Home Chef, a Chicago-based meal kit company that saw its subscription service fall off in the wake of the pandemic, is growing again with a plethora of front door-to-table options to keep its target millennial customers cooking.
In addition to classic meal kits that make everything from umami tortellini in truffle butter sauce to sesame miso chicken in the time it takes Uber Eats to deliver dinner, a newer Home Chef microwavable line can be ready faster than you can place a restaurant order.
“We know people are preparing these oftentimes on weeknights, they don’t want to spend two hours in the kitchen,” said Rich DeNardis, chief revenue officer of Home Chef. “It depends on the meal, but we’re targeting 30 minutes or less.”
Founded in 2013, Home Chef is one of the leading meal kit companies in the nation, with a bustling Old Post Office headquarters, a Bedford Park manufacturing plant, four distribution centers and more than 2,000 employees creating ready-to-prepare entrees.
Home Chef, which was acquired by Kroger in 2018, is projected to top $700 million in sales this year through its $9.99-per-serving online meal kit subscription service. Tempo, a microwavable offering introduced in 2023, accounts for about 15% of revenue, the company said.
Subscribers must order at least two meal kits per week from a rotating menu featuring dozens of recipes with pre-portioned ingredients and step-by-step directions. The meal kits are packed on ice and delivered to doorsteps nationwide.
Not surprisingly, the business model took off during the pandemic.
“The business doubled overnight, literally from the beginning of the pandemic,” DeNardis said. “We were pretty proud of the fact that we were able to keep up with that increased demand.”
Annual revenue peaked at $720 million per year in 2021 as remote work, social distancing and dining at home became de rigueur, DeNardis said. By 2024, however, Home Chef saw annual revenue drop to $625 million as the country fully emerged from the pandemic.
Home Chef was not alone, as the meal kit industry at large saw a significant post-pandemic decline in demand, according to Darren Tristano, CEO of Foodservice Results, a Chicago-based research and consulting firm.
“What you had early on was a lot of people who subscribed and then they found they weren’t using it,” Tristano said. “You’re eating out a lot more, so a lot of those meals were getting spoiled because you either weren’t making them, or you didn’t need them. So a lot of people kind of unsubscribed to it.”
Tristano said the meal kit industry has begun shifting from stovetop to microwave as convenience tops actual cooking in the post-pandemic world.
“You can do both, and I think both is how you survive,” Tristano said.
Germany’s HelloFresh is the largest meal kit company in the world with annual sales topping $7 billion. But year-over-year revenue is declining and the stock price is down more than 90% since its pandemic high in 2021.
Like Home Chef, HelloFresh added a microwavable offering in late 2024 that represented about 20% of its meal kit sales during the first half of 2026, according to financial filings.
Meanwhile, meal kit competitors Blue Apron and Marley Spoon both outsourced their manufacturing to New Jersey-based FreshRealm amid the post-pandemic downturn. The operations rollup took a wrong turn when FreshRealm filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in April following a deadly listeria outbreak in a pasta meal sold at grocery stores.
The FreshRealm ready-to-eat chicken fettuccine alfredo meals were sold under several brand names including Home Chef at Kroger/Mariano’s stores. The product was recalled in July 2025.
“Kroger’s Home Chef-branded products have been made by a variety of manufacturing partners over the years, as well as the in-house deli department.” a Home Chef spokesperson said in an email. “Home Chef does not partner with FreshRealm on any meals or ingredients available via our e-commerce subscription service.”
While the meal kit industry has continued to face challenges, Home Chef has regained some traction through organic growth, its microwavable products and new business siphoned from struggling competitors, DeNardis said.
More Top Picks Best Walking Shoes For Plantar Fasciitis
The Chicago test kitchen inside the Old Post Office is where Home Chef hones its recipe — or more precisely dozens of recipes — for success.
Spread out across expansive work stations that resemble gleaming kitchen cubicles, chefs spend their days whipping up meals from soup to nuts, a laboratory of sorts to create appetizing and easy dinners to make at home.
“We have a team of chefs, and we challenge them to cook things that our customers can cook,” said Kate Ander, culinary director at Home Chef. “We know that our chefs can cook a lot, but can you make it in a way that our customers can also execute?”
A culinary team develops the menus quarterly, coming up with enough recipes to feature 36 different meal kits per week. While favorites regularly rotate in and out of the lineup, every week Home Chef aims for 50% of the meals to be new concoctions — menu items that have never run before.
Ander enlists the broader employee base to taste test the food. That means three dozen or so members of the culinary team — from photographers and writers to chefs — are required to eat on the job every day.
“It sounds awesome, and mostly it is,” Ander said. “But sometimes it’s hard when something is just good. You have to have an opinion, so you can’t just say it’s good. You have to give more than that.”
During a recent visit, chefs were preparing hot soups for the long winter ahead. Despite unseasonably warm weather, there were still plenty of employee taste testers lining up to slurp down a bowl for the sake of culinary science.
Recipes that make it to the test kitchen are rarely shot down, due in large part to a rigorous menu vetting process and weekly ideation sessions before the meal kit hits the pan, Ander said.
A recent recipe that didn’t cut the mustard was a curry concoction that was a big hit in the test kitchen, but a kitchen nightmare for the home chefs, Ander said.
“It could be that for us, it wasn’t that difficult, and we have to remember that our customers aren’t professionally trained,” Ander said. “Every so often we have a reminder of what the target should be.”
In addition to its own team of more than a dozen chefs and apprentices, Home Chef has also featured menu collaborations with celebrity chefs, including Giada De Laurentiis, Rachael Ray and Gordon Ramsay.
Despite his notoriously fiery TV persona, the Gordon Ramsay meal kit doesn’t include any pre-packaged insults or threats to shut your kitchen down — just easy-to-follow recipe cards.
“Working with a chef like Gordon Ramsay, he’s all about trying to get more people confident in the kitchen and making it so that they can really interact with and make his meals,” DeNardis said.