Albertsons paid ~$300M for Plated — two years later it shut the subscription down

Plated was founded in 2012 by Nick Taranto and Josh Hix: recipe-and-ingredient boxes delivered weekly. A 2014 Shark Tank appearance brought backing from Kevin O'Leary after a Mark Cuban deal fell through, and venture rounds followed — $1.4M seed, $20M of Series A, $55M of Series B — as the company moved through fourteen fulfillment centres in its first three years. In April 2014 Mark Cuban offered $500,000 for 6% on camera; the deal collapsed in negotiations.

On 20 September 2017 Albertsons acquired Plated — CNBC reported $300 million, other outlets put it between $175 million and $200 million — to push into meal solutions. Plated kits began appearing in Safeway aisles in April 2018, and Albertsons planned a rollout to hundreds of stores. But the subscription economics stayed hostile: high customer churn, steep marketing costs, and short shelf lives that made in-store merchandising hard.

By 2019 both founders had left the company, Albertsons had cut 10% of Plated's corporate staff, and testing at Northern California Safeways pointed the other way. On 13 November 2019 Albertsons announced the subscription service would be phased out by the end of the month; the last delivery went out on 27 November 2019. The Plated name survived only as a private-label culinary line inside Albertsons' own-brand portfolio, and plated.com now redirects to safeway.com.