Beyond Carry Out: Restaurants Are Touting Meal Kits As A Dining Option

Back in the dark ages of 2019, meal kits were largely the purview of mail order companies, grocery stores and a few specialty shops.

Some chefs were wary of selling customers the ingredients for the dishes they’d otherwise purchase from them.

For one thing, there is no guarantee a home cook can replicate something found in a restaurant, no matter how specific the instructions and ingredients.

But the COVID-19 era has prompted restaurants to try just about every kind of way to get customers to keep ordering. And that includes meal kits.

One of the latest to join the fray is Cafe Cancale in Chicago. Opened in 2019 by restaurateur Paul Kahan, the French bistro was one of the city’s hottest new places. By all rights, it should now be celebrating its first anniversary with fanfare.

Instead, on Monday, the cafe began touting Cafe Cancale’s Marche (the French word for market). Order taking starts on Wednesday.

The cafe promises to offer “curated cook-at-home dinners from our culinary team at Cafe Cancale, plus a rotating selection of ready-to-eat family meals.”

Cafe Cancale has plenty of company. Restaurants at many prices ranges are offering meal kits that customers can cook themselves.

For instance, Crossroads Kitchen, a Los Angeles vegan restaurant, has nine different choices, ranging from wontons and lemon tortellini to cookie dough that can be baked at home. That’s in addition to its eight prepared meals.

A number of pizza places around the country are offering pizza making kits, which hopefully will entertain youngsters or occupy stir-crazy adults.

Meal kits are becoming so ubiquitous that some restaurants may rush to offer them before thinking through the logistics.

It’s one thing to put a set of top quality ingredients in a shopping bag or box, and quite another to expect a dish to come out the way it did as a $40 entree.

Earlier this spring, Upserve, a publication aimed at restaurant professionals, published a series of considerations that go into deciding whether to sell meal kits.

First is food inventory, which has become something of a problem amid meat shortages in many parts of the country.

Restaurants have to figure out how many meal kits they can sell, and how much to order of key ingredients.

Steak or chicken might sound like a great meal kit feature, but if stocks become scarce, it could kill a promising plate.

There’s also the logistics involved for putting the meals together, which could be a challenge with short staffing levels.

Then, restaurants have to figure out how to get meal kits to customers. Are they willing to pick them up? Do they want them delivered by the restaurant, or by the delivery companies that the restaurant uses? How about refrigeration en route?

Can a restaurant convince a local grocery chain to stock them, as Rouse’s Markets has with dishes from a number of New Orleans restaurants? And if so, does it have the ability to make regular deliveries?

There’s also pricing. Even the wealthiest consumers probably have spent a lot on restaurant take out and delivery food over the past few months.

Diners at all income levels probably want meal kits to be less expensive than menu equivalents, since they are doing the cooking (regardless of the fact that restaurant staff had to assemble them).

I’ve found that a number of meal kits aren’t exactly cheap. Although individual meals might range from $10 to $40, I’ve seen numerous name restaurants advertising collections of upscale food items for $100 or even more.

A triple-digit price might cause second thoughts among consumers who used to spend that amount, or even less, on their total weekly food budget. For that, they can get at least a couple of days worth of meals, without having to put in any work.

Finally, restaurants have to deal with the prospect that customers might try the meal kits once, and then abandon them.

That’s a big problem in the broader food kit industry, where a number of companies have trouble convincing customers to order again.

As restaurants are gingerly allowed to open across the U.S., chef-created food kits could turn out to be a COVID curiosity, or they might become something that consumers enjoy.