Marketing meal kits: from customer agency to corporate social responsibility

Meal kits delivered to the home have become increasingly popular in recent years, particularly during the COVID-19 virus pandemic. Several companies offer these through monthly subscription with a vast range of ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes based on chef-inspired meals that customers can cook themselves. This paper examines the marketing of meal kits from three UK companies in terms of how they discursively construct the agency of the consumer. The study is based on a thematic analysis of web-based marketing material from the companies in terms of more or less coherent rhetorical ways of constructing matters in terms of common place descriptions, tropes, figures of speech, and metaphors. The findings point to several ways in which such a positioning is achieved under four thematic headings: the creative and committed consumer, the ethical consumer committed to sustainability, the consumer as an efficient time-saver, and the consumer aligned with corporate social responsibility. It is argued that this marketing approach is more elaborate than conventional identity approaches associated with brands, in that it taps into the consumer’s sense of agency both with and beyond the product.