Dive Brief:

• Thrive Market has introduced a line of frozen meals made with Beyond Meat plant-based protein, according to a press release from the online grocer.
• The line includes five single-serve meals, including lasagna, shepherd’s pie and green enchiladas made with Beyond Meat. The meals come in bundles of 10 for $80 with two of each flavor and will soon be sold a-la-carte.
• Thrive Market is looking to increase the quantity and quality of its private label, which generates nearly a third of its sales. 

Dive Insight:

Numerous retailers have announced the addition of plant-based protein brands to their store shelves, while others, notably Kroger, have incorporated plant-based meats into their private label lineup. But Thrive Market is taking a different approach by co-branding a private label offering with Beyond Meat — a move that offers the margin benefits of store brands with the brand cache of a major plant-based supplier.

In addition to the private label partnership, which kicked off in October when Thrive released a line of shelf-stable plant-based chilis made with Beyond Meat, Thrive also now carries Beyond Meat retail products, including burgers, sausages, meatballs and breakfast sausage.

The two brands overlap in their appeal primarily to young, health-conscious shoppers. They’re also both growing rapidly. Started in 2014, Thrive Market delivers nationwide and recently surpassed 1 million members, co-founder and CEO Nick Green said during the ICR Conference in January. Meanwhile, Beyond Meat has expanded its presence at grocery stores across the country and is expanding its product offerings. 

When it comes to private label, Thrive is trying to “uplevel” the quality of its selections by incorporating regenerative ingredients as well as organic and fair trade-certified ones into its products, and by focusing on packaging that is “beautiful and aspirational,” Green said at the conference.

Thrive had around 700 private label items in its assortment at the beginning of this year and plans to add 300 more by the end of next year, Green said. It’s also pushing into new store brands like Wellmade, a line of supplements it launched last year. The e-grocer's brand products comprise around 10% of the company’s overall assortment and more than 30% of sales, Green said.

“We see a world in which the business becomes not just a membership club but a membership club and really a CPG in our own right,” he said during the ICR Conference.

Thrive’s new meals are tapping into both the growth of the frozen category, which has seen booming sales during the pandemic, and plant-based foods, which had sales spike 27% in 2020, to $7 billion. And they come the same week Target announced its own line of plant-based private label products under its $2 billion Good & Gather brand.