Empty restaurants, online grocery shopping, delivery services in overdrive – the COVID-driven lockdowns have radically changed the food industry. One of the key trends to have swept through our stay-at-home, work-from-home society is meal kits. These cardboard boxes not only contain fresh ingredients, but the recipe to go with it.
Take an egg, 100 grams of sour cream, baby spinach, diced tomatoes, a clove of garlic and fresh herbs – sounds like a tasty recipe, to be precise the beginnings of fiery crepe casserole* of the kind you can order from meal kit maker Hello Fresh*, headquartered in Berlin, Germany. “The meal kit business is complicated,” explains Nils Herrmann, COO of HelloFresh, to etailment* online magazine. “It is not only a portfolio of 14 meals that change on a weekly basis, but also various versions that we put together daily based on the volumes ordered.” It is a herculean logistics task, as it requires precise, highly varied amounts of multiple ingredients and attention to the diverse refrigeration needs of meat, veggies, herbs and more.
An industry in upheaval
This logistics challenge is one of the reasons that many meal-kit providers were operating at a loss in early 2020. But coronavirus wrought huge changes – it was an ill wind that blew this particular industry a lot of good. Hello Fresh, founded in 2011, now sells its boxes of goodies in seven countries. And in the first quarter of 2020*, it succeeded in increasing the number of active customers to 4.2 million, and shipped a total of 111 million meals – a year-on-year rise of more than two thirds.
Georg Schuster, Sales Manager, CE, at automation specialist Dematic, has been keeping a keen eye on developments:
“The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the food market has been massive, and managing logistics for a variety of fresh goods is a major challenge.”
Consumer behavior has been evolving, with a move towards ever more personalized orders with smaller volumes.
Effective answers to changing customer needs
To help retailers cope with consumers’ changing requirements, Dematic offers state-of-the-art food storage solutions, such as micro-fulfillment centers. These are capable of compiling highly personalized orders with items from diverse temperature zones in less than an hour, fully automatically. These are consolidated on-site into a single consignment, and this is delivered, while maintaining the right inner temperature, to the customer’s front door. Georg Schuster is confident: “The trends we have seen with meal kits and increased e-commerce are here to stay.”
* German only.