets doesn't work for their more rural stores. So finding the mix of services can be hard, especially when you don't have the floor space to devote to new products. Also, integrating these types of products into your existing distribution network can be a challenge.
I've been impressed though by how much these companies still do try to innovate in response to competition. For example, when Amazon bought Whole Foods and opened up Prime delivery of groceries in our area, Kroger within weeks started to offer their own 2-hour delivery service. But again, this isn't a service that would be practical to offer across their entire footprint.
This sounds like the Newport Kroger I frequent as well. I've been really happy with the pilots they've done there too as far as the one-step kits and the frozen case.
It’s strange the mix of technology different stores have. One store near us (Hyde Park) has the equipment to effectively scan items into your cart as you go to pay without a checkout line, but doesn’t have the new food kits.
As far as the kits, I don’t think we’ve tried them. My family has been pretty happy with Hello Fresh, so we haven’t tried the Kroger kits. The thing I have found particularly difficult with meal kits is how they handle kids. It can be hard to expand palettes and cooking styles, but still have something that two adults and two kids will still want to eat (let alone be able to make it fast).
Free business idea: A store dedicated to exactly this.
Imagine instead of many different, individually packaged, products, you have one (or maybe a handful) of pre-packaged meals for one or two people. The retail space and checkout would be insanely efficient as you'd just grab and go.
You'd have the green angle too as there wouldn't be any excess packaging to keep the food fresh nor carbon emissions from all the individual deliveries. Just standard refrigerators and pictures of happy patrons walking home with their meal kits.
The recurring subscription model, i.e. the holy grail of high valuations, could be added as well. Either through the usual $X/period gets you Y meals or maybe just a discount ($Z/month to get Q% off).
Or taking it to the next level, imagine a meal kit vending machine. The owner would stock it each day (say around 3pm) and customers could grab their own meals with a quick swipe of their card. Same idea as the store but reducing the retail space from a mini store to a couple square feet.
As a chef, I have seriously considered this. Unfourtanetly I live in Japan now, there isn't as much of a customer base for this sort of thing as say, Australia.
Then again, the more I think about it. You know if you added in a system of reusable containers (for small amounts of spices and herbs), which could be returned for a discount on your next order. . .
Still a hell of a lot to consider, but in a busy enough place (eg Tokyo), might be an interesting idea.
They only sell ready meals, aiming to be a higher quality than the slops you can buy in supermarkets. They've won several Great Taste awards here, which is a fairly well-respected stamp of approval. Perhap the main difference from what you're suggesting is that they're not ingredient kits, they're prepared meals or components (e.g. main/side/dessert).
They have high street shops in - let's be honest - rich parts of the country like the South East. Quality seems quite good and the price isn't that bad - at most £5 per person with reasonable break points for couples, families. The store itself is a few rows of freezers.
I've never tried, but people I know say that it's good if you need an emergency meal that actually tastes nice.
It would be hard to offer differentiation from the grab-and-go setup at our local QFC (a Kroger subsidiary). If I wanted to grab one of their prepared meals and nothing else, I think I could walk in, pick up a prepared meal, and check out in 2-3 minutes. The greater cost is the time required to drive to the store.
The only reason we haven't yet tried a prepared meal is pricing. If prices dropped ~30%, we would be regular buyers.
There was a store in Brooklyn a few years ago called Walk-In Cookbook. They did exactly this, plus if you called or set up a recurring subscription they would deliver the kits to anywhere within a mile or so of the store (which in New York City is a pretty good radius). They also sold basic cooking equipment, so if you were a novice cook you didn't even have to worry about getting gear. They even partnered with local restaurants to provide cross-branded kits based on their recipes.
It was a great business that people in the neighborhood loved, but it also lost a ton of money and closed in under a year. I'm still sad about it.
Why need a full storefront? Why not make them kiosks that others can put in their existing stores to boost foot traffic? i could see this being something walgreens added (like redbox).
FWIW one of the Kroger stores in Cincinnati where they do pilots does offer this. There are self-checkout lanes nearby too, so you can be in and out in 5 minutes. It's not a dedicated store but it's a good approximation of the experience.
It's a big lot in a shopping complex, maybe 5 minutes from pulling in the lot to walking in the door.
They have special parking spots up front for people picking up ClickList orders. It'd be interesting to see if those were made available for this too. I suppose you could probably even order the meal kit via ClickList and have it brought to your car (+= $5).
Snap Kitchen [1], based in Austin, TX but also in rest of Texas and Philadelphia has been doing this for years, they already have 35 locations.
People definitely love them. They even have a food truck/trailer concept for the business crowd downtown. They are a bit pricey-ish but not too bad. Seems to work for their target market (on the go professionals and middle upper income families)!
My Fit Foods had about 50 locations and was popular but shut down [2], but from what I read management was poor and quality dropped more so than it was bad economics [3].
We have a very similar concept here in the Midwest called Eat Fit Go. Definitely a decent choice for food quality, although they too can be a bit on the expensive side.
I was in the Dominican Republic recently and went to a major supermarket, where I saw both a cold and heated foods section full of great tasting, healthy food, individually packaged. I ate like that for the whole week I was there, and it only cost me a few bucks at checkout.
In Brazil, one can easily get "marmitas" (aka "quentinhas") delivered for cheap, which are ready-made meals.
Now I'm in the EU and have been seeing low-cost, healthy, packaged meals in many supermarkets. Seems to have caught on. When I look at two basic options now, I see chicken breasts for 3.50 euro or a ready-made meal for 2-3 euro. Even though the chicken would be enough for two meals, I'm often pulled in by the easier, one-meal option.
My local Mariano's (a Chicago/Milwaukee chain now owned by Kroger's) was trying just this the other week. They had some kits (maybe they were HomeKits) in a cooler in the deli section. Maybe it was a test.
Total nitpick but Mariano's is not in Milwaukee (where I live), although for all I know the very similar Metro Market stores we have could just be an identical model with different branding (since they're both owned by Kroger).
Most higher-end grocery stores in the US sell trays in which the raw, unfrozen ingredients are assembled and require baking -- a sort of upmarket TV dinner. Some sell kits that have some groupings of the ingredients packaged separately, because they need to be cooked separately or in different ways. I'm not a market researcher, but I'm guessing these existing products are packaged in this way for convenience, to appeal to people who want a complete meal with little effort. I can imagine that the thinking goes, if the customer went to the grocery store, they either want to browse and select the ingredients from the entire store themselves -- y'know, the entire reason you stock quality ingredients and furnished the store in an appealing way -- or they're looking for something more prepared that they can grab and go.
The now-hip contemporary subscription meal kit is a box of raw ingredients packaged separately, and there's a fair bit of effort that needs to be expended to prep and cook. The fact that it shows up at your door is great for convenience, but the fact that you have prep for 30 minutes isn't. Most meal kit companies have embraced the prep as an experience to be marketed, and that's smart -- clearly, people exist who will pay for the experience. But in this space, retention is low, and it's hard to be profitable because of the costs of logistics and assembly.
Upmarket grocery stores are in a perfect position to make this style of product work, because they already have the logistics around ingredients figured out, and they have labor on hand in stores and in their distribution and prep centers. And, in theory, they're even cheaper to prepare than the meal trays they sell today. But it remains to be seen whether paying a hefty premium for a pre-selected box of raw ingredients at a grocery store will be a hit or an object of ridicule.
Kroger has an offering in at least 1 store as a pilot here like like what you described called one-step meal kits. There's definitely an upcharge but they're pretty good, very easy, healthier than TV dinners, and cheaper than getting takeout delivered.
They also have a new offering that's a bunch of containers of frozen things like shrimp and potatoes where you can pay one price by the lb and mix and match across 10-15 different options. It's nice if you want a flexible portion size, just cooking for 1-2, etc.
First time seeing this site. I wonder if they will also add the one-step meal kits and the mix-n-match kits to it as they roll them out more broadly? I'm not seeing those two on the site currently.
>Most meal kit companies have embraced the prep as an experience to be marketed, and that's smart -- clearly, people exist who will pay for the experience.
Part of it is that there are definitely people who want to cook a meal from "scratch" with their SO but need some structure and pre-packaging to get started. I suspect some it though is that when you're shipping things, you're probably better off shipping things in their raw state if possible.
Personally, if I were to buy a kit at a local grocery store to bring home for dinner, I'd like to see onions pre-cut, etc. as much as reasonable. I don't mind cooking at all but if it's going to be a bunch of effort I'll just do my own thing; I don't need a kit. If I can grab something that only needs 15 or 20 minutes of active time to put on the table, that's appealing.
I am a Home Chef subscriber and have a Kroger that is literally a 7 minute drive from my house, but the quality of meat and produce at my local Kroger is much lower than what I can have delivered (many of the ingredients are not even sold at my local Kroger).
Kroger is also potentially gearing up for an Alibaba partnership as well that was reported earlier this year. I know rumors are still floating down to the store level on this (my father is a store manager)
Kroger seems to have some vision on technology implementation. I’ve been impressed with thier clicklist (online grocery pickup) here in Salt Lake City. Looking forward to having this available.
They have no vision. They got it from overpaying for Harris Teeter who had a $5 online order service. They botched their implementation of it, too.
Kroger is strictly top-down, workers-are-idiots management that has to buy its innovations from better-managed companies. People are quitting in droves in all areas of the store and management. Heck, local store has different workers every time I shop. Usually a sign of that. ;)
My theory is the media isnt reporting on years of such practices since they're a big customer (advertiser).
It does when the employees leaving were high-performance workers saying they're leaving due to management. Those that left for Kroger's competitors say they're not as bad. Quick example from local Kroger:
1. They cut staff to almost nothing. On some holidays, there were 2 stockers visible in a store with 20 isles. Stuff is empty everywhere. Dept heads I interviewed said they get "no hours" and were told it was just "bad productivity."
2. Response from corporate office was to hire more managers to do the stocking. So, they think it's cheaper to have manager's do clerk work. Corporate people even come stock before audits.
3. Corporate office sends 10-20 people af a tine to "fix" stores with "process compliance," "policies," and so on. The workers say they re-explain the basics of their job like they're dumb and nitpick them over side jobs. Those that went to Walmart and Target said the new bosses mainly let them do their job. They also have staff for stocking.
4. Workers constantly generate ideas to improve stores. Customer satisfaction and sales go up. Corporate tells them to knock it off to follow "the Process" since it's what customers "want." Numbers go back down. Managers claim workers were at fault since the Process works. Like a cult.
5. Corporate controls everything remotely with many policies made by people with no experience. They control how things are laid out, what is stocked, in what order, how much, with what on a dolly, and so on. Workers are expected to be robots. If this process fails, it's the workers that failed.
6. Their tech is garbage, too. They buy a lot of overpriced stuff that doesnt work like the AI controlling registers. The supervisors do it better. I think the handhelds run SCO OpenServer for terminal stuff. Remember SCO? ;)
7. Currently, lots of their equipment is breaking at the nearby stores with them not replacing or fixing it. Workers are sharing stuff adding overhead.
None of this happens at Publix or Costco. They invest in workers, treat them well, let them help innovate, reward them for good work, and so on. They've performed better in most metrics with low turnover. Kroger does the opposite. So, even good veterans are leaving since they're set up to fail every day and mistreated. The union benefits are the only reason veterans I interviewed that stayed were staying.
I'm going to have to disagree -- and this is based on first hand knowledge (albeit from a few years ago), and from second-hand knowledge from friends that I trust who are working in/around Kroger now.
Kroger is in a difficult position -- Grocery is a low-margin space: it is the true "race to the bottom," and now, with Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods, and Target's acquisition of shipt (Kroger has looked at other delivery services, but, can't find one for the same price point), they're struggling to find the same portfolio matrix to keep them competitive to other startups.
They want to use GCE, but, they're truly struggling to use it. They refuse to use AWS for competitive reasons. They don't want to pay for talent (they were offering an Enterprise Architect $25/hour on a contract in the Cincinnati area , they don't want to pay for commercial tooling). Admittedly, in order for them to make money, they have to run truly Lean IT...but, they also make really foolish decisions. They were considering building their own cloud until it was pointed out just the sheer amount of capex needed for that project....and then the VMWare Licensing costs. They spend a crazy amount of money on SurePOS, but, then don't pay for any of the Verifone branding/customization/contactless enablement for their terminals. Technologies like LaneHawk help their cashiers catch shrink, but, their cashiers comment that it's ineffective and do not work 95% of the time.
If it was my job to move Kroger's technology forward, I'd probably do the following:
* Look at ways to help the cashiers do their job better and more effectively. Finding ways to shave transaction time will add up, enabling more customers per hour to flow through the transaction lines.
* Microservices in the store level for things that need to have store level availability, but, push things to cloud services where it's feasible. Yes -- let's buy bigger pipes to the cloud, but, keep a smaller server at the store in case things fail. We can manage that farm in the cloud more efficiently at scale, and then deploy out to the stores nightly or weekly versus continuous delivery in the cloud.
* Vendor Selection: Use the right vendors for the right things. Look at how you're spending your money with your vendors, and do a double check to make sure you're not being foolish with your spending (ala, vendors like Pomeory -- 99.99% of the time, you can do it better in house)
I think Kroger is the Amazon of the grocery space.
Even with several attempts, Amazon hasn't been able to change that so far. Too many grocery items are expensive/heavy to ship. I'm in Cincinnati (Kroger HQ) and Amazon is trying extra hard here with special pilots.
> Kroger has looked at other delivery services, but, can't find one for the same price point
They are already using Instacart in the US and Ocado in the UK.
> They want to use GCE, but, they're truly struggling to use it.
This is outdated info. Their GCP partnership was publicly announced ~6 months ago.
I can tell you worked with them, too. I think you were only scratching the surface, though. Most of the stores I see run on some mainframe apps or something that people use terminals for on buggy handhelds. The checklanes got upgraded recently to what looks like a Fujitsu Linux running Java-based clients. Slow and limited in UI control compared to the concurrent DOS thing from IBM that only slowed down on updates. They had no interest in stuff like QNX when I proposed it for U-Scan to keep robots running despite software failures which they have a lot of. Employees complain the browsers in that company can take several minutes to ten minutes to load on whatever thin client and virtualization solutions they're using. They didn't know. The inventory and Clicklist computers often have different inventory in them or other preventable problems. The digital coupon system constantly screws up to the point that a recent sale required printed barcodes for cashiers at registers in case it screwed up again. They apparently have a social network that few workers use for knowledge sharing since they don't even have time to stock stuff.
The list goes on and on. I keep following the situation out of both concern and morbid curiosity. Easily one of the worst I've seen at managing both operations and IT. Their media and legal departments are among the better I've seen, though. I mean, nobody reports this stuff. Can't be an accident with the amount of attention on them.
Home Chef is by far my favorite of the meal kits I’ve tried (and I’ve tried a lot) in terms of both variety and quality. Fingers crossed this is one of those “keep doing what you’re doing but now with the funds for greater scale and distribution” acquisitions and not one of those “steady degradation of service while the new owner plunders you for parts” acquisitions.
>And you can see why everyone’s diving in. As we’ve covered before: According to Nielsen research, “in the year ended 2017, in-store meal kits generated $154.6 million in sales, posting growth of more than 26% year-over-year. For context, total brick-and-mortar sales for center store edibles (grocery, dairy, frozen foods) dipped 0.1% last year to $374 billion.”
So, "everyone's diving in" because meal kits are a rounding error to the other category?
No, they’re diving in because they want the early growth and infrastructure without the need to build it themselves.
That “rounding error” can be seen in a different light, it’s an area of the market that is making significant progress YoY.
This isn’t a play for the next year, it’s seeing the YoY growth of this vertical within their market and wanting to capitalize on that.
The world is and has been moving towards “easier” and services that provide immediate gratification. In-store meal kits are right in that category.
People don’t want to buy homes, cars or big ticket items anymore, there’s a culture of “leasing” because of the inconvenience that goes along with the maintenance/upkeep of those items. In a similar vein, lots of people view cooking “healthy” meals to be difficult (it’s not) but are willing to spend a little more to get a simple meal to cook that is either healthy or gives the illusion of being so.
$200M is dirt cheap to acquire the talent, and all of the existing processes of the company.
Add in the scale of someone like Kroger, and the price per unit they can acquire is going to be vastly cheaper then someone like Blue Apron or the various other meal kit startups.
You end up placing these in their stores on endcaps and other areas where it’s only a bit more per person to buy a meal kit that’s marketed as “healthy” and they’re going to fly off the shelf.
This is one acquisition that makes a ton of sense to me, and Kroger likely sees In-Store meal kits as continuing to grow tremendously YoY.
>People don’t want to buy homes, cars or big ticket items anymore
That's the perspective of a very specific demographic. And even in SV, there seems to be no shortage of people wanting to buy houses and any shortage of cars on the road.
That said, there is a trend towards convenience which is one reason you see so much food that's been pre-prepped to various degrees (for a premium) in supermarkets. Adding full meal kits seems a very logical extension to that trend.
I would guess the profit margin on meal kits is much higher than the rest of grocery. I know prepared food has some of the highest margins of anything in a grocery store.
I'm really not surprised by this at all. I know that Kroger was exploring a service like this last year, based on conversations that I had with someone from their legal team; they've had this in the Cincinnati area stores that I've been in recently (when I've been in that area) -- including their "flagship" Oakley store -- for at least the last six to eight months.
Why are you talking with their legal team, and what would they say that would lead you to believe they were exploring this service? Honestly wondering, I'm not doubting you.
I did a study on Kroger, Costco, Walmart, Sams, Aldi, and Kroger was a scam.
Constant "10/10$" or "ALWAYS LOW PRICE $2.49" on items that are cheaper at Costco, Walmart, and Aldi.
As a note, Walmart won or was on par with Aldi. Aldi had a very limited selection despite having decent prices. Costco isnt worth shopping at for food item with few exceptions(canned food, which isnt very optimal in general).
Anyway, my point is, I dont really trust Kroger. They overcharge for items and claim its cheap. They even have an 'organic' section of the store, which makes me think is all marketing.
If anyone wants the link to the study, lmk, I avoid posting my link unless its relevant and wanted.
I would be extremely interested in your study. I've long suspected Kroger of inflating prices, especially beef. Most times I've seen them at almost twice the price per lb. than other competing grocery stores in my area.
Also, they seem to lack basic conveniences in stores that others have. One example is hand baskets. They do not place any around the store in case shoppers need to use one. Only at the front.
One thing about Aldi is that it has a lot of seasonal items, and by that i mean items you can only find a specific time of year for a specific period(ex. 2 weeks only for X item).
We shop at Aldi a lot for a long time and in the last year we've seen it starting to get more packed with people.
I've had similar experiences, though can't claim whether or not it's a scam or artificially inflated. When we shop and scan our loyalty card I say "we saved X dollars!" and my wife replies, "you mean, we avoided getting overcharged X dollars."
Since we alternate between QFC and Fred Meyer, I have noticed that Fred Meyer doesn't have yellow stickers everywhere, and generally scanning my loyalty card doesn't reduce any prices, just accumulates points. In a trip to QFC around the same time frame, I've definitely seen the same item listed at a higher standard price, and the loyalty card price will be on par with the Fred Meyer "standard" price.
What they did was increase the "regular" price of retail goods above what competition would charge, apply a "discount" if you have a Kroger card, and then you get this "cheaper" price. They even put how much you would have "saved" on your receipt if you didn't have a card but that's vs inflated prices others don't charge. At one point, their "regular" price for milk was at convenience store levels with sale price just over Walmart. These fake discounts should be considered straight-up fraud. That's not to say they don't have plenty of real ones but you'd have to look carefully to know. There's yellow tags everywhere. So, about all of it is cheaper than Walmart or a similar competitor at that moment, right? Nope.
The other thing they did with Kroger card was price discrimination. The regulations apparently were about the price of items rather than what people paid for them. These are technically two different things. The way that works is they learn that certain people will keep buying specific things. They use this data from their card profile to deny them coupons or other discounts while they give them to other people. They've got a lot of profiling tricks for adding or denying discounts. I'd say more consumers take a hit than benefit since there were previously coupons for all of them in the papers or what they mailed out. They're also mailing out fewer coupons with lower amounts, too, now that they've rolled out digital coupons tied to profile data from card.
So, many of the sales are fake. The line about what people would've saved versus Walmart is fake. Most of the coupons are for brand-name items that already overcharge you anyway. The good generics are cheaper much of the time. The gas discount and recall notices are about the best benefits of the Kroger card. The best coupons they gave me discount per order, department, etc letting me spend on whatever I wanted. Those could probably be delivered based on survey data without tracking.
Summary: the Kroger card is mostly a fraud designed to trick people into thinking they're getting discounts, give them coupons for more expensive stuff, give them less coupons that would make things cheaper, and otherwise make profit on surveillance of them. There's benefit but most selling points are layers of lies. This is why I prefer either no loyalty cards or them limited to stuff having nothing to do with pricing. Preferably by law to increase competitiveness and reduce risk to consumers.
Thanks! It was originally CASPIAN that I learned it from. I confirmed it with my own data. They're pretty fringe in what they publish, though. Might limit their impact on wide audience.
So, a project from a reputable organization re-running the price studies and explaining the scam might be worthwhile. Consumer Reports may have already done something on it. They could be good outlet for next version with new data.
It was reported when it happened, but most New Yorkers are unaware that Kroger bought Murray's Cheese last year. They already have 400 or so standalone Murray's shops _inside_ Krogers around the country, selling the best cheese and 'specialty food' items (charcuterie, crackers, dips, etc.) you can get in the US. And every person behind the counter is trained by Murray's to know their stuff and be able to make expert recommendations.
Murray's bake-at-home mac and cheese, only available at Kroger, sounds quite nice.
I didn't know this, thank you for mentioning it. I shop at Kroger pretty often and have never considered buying cheese or charcuterie there since it seemed like it might be bad, guess I was quite a ways off the mark.
It varies by location, though. If you have a Kroger with a Murray's, the cheese selection will be much better than the average grocer. They're easy to recognize given all the Murray's branding they put up. Kroger with their standard cheese counter is pretty much what you'd expect.
I've tried a half dozen of the meal kit providers and Home Chef is hands down the highest quality in terms of ingredients and also providing recipes that are fancy enough that you don't say "I could have just made this myself" like everyone says about Blue Apron. I order irregularly but my experience with Home Chef has been incredible.
I'm probably one of the few on HN who's tried Kroger's existing meal kits that have been piloted in a few stores around Cincinnati. They definitely target a different audience than the online meal kits, but being able to pick one up at the grocery store on a whim vs committing to buy + cook 3 kits in 1 week has been a game changer for me. I hope that they bring the Home Chef kits in store. Plus it's got to save a ton not having to ship the kits and not requiring the ice packs.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadI would buy A LOT more, and probably even overpay because of convenience if I could walk into my local Harris Teeter/Krogers/Food Lion and just pick up a 3 meal/2 person box with most of what I need.
My problem with the mail order kits is that I have to plan the week before and I have to commit to multiple meals over the course of a week, neither of which are really a fit for me.
Good signage could path customers quickly through the store without the appearance of too much diversion. Perhaps Kroger realized that to break the dominance of each department within the storm that a 3rd party was needed
This is more prepared than a lot of meal kits are but, for a lot of scenarios, that may be a feature rather than a bug. The fact that it's probably easier to get 75% prepped meals at a supermarket rather than shipped to you may be an advantage. One of the common complaints about meal kits is that they can still be fairly time consuming. I know that's one reason I don't use them. If I'm going to cook a full meal, it's really not that hard for me to just do it from the base ingredients.
Granted, this is a very new store in the Kroger home of Cincinnati and used for a lot of testing, but it's something they have been working on.
The problem for these bigger companies is that they are big companies. What works for large, urban markets doesn't work for their more rural stores. So finding the mix of services can be hard, especially when you don't have the floor space to devote to new products. Also, integrating these types of products into your existing distribution network can be a challenge.
I've been impressed though by how much these companies still do try to innovate in response to competition. For example, when Amazon bought Whole Foods and opened up Prime delivery of groceries in our area, Kroger within weeks started to offer their own 2-hour delivery service. But again, this isn't a service that would be practical to offer across their entire footprint.
This sounds like the Newport Kroger I frequent as well. I've been really happy with the pilots they've done there too as far as the one-step kits and the frozen case.
What's your take on the Prep+Pared meal kits?
It’s strange the mix of technology different stores have. One store near us (Hyde Park) has the equipment to effectively scan items into your cart as you go to pay without a checkout line, but doesn’t have the new food kits.
As far as the kits, I don’t think we’ve tried them. My family has been pretty happy with Hello Fresh, so we haven’t tried the Kroger kits. The thing I have found particularly difficult with meal kits is how they handle kids. It can be hard to expand palettes and cooking styles, but still have something that two adults and two kids will still want to eat (let alone be able to make it fast).
Imagine instead of many different, individually packaged, products, you have one (or maybe a handful) of pre-packaged meals for one or two people. The retail space and checkout would be insanely efficient as you'd just grab and go.
You'd have the green angle too as there wouldn't be any excess packaging to keep the food fresh nor carbon emissions from all the individual deliveries. Just standard refrigerators and pictures of happy patrons walking home with their meal kits.
The recurring subscription model, i.e. the holy grail of high valuations, could be added as well. Either through the usual $X/period gets you Y meals or maybe just a discount ($Z/month to get Q% off).
Or taking it to the next level, imagine a meal kit vending machine. The owner would stock it each day (say around 3pm) and customers could grab their own meals with a quick swipe of their card. Same idea as the store but reducing the retail space from a mini store to a couple square feet.
http://global.marksandspencer.com/hk/store-locator/
You drive up, and you can get:
- Kit of ingredients and instructions for a home cooked meal
- Kit of prepped ingredients for a home cooked meal
- A pre-cooked meal ready to take home and eat
By combining with an app/website/service, you would develop meal plans, number of portions, food allergies.
You could walk up and pay full price, or get a discount by pre-buying a meal plan that gives the store more ability to plan and purchase in bulk.
I think the key to profit here is healthy, local, appropriately priced meal kits for families.
Then again, the more I think about it. You know if you added in a system of reusable containers (for small amounts of spices and herbs), which could be returned for a discount on your next order. . .
Still a hell of a lot to consider, but in a busy enough place (eg Tokyo), might be an interesting idea.
They only sell ready meals, aiming to be a higher quality than the slops you can buy in supermarkets. They've won several Great Taste awards here, which is a fairly well-respected stamp of approval. Perhap the main difference from what you're suggesting is that they're not ingredient kits, they're prepared meals or components (e.g. main/side/dessert).
They have high street shops in - let's be honest - rich parts of the country like the South East. Quality seems quite good and the price isn't that bad - at most £5 per person with reasonable break points for couples, families. The store itself is a few rows of freezers.
I've never tried, but people I know say that it's good if you need an emergency meal that actually tastes nice.
They make pizza on fridays and the line goes out the door. Highly recommended. They also have opera singers once a week.
The only reason we haven't yet tried a prepared meal is pricing. If prices dropped ~30%, we would be regular buyers.
It was a great business that people in the neighborhood loved, but it also lost a ton of money and closed in under a year. I'm still sad about it.
It's custom prepared for you though, so you could probably cut back on costs by making them more of a grab-and-go thing.
Since 1952 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwan's_Company
They have special parking spots up front for people picking up ClickList orders. It'd be interesting to see if those were made available for this too. I suppose you could probably even order the meal kit via ClickList and have it brought to your car (+= $5).
People definitely love them. They even have a food truck/trailer concept for the business crowd downtown. They are a bit pricey-ish but not too bad. Seems to work for their target market (on the go professionals and middle upper income families)!
My Fit Foods had about 50 locations and was popular but shut down [2], but from what I read management was poor and quality dropped more so than it was bad economics [3].
[1] https://www.snapkitchen.com/locations/ [2] https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2017/02/13/austin-he... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/5tphuu/my_fit_foods...
In Brazil, one can easily get "marmitas" (aka "quentinhas") delivered for cheap, which are ready-made meals.
Now I'm in the EU and have been seeing low-cost, healthy, packaged meals in many supermarkets. Seems to have caught on. When I look at two basic options now, I see chicken breasts for 3.50 euro or a ready-made meal for 2-3 euro. Even though the chicken would be enough for two meals, I'm often pulled in by the easier, one-meal option.
The Metro markets are the Mariano's-alike in Wisconsin, I think?
The now-hip contemporary subscription meal kit is a box of raw ingredients packaged separately, and there's a fair bit of effort that needs to be expended to prep and cook. The fact that it shows up at your door is great for convenience, but the fact that you have prep for 30 minutes isn't. Most meal kit companies have embraced the prep as an experience to be marketed, and that's smart -- clearly, people exist who will pay for the experience. But in this space, retention is low, and it's hard to be profitable because of the costs of logistics and assembly.
Upmarket grocery stores are in a perfect position to make this style of product work, because they already have the logistics around ingredients figured out, and they have labor on hand in stores and in their distribution and prep centers. And, in theory, they're even cheaper to prepare than the meal trays they sell today. But it remains to be seen whether paying a hefty premium for a pre-selected box of raw ingredients at a grocery store will be a hit or an object of ridicule.
They also have a new offering that's a bunch of containers of frozen things like shrimp and potatoes where you can pay one price by the lb and mix and match across 10-15 different options. It's nice if you want a flexible portion size, just cooking for 1-2, etc.
Part of it is that there are definitely people who want to cook a meal from "scratch" with their SO but need some structure and pre-packaging to get started. I suspect some it though is that when you're shipping things, you're probably better off shipping things in their raw state if possible.
Personally, if I were to buy a kit at a local grocery store to bring home for dinner, I'd like to see onions pre-cut, etc. as much as reasonable. I don't mind cooking at all but if it's going to be a bunch of effort I'll just do my own thing; I don't need a kit. If I can grab something that only needs 15 or 20 minutes of active time to put on the table, that's appealing.
Example - https://www.kroger.com/p/prep-pared-meal-kit-vietnamese-insp...
Kroger is strictly top-down, workers-are-idiots management that has to buy its innovations from better-managed companies. People are quitting in droves in all areas of the store and management. Heck, local store has different workers every time I shop. Usually a sign of that. ;)
My theory is the media isnt reporting on years of such practices since they're a big customer (advertiser).
1. They cut staff to almost nothing. On some holidays, there were 2 stockers visible in a store with 20 isles. Stuff is empty everywhere. Dept heads I interviewed said they get "no hours" and were told it was just "bad productivity."
2. Response from corporate office was to hire more managers to do the stocking. So, they think it's cheaper to have manager's do clerk work. Corporate people even come stock before audits.
3. Corporate office sends 10-20 people af a tine to "fix" stores with "process compliance," "policies," and so on. The workers say they re-explain the basics of their job like they're dumb and nitpick them over side jobs. Those that went to Walmart and Target said the new bosses mainly let them do their job. They also have staff for stocking.
4. Workers constantly generate ideas to improve stores. Customer satisfaction and sales go up. Corporate tells them to knock it off to follow "the Process" since it's what customers "want." Numbers go back down. Managers claim workers were at fault since the Process works. Like a cult.
5. Corporate controls everything remotely with many policies made by people with no experience. They control how things are laid out, what is stocked, in what order, how much, with what on a dolly, and so on. Workers are expected to be robots. If this process fails, it's the workers that failed.
6. Their tech is garbage, too. They buy a lot of overpriced stuff that doesnt work like the AI controlling registers. The supervisors do it better. I think the handhelds run SCO OpenServer for terminal stuff. Remember SCO? ;)
7. Currently, lots of their equipment is breaking at the nearby stores with them not replacing or fixing it. Workers are sharing stuff adding overhead.
None of this happens at Publix or Costco. They invest in workers, treat them well, let them help innovate, reward them for good work, and so on. They've performed better in most metrics with low turnover. Kroger does the opposite. So, even good veterans are leaving since they're set up to fail every day and mistreated. The union benefits are the only reason veterans I interviewed that stayed were staying.
Kroger is in a difficult position -- Grocery is a low-margin space: it is the true "race to the bottom," and now, with Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods, and Target's acquisition of shipt (Kroger has looked at other delivery services, but, can't find one for the same price point), they're struggling to find the same portfolio matrix to keep them competitive to other startups.
They want to use GCE, but, they're truly struggling to use it. They refuse to use AWS for competitive reasons. They don't want to pay for talent (they were offering an Enterprise Architect $25/hour on a contract in the Cincinnati area , they don't want to pay for commercial tooling). Admittedly, in order for them to make money, they have to run truly Lean IT...but, they also make really foolish decisions. They were considering building their own cloud until it was pointed out just the sheer amount of capex needed for that project....and then the VMWare Licensing costs. They spend a crazy amount of money on SurePOS, but, then don't pay for any of the Verifone branding/customization/contactless enablement for their terminals. Technologies like LaneHawk help their cashiers catch shrink, but, their cashiers comment that it's ineffective and do not work 95% of the time.
If it was my job to move Kroger's technology forward, I'd probably do the following:
* Look at ways to help the cashiers do their job better and more effectively. Finding ways to shave transaction time will add up, enabling more customers per hour to flow through the transaction lines.
* Microservices in the store level for things that need to have store level availability, but, push things to cloud services where it's feasible. Yes -- let's buy bigger pipes to the cloud, but, keep a smaller server at the store in case things fail. We can manage that farm in the cloud more efficiently at scale, and then deploy out to the stores nightly or weekly versus continuous delivery in the cloud.
* Vendor Selection: Use the right vendors for the right things. Look at how you're spending your money with your vendors, and do a double check to make sure you're not being foolish with your spending (ala, vendors like Pomeory -- 99.99% of the time, you can do it better in house)
Even with several attempts, Amazon hasn't been able to change that so far. Too many grocery items are expensive/heavy to ship. I'm in Cincinnati (Kroger HQ) and Amazon is trying extra hard here with special pilots.
> Kroger has looked at other delivery services, but, can't find one for the same price point
They are already using Instacart in the US and Ocado in the UK.
> They want to use GCE, but, they're truly struggling to use it.
This is outdated info. Their GCP partnership was publicly announced ~6 months ago.
The list goes on and on. I keep following the situation out of both concern and morbid curiosity. Easily one of the worst I've seen at managing both operations and IT. Their media and legal departments are among the better I've seen, though. I mean, nobody reports this stuff. Can't be an accident with the amount of attention on them.
So, "everyone's diving in" because meal kits are a rounding error to the other category?
That “rounding error” can be seen in a different light, it’s an area of the market that is making significant progress YoY.
This isn’t a play for the next year, it’s seeing the YoY growth of this vertical within their market and wanting to capitalize on that.
The world is and has been moving towards “easier” and services that provide immediate gratification. In-store meal kits are right in that category.
People don’t want to buy homes, cars or big ticket items anymore, there’s a culture of “leasing” because of the inconvenience that goes along with the maintenance/upkeep of those items. In a similar vein, lots of people view cooking “healthy” meals to be difficult (it’s not) but are willing to spend a little more to get a simple meal to cook that is either healthy or gives the illusion of being so.
$200M is dirt cheap to acquire the talent, and all of the existing processes of the company.
Add in the scale of someone like Kroger, and the price per unit they can acquire is going to be vastly cheaper then someone like Blue Apron or the various other meal kit startups.
You end up placing these in their stores on endcaps and other areas where it’s only a bit more per person to buy a meal kit that’s marketed as “healthy” and they’re going to fly off the shelf.
This is one acquisition that makes a ton of sense to me, and Kroger likely sees In-Store meal kits as continuing to grow tremendously YoY.
That's the perspective of a very specific demographic. And even in SV, there seems to be no shortage of people wanting to buy houses and any shortage of cars on the road.
That said, there is a trend towards convenience which is one reason you see so much food that's been pre-prepped to various degrees (for a premium) in supermarkets. Adding full meal kits seems a very logical extension to that trend.
Constant "10/10$" or "ALWAYS LOW PRICE $2.49" on items that are cheaper at Costco, Walmart, and Aldi.
As a note, Walmart won or was on par with Aldi. Aldi had a very limited selection despite having decent prices. Costco isnt worth shopping at for food item with few exceptions(canned food, which isnt very optimal in general).
Anyway, my point is, I dont really trust Kroger. They overcharge for items and claim its cheap. They even have an 'organic' section of the store, which makes me think is all marketing.
If anyone wants the link to the study, lmk, I avoid posting my link unless its relevant and wanted.
Also, they seem to lack basic conveniences in stores that others have. One example is hand baskets. They do not place any around the store in case shoppers need to use one. Only at the front.
Thanks for the request because I noticed it wasnt on my /food/ page.
I'm all about quality and price, quality for food seems pretty similar, price is easily measurable.
I cant speak for paper products, when I did that study it was walmart disposables only.
I dont really trust the company anymore.
If you have been in a kroger, you know what I mean.
Yellow stickers everywhere.
Since we alternate between QFC and Fred Meyer, I have noticed that Fred Meyer doesn't have yellow stickers everywhere, and generally scanning my loyalty card doesn't reduce any prices, just accumulates points. In a trip to QFC around the same time frame, I've definitely seen the same item listed at a higher standard price, and the loyalty card price will be on par with the Fred Meyer "standard" price.
The other thing they did with Kroger card was price discrimination. The regulations apparently were about the price of items rather than what people paid for them. These are technically two different things. The way that works is they learn that certain people will keep buying specific things. They use this data from their card profile to deny them coupons or other discounts while they give them to other people. They've got a lot of profiling tricks for adding or denying discounts. I'd say more consumers take a hit than benefit since there were previously coupons for all of them in the papers or what they mailed out. They're also mailing out fewer coupons with lower amounts, too, now that they've rolled out digital coupons tied to profile data from card.
So, many of the sales are fake. The line about what people would've saved versus Walmart is fake. Most of the coupons are for brand-name items that already overcharge you anyway. The good generics are cheaper much of the time. The gas discount and recall notices are about the best benefits of the Kroger card. The best coupons they gave me discount per order, department, etc letting me spend on whatever I wanted. Those could probably be delivered based on survey data without tracking.
Summary: the Kroger card is mostly a fraud designed to trick people into thinking they're getting discounts, give them coupons for more expensive stuff, give them less coupons that would make things cheaper, and otherwise make profit on surveillance of them. There's benefit but most selling points are layers of lies. This is why I prefer either no loyalty cards or them limited to stuff having nothing to do with pricing. Preferably by law to increase competitiveness and reduce risk to consumers.
So, a project from a reputable organization re-running the price studies and explaining the scam might be worthwhile. Consumer Reports may have already done something on it. They could be good outlet for next version with new data.
Murray's bake-at-home mac and cheese, only available at Kroger, sounds quite nice.
I've tried a half dozen of the meal kit providers and Home Chef is hands down the highest quality in terms of ingredients and also providing recipes that are fancy enough that you don't say "I could have just made this myself" like everyone says about Blue Apron. I order irregularly but my experience with Home Chef has been incredible.
I'm probably one of the few on HN who's tried Kroger's existing meal kits that have been piloted in a few stores around Cincinnati. They definitely target a different audience than the online meal kits, but being able to pick one up at the grocery store on a whim vs committing to buy + cook 3 kits in 1 week has been a game changer for me. I hope that they bring the Home Chef kits in store. Plus it's got to save a ton not having to ship the kits and not requiring the ice packs.