Meal kit services like Hello Fresh and Blue Apron are becoming increasingly popular, especially among young professionals and families who are looking for easy ways to cook and try new ingredients despite busy lives. (Not to mention bypassing the weekly grocery store runs.)
Competition is heating up, too. As a result, the major players are offering new products and services to their catalog and coming up with creative ideas, whether it’s specialty menus for food intolerances, breakfast items, or baby food recipe kits.
And now, Hello Fresh has announced its latest new offering – a wine club.
HelloFresh Wine subscribers will get six bottles of red, white or mixed varietals (depending on preference) shipped to their door for $89 per month. Each wine will be paired with a corresponding Hello Fresh recipe for the month, one red and one white suggested, and will come with a flavor profile and tasting notes.
Hello Fresh is offering a variety of wines for different occasions, from casual tasting to dinner parties, so that customers can get a feel for how to pair and learn about different varietals. It can be overwhelming to choose wine when you don’t know what to look for, or you don’t want to venture outside of the one or two bottles you like. Hello Fresh views this as an opportunity for customers to experiment for themselves without all the pressure.
“In surveying our customers, we discovered that wine was something they indeed wanted, and like with cooking, they often don’t know where to begin the process,” Stacy Gordon, chief product officer for HelloFresh, said to the Observer.
The wine club is available to users who don’t sign up for the Hello Fresh food service.
Hello Fresh isn’t the first meal kit company to offer wine subscriptions to customers; their major competitor Blue Apron began in 2015. However, Blue Apron only offers one option - three bottles of red and three bottles of white each month.
This move is competitive with other meal kit services to be sure, but the overall trend of meal kit services establishing wine clubs competes with wineries themselves, which sell directly to consumers. While wineries used to depend on selling in bulk to restaurants, this revenue stream has decreased over the years. Now, the majority of their wine sales is comprised of direct to consumer, usually through their own wine clubs.
Wine for Hello Fresh is being sourced from all over the world, and the wine club service will be available on the Hello Fresh website beginning May 17th.