Fresh, Fast, Food for Dinner at Six Only $5

There is a new ‘‘pantry’ buster targeting the grocery sector.  This week the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS), working with the Project on Nutrition & Wellness (PNW) to develop ‘better for you’ family dinner kits announced launch of a pilot project that if successful was developed to be a scalable, sustainable, solution that they can roll out across the country. 

This pilot test for new dinner kit that allows time-starved customers to quickly prepare nourishing family meals in less than 30 minutes was launched last week at a Square One Markets convenience store in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. 

The all-in-one kits provide ‘better for you’ healthy options to consumers and eliminate three significant downsides to many popular meal-delivery kits: cost, packaging waste and the need to plan a day or more in advance to order them.

Square One Markets is selling The Six O’Clock Scramble Fresh & Fast Family Dinner Kits™, developed by The Six O’Clock Scramble.  The dinner kits provide all-in-one meal ingredients and recipe cards that contain everything time-stressed families need to prepare a fast, fresh meal.

The Meal Kits are priced around $20 and are designed to feed a family of four. At $5 per person, the dinner kits are less than half the price of meal-delivery services and without the packaging waste and carbon footprint from shipping.  The kits also will feature some locally grown and produced ingredients from the Bethlehem area.

 Jeff Lenard, vice president of strategic industry initiatives for the National Association of Convenience Stores stated; “The evening hours are when families stress about dinner preparation plans. This evening rush is also the most popular time to buy gasoline. This is a great way to combine two trips into one,” said Convenience stores sell an estimated 80% of the gasoline purchased in the United States, an estimated 32 million fill-ups every day.”

Square One Markets will offer the dinner meal solutions for the next 10 weeks as part of the pilot test. A new meal will be offered each week to customers and the groups will survey customers to determine which meals worked best and why.

Aviva Goldfarb, CEO of The Six O’Clock Scramble stated; “As more families have two working parents and busy schedules, it can be a challenge to plan for healthy meals, let alone make an extra stop to purchase the ingredients. The Six O’Clock Scramble Fresh & Fast Dinner Kits™ provide a convenient and affordable solution for busy families, and gets them on their way quickly to a healthy family meal,” 

Consumer driven, demand for meal kits is there. More than three in four consumers (77%) say that they would be interested in purchasing an all-in-one meal kit from a store. Convenience store customers are especially receptive: 85% of weekly convenience store customers would purchase a dinner meal kit, according to the NACS survey results.

Retail sectors are either growing or dying according to our own Grocerant Guru™ and the Convenience Store sector in doing great.  With strong industry leadership from NACS this Meal Kit program is another example of how the C-store sector has become a ‘‘pantry’ buster targeting the grocery sector.  

www.FoodserviceSolutions.us  specializes in outsourced business development. We can help you identify, quantify and qualify additional food retail segment opportunities or a brand leveraging integration strategy.  Foodservice Solutions® of Tacoma WA is the global leader in the Grocerant niche visit, Linkedin.com/in/grocerant or twitter.com/grocerant Contact Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us