It’s been a rough year so far for the meal-kit delivery industry.

After seeing a brief surge in demand during the pandemic as customers sought convenient, home-cooked meals amid lockdowns, some of the biggest players and pioneers in the sector are struggling financially. Blue Apron, the New York City-headquartered meal-kit company (and seemingly perpetual podcast sponsor), reported a net loss of over $109 million for 2022; a year later, the company sold itself to Wonder Group for $103 million after selling its operational infrastructure to California-based meal provider FreshRealm for $50 million and laying off significant swaths of its workforce, as CNBC reported.

Market analysts are also increasingly negative about the financial outlook of HelloFresh. In March, the German company’s shares plunged 42% after it warned its earnings for 2024 and 2025 would fall below expectations, citing a "very different operating environment” than anticipated. The environment is certainly different than when meal-kits first took off in the United States in the mid-2010s. For one, it’s significantly more crowded.

In 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported there were 3823 meal-kit delivery companies operating on both a local and national scale in the United States. In 2013, there were 13.

While it's tempting to attribute the financial struggles of the meal-kit industry's stalwarts solely to the plethora of alternatives available, the true cause is simultaneously both more straightforward and more multifaceted: Meal-kits fail because they are boring.

Related

While Reddit posts about big-brand companies can often quickly become an echo chamber of anonymous complaints, some of the more specific subreddits also serve as an interesting microcosm of consumer behavior. Take for instance, r/MealKits, a 22,000-member online community for people to “discuss and compare all meal kit services, from Blue Apron to Plated to Marley Spoon to GreenChef and more.”

The posts vary. On the homepage today is a picture of the Home Chef shrimp campanelle primavera someone made last night, a question about what meal kits are “reliable,” a few people griping about the amount of calories in Factor meals and a complaint........

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