Episode 65 - Meal Kit Services

What is a Meal Kit?

Meal kit delivery companies offer a service of pre-portioned ingredients delivered to your home with recipe cards. You create the meal yourself, but you’re sent exactly the right amount of items with nothing leftover. They can be a convenient way to get a home cooked meal, without the grocery shopping or mental work of coming up with a menu on your own.

The first meal kits were started in Sweden in 2007 and 2008, Middagsfrid or Linas Matkasse. It took off more globally in 2012 when Blue Apron, HelloFresh and Plated opened in the same year. Plated was recently bought out and shut down, but the others are still going strong.

As of July 2017, meal kits were estimated to be worth just under 1% of the global food market. The customer base is skewed young, urban, and male by a slight percentage, and the services have a retention problem, with most folks signing up for the free meals and then quitting when the full prices kick in.

There’s even a Martha Stewart meal kit now, probably aiming to reel in the baby boomer crowd, which so far haven’t really got on board with the meal kit services. They offer same day delivery for some cities, which means the whole thing costs more but could draw in the hardcore Amazon shoppers who are used to that sweet, sweet instant gratification.

Kyla’s opinion was that the most valuable thing about the meal kits is all the cool ways she learned to combine ingredients; “In a year I’ve become a better cook faster than I have in the last 10 years combined.” They’re ethical because they teach, and teaching has intrinsic value. But how does it stack up against Pullback’s usual metrics?

What Did Kyla Try?

There are not many options for Canada-wide delivery – most of the country is serviced by city-based or maybe provincial businesses. Here are Kyla’s notes on the 4 companies she tried:

Chefs Plate (part of Hello Fresh) - Vegan options mostly non-existent. Tons of packaging used.
Goodfood - Vegan options mostly non-existent. Tons of packaging used.
Hello Fresh - Slightly more vegan options. Say they source locally within Canada whenever possible, but when following the link to look at their suppliers, leads to a 404 page.
Fresh Prep - BC delivery only but talks of expanding to Alberta. Offers a zero waste kit! Vegan options every week with their own menu option. A+

Meal Kits vs Prepping at Home

The University of Michigan published a study comparing the environmental impacts of meal kits and making meals from grocery store items. They considered the entire lifecycle of the meals, from the production of the ingredients, to the packaging, transportation, and supply chain losses, to home waste. The general findings were:
Grocery meal greenhouse gas emissions are 33% higher than meal kits, which in theory have less food waste and lower last-mile transportation emissions, as long as the meals aren’t wasted.

So is food waste worse than packaging? Yup! When the amount of food waste is as high as it is in the USA: The USDA estimates that 31% of food produced in the U.S. is wasted. 10% at the retail level and 21% at the consumer level.

Shelie Miller, the senior author of the study, says:
“Even though it may seem like that pile of cardboard generated from a Blue Apron or Hello Fresh subscription is incredibly bad for the environment, that extra chicken breast bought from the grocery store that gets freezer-burned and finally gets thrown out is much worse, because of all the energy and materials that had to go into producing that chicken breast in the first place.”
The article from the University of Michigan goes on to say:
By skipping brick-and-mortar retailing altogether, the direct-to-consumer meal kit model avoids the food losses that commonly occur in grocery stores, resulting in large emissions savings. For example, grocery stores overstock food items due to the difficulty in predicting customer demand, and they remove blemished or unappealing foods that may not appeal to shoppers.
Meal kits also displayed emissions savings in what’s called last-mile transportation—the final leg of the journey that gets food into the consumer’s home.
Meal kits rely on delivery trucks. Since each meal kit is just one of many packages delivered on a truck route, it is associated with a small fraction of the total vehicle emissions. Grocery store meals, in contrast, typically require a personal vehicle trip to the store and back.
… last-mile emissions accounted for 11 percent of the average grocery meal emissions compared to 4 percent for meal kit dinners.

All that said, even if the emissions are lower it’s hard to justify the waste caused not only by the single use packaging all the ingredients come wrapped in, but also freezer packs. Blue Apron sends over 8 million meals a month, each with between 1 and 3 heavy freezer packs full of weird goo. This doesn’t line up with the brand images these companies are trying to build of being more environmentally friendly.

I’ve tried storing them and flushing them, as directed by the companies, and neither is a real option. In some places the soft plastic outer shell is recyclable, but first the goo inside must be disposed of and a facility must be found where the soft plastics can be taken. That’s a lot of extra work placed on a consumer looking for a convenient dinnertime solution.

The goo is made of sodium polyacrylate, which is used in products like diapers, sanitary napkins, wound dressings, artificial snow, growing toys, and fire retardant gel. It’s marketed as non-toxic, but that doesn’t make it good for the planet; it’s not biodegradable and it can be terrible for for the workers manufacturing it in it’s powdery state, when it can get into lungs and cause illnesses. There are greener options, including collecting the current freezer bags and reusing them.
“A little creative thinking might go a long way – yet none of the companies that I talked to said they had any specific plans to change the freezer-pack system. And when you think about it, why should they fix the problem? …the current arrangement suits the meal-kit providers just fine. “it’s taxpayers that are paying for these old freezer packs to sit in the landfill forever…. Companies are getting a total freebie.””

What About the Workers

Hello Fresh (and Chefs Plate) and Good Food make no mention anywhere on their site of obtaining their food from certified farms or places that ensure workers rights. They do say they get most of their ingredients from Canada whenever possible, but that’s a vague statement that doesn’t necessarily mean workers rights are being met. Good Food says they source meat and fish from eco-responsible sources, which, again, is a meaningless statement without sharing a supplier list or certifications. Pullback demands receipts!

In 2016 Buzzfeed broke a story about Blue Apron scaling up so quickly in Richmond California from 2013 to 2016 that it resulted in health and safety violations, stressed workers threatening their bosses, and sexual assault. Blue Apron had to hire a huge workforce extremely quickly, and they were not prepared to look after their employees.
…between farm and front door is the massive, mostly invisible process by which all those ingredients are measured, cut, prepped, bagged, packed, palletized, and shipped. For all its outward simplicity, Blue Apron’s business model is predicated on a hugely complicated feat of precision logistics, executed at an enormous volume. Each week, the company has to develop 10 original, relatively healthy, widely appealing, geographically and seasonally appropriate recipes that can be prepared easily and quickly, with ingredients that are affordable and available at scale. It has to source correct quantities of produce, meat, cheese, bread, spices, and staples from “artisanal purveyors and hundreds of family-run farms” across the country. And then it has to precisely portion and package each of those ingredients — 10 to 12 per meal in this week’s boxes — and send them out to hundreds of thousands of people, ideally without breakage, spoiling, lost packages, or missing ingredients. While the USDA estimates that 10% of food produced in the US is wasted at the retail level, Blue Apron aims to waste just 3% of the food it purchases.

A day after this episode was recorded news broke that at two Californian Hello Fresh factories workers announced plans to unionize. If the vote passes this will be the first union in the meal kit industry. Over 1300 of Hello Fresh's 6000 employees would be represented.
A petition from workers said that "while HelloFresh Profited from the pandemic, employees faced disrespect, a covid-19 outbreak, and preventable injuries."
Last year at least 171 workers tested positive for COVID at the facility in Richmond. The petition goes on to say "we know what happens when thousands of new jobs are created in new industries overnight with little regard to the dignity or the safety of work. Today's meal kit factory kitchens are yesterdays garment factories."
Workers told Vice that the pressure to maintain production in the face of explosive growth has been detrimental to their wellbeing. Kristen made a joke about peeing in jars, and unfortunately it's not too far off. Workers at HelloFresh have said they are discouraged from taking water breaks and are timed for bathroom breaks.
Anti-union consultants have already visited these facilities to hold mandatory anti-union meetings.

Conclusion

Meal kits could be better, but as a service for folks who are tight on time or creativity, and who always eat the whole meal (sometimes tough when there’s a minimum buy) they can be a service that improves quality of life. But ultimately, the best thing a shopper can do is walk or take transit to the grocery store or grab everything for the week in one big shop, then make it at home without wasting any leftovers or ingredients.
This is hard for Kyla; parsley never gets fully used.

Meal kits are better if you:
Find yourself throwing away food that’s gone bad
Often drive to the grocery store
Buy a lot of pre-packaged food anyway
Are time poor (saves time on meal prep, grocery shopping, clean up)

If you want to use meal kits but are uncomfortable with all the packaging being wasted, tell your favourite companies you want to see a zero waste kit! And ask for vegan options for good measure ;)