Many people want to eat healthier, home-cooked meals, but simply don’t have the time or expertise to do so. Even people with the best of intentions often end up letting fresh ingredients go to waste — in fact, some experts estimate that one-third of every grocery shopping trip, on average, ends up in the trash.
Meal kits provide a more convenient and less wasteful alternative for people who are busy or not as experienced in the kitchen, giving customers preportioned ingredients so they can easily cook at home.
Meal kit delivery services (think: HelloFresh, Blue Apron) are expected to make a stunning $5.95 billion in 2025 — and supermarkets and food markets are eager to take advantage of their popularity. Offering meal kits at your local food market introduces your customers to new ingredients, makes shopping easier, and opens up entirely new revenue streams.
Not sure where to start? In this post, we’ll cover five meal kit ideas that you can sell at your market today.
Why Meal Kits Are a Good Fit for Food Markets
Many supermarkets and food markets already offer some form of prepared meals, so why is it worth it to create meal kits, too?
Here are some common reasons why meal kits are a good idea:
- They allow customers to prepare meals for later in the week, instead of ready-made meals, which need to be eaten immediately.
- Meal kits are generally cheaper than ready-made meals.
- Customers who like to cook can explore new dishes without the stress of searching for ingredients and recipes.
- They give niche and international food markets a chance to make shopping at their store less intimidating by showing customers how certain ingredients are used.
- They serve as an introduction to home cooking for customers who are less experienced in the kitchen.
- They allow stores to move lesser-known or less popular ingredients by including them in a meal kit.
- Regularly rotating different recipes and types of meal kits gives shoppers a reason to check back in with your store more often.
Many customers who want to eat more fresh fruit and vegetables at home say that they need more guidance on how to cook with them — meal kits are an effective way to educate customers and cut down on food waste.
5 Meal Kit Ideas To Offer at Your Food Market
Generally speaking, there are two ways to sell meal kits at a food market:
- Partner with a third-party meal kit service, restaurant, or chef to prepare and sell them at your store.
- Make meal kits yourself.
It goes without saying that option two will have more upfront labor (though not much more than creating prepared meals). However, creating your own gives you a unique chance to share your expertise and offer something that no one else can.
Remember: At their core, meal kits are just prepped ingredients that aren’t cooked. So if you’ve got a simple prepared meal you already make, a change in packaging might be all you need to get started.
Not sure what kinds of things you can make? Here are some ideas.
1. Salad Kits
These are already a staple at many grocery stores because they’re relatively easy to put together. Separate your proteins, greens, dressing, and other veggies into separate packs, then allow people to combine everything at home.
Unlike the single-serve salad kits that are most common in supermarkets, you can portion things in a way that works for a family dinner or party.
Of course, leafy, western-style salads aren’t the only thing you can offer. Sell premeasured packs of ground beef or pork, sliced shallots, chilies, sauces, and spices to combine for a delicious laarb meal kit. Or package up minced jalapeños, corn kernels, cotija cheese, cilantro, and lime for a make-it-yourself esquites kit.
2. Pasta Dishes
(Image source: Made by Mama)
Pasta is another great candidate for meal kits since many of the core elements can be kept safely in the fridge for days or weeks.
For most people, the hardest part of cooking a perfect bolognese or alfredo is the sauce. So create pasta meal kits with:
- Premeasured pasta
- The perfect amount of sauce
- Spices
- Herbs
- Precut or grated meats and cheeses (pancetta, parmesan, etc.)
If you sell sauce in jars, this can also give people a sampler of it in a way that’s not intimidating.
Many pasta recipes require you to reserve some pasta water for the sauce, so if that’s true in the case of your pasta, make sure to bold that step on your recipe card, as many home cooks are used to dumping it out.
3. Grilled Meats
Another relatively easy offering is in the butcher section of your market. Premarinated steak, chicken, and pork are already popular items at many butchers, and by simply packing a few extra ingredients, you can upsell people into a meal kit.
For example, you can take marinated flank steak, precut vegetables, tortillas, and spices to create a fajita kit. For fishmongers, selling a fillet of fish with a herb butter and precut fennel can be a quick and easy oven-ready meal.
Start with your own expertise: What are your go-to ways to prepare certain cuts? Then, see if it’s cost-effective to prep and package that meal. Remember: For many, simply having everything measured out for them is enough to take a chance on a new recipe.
4. Soup Kits (Beginner and Advanced)
(Image source: Healthy Gourmet Kitchen)
There’s nothing quite as comforting as a home-made soup, and many people don’t realize how easy they are to make at home.
Sell packets of spices along with prepackaged stock, cut vegetables, and meat, for delicious home-made soup. Some easy candidates for soup meal kits include chicken noodle, lentil soups and curries, or mushroom soups with dehydrated mushrooms.
However, you don’t have to just sell to beginner cooks. You can create stock-making kits with beef bones, chicken parts, and spices. Combine these with rice noodles or other ingredients to create do-it-yourself kits for pho, boat noodles, or green chili chicken soups.
If your customers are more confident cooks, this latter method is also a way to sell some of the more “undesirable” leftovers from your butcher counter (which many chefs covet).
5. Stir Fry Sauces
Many people enjoy a quick and easy stir fry or fried rice because they can be made with pretty much anything. This gives you a chance to create meal kits on the fly by having a few tried-and-true stir fry sauces ready to go.
Create stir fry sauces and sell them separately, or take a selection of vegetables, presliced meats, or noodles to prepare as stir fry packages.
Prepping things this way can be advantageous for a few reasons:
- It allows you to offer customers a mix-and-match selection of different sauces, veggies, and meats.
- It gives you a chance to use vegetables that people don’t always think to pick or that you’ve overstocked.
- The variety gives people an incentive to check back and see what you have.
You can do generic stir fries or be more specific with yakisoba kits, chow mein, and beef and broccoli. You can even sell your day-old fried rice (ideal for fried rice) as part of a fried rice kit to cut down on food waste.
Essential Tools To Sell Homemade Meal Kits
Thinking of selling your own unique meal kits at your store? Here’s what you need:
- A flexible POS system: You need a point of sale (POS) system that allows you to create custom SKUs and track input prices. This lets you ring up your custom meal kits at checkout and price them for a profit.
- Label printer: Unless you want to manually look up and enter prices for your new meal kits, you want to print barcodes.
- Packaging: Depending on the types of meal kits you’re putting together, packaging can be as simple as a styrofoam tray and plastic wrap or a series of sealed bags with different types of ingredients.
- Food scales: Weighing out your ingredients helps you create consistent portions and ensure that your pricing is accurate.
- Recipe cards: Include printed cards with every meal kit to give customers step-by-step instructions on how to prepare their meal. If you can’t afford to physically print them, you can use a QR code that links to a page on your website.
- Reporting tools: Meal kits are new for businesses and customers both — use sales reports to track sales and understand your profit margins.
An important note: While it often makes sense to sell fully prepared meals by weight, meal kits generally work better at a fixed price. Why? In truth, it comes down to psychological pricing.
Someone buying a prepackaged stir fry will see it as a single product and be willing to pay by weight, whereas selling a meal kit could have them question how each individual ingredient is priced (and wondering if they’re getting a good deal).
Ultimately, making custom meal kits will take more effort at first, but it allows you to offer a unique and experiential product customers can’t find anywhere else.
If you’re already selling prepared meals, start by using the reports on your POS system to see what your bestsellers are. Then, narrow down a few bestsellers that can feasibly be made in a home kitchen with your ingredients. Customers who always buy your chicken parmesan might be thrilled to make it for their families and friends at home.
Boost Profits by Offering Meal Kits at Your Market
Meal kits are a relatively new frontier outside of established meal kit delivery services — but their popularity speaks for itself.
By creating custom meal kits at your food market, you can highlight the unique ingredients that make you great while lowering the barrier of entry for the average home cook.
The right POS system makes selling custom meal kits even easier. Markt POS allows food markets and butchers to easily add custom items to inventory, adjust pricing, and monitor their popularity.
To see how much a food market POS system would cost, try out our transparent build and price tool.
by Luke
