Coronavirus lockdowns turn UK’s Mindful Chef profitable
The healthy recipe box service has been a pandemic winner, with locked-down customers driving sales up threefold to £53m last year.
Mindful Chef today reported it is profitable for the first time, with 2020 sales figures up 230 per cent on 2019, buoyed by the pandemic shift to online food delivery.
Customers for the Nestle majority-owned business rose by 205 per cent last year, increasingly attracted to its pre-prepared recipe boxes.
The business also reported a strong start to 2021, with Q1 sales up 200 per cent compared with the same period the year before, and a 50 per cent year-on-year increase in new customers.
Mindful Chef’s Q1 figures hinted at lasting behavioural change, with recipe box orders increasing by 35 per cent in the first three months of the year, compared with the same period in 2020.
The food delivery service, which focuses on sustainably sourced ingredients and encouraging people to avoid processed food, saw sales spike across its entire range – from one person boxes to family boxes and a pre-prepared frozen range.
The B Corp recipe box service has cashed in on booming demand for food delivery kits across the board during the pandemic. Recipe box rival Gousto recently announced plans to double its workforce after a year of bumper sales, while over-60s competitor Parsley Box listed on London’s Aim market in March.
“Despite the easing of Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, health and convenience remains a high priority for many people,” said Mindful Chef CEO Tim Lee.
“As a business with health and wellbeing at its heart, we’ve seen order frequency rates in Q1 increase by +35% YOY, a historically challenging figure to shift, demonstrating that food shopping online is increasingly becoming the norm for many households,” Lee added.