Amazon's new 'Meal Kits' are already on sale — here's what they look like

Amazon Meal Kit (Amazon)

Amazon's new home-delivery meals are already being sold to select customers on Amazon's US website.

Amazon Meal Kits, which aren't yet available in the UK, contain all the ingredients required to cook a selection of meals chosen by the customer.

They're available through Amazon's $14.99-a-month (£11.49) grocery service, Amazon Fresh, which can be used only by customers who have signed up to Amazon Prime, which costs $10.99 (£8.43) a month.

Amazon filed a trademark application on July 6 for "prepared food kits" as it looks to take on the likes of HelloFresh, Blue Apron, and Gousto.

Stock in Blue Apron plummeted by about 11% on Monday as investors learned of Amazon's plans to start directly competing with meal-delivery companies.

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(Amazon (Amazon)

After the various subscriptions have been paid for, Amazon Meal Kits work out at $8 (£6) to $10 (£7) a serving. There are 17 meals to choose from including tacos al pastor with pork and roasted cod with cannellini bean ragout and pesto. Each box contains just the right amount of ingredients and what the company describes as "easy-to-follow, chef-designed" recipes.

One Amazon Fresh customer named Josh Chadd told GeekWire that he started to see the Amazon Meal Kits appear online about a week or two ago, while user reviews suggest that the Meal Kits have been available since late June. Chadd reportedly said that the Amazon Meal Kits were slightly smaller than recipe boxes offered by other companies he had tried and that everything was fairly easy to recycle, with the exception of a couple of plastic bags.

Amazon began as an online bookseller, but today it's on a mission to become the go-to destination for an increasing number of shopping needs. The food industry is the latest market that Amazon is aggressively targeting.

Last month, Amazon acquired the supermarket chain Whole Foods for $13.7 billion (£10.5 billion), and the tech giant has also set up a restaurant food-delivery business to take on Deliveroo and UberEats.

Amazon did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

(Amazon (Amazon)

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