Dive Brief:

• As part of National Family Meals Month, Stop & Shop is offering up to 30,000 customers free access to meal planning service The Dinner Daily until the end of the year, according to a company release.
• The service provides users with a weekly meal plan based on a family’s food preferences and current sales at their local Stop & Shop. Users can customize the plan as they see fit, then generate a shopping list that can be accessed through the Stop & Shop app.
• Shoppers interested in pickup and delivery for their Dinner Daily orders can also use one-click ordering through Peapod.

Dive Insight:

Consumers are hyper-focused on convenience, but 77% of them would still rather cook at home according to a survey from online grocer Peapod. Meal kits were intended to be an answer to this pain point, but the meal kit space has struggled to find its footing.

Dinner Daily is a service designed to help families eat healthy dinners at home for less than half the cost of a meal kit. The plan’s ability to customize based on dietary preferences makes it useable for a wider audience of shoppers while the integrated store coupons and promotions can save hundreds of dollars each month, according to the company.

The advantage of a meal-planning service like The Dinner Daily is twofold: It's cheaper for customers, and it promotes grocers' existing assortment. The challenge is getting shoppers to adopt the service and then stick with it. Stop & Shop no doubt hopes shoppers see The Dinner Daily as a good value, and that it becomes a discovery tool for products throughout the store. 

Founded in 2016, The Dinner Daily pulls pricing and availability information from weekly flyers at more than 16,000 grocery stores nationwide to generate its menus. The service starts at $4 a month, and can be offered by retailers as a white-label service.

Services that combine meal inspiration, list-building and shopping tools are on the rise. ShopRite and Target have both added shoppable recipes to their digital channels. Connected kitchen app Innit offers shoppable recipes from 30 retailers along with video cooking instructions and integration with smart appliances from companies like LG and Bosch.

Earlier this year, Kraft Heinz launched a meal planning app called Meal Hero that incorporates users’ taste preferences and makes suggestions on meals they may like. When a meal is added to a user’s plan, the ingredients are automatically added to an interactive shopping list that’s integrated with Instacart.