Meal Kits Vs Combo Meals

Meal kits are training wheels for Millennials.  Meal Kits are garnering lots of attention within the grocery sector and excitement for investors of Online meal kit companies the ilk of Hello Fresh, Plated, and Blue Apron but fast food combo meals continue to fined favor with families according to Foodservice Solutions® Grocerant Guru®.

Recent predictions that the meal-kit service segment of the foodservice market will grow to between $3 billion-$5 billion over the next 10 years based on current adoption rates. Since meal kit startups Blue Apron and Plated launched in 2012, they have raised $58 million and $21.6 million, respectively; the Wall Street Journal recently reported that Blue Apron is in talks to raise a huge new round from investors that would value the company at $2 billion. 

HelloFresh, a European meal-kit company founded in 2011 and backed by notoriously competitive startup copycat Rocket Internet, just closed $126 million in Series E funding with the goal of making incursions in the U.S. market. Blue Apron delivers more than two million meals a month, and HelloFresh claims it's already doing twice that volume. The companies are grocery store pantry busters not restaurant slayers. 

NPD recently reported that “Over the last six months, the most popular QSRs have introduced new, value-oriented combo deals that give consumers the choice they are looking for. Wendy’s 4 for $4 Meal; McDonald’s McPick 2 for $2 offering, which then changed to 2 for $5 with a different product offering; and Burger King's 5 for $4 deal are a few examples.  The results will show price is a key driver of restaurant sales success. 

In fact, combo meal visits rose by 1 percent at QSRs for the year ending February 2016 vs. the year-ago period. NPD reported that this entire increase was driven by the combo meal deals. “Combo meals purchased on a deal at lunch and dinner rose from a rate of 6 percent in the year ending February 2015 to 8 percent in the year ending February 2016. This increase resulted in an additional 110 million combo meal deal orders, or a total of 686 million combo meal deal orders. All three major hamburger chains — Burger King, McDonald’s and Wendy’s — collectively were responsible for the order increases through combo meal deals.”

Success does leave clues and while sales of meal kits continue to rise, fast food restaurant combo meals are less expensive, require no cooking, no clean-up, and have not lost favor with consumers.  Since 1991 www.FoodserviceSolutions.us   of Tacoma WA has been the global leader in the Grocerant niche visit Facebook.com/Steven Johnson, Linkedin.com/in/grocerant or twitter.com/grocerant or Contact our Grocerant Guru® at: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us