Environmentally Friendly Meal Kit Service Through Grocery Store Partnership

6 min readFeb 25, 2019

This post is part of a series where we’ll explore how technology can change our perspective by writing and designing novel products every week this year.

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Recently, for the first time in a while, I cooked handmade spinach infused pasta. Though I was proud of my achievement, I was less proud that I had leftover ingredients. It turns out that you don’t need an entire block of cheese when cooking for a person or two. Suffice to say, I ate pasta for a while. And some of that cheese… well, it’s still in my fridge.

Not only is food waste a huge financial issue — costing the United States alone $218 billion annually — it’s also one of the top three problems related to climate change. Ironically, the lack of reliable access to food is also a significant problem, affecting 1 in 8 Americans.

The fact is 40% of food gets wasted (up from 30% in the 70s by the way). Wouldn’t it make sense to reclaim that food to help the environment, and those in need of food? Even better, what if doing this quantifiably reduces business loss while creating recurring business revenue?

F00D

F00D partners with local grocery stores to create a subscription-based ingredient and recipe meal kit service that diverts and recovers food waste by turning imperfect/extra inventory into pre-portioned ingredients for a nutritionally complete fresh meals, thereby increasing food security for local residents while simultaneously providing a larger customer base for said grocery stores.

How it Works

Subscribers provide F00D with the number of meals they would like to purchase. At the same time, grocery stores share with F00D their excess/imperfect inventory. Using the information provided by both parties, F00D can determine how the grocery store’s inventory can be distributed into the optimal number of healthy meal kits requested by subscribers.

Instead of having to buy excess ingredients at the grocery store, we can cut food waste by pre-portioning them.

Leveraging Local Grocery Stores

Unlike other meal kit services, F00D partners with existing grocers to power its network. By using existing infrastructure as its fulfillment center F00D is able to flexibly scale to meet demand. At the same time, it provides these grocers with new and recurring customers in the form of F00D subscribers.

Additionally, this system has the advantage of using existing supplies. According to the USDA, 43 billion pounds of food is lost at the retail level — about 10% of the total retail supply. By joining the F00D network, grocery stores can reduce business losses while simultaneously saving the environment and acquiring customers.

Distributed Fulfillment Center

Another benefit of partnering with grocery stores is that, unlike other meal kit services which require delivery and its associated cost (both environmental and financial), subscribers can visit their local grocery stores to pick up their kit. In doing so, F00D can provide a fresh alternative to processed food in the prepackaged food aisle.

We can cut carbon emissions by having subscribers pick up straight from the source while they’re doing their grocery shopping.

Even better, it can extend grocery stores beyond its walls. Due to the unequal distribution of grocery stores, access to fresh, healthy, and good quality food may be limited in some areas — areas known as food deserts. This is problematic as food deserts have been linked to higher rates of obesity which, in the United States, have exceeded the cost of healthcare associated with smoking.

Through the scale of the network, F00D can provide grocery stores with the logistics needed to deliver their kits to nearby neighborhoods, countering the aforementioned food deserts. Since these kits will come from local grocery stores rather than large centralized distribution centers, F00D reduces the environmental footprint of shipping since the distance between storage and destination is much shorter.

Even if we were to deliver meal kits, grocery stores are distributed and can deliver meal kits more efficiently than a centralized warehouse.

Pre-portioning and Pre-packaging to Fight Food Waste

Admittedly, ordering and getting a meal kit delivered may be suboptimal since those in food deserts are likely the ones who won’t be able to afford the premium of a delivered meal kit.

By partnering with local grocers, however, F00D can arguably provide a cheaper alternative by leveraging surplus groceries. In the United States, $15.4 billion is lost in produce at the retail level alone due to spoilage, age dating, package damage, etc., so there is incentive for the grocery stores to offset this loss by providing discounts. Since F00D packages these produce into smaller portions for immediate use, expiry dates, packaging issues, and clearance stigma wouldn’t be an issue.

Reducing additional sources of food is the most optimal way of recovering food according to the EPA.

By using existing inventory, F00D doesn’t require a new food source — which, according to the EPA, is one of the most important factors in reducing food waste. It joins companies like Imperfect Produce in reducing food waste by making use of quality, but visually odd produce. By having trained professionals pre-package food ingredients, F00D also helps fight back against the need to filter and modify groceries to fit the common consumer’s mental model which can lead to chemicals and waste.

Additionally, since the kits are pre-portioned for the right amount of meals, subscribers will save by not having excess groceries. This is especially important since food waste in homes account for the largest source of waste at 43%. Pre-portioning at the retail level would reduce the likelihood of having extra ingredients end up at the subscriber’s back of the fridge and expiring — which is notable because expiring items such as dairy products, vegetables, and fruits, made up 52% of the total food waste generated.

A meal kit service that leverages excess inventory of grocery stores is beneficial for their business, the environment, and residents.

Future

So far we’ve touched on how a subscription service that partners with grocers can be advantageous to the grocer’s business, subscribers, and the environment. However, we’ve only touched the surface.

In the future, we can look at how we can use reusable containers to further reduce environmental footprint since they can be returned easily to local grocers. Moreover, this means we can reduce the use of refrigerants which is not only an environmental problem, but also a personnel hazard.

We can also take a look at the social implications of F00D. We’ve talked about how F00D can reduce the physical cause of food desert, but in the future we can also explore how it reduces the mental causes of food deserts. Like other meal kit services, F00D can encourage a healthier lifestyle by lowering the barrier toward a freshly cooked nutritionally whole meal, thus making it accessible to a larger number of people.

TL;DR

There is a lot of food insecurity while, at the same time, a large amount of food waste. By working with existing grocers to create a meal kit service, we acquire the advantage of scaling with flexibility and reduced environmental cost, with the added financial benefit of using unsold/imperfect inventory. By pre-portioning ingredients, we help reduce waste at the retail and home level. The outlined strategy benefits the environment by reclaiming what might have been food waste while simultaneously improving business opportunities for grocers and food access for individuals.

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