Dinner by Design, a Grayslake-based “meal assembly” business, on Tuesday announced it has entered into a national collaboration with the Northfield-based food giant.
Dinner by Design has 75 franchisee-operated outlets across the country where people too busy to shop for groceries and prepare their own meals can go to assemble entrees to take home to cook or to freeze.
Kraft has paid Dinner by Design an undisclosed sum to use such brands as Oreo cookies, Stove Top stuffing and A.1 Steak Sauce in its recipes and to promote them on its menus and marketing materials.
And that’s just the first step in what’s expected to be a growing relationship between the two. Dinner by Design is talking to several Kraft brand managers about giving its clients coupons for certain Kraft products used in recipes, says company president and founder Julie Duffy.
More at Influx
Americans, pinched for time and increasingly uncomfortable in their kitchens, have been on a 50-year slide away from home cooking. Now, at almost 700 meal assembly centers around the country, families like the Robbinses prepare two weeks’ worth of dinners they can call their own with little more effort than it takes to buy a rotisserie chicken and a bag of salad.
The centers are opening at a rate of about 40 a month, mostly in strip malls and office parks in the nation’s suburbs and smaller cities, and are projected to earn $270 million this year, according to the Easy Meal Prep Association, the industry’s trade group.
“It’s been keeping us from ordering pizza all the time,” Ms. Robbins said. “And you still feel like you’re cooking.”
The prototype, a kind of elevated cooking session among friends in a commercial kitchen, popped up in the Northwest in 1999. The concept did not take off until 2002, when two Seattle-area women streamlined the process so customers could make 12 dinners for six in two hours for under $200. That company became Dream Dinners, which opened a year later and now has 112 franchise stores, with 64 under construction.
Super Suppers, which opened a year later in Fort Worth, is the largest chain, with 121 franchise stores and 77 more under construction. For people with few cooking skills, the centers keep things simple with a rotating menu of mostly stews and casseroles designed to be assembled in freezer bags or aluminum trays, then taken home to be baked or simmered in a single pot.
NYT
Coca-Cola said trials of new vending machines that allow users to take digital photos and download ringtones for mobile phones could be replicated worldwide as the soft drinks company seeks to interact more directly with consumers.
The Cokefridge machine, on display at the CIES world food business conference in Paris last week, has an interactive screen that runs advertisements, and allows users to obtain free photos, games, logos and ringtones after they have bought a drink.
Users type a numerical code inscribed inside the cap of the drink into the interactive screen to get access to the photos and games.
The interactive screen says: “Available here: Cool mobile logos. SMS and ringtones and exciting mobile games. Every Coke and every Code is an experience!” Drinks available for purchase include bottled water as well as soft drinks.
Consumers can use a “Coke Cam” to take a photo of themselves in a frame that contains a Coke logo, and send the photo to an e-mail address or to a mobile phone. They can also interact with a website, www.cokefridge.de
MSNBC
Miss that Airport lounge when in the city?
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Springwise
