Dive Brief:

• The Giant Company announced a new fresh-prep addition to its private label lineup: Cook-In-Bag, which features seasoned meats and seafood items inside oven-ready bags.

• The company's seafood bags, which must be cooked in the oven, include selections like Mediterranean cod, lemon dill scallops, Chesapeake Bay shrimp and bourbon salmon. The pork and chicken bags, which can be cooked in either the oven or a slow cooker, feature flavors like triple mustard and honey roast, Jamaican jerk roast, Greek loin filet, chimichurri chicken thighs and red wine and herb loin filet.

• The bags are available in the seafood and meat sections at Giant and Martin’s stores, according to a company press release. Serving sizes vary by package.

Dive Insight:

Giant’s new private label meal solution provides a leg up in the kitchen for the many shoppers that are cooking at home more these days. By tackling the often tricky center of the plate, the grocer is looking to build incremental purchases in fresh and become a culinary destination for customers.

Grocers have long offered rotisserie chickens in deli and seasoned proteins at their meat and seafood counters. Cook-In-Bag adds an element of convenience that nods to the meal kit concepts many food retailers have incorporated into their stores.

In addition to stocking packaged meal kits, grocers are adding their own private label kits as well as ready-to-heat selections that target specific parts of the meal, or the entire meal itself. Kroger offers frozen food bars at hundreds of stores, and in June Giant Eagle launched a line of ready-to-heat meals that complement its lineup of store brand meal kits. 

Offering a variety of meal solutions promises to win over shoppers who have honed their cooking skills during the pandemic. Seventy-nine percent of consumers recently surveyed by PwC said they're enjoying cooking at home at least occasionally. 

In addition to this new product line, Giant has set a goal of improving the taste of its private label products and making them cleaner by removing synthetic colors, MSGs, high fructose corn syrup and artificial flavors, preservatives and sweeteners by 2025, the retailer said in its press release.

The demand for "clean" products is growing as shoppers turn to healthy eating. According to Innova market research from 2018, 91% of U.S. consumers believe food and beverage options with recognizable ingredients are healthier.