The Food Network Wants To Deliver Your Dinner

What happens when you take Food Network and create a partnership with Instacart? A new supermarket competitor.

It’s Instacart’s same day deliver model based on recipes on Food Network’s website. Find a recipe you like, add ingredients from that recipe to your Instacart shopping cart, select a delivery time, and an Instacart Personal Shopper will deliver the items later that same day. 

While it may sound like another meal kit delivery service, it’s different. The ingredients aren’t premeasured to that recipe, and it doesn’t come with step-by-step ingredients. So it’s not as simple, or as cheap as services like Blue Apron or HelloFresh. But you can have it within hours instead of waiting. 

While it is an interesting concept, and follows the model that Instacart already has with All Recipes, what we don’t know is if the shopper can choose what retailer to fulfill the recipe’s ingredients. And is there an upcharge? Obviously Food Network is in the game for more than just exposure. The money has to come from somewhere. 

The success of the meal-kit acceptance by customers is the convenience, portion control and unique recipes and sourcing of ingredients. The Food Network concept seems to be more of a dumbing down, mass market approach that isn’t convenient and lacks the fun that many Blue Apron users report.

Supermarkets won’t have to worry about this one – but they need to watch and create their own versions of Blue Apron and the like.