Kroger Meal Kits – Here’s What You Can Get (2024)

Click for Best Price

To be your own home chef by cooking with meal kits was a practice that had plummeted during 2019 and early 2020 – something that drastically changed with the pandemic. Closed restaurants and people working from home meant a surge in Home Chef lunch kits as well as similar meal solutions. But was the spark in cooking interest only a fluke?

"Our [in-store] kits are more of a browsable experience," said Rich DeNardis, Home Chef's chief revenue officer. "We’re certainly still in the early days of introducing the brand to Kroger households. And so building that nice cycle of introducing folks to the brand as they’re walking through the store … that’s obviously been slowed a little with trips being down."

In 2019, the year following the Kroger acquisition of Home Chef, the company added ready-made meals to their line of meal kits, the so-called Heat & Eat meals. These fully cooked meals are ready to be heated and can be prepared in as little as five minutes!

This in addition to their Oven-Ready Meals that require only 5 minutes of prep work and can then be put together in the oven. The other options are the lunch kits. These feature salads, grain bowls, and sandwiches, along with options with fully cooked protein.

Read about Kroger's Home Chef Meals now using Impossible meat by clicking here!

The challenge for meal kits expanding from home delivery to the shelves in grocery stores is to get people buying. There's a lot of competition from purely ready-made meals – something that's in high demand. Was that the reason why Home Chef added prepped meals to their line of meal kits?

Besides, one of the points of signing up for a meal kit subscription is the home delivery and possibility of skipping the grocery store queues. Will people be ready to buy when they might as well fetch the ingredients on the shelves around them at a lower price? Time will tell.

There's also the infamous subscription problem: people sign up and stay for a few months to then leave the service. Since having retainer clients is desirable for all businesses, the constant chase for new clients is a challenge that meal kit delivery companies face today. Perhaps their appearance in stores more than anything will serve as good PR that has retail clients discovering the convenience of meal kits over cooking from scratch.