How much more convenient can convenience get? The core consumer pitch of meal kit brands is that they make scratch cooking at home as simple and straightforward as possible. All the ingredients necessary for a meal, perfectly portioned, bagged up and delivered to your door. Rip it open and cook it. Dinner is served.
But even this minimal-prep brand of scratch cooking can seem too daunting a task at times, something recipe kit brand Gousto has recognised in its continuing quest to “challenge for the mainstream dinner market” with the launch of its new ready meal range this week: Heat & Eat.
What are its chances of success?
“It seems Gousto has finally come to the same conclusion as me: No matter how convenient you make cooking, there are days when I simply can’t be bothered,” says Mintel food and drink research director Ayisha Koyenikan.
“Consumers don’t choose between meal kits, ready meals and takeaways. They choose the right level of effort for that day,” she says.
That level of effort is a sliding scale, with opportunities for brands and services at every step.
The Gousto ecosystem
Take frozen meal kit brand Chefees, which delivers pre-chopped, seasoned and sauced meal elements to be assembled at home (Prawn Marinara, for example, requires the customer to simply add cooked pasta). It has expanded into retail from its DTC roots this week. Or HomeCooks (which raised £750k in crowdfunding earlier this year) a subscription ready meal service that allows customers to connect with different chefs who then prep and dispatch the meals from their own kitchens.
Gousto has already been picking off many of those opportunities. In recent years it has introduced a One Pan Wonder range, 20 Minute Meals, then 10 Minute Meals. And customer have responded, with sales of these convenience options increasing 23% in 2025.
Heat & Eat takes that even further. Gousto is not the first in this space, however. The likes of Frive, Prep Kitchen, Bozu and Simmer have offered ready meals (exclusively) on a subscription basis for several years.
But Gousto has the scale those rivals can only dream of and a reputation for quality ingredients and good-tasting recipes that is already well-established among its customer base. And it’s easier for an existing customer to be tempted to add a Heat & Eat meal or two to their weekly selection than for a rival service to win that customer from a standing start.
Heat & Eat sits nicely between scratch cooking and a takeaway on price too. Analysis by Bozu estimates each Gousto Heat & Eat ready meal costs approximately £7.85 per person. A touch more than a Charlie Bigham’s meal for one, and far more than traditional scratch cooking with supermarket ingredients, but also significantly less than the £13 an average Brit spends on a takeaway. The ultra-convenience is costed in, but there are savings to be made (in pounds and guilt) versus a takeaway.
Gousto’s broader range also means a customer doesn’t need to make the decision to subsist solely off ready meals – as they might with a rival – but each week can tweak the dial between recipe kit cooking and fridge-to-plate-in-seven-minute meals. And while ready meals can easily be bought from a supermarket – and delivered instantly via a delivery app – the range keeps customers within the Gousto ecosystem.
It’s something Gousto rival HelloFresh is already doing in North America and Sweden – although it keeps its ready meals service Factor distinct from its core offering.
As Koyenikan puts it: “Dinner is becoming less about format and more about flexibility”. Subscribing to Gousto now provides a bit more of that.
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