Meal Kits? Not for me, thanks.

The latest trend in how to buy groceries may be meal kits. As everyone knows, these boxes of pre-measured ingredients plus recipe, delivered by mail or UPS, allow you to cook without premeditation, but with quite a bit of expense and commitment. I've never tried them, and probably never will. I keep a very fully stocked pantry and can follow a recipe (and know many without looking), but the idea interests me anyway.

Many articles have indicated is that instead of being ordered and delivered, meal kits are coming soon to a market near you! Why? Because customers who try meal kit plans usually drop out quickly, so the various food-kit-providers need a new way to sell their product. As the Wall Street Journal says: "Blue Apron Holdings Inc. will try to give its struggling business a boost by selling meal kits in stores, acknowledging that its subscription-only model isn’t enough in an intensifying fight to fill people’s dinner plates." (link)

1944 Kraft Dinner Ad.

Curious about the trend I looked on amazon.com, to see if their partnership with Whole Foods was trying to fill this niche. I found no Amazon or Whole Foods branded meal kits -- but I was incredibly amused to see a "sponsored" link to the good old days: it offered me Kraft Dinner Mac and Cheese. I guess that actually is a kind of meal kit: everything you need in one box.

This got me to thinking. Twentieth-century food manufacturers really offered lots of "meal kit" products that enabled quick preparations from packaged food and didn't require a fully stocked pantry. Some were complete, some required the addition of meat. (The same is true for some of the meal kits now offered on Amazon.)

For example, from a newsletter for the food industry, I read:

"Meal kits for years have been a way to quickly prepare a family meal. The first packaged meal kit was most likely Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, created in 1937. Hamburger Helper was introduced in 1971 in response to a meat shortage and escalating meat prices." (source)

Curiously, I looked for ads for familiar "meal kits" from the past.

OK, you had to add meat -- but here's a coupon
for seven cents off the price of Hamburger Helper.

Chun King Chop Suey "meal kit" of cans dates from 1940s.

This painfully racist ad for a chop suey kit from La Choy
dates from 1955. My mother was a customer: I remember the little bottles
of soy sauce that would stay in the refrigerator forever. (source)

1960s ad for Rice-a-Roni, invented in the 1950s.

What more can I say?