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Why Meal Kits Fell Out of Flavour

Home cooks once signed up in droves. Now they’re losing their appetite

Their promotional cards regularly inhabit my mailbox: up to twenty-one free meals, Chef’s Plate tells me. Seven free meals and more than eight hours saved, Factor proclaims—even Blue Jays infielder Ernie Clement endorses the product. So how are these meal kit companies doing? Not so well, as it turns out.

When the world shut down in 2020, millions of Canadians turned to their kitchens. Everyone, it seemed, was making bread, exchanging recipes, and cooking. Meal kits were primed for the new crop of pandemic-era home cooks. The already burgeoning industry offered the pleasures of cooking without the struggles of meal planning, food prep, and grocery shopping. It wasn’t long before large boxes of groceries, perfectly portioned and packaged into insulated boxes with reusable ice packs, began arriving with increasing frequency on the doorsteps of thousands of Canadians, alongside step-by-step recipe instructions. Nearly one in four Canadian households ordered a meal kit in 2020, market research firm NPD Group (now Circana) estimated. It was a scene playing out across the United States and beyond as well.

Almost as quickly, however, the meal kit bubble popped.

The recent collapse of Montreal-based Goodfood, one of the biggest meal kit companies in Canada, combined with a string of bad news from other businesses, accentuates the challenges of a sluggish market.

Goodfood began in a small Montreal apartment in 2014, the brainchild of two former investment bankers, Jonathan Ferrari and Neil Cuggy. The website’s feel-good origin story touted qualities that were supposed to set them apart—“exciting” recipes good enough for a foodie city like Montreal, industry-leading sustainable practices, and fresh local ingredients. It went public in 2017 and, by 2019, cornered some 40 to 45 percent of the meal kit market, according to the Montreal Gazette. In early 2021, near the tail end of COVID-19’s second deadly wave, 319,000 Canadians were active weekly subscribers (this includes accounts that skipped orders some weeks). Business was booming, even as the company operated at a loss.

But cracks began appearing, and by August 2025, Ferrari left. Cuggy followed in January 2026 and, in April, so did their head of finance. His replacement, along with the new chief executive officer, have since quit too. In June 2026, Goodfood had 48,000 active customers (described as a customer who has placed an order within the last three months), according to its 2026 third quarter results.

In August, Goodfood filed for—and was granted—creditor protection by a Quebec court as it looks toward restructuring and possibly even a sale. Once reportedly worth $1 billion with a share price of $13, it is now a penny stock with a market cap of just $3 million. It owes nearly $49.7........

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