Walking past a house with a large box on the stoop, your mouth starts to salivate. A meal kit waiting for its owner to make the evening dinner. They pick up the box before coming inside. No pizza delivery to call as soon as you get home.
Put the box on the kitchen counter. Get everything out. Do a bit of mild prep. No knifes or cutting boards. Get dinner started. Pour a glass of wine and you won't even need to use the wine in your dish.
You might have to wash the plates and silverware later; otherwise, you have worked very little to have a high quality meal after a hard day at work.
The food looks good. You don't have to worry about leftovers. The people in the ads look like they enjoy the food.
Meal kits were an ideal even before the COVID-19 pandemic started. The beauty of a home-cooked meal with the advantages of eating out without the disadvantages of eating out. Working from home during the pandemic meant you didn't have to go outside your stoop for a nice dinner that you didn't really have to cook.
Some restaurants got the brilliant idea to create meal kits for delivery so customers can have their food with the convenience of the meal kit.
Green Chef, Hello Fresh, Freshly, Blue Apron, Sun Basket, Home Chef, Dinnerly. So many of these and other choices. Why would anyone not choose to do a meal kit?
Before the pandemic, your humble narrator saw meal kits as a very niche market. Those with enough money, very busy lives, no desire to cook, and no interest in going to a grocery store. You can make plenty of $ off of people in this group.
The financial divide between the few "haves" and the many "have nots" can make meal kits seem elitist. Families who struggle to come up with meals that feed leftovers, who makes beans and rice because the food is filling and cheap might struggle with the idea of a large, expensive box designed not to create a second meal.
Let's throw out financial concerns aside. You've been cooking for yourself for like 400 days in a row. Why not have a box come to you and help you out for a night. A splurge to have someone else do the hard part.
All the ads I see involve a subscription basis. The idea of a 1-time shot isn't in their business model.
"12 free meals" sounds good even if you have to buy a lot of meals to get 12 for free.
If you are willing to give a meal kit a try say every Friday after a rough week, well, meal kits aren't for you short of a local restaurant doing something similar. This is not a casual transaction. Dive into the deep end or stay out of the pool.
An expensive, limited meal several times a week can be nirvana to those who qualify. If you don't qualify, you are out of luck, even if you are desperately interested.
That local restaurant will serve you a meal whether you come every Friday, 3 times a week, or once a month. Meal kits, not so much.
If you used meal kits to get you through the pandemic, you might wonder about cheaper alternatives now that going to the grocery store seems less scary.
The boxes all seem pretty much the same. None of them have as much gall as Tovala.
"We're Tovala, a meal service for insanely busy people. We've reinvented home cooking to save you time."
No chopping; no dishes; no hard stuff.
They have boxes. They also have a $299 oven to make making dinner so much easier. "Just scan the bar code, sit back and relax until dinner is ready."
You do need wifi (2.4 GHz) and a smart phone with their mobile app. The Tovala Smart Oven is $299, or $199 when you sign up to order 6 meal deliveries in your first 6 months of your oven purchase.
You must be insanely busy to need to add $200-$300 for a separate oven.
You can cook the meals in a regular oven but you are clearly too cool to do that.
Use your creativity to invent a new food during the pandemic
"Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you've fed him for a lifetime."
A meal kit is giving a man a fish. Learning how to cook is a valuable skill in a pandemic. Cooking teaches you about using different ingredients that you might want in another dish. You might learn to love anchovies or scallions and want to use them in a dish. A pre-cut amount of any ingredient doesn't allow you to experiment.
As we enter Year 2 of the COVID-19 pandemic, where cooking was supposed to be the skill to last, meal kits are more prevalent.
Meal kits can help when you have less time. Lives are less busy for a lot of people during the pandemic. When you have more time, cooking is exactly what you need.
A meal kit can be fun as an occasional treat. Just not ready for a steady relationship with the concept.
photo credits: Blue Apron; Hello Fresh; Tovala
