Food Manufactures find success with Meal Kit’s

The grocerant niche continues to garner momentum making it the fastest growing sector of retail foodservice. Restaurants, C-stores, Grocery Stores, and Drug Stores are now all selling ready-2-eat and heat-N-eat food.  Legacy food manufactures have found success in all the same avenues of distribution and in the Dollar store channel as well. We have pontificated since 1991 that consumer prefer to assemble meals rather than making their meals from scratch.  In fact today consumer utilizing meal kit’s say they cook from scratch.

Here are some Meal Kit examples:

Kraft's Velveeta Skillets, a deluxe version of mac-n-cheese in a box with flavors such as Chicken Alfredo and Lasagna. Kraft Sizzling Salads dinner kits are not exactly your mother's "made from scratch" recipes.

Kraft directs consumers “to heat up some chicken with the marinade and toss a salad with the dressing”. Fear not Kraft provides extensive cooking tutorials online.

Kraft  provides a “video for the Chicken Caesar meal kit, a woman demonstrates how to squeeze the marinade over four chicken breasts in a frying pan. She then guides viewers through the steps of adding croutons and shredded cheese into a bowl of chopped lettuce. The finishing touch? Squirting in some Kraft dressing.”

General Mills  as a line of "Progresso Recipe Starters," which are pre-made sauces in flavors such as "Fire-Roasted Tomato" and "Creamy Portabella Mushroom" that can be a base for a variety of dishes.

Progresso's “sauces involve a little more work. For example, let's say you want beef stroganoff. All you need is two pounds of boneless beef sirloin, an onion, garlic, Worcestershire sauce and a can of Progresso's Recipe Starters in Creamy Portabella Mushroom flavor. The dish takes 35 minutes from start to finish, according to the recipe on the can’.

Campbell Soup has "Skillet Sauces" that can be mixed with fresh meat and veggies. Total prep time: 15 minutes.

Land O' Lakes has "Saute Starters," cubes of butter that contain olive oil and are packed with the right mix of spices to make a dish, coming in flavors such as Italian Herb and Lemon Pepper.”

Does your restaurant sell meal components To-Go?  C-stores and grocery stores now have hot ready-2-eat proprietary soups available daily. If success leaves clues sell meal components that can be bundled into a customized home cooked meal is one of them.

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