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meal kit2 companies found

Meal Kit Subscription2010–2019Shut Down

Munchery

Same-day prepared meal delivery startup that reached a $300 million valuation before food waste, thin margins, and constant reinvention caught up with it.

Munchery never solved its underlying operational economics: the company wasted an average of 16% of the food it produced, and years of reinventing its model, from ready-to-eat meals to meal kits to an $8.95-a-month subscription plan to a walk-up shop inside a San Francisco BART station, never fixed the core cost structure. CEO James Beriker later cited increased competition, over-funding relative to actual demand, aggressive expansion, and Blue Apron's failed 2017 IPO souring investor sentiment toward the whole meal-delivery category as reasons for the collapse. After retreating from Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle in 2018 and failing to close a final funding round, Munchery shut down abruptly in January 2019, leaving vendors and gift-card holders owed roughly $6 million.

San Francisco, USA

Meal Kit Subscription2013–2017Shut Down

Sprig

Fully vertically integrated meal delivery startup, sourcing, cooking, and delivering its own food, that couldn't make the model profitable before UberEats arrived.

Sprig's fully vertically integrated model, owning meal sourcing, cooking, and delivery all at once, proved far more operationally complex and expensive to scale than the company anticipated, and it never established a path to profitability, burning around $850,000 a month in its final stretch. The arrival of Uber's deep-pocketed, aggressively subsidized UberEats service intensified competition just as Sprig was already struggling, and the company was forced to retreat from markets outside San Francisco, including pausing service in Chicago in mid-2016. Unable to find a buyer for the business, Sprig shut down on May 26, 2017.

San Francisco, USA

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