EKOOK, a new meal delivery service, brings fresh Italian pastas to your home.
The global pandemic, which has shuttered restaurants and driven people indoors, has an unexpected bright spot: More people are cooking at home and brushing up on their chef skills. And with that, at-home meal delivery services are finding a new set of consumers.
Meal-kit sales had a market value of around $2 billion in 2016, and were projected to grow to more than $6 billion in 2021, according to a 2018 report by consultancy Pentallect LLC. Pre-pandemic, the consumer appetite for meal kits was starting to sour. In 2018, Blue Apron and Hello Fresh, early meal-kit services, started seeing sales from regular customers crater and both sustained mass cancellations.
More people cooking at home has lifted the meal delivery kit sector in 2020.
But the pandemic potentially changed all of that, as people had no choice but to stay inside and cook, and quickly ran out of recipe ideas. A new report, issued in June of this year, by Grand View Research, a U.S.-based market research firm, forecasts that the meal kit sector will grow to $19.9 billion by 2027, fostered in part by “increased awareness regarding hygienic food” and “increased traction in 2020 owing to the spread of Covid-19.” “Direct to consumer delivery of food products has been playing a crucial role in preventing frequent visits to grocery stores,” the report states.
A selection of the fresh pasta dishes available from EKOOK.
The newest entrant into the at-home cooking space aims to deliver fresh Italian pasta to your door. EKOOK, an Italian-focused brand, began operations in England this past fall, offering specials such as truffle-scented wild boar ravioli, strozzapreti pesto with walnuts and Parmesan, and spaghetti with lobster and cherry tomatoes. The start-up now averages about 2,000 orders per week, prompting the company to announce expansions to Italy as well as the United States.
Come next spring, the brand aims to bring the same fresh Italian cooking to the U.S. next February, starting with next-day deliveries in Florida, and then expanding to other major cities.
In the wake of COVID, more people are turning to meal delivery kits.
Dishes start at $6.99 per serving, and will feature handmade, artisanal Italian ingredients, as well as gluten-free and vegetarian options. According to the founders, there will be between 15 to 20 pasta dishes always on offer, as well as several seasonal variations (such as fall’s pumpkin and sage ravioli) that will be available for a few weeks at a time.
In a nod to creating an immersive, yet accessible, cooking experience, the EKOOK meal kit arrives not just with fresh ingredients, but also a QR code that users scan to get instructional cooking videos as well as a playlist of classic and contemporary dinner music.
