03.12.2008

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Meal Assembly Retail

It Sounded Like a Great Idea at the Time

For consumers short on time and long on fatigue from drive-thrus and “get the door” deliveries, meal assembly came just in the nick of time. Built upon notions of convenience and saving time — two pillars of surefire retail success — meal assembly outlets (i.e., Dream Dinners and Super Suppers) expanded across America a few years ago, passing out aprons to patrons eager to assemble an assortment of dinners, leave the clean-up to somebody else, and return home with a variety of plastic wrapped meals ready to place in their freezer.

And then the fad fizzled.

Hundreds of stores closed in 2007 with even more projected to be shuttered in 2008. So, what went wrong causing these shops to close their doors faster than you can say “assemble-it-yourself chicken pot pie?”

While it is true that consumers want convenience when it comes to meal planning, it isn’t necessarily the before dinner part of dinner — meal planning and cooking preparation — that make their lives difficult. Furthermore, much of the meal assembly formula for success runs counter to many trends in food culture we see today and emerging in the future.

If consumers perceive they don't have time to cook they aren’t going to cook. And when they want a convenient meal solution they are most likely going to dine in a restaurant, not seek out restaurant quality food that requires assembly and cooking.

Over two years ago we mused about what cultural role meal assembly retail was trying to play in our lives. If restaurant takeout and prepared foods brought home are ready-to-eat and frozen entrees/left-overs are ready-to-heat, meals from meal assembly brands are something in between…like ready-to-cook?

We’ve tried to imagine that in the context of consumer lifestyles, ready-to-cook meals appeared to have a lot of potential relevance. In theory such meals can:

• Act as substitutes for cooking from scratch, which some consumers perceive as more time-consuming and laborious (in terms of planning the recipe, obtaining the ingredients and pulling it off).


• Prevent consumers from scrambling after work for dinner ideas or from running to the grocery store for ingredients (especially in suburban and ex-urban areas where stores require 15 minutes of driving or more).


• Be a way for less confident or creative consumers to try something beyond their usual roster of standby meals.


• Allow consumers with minimal wellness standards to feel satisfied that they have a better convenient dinner option than packaged dinners, frozen entrees or delivery pizza.

What we find is that the problem meal prep retail has encountered is that it marketed itself as a convenient and affordable way to quickly assemble a month’s meals for your home. It promised easier at-home meal preparation without all the ‘stress’ of planning each day or what to make, especially for a family. For “Jon and Kate plus eight” kind of families, we admit that this has an attraction. But for the rest of us (as we noted in 2005), the concept simply was not on trend and made some startlingly retrograde assumptions about families, moms and the options available to both in a rapidly changing food culture.

In the tumultuous and ever-changing American food culture, unfortunately what nearly all meal assembly brands are discovering today is that:

• Ready to cook doesn’t really save much time, especially when you add in the 3-4 hours spent in your local Dream Dinners — in the end, you still have to cook…!


• Convenient meal preparation for the family is increasingly about going to a family restaurant or picking up take out from restaurants food or grocery stores.


• Ethnic restaurant takeout as well as prepared foods at grocery stores are much more popular and trendy ways to meet the need for easy, stress-free meal preparation. They also offer consumers a broader range of choices than most meal prep retail outlets with their fixed monthly menus.


• Most people no longer plan their meals more than a few days ahead; our increasing fickleness is a result of the increased scope the restaurant approach to eating has even at home.


• A month’s worth of pre-bought meals reduces the feeling of choice and creates the ‘Jenny Craig’ effect that is simply not sustainable for more than a few months (as are most of the packaged food diet programs).


• Fragmenting taste preferences within homes have caused the phenomenon of "multiple" dinners in many families; preparing meals in 4-6 serving sizes simply doesn't address this reality.

Meal prep retail brands generally do not offer much culinary diversity on their menu and most come off as rather bland even in their local markets where brands like Applebee’s, Chili’s and independent restaurateurs generally offer more contemporary, exotic flavor along with the total convenience of eliminating cooking entirely (at least for the consumer).

Assemble the Family, Not the Meal

While it sounds like a nice idea, we find that meal prep retail in its current form was trying to return to an imagined past of quaint, frugal, at-home dinners, a concept that increasingly few Moms feel that obligated to make fresh every day. Most Moms, even in the target markets for these brands, are increasingly not that guilty about the reduced number of dinners they have cooked at home. In times where commensality is in short supply, they are much more concerned about simply getting everyone to eat together at all.

Meal preparation retail was an idea for the 1980’s housewife who, in most markets, had no access to decent restaurant/take out food priced reasonably enough for everyday use and who also truly felt the moral compulsion to serve fresh, home-cooked dinners at home each evening. In the 21st century marketplace, consumers are looking for distinctive, unique, exciting quality food and dining experiences and meal assembly centers are out-of-step with today's consumers.