Weight Watchers Is Jumping on the Meal Kit Bandwagon

It seems like everyone is making meal kits these days. Blue Apron and Hello Fresh are a couple of the most famous, and Martha Stewart also has a meal kit. Amazon is starting meal kits too, and plans to sell them at its robot-monitored cashierless Amazon Go grocery stores. Wolfgang Puck created meals for Chef’d. Heck, even one of my college friends started a slow cooker meal kit service last year.

Now Weight Watchers is jumping on the bandwagon with their own healthy meal kit service, but theirs is breaking away from the Blue Apron/Hello Fresh subscription box model. Instead, the Weight Watchers meal kits will be sold in grocery stores.

Weight Watchers operates in 13 countries and is one of the most famous diet programs in the world, thanks in large part to its spokesperson and largest shareholder, Oprah Winfrey. The meal kit game seems like a shoo-in for them, too.

A big part of the appeal of meal kits is that they’re better than takeout or frozen or pre-prepared dinners, but they’re easier than meal planning. They take all the planning and shopping out of the nightly dinner-making equation, and they also let people try new recipes without having to shell out for a big jar of some new sauce they might not like. Given all that plus an easy answer to the “How many Weight Watchers points are in that?” question seems like it’d be very appealing to people on Weight Watchers.

Chef’d already sells Weight Watchers-approved meal kits, but these are part of a new product called WW Healthy Kitchen. The specific meals and box prices are still unknown. For right now, most of what we know is that they’ll be pre-portioned, quick-prep healthy meal kits that will be sold in grocery stores, not through a subscription service like Blue Apron.

Meal kits are so hot right now, but not everyone wants to sign up for a weekly meal kit subscription service. Buying an individual meal kit at the grocery store is the type of thing a lot of people might want to try, either as a one-time thing or as a regular habit. (Or as a one-time thing that becomes a regular habit when a person realizes they really like the convenience, which is how a lot of people wind up eating takeout every night.)

Selling in grocery stores also sounds like a good idea for a company like Weight Watchers, because I can imagine those meal kits catching the eye of shoppers who are interested in healthy meals but do not use Weight Watchers. I’d probably be interested in picking up a box as a one-time experiment. If the box isn’t terrible, Weight Watchers could even pick up new members like that.

Would you try one of these meal kits?