It’s Elf in a Box!

What’s Up

Meal kit company HelloFresh and Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products teamed up to launch a limited-edition Buddy the Elf Spaghetti meal kit for the holidays. The meal kit was inspired by the dish featured in the holiday movie Elf, starring Will Ferrell, and allowed customers to prepare a sweet plate of spaghetti topped with candy and dessert items. It included Colavita spaghetti, maple syrup, chocolate syrup, marshmallows, chocolate nonpareil candies, crumbled chocolate frosted pastries, and other ingredients.

HelloFresh offered timed chances to purchase the meal kits between December 5 and December 9 on the brand’s website, no subscription required. The kit was priced at $14.99 for two servings and came with the pre-portioned ingredients and a step-by-step recipe card to make the dish at home.

What it Means

Consumers love convenience and meal kits make cooking at home easier — no wonder this category has seen such growth. According to Research and Market’s Meal Kit Global Market Report 2022, the global meal kit market is expected to report a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.64% with the market growing from $11.19 billion in 2021 to $13.50 billion in 2022, and an estimated $23 billon by 2026. With increasing demand, more meal kits are expanding where customers can find them — recently, Blue Apron meal kits became available via Amazon and were the first meal kits carried by Walmart.com.

Another area of rising usage for consumers is streaming video on-demand (SVOD) platforms. Kantar’s Entertainment on Demand Panel found that 88% of U.S. households now have video streaming services, which is up 2% quarter-on-quarter after no growth in the second quarter of 2022. As of June 2022, 113 million U.S. households access streaming services with the average household watching five different services.

Amid the crowded and competitive SVOD landscape, more companies are branching out and others banding together to expand offerings and build-in value whenever possible:

• We wrote about how Netflix continues innovating around interactive content with its recent debut of Triviaverse
• Disney+ offered subscribers advanced access to new merchandise
• Walmart and Paramount+ collaborated to grant members access to streaming content, as we covered in a previous article
• Domino’s Pizza and Netflix worked together to create a Stranger Things mind-reading app where fans could place an order using “mind ordering”

These activations and campaigns can amplify both brand’s impact with customers and stand to bring in new attention.

Around the holidays, consumers are looking for special, festive ways to celebrate and spend time with friends and family. SVODs — and all businesses, especially those in increasingly competitive spaces — should explore new partnerships with brands to create novel ways for consumers to engage with their favorite characters, content, and products.