Kroger acquires Home Chef for $200M

I have noticed a distinct improvement and selection in recent years if not just the past six months. I too am surprised at how stores haven't made the leap. There seems to be resistance to combine the items and instead they want customers to visit each department separately. This can work if the store develops a kiosk or such which gives customers suggestions and quick path to the selections.

Good signage could path customers quickly through the store without the appearance of too much diversion. Perhaps Kroger realized that to break the dominance of each department within the storm that a 3rd party was needed

Frankly, the typical supermarket probably already has most of the pieces to assemble--perhaps with the addition of some spices and other add-ons like salad toppings. There are tons of marinated kabob sticks and the like, pre-made salads, chopped veggies for stir fries, etc.

This is more prepared than a lot of meal kits are but, for a lot of scenarios, that may be a feature rather than a bug. The fact that it's probably easier to get 75% prepped meals at a supermarket rather than shipped to you may be an advantage. One of the common complaints about meal kits is that they can still be fairly time consuming. I know that's one reason I don't use them. If I'm going to cook a full meal, it's really not that hard for me to just do it from the base ingredients.

Hello from Cincinnati :)

This sounds like the Newport Kroger I frequent as well. I've been really happy with the pilots they've done there too as far as the one-step kits and the frozen case.

What's your take on the Prep+Pared meal kits?

I think you described Mark's and Spencer food stores.

I've always thought about this. Basically, drive through for dinner kits and/or a Uber Eats for dinner kits.

You drive up, and you can get:

- Kit of ingredients and instructions for a home cooked meal

- Kit of prepped ingredients for a home cooked meal

- A pre-cooked meal ready to take home and eat

By combining with an app/website/service, you would develop meal plans, number of portions, food allergies.

You could walk up and pay full price, or get a discount by pre-buying a meal plan that gives the store more ability to plan and purchase in bulk.

I think the key to profit here is healthy, local, appropriately priced meal kits for families.

As a chef, I have seriously considered this. Unfourtanetly I live in Japan now, there isn't as much of a customer base for this sort of thing as say, Australia.

Then again, the more I think about it. You know if you added in a system of reusable containers (for small amounts of spices and herbs), which could be returned for a discount on your next order. . .

Still a hell of a lot to consider, but in a busy enough place (eg Tokyo), might be an interesting idea.

You have partially described Cook, in the UK https://www.cookfood.net/

They only sell ready meals, aiming to be a higher quality than the slops you can buy in supermarkets. They've won several Great Taste awards here, which is a fairly well-respected stamp of approval. Perhap the main difference from what you're suggesting is that they're not ingredient kits, they're prepared meals or components (e.g. main/side/dessert).

They have high street shops in - let's be honest - rich parts of the country like the South East. Quality seems quite good and the price isn't that bad - at most £5 per person with reasonable break points for couples, families. The store itself is a few rows of freezers.

I've never tried, but people I know say that it's good if you need an emergency meal that actually tastes nice.

It would be hard to offer differentiation from the grab-and-go setup at our local QFC (a Kroger subsidiary). If I wanted to grab one of their prepared meals and nothing else, I think I could walk in, pick up a prepared meal, and check out in 2-3 minutes. The greater cost is the time required to drive to the store.

The only reason we haven't yet tried a prepared meal is pricing. If prices dropped ~30%, we would be regular buyers.

There was a store in Brooklyn a few years ago called Walk-In Cookbook. They did exactly this, plus if you called or set up a recurring subscription they would deliver the kits to anywhere within a mile or so of the store (which in New York City is a pretty good radius). They also sold basic cooking equipment, so if you were a novice cook you didn't even have to worry about getting gear. They even partnered with local restaurants to provide cross-branded kits based on their recipes.

It was a great business that people in the neighborhood loved, but it also lost a ton of money and closed in under a year. I'm still sad about it.

Some of this is implemented by https://eatzis.com (and to a lesser extent, parts of https://centralmarket.com). Granted not the technical/quick aspects.

Why need a full storefront? Why not make them kiosks that others can put in their existing stores to boost foot traffic? i could see this being something walgreens added (like redbox).

This place does that: https://dreamdinners.com/main.php?static=how_it_works

It's custom prepared for you though, so you could probably cut back on costs by making them more of a grab-and-go thing.

Or maybe they could deliver it direct to peoples homes too!

Since 1952 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwan's_Company

In my town there is super suppers which does just this. Buy meals you can freeze that you just drop in the oven.

FWIW one of the Kroger stores in Cincinnati where they do pilots does offer this. There are self-checkout lanes nearby too, so you can be in and out in 5 minutes. It's not a dedicated store but it's a good approximation of the experience.

Snap Kitchen [1], based in Austin, TX but also in rest of Texas and Philadelphia has been doing this for years, they already have 35 locations.

People definitely love them. They even have a food truck/trailer concept for the business crowd downtown. They are a bit pricey-ish but not too bad. Seems to work for their target market (on the go professionals and middle upper income families)!

My Fit Foods had about 50 locations and was popular but shut down [2], but from what I read management was poor and quality dropped more so than it was bad economics [3].

[1] https://www.snapkitchen.com/locations/ [2] https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2017/02/13/austin-he... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/5tphuu/my_fit_foods...

I was in the Dominican Republic recently and went to a major supermarket, where I saw both a cold and heated foods section full of great tasting, healthy food, individually packaged. I ate like that for the whole week I was there, and it only cost me a few bucks at checkout.

In Brazil, one can easily get "marmitas" (aka "quentinhas") delivered for cheap, which are ready-made meals.

Now I'm in the EU and have been seeing low-cost, healthy, packaged meals in many supermarkets. Seems to have caught on. When I look at two basic options now, I see chicken breasts for 3.50 euro or a ready-made meal for 2-3 euro. Even though the chicken would be enough for two meals, I'm often pulled in by the easier, one-meal option.

Total nitpick but Mariano's is not in Milwaukee (where I live), although for all I know the very similar Metro Market stores we have could just be an identical model with different branding (since they're both owned by Kroger).

Kroger has an offering in at least 1 store as a pilot here like like what you described called one-step meal kits. There's definitely an upcharge but they're pretty good, very easy, healthier than TV dinners, and cheaper than getting takeout delivered.

They also have a new offering that's a bunch of containers of frozen things like shrimp and potatoes where you can pay one price by the lb and mix and match across 10-15 different options. It's nice if you want a flexible portion size, just cooking for 1-2, etc.

>Most meal kit companies have embraced the prep as an experience to be marketed, and that's smart -- clearly, people exist who will pay for the experience.

Part of it is that there are definitely people who want to cook a meal from "scratch" with their SO but need some structure and pre-packaging to get started. I suspect some it though is that when you're shipping things, you're probably better off shipping things in their raw state if possible.

Personally, if I were to buy a kit at a local grocery store to bring home for dinner, I'd like to see onions pre-cut, etc. as much as reasonable. I don't mind cooking at all but if it's going to be a bunch of effort I'll just do my own thing; I don't need a kit. If I can grab something that only needs 15 or 20 minutes of active time to put on the table, that's appealing.

It varies by location, though. If you have a Kroger with a Murray's, the cheese selection will be much better than the average grocer. They're easy to recognize given all the Murray's branding they put up. Kroger with their standard cheese counter is pretty much what you'd expect.

By that logic McDonalds, Home Depot and Walmart would have been out of business decades ago. Local store turn over has zero indication of management.

I think Kroger is the Amazon of the grocery space.

Even with several attempts, Amazon hasn't been able to change that so far. Too many grocery items are expensive/heavy to ship. I'm in Cincinnati (Kroger HQ) and Amazon is trying extra hard here with special pilots.

> Kroger has looked at other delivery services, but, can't find one for the same price point

They are already using Instacart in the US and Ocado in the UK.

> They want to use GCE, but, they're truly struggling to use it.

This is outdated info. Their GCP partnership was publicly announced ~6 months ago.

I can tell you worked with them, too. I think you were only scratching the surface, though. Most of the stores I see run on some mainframe apps or something that people use terminals for on buggy handhelds. The checklanes got upgraded recently to what looks like a Fujitsu Linux running Java-based clients. Slow and limited in UI control compared to the concurrent DOS thing from IBM that only slowed down on updates. They had no interest in stuff like QNX when I proposed it for U-Scan to keep robots running despite software failures which they have a lot of. Employees complain the browsers in that company can take several minutes to ten minutes to load on whatever thin client and virtualization solutions they're using. They didn't know. The inventory and Clicklist computers often have different inventory in them or other preventable problems. The digital coupon system constantly screws up to the point that a recent sale required printed barcodes for cashiers at registers in case it screwed up again. They apparently have a social network that few workers use for knowledge sharing since they don't even have time to stock stuff.

The list goes on and on. I keep following the situation out of both concern and morbid curiosity. Easily one of the worst I've seen at managing both operations and IT. Their media and legal departments are among the better I've seen, though. I mean, nobody reports this stuff. Can't be an accident with the amount of attention on them.

>People don’t want to buy homes, cars or big ticket items anymore

That's the perspective of a very specific demographic. And even in SV, there seems to be no shortage of people wanting to buy houses and any shortage of cars on the road.

That said, there is a trend towards convenience which is one reason you see so much food that's been pre-prepped to various degrees (for a premium) in supermarkets. Adding full meal kits seems a very logical extension to that trend.

Here is the article http://efficiencyiseverything.com/grocer-comparison-aldi-wal...

Thanks for the request because I noticed it wasnt on my /food/ page.

I'm all about quality and price, quality for food seems pretty similar, price is easily measurable.

Its more expensive, I replied my link to another poster if you want to see the data.

I cant speak for paper products, when I did that study it was walmart disposables only.

Aldi spams /r/frugal and has been a gigantic turnoff. Like straight astroturfing.

I dont really trust the company anymore.

No, that they claim to have low prices, but they are the most expensive of any store.

If you have been in a kroger, you know what I mean.

Yellow stickers everywhere.

What they did was increase the "regular" price of retail goods above what competition would charge, apply a "discount" if you have a Kroger card, and then you get this "cheaper" price. They even put how much you would have "saved" on your receipt if you didn't have a card but that's vs inflated prices others don't charge. At one point, their "regular" price for milk was at convenience store levels with sale price just over Walmart. These fake discounts should be considered straight-up fraud. That's not to say they don't have plenty of real ones but you'd have to look carefully to know. There's yellow tags everywhere. So, about all of it is cheaper than Walmart or a similar competitor at that moment, right? Nope.

The other thing they did with Kroger card was price discrimination. The regulations apparently were about the price of items rather than what people paid for them. These are technically two different things. The way that works is they learn that certain people will keep buying specific things. They use this data from their card profile to deny them coupons or other discounts while they give them to other people. They've got a lot of profiling tricks for adding or denying discounts. I'd say more consumers take a hit than benefit since there were previously coupons for all of them in the papers or what they mailed out. They're also mailing out fewer coupons with lower amounts, too, now that they've rolled out digital coupons tied to profile data from card.

So, many of the sales are fake. The line about what people would've saved versus Walmart is fake. Most of the coupons are for brand-name items that already overcharge you anyway. The good generics are cheaper much of the time. The gas discount and recall notices are about the best benefits of the Kroger card. The best coupons they gave me discount per order, department, etc letting me spend on whatever I wanted. Those could probably be delivered based on survey data without tracking.

Summary: the Kroger card is mostly a fraud designed to trick people into thinking they're getting discounts, give them coupons for more expensive stuff, give them less coupons that would make things cheaper, and otherwise make profit on surveillance of them. There's benefit but most selling points are layers of lies. This is why I prefer either no loyalty cards or them limited to stuff having nothing to do with pricing. Preferably by law to increase competitiveness and reduce risk to consumers.