TASTE
Prepping for Success
Meal prep delivery services thrive in the Capital Region despite national decline
BY Jennifer Fergesen PHOTOS BY Debbie Cunningham
N
Kimberley Bernhardt, owner of Kimberley’s
Kitchen in Sacramento, drew on her 15
years of supply chain expertise to launch
a subscription meal service.
24
comstocksmag.com | May 2020
ot long ago, meal prep delivery
services seemed like the biggest
food business innovation since
sliced bread. Powered by algorithms
and venture capital, startups such as
Blue Apron sent out boxes of ingredients
ready to be assembled like model train
kits. Others, like Munchery, went a step
further and mailed the meals them-
selves. Investors lauded the companies
as disruptors, despite the products’
resemblance to the prototypical Amer-
ican convenience food: the TV dinner.
For the past few years, though, the
meal prep market has been on a death
march. Blue Apron, once the market
leader, laid off 240 workers and shuttered
its Arlington, Texas, distribution center
in February. Other bandwagoners have
been even less lucky. San Francisco-based
Munchery, which raised $120.7 million in
venture funding between 2013 and 2015,
shut down abruptly in January 2019. It
was the latest in a chain of similar con-
cepts, born in the optimistic first half of
the 2010s, that floundered in the second:
Din and SpoonRocket closed in 2016;
Bento, Maple and Sprig in 2017, Chef’d
in 2018 and Kettlebell Kitchen in 2019.
The surging demand for food delivery
in the wake of the coronavirus has had an
impact on the surviving businesses, in-
cluding Blue Apron, whose stock rose 500
percent in the third week of March. It’s too
early to say if growth will continue after
restrictions are lifted and consumers can
shift back to their regular shopping habits.
In the Capital Region, a homegrown
meal prep market has been thriving
for years. There are more than a dozen