So What, Who Cares (vol 3, issue 20) How do boxed meal services affect the environment?
Hello!
This is the second of the So What, Who Cares columns that ran last week in the Observer, which is why you're getting the catch-up newsletter today. I want to also thank Omar Gallaga for his very kind tweet on the column's subject last week. You readers are aces.
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There are approximately 150 meal kit companies in the United States. What is the environmental impact of getting food from farm to meal kit customer? And will knowledge of that impact ultimately sink these services -- or give them a competitive edge if they can convince consumers that prepackaged meals generate less overall waste than DIY meal prep?
Critics of meal kit waste generally focus on a few areas: How the food is supplied, how the supply chains are set up, how the food is processed, and how the food is packaged for consumers. All of these are interrelated.
Fox example: The eight million monthly meals Blue Apron produces flow through three regional distribution centers — Richmond, California; Arlington, Texas; and Jersey City, New Jersey. The company says that it tries to source all its produce within 200 miles of the distribution centers, but its menus aren't exactly local. If radishes are on the menu for the week and there aren't any in New Jersey, they've got to be shipped from somewhere else. As a Fast Company report on the industry noted:
Since the vast majority of meal-kit companies are not local, they face the complex supply chain logistics of transporting food from farms and manufacturing plants to locations across the country, while keeping everything at the right temperature. This is a hugely energy intensive process. Meal kits use large quantities of packaging to contain small amounts of spices or cheese or balsamic vinegar.
Because that food has to stay reasonably fresh, and because grouping the ingredients is part of the service's appeal, there are a lot of packaging issues -- styrofoam coolers are not out of the norm for storage, and neither are plastic bags, sealed plastic "ice packs" (usually a chemical gel) and other packaging that can be challenging to break down and recycle.
While meal kit makers often acknowledge that packaging is a problem, their solutions vary. Some companies say their sourcing practices -- requiring suppliers to farm sustainably, for example -- offset the environmental damage done by other parts of their supply chain. Other companies are making biodegradable packaging part of their marketing pitch to consumers.
Americans have become increasingly sophisticated food customers, expecting to know where their food was grown and whether it was in season. Calculating the waste footprint of their meals may be a logical next step.
So what? Boxed meal businesses thrive because they make consumers' lives simpler. A meal subscription streamlines dinnertime labor: They tell you what you're eating for dinner, they've portioned the ingredients so there's no leftovers, and they've dropped it at your door. If you're one of the adults in a family of four, the $140 per week you'd spend on a four-meal Blue Apron service -- $8.74 per meal per person -- is roughly what you'd spend for a McDonald's value meal, but with a significantly different nutritional profile and no need to drive anywhere to get it.
Meal kits also tackle the embarrassing leftovers in your fridge -- the liquifying parsnips you have left after trying some in a recipe and discovering you didn't really like them, the bottle of fish sauce you bought because a recipe you were trying required a teaspoon of the stuff. The lack of food waste and the lack of extraneous ingredients cluttering up one's cabinets is tremendously appealing.
The boxed meal service industry may become a $5 billion industry in the next 10 years if it can keep up the value proposition -- more convenience, less hassle, better dinners for busy people. As the industry scales up, it will have to revisit its sourcing, distribution and packaging models. And the industry will scale up: Jeff Bezos teamed up with Tyson foods to begin offering meal kits via Amazon Fresh. Campbell Soup and Hershey are also looking at the business. And when these big companies come into the space, everyone will have to adjust.
Who cares? People who care about food waste are watching the packaged-food industry, because one of the claims from a company like Blue Apron goes like this: the prepackaging of food helps eliminate food waste. As of right now, a staggering 21% of food waste in this country can be laid at the feet of consumers who don't use up everything they buy. Precisely packaged quantities of ingredients eliminate that hazard. And if food waste becomes a trendy issue in food culture -- the way slow food did in the aughties, for example -- then meal delivery boxes can capitalize on that trait.
Farmers are also seeing where this market goes. Last year, Blue Apron sourced 75 crops from independent farms at prices that are higher than typical wholesaler rates (yet lower than typical CSA rates). Their operational model has their recipe developers working with specific farms months in advance, with an idea of timing recipes to coincide with the farms' optimal harvest periods. For American farmers, there's hefty incentive to partner with a meal delivery business, because the sheer volume of produce required, plus those above-wholesale rates, can really tilt a balance sheet.
Your old-school environmentalists are watching too. Those gains in eliminating food waste may come at the expense of a lot of plastic packaging and a lot fuel burned in getting food to distribution centers, packaging it, then delivering it to millions of households. The question facing those critics: Do they have enough of a case about the negative aspects of meal kits to offset the presumed positives like lower food waste and more business for local farmers?
There is no way to eat where you're actually conserving energy and resources. But just as slow-food proponents encouraged people to take a look at the benefits of eating seasonally and shopping locally -- and look how that's diffused to chain restaurants and supermarkets in a decade -- expect low-waste proponents to start asking boxed-meal subscribers to think about the rubbish that goes with every meal.
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Your pop culture recommendation of the day: I just finished Joan Juliet Buck's The Price of Illusion (you can get a preview of the subject matter and writing in this excerpt, "I was Queen of French Fashion. Then Came the Guillotine.") and Pat Cleveland's Walking with the Muses.
There is an emerging thesis here to be developed about how survivors of the fashion and fashion media industry craft very specific story arcs, but a lot of the "Oh, this glamorous world! It's simply terrible!"-type writing reminds me a lot of the Tim Meadows running joke through Walk Hard -- "You don't want no part of this!"
The Cleveland book is a beach read through the wildness of the 1970s fashion scene -- you may recall that Cleveland was one of the stars of the Battle of Versailles, a fashion event that has been beautifully recounted by Robin Givhan in The Battle of Versailles: The Night American Fashion Stumbled into the Spotlight and Made History. Cleveland recalls being a participant in that, and she also tackles the racism of women's media in the '60s and '70s.
The Buck book is dishy, but in the genteel Vanity Fair style of "all the principle subjects of the dirt are dead so it's okay to air my side of the story uncontested." For all that Buck claims she's done with the pyrite sparkle of fashion media, the last few chapters suggest she's hedging her bets. Read this if you're the type of person who can't pass up anything anyone associated with a Conde Nast masthead writes.
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