Alice Ting, vice president of brand development, licensing and syndication told Bloomberg the Times expects the meal kit service to be at least as big as the Times’ travel unit, where the paper’s foreign correspondents act as tour guides in places like Iran and Cuba.

Today the New York Times (NYT) announced it has partnered with startup Chef’d to sell meal kits to readers based on recipes from its NYT Cooking section. Meal kits are so hot that the Times even lost its famous food columnist, Mark Bittman, to a meal kit startup called Purple Carrot. The category is crowded, with Plated, Chef’d, Home Chef, Munchery, HelloFresh, and many others all offering comparable services. (At $10 each, that’s $960 million in annual revenue.) The company is valued at $2 billion, which is higher than Groupon’s (GRPN) current market value. Blue Apron now ships eight million meals a month through its subscription service. Startups selling ingredients in a box have surged in popularity in recent years. Now it’s happening again, but with meal kits. I could only find one survivor: the San Diego Union Tribune. TimesSelect, the Times’ option, is no longer available. “Should Groupon be worried?” Ad Age asked.

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