If the only thing standing between you and a home cooked meal is the time and energy to shop and prep, a new breed of would-be cyber sous chefs wants to help get you cooking.

Think of it as Hamburger Helper for the Amazon.com era. A bevy of new online services is angling to be your virtual kitchen assistant, giving you the chance to outsource the tedious aspects of cooking — the shopping, sorting, washing and prepping — so you can focus on the more satisfying assembling and eating parts.

“The idea came out of a need my co-founders and I had in our own lives,” says Matt Salzberg, co-founder and CEO of Blue Apron, a 2- year-old New York startup that delivers high-end, premeasured ingredients to your doorstep. “Our customers love sitting back and letting us do the grocery shopping for them. They know they’re going to get home and there’s going to be everything they need to create a fresh, delicious meal.”

Supermarkets and even online giants such as Amazon and Google deliver groceries. But these so-called “meal kit” services take that model a step further, offering time-starved, convenience craving cooks the ability to go online, click on recipes that appeal, then have farm-fresh ingredients — pre-measured and sometimes even pre-chopped — arrive on their doorsteps ready for the skillet.

To appeal to a gourmetleaning crowd, many of the companies source from farms local to their delivery areas. And recipes also skew upscale, with options such as quinoa patties with pan-roasted mushrooms or togarashi-spiced tilapia with jade pearl rice. Blue Apron, which ships to roughly 85 percent of the continental U.S., specializes in gourmet items, such as fiddlehead ferns and husk cherries.

New York-based Plated, a similar service that also delivers to most of the country, promises premium cuts of meat and chefdesigned recipes. Seattlebased Gathered Table generates customized weekly dinner menus and allows customers to enter their own recipes, while Forage in San Francisco collects recipes from star chefs to help people recreate restaurant dishes at home — in 20 minutes. Chicago-based Madison and Rayne delivers ingredients pre-chopped, pre-measured and with sauces already prepared.

“It’s like cooking on a cooking show,” says Madison and Rayne chef and cofounder Josh Jones. “The onions are minced, the lettuce is washed. It’s ready for you to have the fun part. It’s just like watching Rachael Ray on TV make a meal.”

The Chicago-based food industry consulting firm Technomic predicts that meal kit services like these could become a $3 to $5 billion segment of the food industry during the next 10 years.

“Our hope is that people never have a reason to go the grocery store,” says Blue Apron’s Salzberg.

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