When you’re hungry for dinner and can’t decide between delivery, take-out, or cooking at home, the grocery chain Albertsons hopes you’ll choose a Plated meal kit from one of their stores that combines elements of all three.
The do-it-yourself food prep packages are available at hundreds of Albertsons stores across the country, Plated CEO and co-founder Josh Hix said. They give busy people who don’t want to commit to a meal subscription service a one-off option.
“We can’t profitably ship just one meal,” Hix said Friday in an interview on Cheddar. “They want to buy at the last minute, we can’t profitably ship at the last minute. So it’s really about serving lots and lots of different types of customers.”
Each meal kit costs around $16, said Hix. Consumers can order online and pick their meal kit up, or go to the store and buy them off the shelf.
Albertsons, which owns Safeway and ACME stores, acquired Plated last summer for $200 million. The purchase was designed to give the brick-and-mortar retailer an entry into the growing meal kit market.
The grocery chain Krogers announced recently that it will begin carrying meal kits in its stores, as will Walmart, which plans to have them in more than 2,000 stores by the end of the year. Blue Apron and Weight Watchers plan to sell kits at retailers too.
Amazon, which acquired Whole Foods last year, filed a patent for a new meal kit service to be sold in stores even though it already sells kits online.
“I think the retail presence is critical,” Hix said, noting that online doesn’t work for all customers.
“You end up with a lot of people that may try it and love the product but don’t love the purchasing model.”
For the full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/make-room-for-plated).
An independent watchdog within the IRS reports that while taxpayer services have vastly improved, the agency is still too slow to resolve identity theft cases. And National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins says those delays are “unconscionable.” Erin M. Collins said in the report released Wednesday that overall the 2024 filing season went smoothly, though IRS delays in resolving identity theft victim assistance cases are worsening. It took nearly 19 months to resolve self-reported identity theft cases as of January, and Wednesday's report states that now it takes 22 months to resolve these cases.
Amazon.com Inc. surpassed $2 trillion in market value for the first time in afternoon trading on Wednesday. The push higher for Amazon’s stock market valuation comes a little more than a week after Nvidia hit $3 trillion and briefly became the most valuable company on Wall Street. Nvidia’s chips are used to power many AI application and its valuation has soared as a result. Amazon has also been making big investments in AI as global interest has grown in the technology. Most of the company’s focus has been on business-focused products.
Climate change doesn’t just mean more extreme weather – it also leads to billions of dollars in lost productivity, tourism, and stresses infrastructure.
