The market for meal kit services is booming. Not only is this a great industry to be part of, but they help everyone save time and money while eating healthy. And actually, anyone interested in starting a catering business may want to think again. Your passion may be in providing great meal options for events, but there is a growing market for a different kind of catering.

Meal kit delivery services like Sun Basket meal delivery and others are becoming increasingly popular. These services are essentially catering businesses for individual meals. Instead of providing solutions for events, they design meals for homes, curated to meet a person’s dietary needs and preferences.

How does it work? A customer orders a meal according to their needs and they receive all the ingredients for that meal delivered to their door. Everything is already cut and prepped, and comes with a simple recipe to apply the finishing touches. They have a home-cooked meal in no time, without needing any sort of expertise or major time investment.

There are many reasons meal kit delivery services is a growing industry and increasing in popularity. Let’s explore the top two reasons.

Keeping Healthy

Americans want to be healthy, but it is hard with busy lifestyles. In spite of US citizens paying four times as much as citizens of any other countries spend on health care, our life expectancy rate is dropping. There are a number of reasons for this, which are constantly debated by politicians, but what more Americans are realizing is that staying healthy is much more realistic than paying to recover from health problems.

Many of us are turning to healthier eating. Healthy meals ensure we get all the nutrients we need and keep us from getting dangerously overweight. They also make it easier to lose weight.

Not everyone has the time or skills to cook their own healthy meals. Meal kit delivery services make eating healthy home-cooked meals easier than ever.

Waste Prevention

In addition to many preventative health benefits, meal kit delivery services serve another important goal. They lower the amount of food we all waste. Food wastage is a financial problem, as we spend money on groceries we end up throwing away. But it is an even bigger problem for sustainability, food security, and resource conservation.

America has a huge food wastage problem. Over 30% of all perishable food goes to waste every year. That amounts to 133 billion pounds of food which ends up in landfills. This consequently amounts to 18% of methane emissions that come from landfills according to the EPA.

Meal kit delivery services provide the exact amount of ingredients people need. Instead of buying perishables at the grocery and hoping they survive in the refrigerator, the ingredients are used right away.

Additionally, meal kits use produce that won’t necessarily make it to the shelves of grocery stores due to aesthetic reasons. Yes, ugly food gets its chance! A lot of this produce goes to waste for this reason, but in meal kits, the ingredients are chopped and ready. It doesn’t matter how perfectly round a tomato was when it is chopped into pieces.

Meal kit delivery services are becoming more and more popular, due to their practicality, health benefits, and the effect they have on reducing food wastage. It is a market that is growing steadily, and looks set to do so for the foreseeable future.

If you’re looking for a market to explore, meal kits might be a tasty option that you can sink your teeth into.