NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. — Six months after its acquisition of meal kit company Chef’d, True Food Innovations is launching new clean label retail meal kits under both the Chef’d and True Chef brand.

“Our strategy is to provide retailers with a multi-brand offering with the ability to provide meal kit options based on price, demographics and geography,” said Robert Jones, president of True Food Innovations. “We have cracked the code that has limited large-scale retail roll-outs of fresh meal kits.”

To crack that code, True Food Innovations challenged its R&D, food science and technology teams to develop long shelf life retail meal kit products, because the company identified shelf life as a “key differentiator and absolute requirement for retail meal kits to be commercially viable for nationwide distribution,” the company said. All have a 55-day shelf life via patent-pending formulations and High Pressure Processing, True Food Innovations said.

“We are setting the standard for the retail category through innovation, product development and technology,” said Alan True, founder and CEO of True Food Innovations. “We listened to our retail partners and we developed products to solve their problem: shelf life.”

All new Chef’d and True Chef meal kits, launching in stores nationwide throughout 2019, are preservative-free and require 15 to 20 minutes of total prep and cook time. New Chef’d meal kits recipes include chicken piccata, peppercorn steak, saffron tomato chicken and roasted garlic herb chicken. True Chef meal kits come in varieties, including garlic herb chicken, truffle butter sirloin steak, Mediterranean style chicken and classic chicken marsala.

True Food Innovations acquired the assets of Chef’d for an undisclosed amount in July 2018 after the meal kit company suddenly ceased operations earlier that month, citing funding and expense issues. Chef’d was previously valued at $160 million and, according to IRI data, was the leading brand in retail meal kits.