Offering anything from family favourites such as spaghetti bolognese to tofu tagines and Japanese rice bowls, meal kits have enjoyed a sales surge during UK lockdown as wannabe chefs embrace the convenience of recipes and pre-measured ingredients delivered to their door.
The subscription-based schemes have helped people struggling for mealtime inspiration when the enforced closure of restaurants and pubs left them trying to rustle up meals from scratch at home.
The tailor-made products are marketed as a convenient, healthy alternative for time-poor professionals and working parents and even before lockdown, recipe kits from the UK’s three biggest suppliers – HelloFresh, Gousto and Mindful Chef – more than doubled their sales last year.
HelloFresh, the first such service to launch in the UK – it’s now the largest in the world, operating in 12 countries – delivers about 6 million meals a month. It had already reported a strong increase in the first two months of this year, pre-Covid, compared with 2019.
“Once the pandemic hit, we saw a surge in demand: weekly customer orders more than doubled, and we quickly scaled up our operations,” says a spokeswoman. “This was challenging, especially in the first few weeks, but we were able to control this quickly.We also expanded our product offering by increasing the number of weekly recipes to more than 30, giving vegetarian customers more choice.”
Since March, she adds, customers have been ordering more meals per delivery – many with servings for three or more people – as well as add-ons such as desserts. To cope with demand, the company is opening a second production facility in Nuneaton, creating new jobs and doubling current capacity.
Mindful Chef, launched in 2015, says it has supplied more than 2 million meals since the start of 2020, and saw demand during lockdown rise 452%.
Chief executive Tim Lee said the service had attracted custom from people who had never shopped online for food before, while as demand soared the company was able to quickly scale up because it does not rely on automation. “We cut a couple of our recipes, so instead of 16 a week we did 14, but otherwise we carried on. We even introduced a 24-hour lead time care box for people who wanted to send one to their loved ones.” A survey of its users found the top reason for signing up during lockdown was to improve health.
Of the other major players Gousto, launched in 2012, is now selling 5 million meals a month and sold more in the first six months of this year than in the whole of last year. It says lockdown has attracted new customers to the service, and that existing customers are buying more meals. It is planning to hire 1,000 new staff by 2022 – mainly in technology roles – to help meet the extra demand.
In June it announced a high-profile partnership with influencer and self-styled “PE teacher to the nation” Joe Wicks – who is also an investor in the company – to develop a range of recipes using lean proteins and up to four of the recommended five daily portions of fruit and veg.
Smaller-scale alternatives include organic veg box company Riverford, which has reported a 26% rise in sales of its recipe bags and boxes since the outbreak of Covid-19.
• This article was originally published on 15 August 2020, erroneously appended to a separate article about food delivery services.
