Meal kits are becoming ever more popular. Companies such as HelloFresh or Mindful Chef offer consumers easy to cook, freshly prepared food without the fuss of planning meals or going to the shops. Two articles, Heard et al. (2019) and Fenton (2017), investigate the carbon intensity of meal kits and find they produce less CO2 emissions compared to the same meal bought from supermarkets. This is because the pre-portioned ingredients of meal kits reduce domestic food waste. However, Gee et al. (2019) suggest that meal kits may actually increase emissions because they use significantly more packaging. This is a complex and under-researched problem, and there may be a trade-off between reducing CO2 emissions or reducing plastic waste.
