Update July 18: It turns out Amazon has been working on a trial of a meal kit service, in the US in very selected areas.
One Seattle-based customer reached out to GeekWire to detail his experience with the service, which looks to entail ordering ingredients for one meal at a time to be delivered and prepared at home.
We'll keep you updated on whether or when Amazon plans to roll out the service more widely.
Original article below...
Following Amazon's massive purchase of Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, it looks like the next step in the retail giant's plan for dietary domination involves prepared meal kits.
Amazon has filed for a trademark using the phrase 'We do the prep. You be the chef,' according to TechCrunch. The trademark describes a service that provides 'prepared food kits' that can be turned into a meal out of the box.
This sounds similar to meal kit delivery services like HelloFresh and Blue Apron (which only operates in the US at the moment), which regularly mail groceries to a customer's doorstep so they can cook dishes without any extra trips to the store.
Other slogans like 'We prep. You cook' and 'No-line meal kits' were also applied for trademarking by Amazon. This makes it all the more likely the big box behemoth is cooking up a meal delivery service of its own.
Though Amazon has yet to confirm any sort of meal-in-a-box delivery service plans (the trademark applications are still pending at the time of writing), the move would be very much within the company's scope of operations.
Between Amazon Fresh mailing food staples to your door, the Amazon Dash Wand enabling you to reorder said food with a single scan, and even its own automated grocery stores on the way, it's clear that Amazon's next frontier is ruling pantries just like it rules, well, everything else.
- Our review of the Amazon Echo
