Upmarket supermarket brand Waitrose is partnering with Mindful Chef, the recipe box service, which features nutritionist-designed options.
Mindful Chef’s core mission is to make healthy eating easy through bringing healthy, quality and sustainable food directly to people's homes. Since 2015 it has delivered over 20 million healthy meals to households across the UK. Mindful Chef will be providing Waitrose customers with the recipes and ingredients to 20 new recipes to choose from every week.
Mintel comment:
“When the likes of HelloFresh, Gousto and Mindful Chef began to make waves in the mass-market, many of the major UK grocers were quick to react with their own services. Waitrose was one of those with Cook Well, launched in 2017. The service was said to initially find an audience before supplier issues caused the scheme to end in 2019.
Indeed from these early mimic services was born a greater focus of providing meal kits at store level and online, rather than creating a differentiated brand. We have seen both private label and brand partnerships in this area, with Mindful Chef, now majority owned by Nestle, a key part of this – with kits to be found in Amazon’s fledgling Amazon Fresh UK stores.
This move speaks to how established, albeit still relatively niche, meal kits and recipe boxes retailers have become in the UK grocery market with 4% of consumers using Mindful Chef in 2020 (see:Online Grocery – UK, March 2021). They have largely fended off the dedicated mimic services and created brand equity that they are now credible partners for leading players. For Waitrose’ part it allows it to step back into the meal kit space without the exposure to the troubles it ran into through the Cook Well service.”
