Home Chef Expands Southeast Footprint With More Production Space

Kroger-owned meal delivery company opens facility outside of Atlanta

7/19/2022

Home Chef's new production operation will provide more space and opportunities to better serve the company's growing customer base.

To better serve its growing meal kit consumers, Home Chef is expanding its southeast footprint to a brand-new production space that will allow for more capacity and increased efficiencies. The company has leased a 181,000-square-foot facility at 2120 Skyview Drive in Douglasville, Ga.

A subsidiary of The Kroger Co., Home Chef offers recipes in many formats, from minimal-mess Oven-Ready and Fast & Fresh meal kits to its Culinary Collection for more adventurous home cooks, as well as add-ons like protein packs, salads, desserts and more. With meal solutions available from www.homechef.com and at more than 2,200 stores in the Kroger family, Home Chef’s new production space will accommodate both the e-commerce meal delivery service and the retail needs of the business.

While Home Chef has had operations in the south since 2017, the Douglasville production center is the company’s first single-tenant facility. It will be equipped with such state-of-the-art features as upgraded food-safe material design, cleaning processes and facility flow. Located just outside of Atlanta, the Douglasville location will also be the first Home Chef facility to incorporate a full-service kitchen for cooking and batch production of ingredients to be used in the company’s meals. The 6,000-square-foot space will handle the cooking of vegetables, starches and grains, in addition to in-house sauce production.

"Our Atlanta facility is a foundational part of delivering high-quality meals to our customers in the south and beyond," said Erik Jensen, CEO of Chicago-based Home Chef. "This brand-new center will make our production and distribution even more efficient so we can continue to bring fans easy, delicious recipes."

The new Home Chef production facility comes at an ideal time, as consumer research from Chicago-based Culinary Visions has found that meal kits are well on their way to becoming a mainstream phenomenon, with 49% of consumers ages 18-34 saying that meal kits are part of their weekly grocery routine. Meal kits are most attractive to households with three or more people, according to Culinary Visions’ research, with 49% of consumers in such households using this option on a weekly basis.

With its new location, Home Chef will be hiring for nearly 700 new jobs. To support the meal delivery service company’s staffing needs, Elevate Douglas Economic Partnership is working with Home Chef on numerous workforce initiatives, including job fairs for salaried and hourly roles that provide opportunities for internal mobility and professional development. For more information on upcoming hiring events, those interested can visit www.elevatedouglas.com/homechef.

Serving more than 9 million customers daily through a digital shopping experience and 2,800 retail food stores under a variety of banner names, Cincinnati-based Kroger is No. 4 on The PG 100, Progressive Grocer’s 2022 list of the top food and consumables retailers in North America.