How Home Chef Cuts Meal Kit Food and Packaging Waste

Meal kits, delivered pre-portioned to consumers’ homes, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 33 percent on average over grocery store- bought meals, according to a University of Michigan study.  Though they usually require more packaging, they come out ahead as carbon shrinkers because they cut out supply chain steps and mitigate wasted leftovers; households toss about 38 percent less food when they opt for meal kits over grocery store shopping, reports the Journal of Cleaner Production.

By purchasing several pre-portioned lunches or dinners a week, you get exactly what you need. You are not buying excess specialty ingredients that you use once then waste what’s left, says Cody Ferrantino, program manager for Sustainability and Impact at Home Chef. That means no extra parsley left to wilt; no spinach turned to soup on fridge shelves.

Home Chef sells both meal kits containing uncooked, prepackaged ingredients and fully cooked, re-heatable meals. The Chicago-based company has spread out since its launch 11 years ago, strategically locating facilities around the country to shorten the haul to customers’ doors, which has helped to reduce spoilage and cut delivery truck emissions. But the plan to trim carbon footprint goes beyond logistics, from thought-out forecasting to figuring out how to consolidate ingredients so they can be used across menus.

When waste still happens, there is plan B – seeing that good, edible surplus that won’t hold till the next week is donated to people who need it and sending it for aerobic digestion to be converted to power if it has spoiled.

“Because we forecast early and often, we are able to estimate what we need to order. So, we are not ending up with a lot of inventory that just takes up space and leads to potential waste,” Ferrantino says.

Customers have until Friday to submit orders for the next week. Home Chef sends out those orders on Sunday. But the team has been forecasting for weeks prior, using data from previous years and customer trends to estimate how much of each ingredient they will need, but creating a little buffer to not run short.

“Over the years our team has learned to get closer to what customers want to be sure to purchase appropriately week over week,” Ferrantino says.

Making the most of resources takes collaboration with product and culinary teams to consolidate ingredients across meals.

Home Chef puts out 75 unique recipes weekly. That’s a lot of cuisine choices and mountains of ingredients. If meals have similar ingredients across recipes the goal is to maximize inventory by using the same or similar portion sizes in multiple meals.  Say there are extra broccoli servings left from one menu; they can be placed in another one rather than wind up as surplus with no home.

There’s no way around it—meal kits take a fair amount of packaging. Home Chef’s packaging changes based on each recipe, but those recipes include up to 10 ingredients. Besides the cardboard shipping box, meals typically come in plastic bags for consolidating ingredients, jars and bottles, plastic trays sealed in plastic film, and/or ice packs for temperature-sensitive foods.

“We’re always exploring new packaging types, and recyclability and reusability are considerations in that process,” says Scott Fratzke, Home Chef's COO, who says most of the packaging is recyclable (depending on the curbside program) or it’s reusable, from recyclable trays and their sleeves to recyclable or reusable ice packs and insulation, including liners made from PET or from denim that can be repurposed.

The packaging comes with messaging steering customers to the company’s website for instructions on what to recycle and how to do it.

Operational changes have taken packaging waste reduction further, such as the recent installation of in-house machinery to package ingredients bought in bulk with less plastic than before.

Home Chef established food donations last year and has donated over 250 tons of food since September 2023 across its four facilities in Chicago, Atlanta, San Bernardino, and Baltimore.

“That’s 420,000 meals that have gone into the community rather than to landfill. It’s edible, healthy food going to people who need it most. We recover as much as we can to donate. What is spoiling or would spoil before it got to customers, we separate for anaerobic digestion as much as possible,” Ferrantino says.

Nonprofit 4MyCiTy, is Home Chef’s Baltimore food rescue partner.

The charity’s work is not easy, with the biggest challenge being securing consistent funding for daily operational costs. While many grants support specific programs, they often come with restrictive funding that doesn’t cover essential operational expenses further taxing the ability to get ahold of and distribute much-needed large quantities of edible food.

“Our partnership with Home Chef enables us to serve over 7,500 families through our daily food distributions, significantly enhancing food security within our Baltimore communities,” says Christopher Dipnarine, founder and executive director of 4MyCiTy.

“Their flexibility in donation scheduling and the consistency of their contributions help us plan our distributions better, ensuring that we can reliably serve the families who depend on us.”

.

Baltimore is for now the only city where Home Chef sends food waste for anaerobic digestion. It’s resulted in a reduction in trash pickup service from twice a week to every 10 days, lowering disposal costs while separating and recycling 80 tons of decomposing food since January 2024 that would otherwise be landfilled.

Ironing out logistics is part of carving a more sustainable path. That means working with on-the-ground partners to deliver meals to customers’ doorsteps fast, ensuring they are fresh while cutting down on road time and emissions. Optimizing delivery routes helps, as does having facilities across the country.

Home Chef is not alone in this niche. The model has gained in popularity since its introduction around 2012, with online meal kit delivery services expected to hit $19.52B by 2028.

Many of these companies like Hello Fresh, Martha Stewart & Marley Spoon, and Dinnerly are jumping on the sustainability bandwagon. They follow some of the same protocol as Home Chef; sell “Climatarian diet” menus with planet- and people-friendly locally sourced plant-based foods; are transitioning to renewable energy; and or even investing in electric bike fleets.

 Home Chef is looking to do more to green its operations.

“We set a strong foundation this year to put food that cannot go in our kits to optimal use. We developed a wide scope of programs, and next year I want to go deeper,” says Ferrantino who, for one, hopes to onboard compost partners to have one more option beyond anaerobic digestion for what can’t be donated.

Home Chef is looking to duplicate its work that began in Baltimore, where organic diversion laws were about to take effect.

“We wanted to get ahead of the regulations. So before we were shipping boxes out the door, we were laying out the processes of separating donatable foods and separating food waste from there,” Ferrantino says.

The Baltimore facility hit a new milestone in April 2024, diverting 80 percent of all its waste – organics and other. “We are showing it’s possible in Baltimore. We want to recreate [the processes there] and have the Baltimore team train staff at our other facilities on how to do this as part of our day-to-day life.”