Plated meal kits were in Albertsons stores, then disappeared. Now this.
Earlier this year, Albertsons pulled Plated meal kits from most of its stores. Customers had to go online to buy the kits and have them shipped to their homes.
Now, Albertsons has announced that it will no longer sell Plated kits online but will bring them back to stores as part of the Boise grocery chain’s private label lineup.
“We are planning to expand Plated products into more stores in 2020,” Albertsons spokeswoman Chris Wilcox said by email. “After resting in our Safeway stores in Northern California, we think there is great potential to grow the Plated brand through expanded product offerings.”
The Plated website has already shut down, with a message saying the company is ending its subscription service and directing customers to an Albertsons company search portal.
An Idaho Statesman search found 19 Safeway stores in the San Francisco area of California and four Market Street stores in Texas that still sell Plated meals. That’s similar to what the Statesman found in April, when Plated was pulled from Treasure Valley Albertsons stores and other stores across the country.
“Our vision for Plated includes an expanded set of products that goes far beyond a dinner-based solution and into a comprehensive in-house culinary brand,” Geoff White, Albertsons’ chief merchandising officer, said in a statement.
The company said it found that Plated customers are more likely to have families and make larger grocery purchases than other customers.
Albertsons’ experience with Plated has been baffling.
When the company bought New York-based Plated in September 2017, Albertsons executives said the purchase would allow the company to get meal kits in the hands of more customers by selling them in stores, cutting out the shipping time and expense from ordering online. At the same time, Plated would continue to offer the convenience of website purchases.
Then-CEO Bob Miller told the Idaho Statesman that the stores were “offering another service to our customers that we know they want.”
Albertsons debuted Plated at 20 Albertsons-owned Safeway stores in the San Francisco area and 20 Jewel-Osco stores in Chicago. It had plans to expand to as many as 650 stores across various Albertsons Cos. banners by the end of 2018.
To that end, Plated kits were placed prominently near the front of the gourmet Broadway Albertsons store when it opened in July 2018. That same week, the kits were available in six other Boise stores.
Plated provided meat, vegetables, sauces and other ingredients for a dinner for two. Choices included crunchy chicken Milanese with honey mustard and arugula, roasted chicken au jus with orzo and peas and steak frites with creamy shallot sauce and sautéed spinach. The boxes, which provided servings for two adults, sold for $18.98 each.
Eight months later, though, when the similar Albertsons Market Street store opened in a larger space in Meridian, Plated kits were nowhere to be seen. Albertsons never explained why.
By this past April, Plated kits were pulled from stores across the nation. Only the Bay Area and Texas stores still had them. At the time, the company said it was working to evolve its in-store presence.
Plated co-founder and former CEO Josh Hix stepped down without explanation in January. His cofounder, Nick Taranto, left in October 2018. They cofounded Plated in 2012 and sought investment on TV’s Shark Tank two years later.
Plated once had estimated annual sales of $100 million, reported Winsight Grocery Business, which monitors the industry.
This story was originally published November 14, 2019 at 3:57 PM.
