., Instacart, DoorDash, Uber), and meal kit companies (i.e., Blue Apron, Hello Fresh). It excludes restaurant sales. Delivery includes home or work locations. Click and Collect: Sales of grocery products ordered using the internet for pickup in a store, curbside, drive-up or a locker in a retail, or pickup hub location.

Busy, dual-income households increasingly demand time-saving meals, but don't want to sacrifice quality. For many, the go-to solution has been meal kits, which marketers have touted as healthy, convenient alternatives to traditional home cooking.

Meal kits are experiencing an uptick in popularity as more people practice social distancing and turn to alternatives to limit their grocery store shopping.

eMarketer principal analysts Andrew Lipsman and Nicole Perrin discuss a recent report from The Wall Street Journal indicating that Amazon tweaked its algorithm to favor profitable, Amazon-branded products, the significance of consumers scaling back spending post-summer sales, Americans’ thoughts on meal kits and more.

Over the past few weeks, online grocery stores and meal kits have seen a stream of orders coming in, not only from existing customers, but also new ones looking to avoid physical stores during the pandemic. Plant-based meal company Splendid Spoon is one of those receiving demand.

That’s because more consumers took to online grocery shopping and leaned more heavily on apps like Instacart and meal kit companies like HelloFresh and Blue Apron. “While we do expect grocery app user growth to decelerate this year, to 5.8%, this is a reversal of our previous predictions for 2021,” said Cindy Liu, eMarketer director of forecasting at Insider Intelligence.

Meal-kit sales likewise exploded in 2020 and are expected to hit $19.9 billion in the US by 2027. Meanwhile, Mastercard’s QuickBooks and Zoho Marketing rewards offer digital solutions that might appeal to small businesses: 30% of them have begun to digitize their business functions, per Visa.

Smaller shares said they’d give home delivery of cooked meals, meal kits, and fresh ingredients a first try. In the week ending March 8, 2020, home delivery of CPG products in France was 72.2% higher than in the same period in 2019, per Nielsen, and curbside pickup of CPG product orders rose by nearly 30% year over year.

Food service beyond grocery will shape up differently post-pandemic, with a wider variety of options supplementing the patronizing of sit-down restaurants, including meal kit delivery and ordering food online directly and via third-party aggregators' apps.

Consumers are constantly in search of convenience, particularly in the form of timesaving. In the past 12 months, numerous direct-to-consumer (D2C) meal plan services have emerged, offering consumers an alternative solution to home cooking without paying a dreaded visit to the grocery store—or spending time trying to figure out a recipe.

Overall, consumers are turning to some iteration of online grocery to meet their needs, whether it’s through a company’s website or by subscribing to meal kits.

Mosaic Foods has had to acclimate to a new normal in the past few months, and as a relatively new brand, that hasn’t always been easy. Before the pandemic, employees of the meal delivery company were able to test out new recipes and offer feedback right then and there. But today, meals are shipped to co-workers who do video taste tests and offer notes.

Lunch and dinner subscription company MealPal started out as a service through which consumers could pick up meals from local restaurants during the work week—but, like many in the food industry, it has adjusted its operations for quarantined customers. The company now offers groceries supplied by local restaurants via MealPal Market.

Subscriptions like Netflix and Spotify have successfully transformed the way people engage with media, but retail subscriptions are yet to transform the way people shop. So far, retail subscription boxes have seen momentum within the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) category—think companies like Blue Apron, Dollar Shave Club and Birchbox. Despite the waves these companies have made, are consumers actually ready to automate their purchases of everyday goods?