A Few (More) Remarks on Meal Kits
May. 19th, 2018 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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I have been doing meal kits for a few weeks now, and talking to others about them (whether they have tried them themselves, or are just mentally exploring the space). Here are my current thoughts on what meal kits do well, and how they fit into a longer context of efforts to automate / labor reduce / make more efficient the basic task of feeding a household.
Here are some other examples of outsourcing / automating / labor reducing / making more efficient the task of feeing a household: restaurants (eat in); takeout and/or delivery of prepared meals, including frozen foods and prepared foods in a grocery store, fast food, pizza, takeout from sit down restaurants, etc.; in-home cooks (old skool “cook”, late 1990s “Personal Chef” — so there part of most days or once every few days cooking many meals and leaving them ready for reheating / plating); community kitchen / meal prep services OUT of the home (Dream Dinners). And now meal kits.
Meal Kits reduce the cognitive load of feeding a family, while preserving choice and a substantial amount of customization. First, the apps / websites supply a number of meals that can be chosen among (thus allowing choice and customization — avoiding allergens, disliked foods, meeting other dietary constraints such as sodium, etc.). This is constrained, versus looking at NYT What to Cook This Week or opening a cookbook or looking at AllRecipes etc. Constrained choices have less load. The meals are chosen _as meals_ to hit a certain calorie range, and include a certain proportion of macronutrients (you can choose which range, i.e. low carb). This reduces the load versus assembling a group of dishes. The instructions interleave the steps for the full meal, rather than for each dish, and are constructed to ensure that the entire meal hits the plate at an optimum point for each component and at the same time on the clock. Meal kits allow a wide separation between planning the meal and preparing the meal, so you don’t have to do it all at once.
Meal kits allow you to _not_ go to the store. This could be helpful in a “food desert” (if you can get it delivered there — I have no idea if you can), or if you will be arriving at a time when the local stores are not open but would like to start cooking before they are open (the box of food is insulated and chilled, so as long as it isn’t a theft or pilferage risk it can sit a while until you get to it). It also supports people who are “socialed out” and can’t cope with the personal interaction of shopping, who are agoraphobic, who cannot drive, etc. This is also a substantial time saver.
Meal kits do portion control. In addition to helping someone manage weight / health issues, this reduces the need to manage leftovers.
Meal kits provide small amounts of specialized foods (spices, unusual vegetables, etc.). This allows you to try with low commitment something that you haven’t had before and are not sure if you will like. It also means you can have something occasionally, without worrying about whether you will use up a container before it goes bad.
Some meal kits offer seasonality (ingredients that are close to optimal harvest time), benefiting the maker by reducing cost of ingredients and the customer by hitting peak flavor. Figuring out what is seasonal and meal planning around it is even more cognitive load.
Meal kits do repeat dishes, but often with modifications (a switch in protein, or the contents of a salad, or spicing, or the sauce, etc.); they provide novelty.
Meal kits help to teach new cooks how to cook — right down to telling you to cut something in half lengthwise, and then crosswise in a certain width. You are warned to thoroughly rinse things like bok choy which tend to trap sand and dirt. They also make it so cooks of varying skill levels can share the task of cooking, without requiring the more skilled cook to explain every damn thing. The pictures and bolding of ingredients in the interleaved instructions helps avoid common errors, and supports cooks who are more visual learners than people who do best with words.
Meal kits control the total time commitment. With extremely rare exceptions total time from pulling the kit out of the fridge, to closing the dishwasher and starting it, including eating the meal and having a beverage with it is generally at or under 1 hour.
Meal kits are an improvement over frozen foods, delivered foods and takeout foods, in terms of customizability. Meal kits are an improvement over a Personal Chef in terms of cost of paid labor. Meal kits are an improvement over community kitchens, in terms of being able to stay at home / avoid leaving the house. Meal kits justify their added expense (and packaging and other negatives) by providing lasting benefits in the form of improved knowledge of cooking techniques and ingredients versus a typical American eater. The portion control and balance of macronutrients is generally better than inexpensive delivered prepared foods and takeout.
Meal kits justify their incremental cost over planning and cooking food one buys on one’s own at the supermarket by emphasizing that meal kits will divert one from eating out, through a combination of sunk cost (I already bought this, I should eat it) and appeal (this is way better than takeout). The general idea is that, left to our own devices, we’ll probably decide to eat out some nights each week, rather than eat the food in our own fridge. But we probably will do that a lot less or not at all, if the fridge contains meal kits.
I’m not sure exactly how to relate meal kits to services which let you select recipes and then produce a shopping list with instacart (walmart, amazon, etc.) integration services.
I have been doing meal kits for a few weeks now, and talking to others about them (whether they have tried them themselves, or are just mentally exploring the space). Here are my current thoughts on what meal kits do well, and how they fit into a longer context of efforts to automate / labor reduce / make more efficient the basic task of feeding a household.
Here are some other examples of outsourcing / automating / labor reducing / making more efficient the task of feeing a household: restaurants (eat in); takeout and/or delivery of prepared meals, including frozen foods and prepared foods in a grocery store, fast food, pizza, takeout from sit down restaurants, etc.; in-home cooks (old skool “cook”, late 1990s “Personal Chef” — so there part of most days or once every few days cooking many meals and leaving them ready for reheating / plating); community kitchen / meal prep services OUT of the home (Dream Dinners). And now meal kits.
Meal Kits reduce the cognitive load of feeding a family, while preserving choice and a substantial amount of customization. First, the apps / websites supply a number of meals that can be chosen among (thus allowing choice and customization — avoiding allergens, disliked foods, meeting other dietary constraints such as sodium, etc.). This is constrained, versus looking at NYT What to Cook This Week or opening a cookbook or looking at AllRecipes etc. Constrained choices have less load. The meals are chosen _as meals_ to hit a certain calorie range, and include a certain proportion of macronutrients (you can choose which range, i.e. low carb). This reduces the load versus assembling a group of dishes. The instructions interleave the steps for the full meal, rather than for each dish, and are constructed to ensure that the entire meal hits the plate at an optimum point for each component and at the same time on the clock. Meal kits allow a wide separation between planning the meal and preparing the meal, so you don’t have to do it all at once.
Meal kits allow you to _not_ go to the store. This could be helpful in a “food desert” (if you can get it delivered there — I have no idea if you can), or if you will be arriving at a time when the local stores are not open but would like to start cooking before they are open (the box of food is insulated and chilled, so as long as it isn’t a theft or pilferage risk it can sit a while until you get to it). It also supports people who are “socialed out” and can’t cope with the personal interaction of shopping, who are agoraphobic, who cannot drive, etc. This is also a substantial time saver.
Meal kits do portion control. In addition to helping someone manage weight / health issues, this reduces the need to manage leftovers.
Meal kits provide small amounts of specialized foods (spices, unusual vegetables, etc.). This allows you to try with low commitment something that you haven’t had before and are not sure if you will like. It also means you can have something occasionally, without worrying about whether you will use up a container before it goes bad.
Some meal kits offer seasonality (ingredients that are close to optimal harvest time), benefiting the maker by reducing cost of ingredients and the customer by hitting peak flavor. Figuring out what is seasonal and meal planning around it is even more cognitive load.
Meal kits do repeat dishes, but often with modifications (a switch in protein, or the contents of a salad, or spicing, or the sauce, etc.); they provide novelty.
Meal kits help to teach new cooks how to cook — right down to telling you to cut something in half lengthwise, and then crosswise in a certain width. You are warned to thoroughly rinse things like bok choy which tend to trap sand and dirt. They also make it so cooks of varying skill levels can share the task of cooking, without requiring the more skilled cook to explain every damn thing. The pictures and bolding of ingredients in the interleaved instructions helps avoid common errors, and supports cooks who are more visual learners than people who do best with words.
Meal kits control the total time commitment. With extremely rare exceptions total time from pulling the kit out of the fridge, to closing the dishwasher and starting it, including eating the meal and having a beverage with it is generally at or under 1 hour.
Meal kits are an improvement over frozen foods, delivered foods and takeout foods, in terms of customizability. Meal kits are an improvement over a Personal Chef in terms of cost of paid labor. Meal kits are an improvement over community kitchens, in terms of being able to stay at home / avoid leaving the house. Meal kits justify their added expense (and packaging and other negatives) by providing lasting benefits in the form of improved knowledge of cooking techniques and ingredients versus a typical American eater. The portion control and balance of macronutrients is generally better than inexpensive delivered prepared foods and takeout.
Meal kits justify their incremental cost over planning and cooking food one buys on one’s own at the supermarket by emphasizing that meal kits will divert one from eating out, through a combination of sunk cost (I already bought this, I should eat it) and appeal (this is way better than takeout). The general idea is that, left to our own devices, we’ll probably decide to eat out some nights each week, rather than eat the food in our own fridge. But we probably will do that a lot less or not at all, if the fridge contains meal kits.
I’m not sure exactly how to relate meal kits to services which let you select recipes and then produce a shopping list with instacart (walmart, amazon, etc.) integration services.