Roast Duck with Blackberry Shallots and Parsnip Mash
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Perspective

Why Meal Kits Are Losing the Joy of Cooking: Frive and the Race to Convenience

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7 min
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By
Alex Fahey

Pictured: Roast Duck with Blackberry Shallots and Parsnip Mash

Short answer

Meal kits remove the planning, shopping and measuring around dinner, but they can also stop people building their own recipe repertoire and kitchen habits. The growth of prepared-meal services such as Frive suggests that when convenience is the only goal, the logical end point is removing the cooking too. Chop it takes the opposite approach: remove the admin, keep the cooking.

Contents

Meal kits are winning the wrong race.

Frive isn't really a meal-kit company. It delivers prepared meals, which is exactly why its growth tells us something about the wider category.

The Financial Times reported in June 2026 that Frive generated £50 million in revenue in 2025, served 30,000 households a week and had delivered more than 25 million meals. It forecast £70 million revenue for 2026.

At the same time, traditional meal kits are putting more emphasis on speed. The Times reported in March 2026 that HelloFresh orders for 15-minute meals were up 30% year on year and almost five times higher than in 2022. HelloFresh has also expanded its ready-to-eat Factor brand in Europe.

The direction of travel is obvious: fewer ingredients, fewer steps, less preparation, less cooking and less thinking, until you wonder why you'd cook at all.

The convenience race from home cooking to a prepared meal, with less deciding, shopping, preparation and cooking at each stage

The graphic isn't a judgement on any one service. It shows the logic of the category.

Why meal kits can make cooking feel harder over time

I'm exactly the person meal kits were invented for. I enjoy food and I'm a good home cook. I also have a busy job, a family and very little interest in spending Sunday afternoon on a spreadsheet about what everyone's going to eat for the next seven days.

So at first meal kits felt brilliant. Someone else decided dinner, the ingredients arrived portioned and there was nothing to remember.

After a few months I got bored and switched services. Then I switched again, and again. About a year in, I noticed something strange.

I hadn't stopped liking food. I'd forgotten how to feed myself.

Not literally, obviously. But I'd lost the habits that made me a good home cook. I wasn't saving recipes I loved, building a repertoire or looking in the fridge and thinking, “I could make something with that.”

Dinner had become an assembly task: open the bag, follow the card, eat it, repeat. After a while, even perfectly decent meals started to feel a bit like prison food to me. The food wasn't bad. It was prescribed.

The joy of cooking had slowly been replaced by the efficiency of completing dinner.

The meal-kit dependency loop, from not knowing what to cook through subscribing, losing planning habits and finding meal planning harder

This was my experience, not a universal verdict. Plenty of people use meal kits happily for years. But the loop explains why changing provider every few months never solved my problem. I was outsourcing the habit I needed to rebuild.

Meal planning is part of cooking, not just admin

Some meal planning is admin, but some of it is cooking. Remembering that brilliant pasta you made six months ago, knowing there's half a bag of spinach in the fridge, wanting fish and vegetables tonight after a heavy weekend, changing your mind because it's suddenly sunny: all of that is cooking. So is having ten reliable meals that everyone in your family likes.

Meal kits solve the admin by replacing that whole system with their own. That works brilliantly until you leave. Then you're standing in a supermarket thinking: what did I used to buy?

You also still have to go shopping. Meal kits cover some dinners, not necessarily breakfast, lunch, fruit, milk, snacks, washing-up liquid, toothpaste, nappies or the hundred other things a household needs. Instead of replacing the weekly shop, they can create a second food system beside it: your normal shop, plus a large refrigerated box containing four dinners.

Convenient starts to get surprisingly complicated. If you want the practical alternative, this is the weekly meal-planning system I now use.

Why Frive is the logical conclusion of the convenience race

That's why I find Frive's growth interesting. I don't read it as evidence that people have stopped caring about food. It shows what happens when time becomes the main problem a category is trying to solve.

If I'm already choosing from somebody else's weekly menu, receiving exactly the ingredients they specify and following exactly their instructions, it's reasonable to ask why I'm doing the cooking bit. Frive's answer is that you aren't. The meal arrives made.

That's an entirely legitimate product, and clearly one that many households want. It also shows the direction the market has been moving in.

Comparison of what remains in traditional cooking, meal kits, quick meal kits and prepared meals

Traditional home cooking asks you to decide, shop, prepare, cook and eat. A meal kit usually removes deciding and most shopping. Faster kits reduce preparation and cooking. A prepared-meal service leaves the eating.

If every inconvenience is removed, eventually the only thing left is eating.

There has to be something between doing all the work yourself and outsourcing dinner completely. That's the gap I built Chop it to fill.

The missing middle: remove the admin, keep the cooking

I didn't want technology to decide what I was allowed to cook. I wanted it to do the boring work around cooking.

I should be able to find a recipe anywhere, keep it and build my own collection rather than live inside somebody else's catalogue. With ten minutes on Sunday, I should be able to look through dinner ideas and swap the ones I don't fancy. If I want a healthy reset this week, or comfort food, the system should adapt. If I open the fridge and need to use chicken, spinach and half a tub of crème fraîche, I should be able to start there. And if I change my mind on Wednesday, nothing should break.

The missing middle between doing everything yourself and outsourcing dinner: Chop it removes the admin while the cook keeps choosing and cooking

That is the missing middle:

  • Discover anywhere: websites, cookbooks, social video and ChatGPT.
  • Let Chop it handle the boring work: save, organise, tag, plan, merge and shop.
  • Keep the good part: choose, improvise, change your mind, cook and eat.

The meal planning apps I compared for 2026 take very different approaches to this. The distinction that matters is whether the plan belongs to the service or stays useful as part of your own cooking system.

What AI should do in the kitchen

A useful personal cooking system needs a lot of deeply boring upkeep: organising recipes, cleaning up ingredients, sorting tags, making sense of serving sizes, keeping the pantry easy to maintain and the library usable as it grows. None of that makes you a better cook. It's admin, so let the machine do it.

Planning is the same. Sometimes I want to put a week together visually from my recipes. Other times I have 90 seconds and want to say: “Give me five dinners. Two quick ones, something healthy, fish once, and something I can cook properly on Sunday.” Both should work. The technology should fit around how much time I have, not force me through the same workflow every week.

That's also why saving a recipe can't be the end of the job. A useful system turns it into a plan and then merges the ingredients into one shopping list.

Convenience should not mean surrendering control

I don't think people have suddenly lost their desire to cook. Modern life has made the organisation around cooking disproportionately difficult, and that's the part to remove.

Keep discovering something new, improvising, cooking for people you love and building your own repertoire. Get rid of the rubbish around it: the spreadsheets, the screenshots you can never find again, and a refrigerated box dictating Wednesday's dinner because you selected it six days ago.

I'd like the future of home cooking to be technology that makes cooking fit around real life again, rather than a better subscription box or a better ready meal. The machine handles the admin. You decide what's for dinner.

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