Amazon Launches Meal Kit Delivery Service

This fall, Amazon Fresh and Tyson Foods join together to debut Tyson Taste Makers.

May 11, 2016

SEATTLE – Amazon will soon get into the meal-kit delivery service with the projected fall launch of its Tyson Taste Makers via a partnership with Tyson Foods, Business Insider reports. “We’re expanding our relationship with Amazon Fresh to sell fresh protein as well as partner with them around innovation,” said Tyson Foods CEO Donald Smith during an investors call this week. “We plan to launch Tyson Taste Makers, a line of chef-inspired meal kits in premium proteins for home delivery with Amazon Fresh this fall.”

While Smith didn’t provide many details, Taste Makers appears to be similar to ready-to-cook meals delivered directly to consumers, such as HelloFresh and Blue Apron. “We’ll teach them about the cuts of meat and where they come from. We’ll help pre-cut, trim, dry age, smoke, marinate, and do the prep so all they have to do is cook it. And then we’ll inspire them to explore and cook with ingredients that they may have never used before,” Smith said during a March conference.

Taste Makers represents Amazon’s latest idea to capture the food and grocery market. Its Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service ships thousands of products to numerous cities, including Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia for a $299 annual fee. Analysts speculated that adding a meal-kit delivery product to its portfolio would allow Amazon to entice the younger, upper-income households to join its service.

Regardless, Taste Makers has the potential to make Amazon an even more major business in the U.S. beverage and food industry. Cowen & Co. predicts the retail giant will sell $23.2 billion worth of grocery products by 2021, close to a three-fold jump from this year’s forecast. That leap would make Amazon the seventh biggest food-and-beverage retailer in the country. 

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