Everything but the Cook
Evan Sung for The New York Times
Nick Taranto thinks you should cook your own dinner tonight. He even thinks you might pay him for the privilege.
At 28, Mr. Taranto already has a double-Ivy education (Dartmouth, Harvard) and served in the Marines; he was a microfinancier in Indonesia and a private wealth adviser on Wall Street.
Now his professional focus is on perfecting recipes for maple-glazed salmon and Mexican lasagna — and on how his new e-commerce business, Plated, will buy, measure, cut, chill, box and ship every ingredient to your door. All the home cook has to do, in theory, is click on “order,” open a box and follow a recipe.
This ready-to-cook meal is called the dinner kit. And Plated — along with a host of similar new services, including Blue Apron, Chefday! and HelloFresh — is the latest in a stream of technological innovations and corporate interventions, from the cake mix to the cookbook app, that have long promised to relieve Americans of kitchen drudgery while retaining the flavor and cachet of home cooking.
“When we started jobs in New York, we realized that cooking dinner is really, really hard,” Mr. Taranto said of himself and his business partner, Josh Hix, 31. (They often cooked together in graduate school.) “There’s not enough time in modern lives to recipe-select or grocery-shop.”
Home-delivered food, of course, is not news, and neither is online shopping. Over the last decade, services like Peapod and FreshDirect have accustomed millions of consumers to buying fresh ingredients online, while frozen-dinner delivery businesses like Schwan’s have sold them on fully prepared meals.
But the dinner kit aims for a sweet spot somewhere between the bunch of asparagus and the finished asparagus-stuffed salmon. And it addresses some paradoxes peculiar to today’s home kitchens: while Americans, fed a steady diet of TV cooking shows and nutritional news, care increasingly about what they eat, many feel too harried to hunt down new recipes and make dinner from scratch. Yet they remain unwilling to live on takeout and heat-and-eat meals alone.
John Leeman, the director of marketing for FreshDirect, the New York-based company that has become the nation’s largest all-online grocery, said his company’s research shows that while prepared, or “turnkey,” meals are a cornerstone of its business, customers feel uneasy if they do not cook often enough.
“Heating food up night after night is not what a mom does,” Mr. Leeman said one regular customer told him. “ ‘That’s no better than taking them to McDonald’s.’ ”
In response, last month FreshDirect introduced a line of dinner kits that demand some cooking: chicken breasts premarinated in yogurt, but not cooked, delivered along with pattypan squash and zucchini already cut and peeled, ready for the oven.
Ordering a kit isn’t as thrifty as cooking from scratch; the meals cost $7 to about $17.50 a serving, more than it would cost to buy the raw ingredients at FreshDirect or Whole Foods. But a precooked version of a similar dish from Schwan’s would also cost about $6 a serving; from Boston Market, about $8.50.
The companies say the kits can save money by reducing food waste, since all ingredients are used up; there is no need, say, to buy a jar of curry powder when only half a teaspoon is called for. And, they say, given the quality of the ingredients and inventiveness of the recipes, the proper price comparison to make is with a restaurant meal — at the kind of restaurant that their target audience prefers: sophisticated, with a global, seasonal or local spin.
The dinner-kit business model — online ordering, overnight shipping, premium ingredients and weekly recipes — has already proved successful abroad. The first service, Middagsfrid, started in Sweden in 2007, and the concept was quickly replicated elsewhere in Europe.
So far, it has been a niche enterprise for young urbanites, but that niche is clearly growing, with copycats around the globe. HelloFresh, owned by the German e-commerce giant Rocket Internet, delivers more than 10,000 boxes a week in Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Australia, and has expanded its reach in the United States from Maine to Florida. (Dinner kits are now available mainly along the East Coast; HelloFresh distributes as far west as Wisconsin, and the company has plans to go national.)
In this country, there have been few new models for e-commerce in fresh food since online grocery shopping became popular. Perishable ingredients, unlike boots and best sellers, remain bound to brick-and-mortar markets. “Food is one of the last pieces of daily life that is still analog,” said Mr. Hix, of Plated. “We want to bring it into the digital space.”
All the dinner-kit companies provide essentially the same service: easy-interface Web sites with fresh graphics and pretty pictures of food, where cooks can choose from an ever-changing roster of recipes for a quick weeknight dinner. (Some allow ordering by the individual meal, others by subscription only.) Ingredients are shipped fresh, not frozen, insulated in a trove of packing and cooling materials.
The box — or bag, or crate — includes a recipe, usually with photos showing each step. Inside, ingredients are already portioned and measured: if a chili recipe calls for a teaspoon of cumin, there it is, neatly labeled, in its own little cup. Two tablespoons of olive oil arrive in a tiny screw-top jar; six sprigs of cilantro, in a zipped plastic bag. The cook still has to dice the onions, mince the garlic and simmer the stew, but the start-to-finish cooking time is significantly shortened.
“It showed up in my kitchen at the point where I had already found the recipe, gone to the store, taken off my coat and put everything out on the counter, but I didn’t have to do any of that,” said Peter Eisen, a Web site designer in Brooklyn who tried Plated last December. “It was like I had gone through a hole in the Matrix.”
To some home cooks, the dinner kit appears as a godsend, saving precious time while offering exotic ingredients and new recipes, like seared cod with yuzu butter, or charred Nordic chicory with hanger steak.
Yet Rachel Katz, a mother of four in Rockland County, N.Y., said the kit did not provide the “practical, everyday food” that she had hoped would streamline her life.
Others say it looks like play food, providing a facsimile of home cooking that does not nurture the skills or taste that make a cook.
“I felt completely infantilized when I saw all the ingredients laid out, as if a grown-up had to do it for me,” said Laura Shapiro, a culinary historian and the author of “Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America.”
Dinner kits are not the only service promising to simplify and improve on the home-cooked dinner. There are meal assembly centers like Dream Dinners, where customers choose recipes and fill bags with prepared ingredients, to be cooked at home; services like Simply Fresh to You, in Charlotte, N.C., that deliver par-cooked entrees; and shelf-stable kits like Chef Set that provide everything but the protein and produce for a full meal.
Just how many Americans are ready to pay regularly for such hybrid meals — part prefabricated, part homemade — is unclear. Sucharita Mulpuru, a retail analyst at Forrester Research, said there were no numbers yet on this tiny sector of the $1 trillion food economy. But, she said, entrepreneurs always hope that they can slice off a piece of that bigger pie.
“I have no doubt that one of these guys will make it,” Ms. Mulpuru said of the dinner-kit services. “But the food business is so hard, and people are picky. I’m skeptical that this model will become more than one small player among many dinner solutions.”
Even the entrepreneurs concede that it will take a leap of faith for home cooks to move from ordering staples like ground beef and carrots with a few keyboard clicks, to letting a Web site choose, shop for, prep and season the Moroccan carrot and beef tagine that goes on the dinner table.
“We know that’s a big trust gap,” said Matt Salzberg, a founder of Blue Apron, which is based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. “We believe we can bridge it with high-quality ingredients and services. We plan menus for you, source ingredients that are fresher than what you can buy, and teach you to be a better cook.”
Still, as Ms. Mulpuru pointed out, a solution to the hardest part of dinnertime is not included in the box.
“You still have to clean up the kitchen,” she said. “When they figure out how to take away the mess, that will really be a revolution.”
