Plated

Plated was a New York meal-kit company that shipped pre-portioned ingredients and recipes to customers' homes so they could cook dinner at home. Nick Taranto and Josh Hix co-founded it, with Elana Karp as the culinary co-founder. Taranto and Hix pitched in Season 5, Episode 22, requesting $500,000 in exchange for a 4% stake, which implied a valuation of $12.5 million. Mark Cuban was willing to fund all of it for a slightly larger share, and the founders agreed on camera. That handshake never became a finished investment. Wikipedia and later press accounts report that the deal fell apart after taping, and that Kevin O'Leary invested separately afterward on terms that were not made public. Plated arrived early in what became a crowded meal-kit market, and it is often mentioned alongside better-known subscription rivals. The company kept growing after the show and eventually drew interest from a major grocery chain. That interest became a sale to Albertsons in 2017, at a price the companies never disclosed, though reports put it in the hundreds of millions. Under Albertsons, the home-delivery subscription was later ended and the Plated name was kept as a store brand, so this page lists the company as acquired. Its old web address now sends visitors to another Albertsons site. Plated remains one of the best-known examples of a company that made a deal on Shark Tank, saw it fall apart, and still reached a large exit. The reported prices are covered in the update below.