Food Network Wants to Deliver Your Dinner

It’s Instacart’s same-day delivery model, based on recipes on Food Network’s website. Find a recipe you like, add ingredients from that recipe to your Instacart shopping cart, select a delivery time, and an Instacart personal shopper will deliver the items later that same day. 

While it may sound like another meal-kit delivery service, it’s different. The ingredients aren’t pre-measured to that recipe, and it doesn’t come with step-by-step ingredients. So it’s not as simple, or as cheap, as services like Blue Apron or HelloFresh. But you can have it within hours, instead of waiting. 

While it is an interesting concept, and follows the model that Instacart already has with Allrecipes, what we don’t know is whether the shopper can choose the retailer to fulfill the recipe’s ingredients. And is there an upcharge? Obviously, Food Network is in the game for more than just exposure. The money has to come from somewhere. 

The success of meal-kit acceptance by customers is the convenience, portion control, unique recipes and sourcing of ingredients. The Food Network concept seems to be more of a dumbing-down, mass-market approach that isn’t convenient and lacks the fun that many Blue Apron users report.

Supermarkets won’t have to worry about this one – but they need to watch and create their own versions of Blue Apron and the like.