Dive Brief:

• Whole Foods announced a partnership with plant-based meal kit delivery service Purple Carrot. The retailer will sell Purple Carrot meal kits at its Dedham, MA, location, which is Whole Foods' North Atlantic’s flagship store, according to a news release.
• The in-store meal kits will contain the same hand-selected, pre-portioned ingredients that consumers receive in the ones delivered to their homes.
• This will be Purple Carrot's brick-and-mortar debut and the first meal kit collaboration in this region for Whole Foods.

Dive Insight:

In-store meal kits could challenge manufacturers. That's particularly true for companies like Tyson Foods, which makes a variety of prepared foods that also offer consumers more convenient at-home meal choices. Meal kits like Purple Carrot could succeed because of consumer perceptions that their components are fresher than those in prepared foods, which many view as more processed. 

The Purple Carrot-Whole Foods partnership also offers more visibility to meal kits. This could be a disadvantage for manufacturers if meal kits leach from sales of the individual ingredients manufacturers sell in stores.

But this kind of partnership could also benefit manufacturers. The meal kit category offers companies the opportunity to assimilate their products into a new, convenient format that gives consumers the fresh, easy-to-prepare meals they demand. Last month, Hershey announced a partnership with Chef'd to offer dessert-centric meal kits, which could be just the start of of branded kits.