Tear Here for Dinner

It’s an odd thing to get fish by mail. But there they lay, nestled between ice packs the size of paving stones, six beautiful fillets of Acadian redfish from the high-end supplier Sea to Table. They came with tiny bottles of soy sauce and rice wine vinegar, exactly two pats of butter, and a half-dozen other ingredients that go into miso rice with roasted redfish—all delivered overnight by a company called Plated. Inside the box, everything was premeasured but unprepared: Vegetables had been left whole, meats unmarinated. So that night, when dinner landed on my table—and then on my Instagram account—I could honestly brag that I cooked it from scratch.

Meal kits like this first took off in Sweden in 2007 with a company called Middagsfrid, which roughly translates to “dinner peace.” (Similar businesses had a moment in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s.) American versions began popping up in 2012, with the near-simultaneous creation of Blue Apron and Plated by separate factions from the same Harvard Business School class. The rumor among classmates, which Blue Apron Chief Executive Officer Matt Salzberg denies, is that he got his idea from Plated founders Nick Taranto and Josh Hix, then was faster to line up funding. Later in 2012, a year-old German startup called HelloFresh came to the U.S. In 2013, Atlanta-based PeachDish joined the fray with boxes that have a “Southern accent.” The Purple Carrot began providing vegan options last fall.