This was bound to happen. A lot of financial analysts have been saying for a while that Blue Apron is a good idea that will be successful under different circumstances. Right now, Blue Apron's cost to attract and retain customers is astronomical and ripe for a competitor like Amazon to undercut.
Amazon is in a much better position to win the market, and investors recognize that.
Amazon has a logistics network capable of doing same-day delivery at lower-than-Blue-Apron's costs. Amazon will ship locally rather than cross-country using dry ice. Purchasing ingredients in Whole Foods' massive quantities will lower costs further. Coupling that with their huge warchest, Amazon can crush Blue Apron by offering a competing service at far below cost for years.
If Amazon plays this as aggressively as they did eCommerce, I don't see any way for Blue Apron to win on their own.
It indicates that a competitor Blue Apron can't hope to compete with is ready to compete. Amazon has everything to hit the ground running and more, and with everyone knowing Blue Apron is bleeding to get customers, it means that investors aren't going to be throwing money their way. With Echo being as popular as it is, it's a natural addition to the Echo Ecosystem; undoubtedly Alexa is about to become the world's best sous chef.
As has been pointed out, Blue Apron fails to mark its territory in any meaningful way and only had power from first movers advantage. That power is gone now.
I wouldn't say Amazon does at all. Even their cheaper stuff, like AmazonBasics, is pretty solid. The companies on their marketplace, on the other hand...well, I dunno how effectively other people really divorce Amazon from "Amazon sellers", so maybe the earlier poster has a point.
Since their site was full of knock-offs and half of it ships from China? Every time I shop on Amazon, I have to cross-reference with like 8 different sites to make sure I'm ordering the right thing and that the price is fair.
You don't _have_ to shop on Amazon. But I feel like being a cognizant consumer is your own responsibility. By that I mean I don't have to cross-reference with 8 other sites, I feel like the prices are fair, and as best I can tell I have avoided buying cheap knockoff items. I hear this complaint a lot (here, especially) but have yet to see much evidence of that.
A good filter to start with is only products fulfilled by Amazon, and a step further, only Prime products. Granted, the due diligence still sucks, but I spend several thousands of dollars a year on Amazon products, and aside from the products that I know are cheap (like $4 phone cases) I've never had any issues.
Wal-Mart actually has pretty good food even under its own brand. It's certainly no worse than any other generic / store-specific brand of food.
Wal-Mart also happens to be among the few grocers in my area that consistently stocks plantains (which are among my favorite foods, especially when fried and served with refried beans and sour cream).
Maybe so, but a Whole Foods branded meal kit, with logistics from Amazon Prime probably doesn't sound gross to many people. That's where I assume they're going with this.
Until you realize you can get a Whole Foods branded meal kit with the Whole Foods smell included (ahh, fresh produce!) delivered SAME DAY with Amazon Prime shipping. Premium product + unmatched delivery network = 800lb gorilla
It would be a great fit given that the main challenge is logistics which Amazon is already a leader in. With Amazon Fresh they even have the ability to pick up the previous week's boxes and cold packs (along with delivering the rest of your groceries at the same time!).
Blue Apron spends a fortune acquiring new customers, possibly up to $460 per sign up as of recently [1]. I bet the percentage of Blue Apron subscribers that are also Prime members is amazingly high. Amazon doesn't have to pay a dollar to advertise to these people, let alone $460.
And possibly the ace in the hole, the Whole Foods aquisition. Local distribution centers via the whole foods stores, with fresh foods, even with premade foods if you wish. Could ultimately be a blue apron/munchery hybrid.
Their advantage would of course be their world class distribution/fulfillment tech, but also the fact that the costs of the food parts are mostly sunk already into the Whole Foods biz.
I agree. The munchery/whole-foods combo is the ace here.
They only need to figure out meals that last 7 days (chilled) with natural ingredients only, but since freshly(acquired by nestle) did it, it's possible.
Or maybe there's some patent here, and it's really hard to achieve otherwise, and that's why nestle bought them.
As I have said before with Amazon eating Whole Foods meal kit companies that are not currently ramen profitable are toast. Ramen profitable companies would have to learn how to grow out of their cash flow.
No sane investor would be pumping money into them until they know what and how Amazon would be looking at this market.
I think over next few years we would see a total implosion of meal-kit industry with the exception being whoever operates Whole Foods on a national scale. On a regional level grocery stores and small grocery chains would offer the local meal kit service as for them the costs of expanding into that market locally is tiny.
- Grocery delivery seems to generally be gaining a bit of momentum in the US, at least close in to major urban centers, as a lot of people get more and more comfortable with buying things online.
- Grocery chains are beginning to take notice of meal kits. Most of them already sell a fair bit of prepped but uncooked food. Creating packaged bundles with a recipe card is a pretty small incremental step.
Amazon is going to have giant advantages which will allow them to push the prices through the floor. The only thing that Blue Apron had going for it was the fact they had a giant markup on their product.
Amazon now has regional distribution centers in every major city. They have a network of vendors, they have a fleet of delivery trucks and contract drivers. Blue Apron is F'ed.
Meal-kit companies of today think they would re-shape food industry and build global ( or at least national brands ). If the market was split between the meal-kits ( Plated, Blue Apron, HelloFresh, HomeChef etc etc etc ) then it is possible that one of them would have become something rather big or at least profitable.
Instead what we have now is Amazon not just eating Whole Foods but taking away the customers from the meal-kit industry by taking them back into Whole Foods. So it is Amazon's global logistics + Amazon ops + Whole Foods supply chain in food business + Wholefoods profitability v. upstart with at best a couple of warehouses, some engineers, and a dozens minimum wage paid workers assembling kits. The pie available for the upstarts just became much smaller.
For Whole Foods entering a national meal-kit business is a no brainer. It has the needed footprint that dwarfs their meal-kit competitors, it has the logistics of the supply chain and places to distribute the deliveries out of ( Whole Foods stores ) and it has a brand familiar with and trusted by the same people who are targets of the meal-kit offerings. Blue Apron simply won't be able to complete with 2-3 hour delivery from Whole Foods. Not to mention every single thing that one needs to create the most complicated Blue Apron recipe is available at pretty much every Whole Foods immediately. Oh, and Whole Foods is profitable already. Oh, and they can make even more money upcharging.
Who can compete with Whole Foods? Your neighborhood grocery store. Why? Detailed local knowledge means knowing exactly who buys what, who lives where and when they are home. Delivery windows of 15 minutes. Prices lower than the prices at Whole Foods.
[Late addition below:]
The other advantage that local grocery stores/small chains would have over the nation-wide chain is that being Ramen Profitable after all costs is a great result for a stable business not looking at expansion.
None of these companies is anywhere close to a monopoly on food.
Cargill might be big at 100B+ revenue (global) per year but US food expenditures are 1.5T+ per year, so even a company as huge as Cargill is capturing < 10% of the US market. Hardly a monopoly.
Please Amazon, do something different about the huge amount of material waste generated by companies like Blue Apron and Hello Fresh. This is the main reason why I stopped using these services, the footprint is just disgusting: plastic bags inside aluminum+plastic bags inside cardboard boxes with more plastic. Please, invent some form of reusable container that can be easily stored and delivered back so we can stop trashing the Earth.
Because the ingredients provided are the exact amounts needed for a meal. If I was making the same meal doing my own shopping I will probably purchase slightly more than I need of some perishable ingredients. These will in a lot of kitchens end up as waste and not used in other meals.
That's fair, but when I shop I don't buy food with just one meal in mind. Sure, at home maybe I'll have a bit less onion one day then I would prefer because I used half of it the night before, but storing excess in the fridge and buying with leftovers in mind or multi-use items (bulk bag of carrots) means I have very little excess food waste. Certainly excess food waste is far, far less than packaging material from these companies.
You are the exception though. The statistical fact is that most people are like notyourwork, myself included. I'm absolutely horrible at this. I buy a huge bag of potatoes because even if I waste half the bag (although usually I'm not that bad) it's cheaper than buying a few as needed. I want to use them all but I just don't get around to it in time.
You can bake them in the microwave and put them in the freezer until needed. There's a lot you can do with a baked potato. I like to cut those freezer pot pies with them so they're actually filling.
And sometimes life happens and food goes bad before I have a chance to cook everything I purchased. I cook a lot so I am aware of the versatility of perishable ingredients. That doesn't change the premise of my point.
Why is this being downvoted? It's like almost every post here is interpreted as right/wrong in the context of The Great Argument, and as such, folks are punished for sharing in general. rainbowmverse contributed an idea I'd never thought of (being in notyourwork's camp myself), yet they are being downvoted because their post does not directly support The Most Correct Parent.
It's not so much that people end up with a lot more food than they need and throw it out. It's the wastage at the supermarket and elsewhere in the distribution chain. Furthermore, I suspect the meal kit companies are tending to replace takeout of various sorts and eating out more than they're replacing conventional shopping and cooking.
And there's lots of waste throughout in those cases even when it's not visible.
It's hard to quantify any of that but, plastic bags or not, I suspect Blue Apron is relatively environmentally friendly.
Presumably because of better portioning. For a lot of meals, you only need a very small amount of one ingredient which you cannot buy in that quantity. Meal kits come with the right proportions for every ingredient.
Beyond normal shelf spoilage from super markets there's a lot of ingredients that can only really be bought fresh in amounts much larger than can really be used. For example cilantro or parsley generally comes in either in cheap large bunches or much more expensive individually (plastic) packaged smaller servings but the large bunches is way more than most people could reasonably use before it begins to wilt and rot so it's wasted.
Put the cilantro/parsley stems immersed in a glass of water. Cover the leaves with a plastic bag and it will keep in the refrigerator for at least a week without wilting
> The packaging waste with some meal kits is a negative but they also eliminate a lot of food waste which is a positive.
That's really hard to estimate; did Blue Apron (etc) users previously buy a lot of groceries, cook some of them, then throw the rest of the food away as it rotted? Or did they simply cook less, and rely more on delivery, restaurants, or putting more work into planning their meals?
Food waste happens at every level of the food distribution system. Produce discarded in a field becuase it didn't meet some ripeness or quality standard(likely unchanged), produce that rots or is damaged during transport to local distribution channels(could be reduced by meal prep), food that rots or is unsold at the retail level (obviated by meal prep), food purchased by consumers that goes unused(obviated), and food waste that gets landfilled(instead of getting composted at meal prep place).
Amazon needs to do this with their regular shipments as well. They contain a lot of plastic insulation (air bags). Instead of throwing mine away, I've been saving it until it fills up a closet then I give it to a local UPS store to reuse. My closet fills up in about a month. It would be nice if Amazon had a formal program for this since you can't recycle them with your garbage company.
Took a look at sealedair's 'program'. I could be wrong, but it looks like it's just links to other organizations' directories of local recycling programs; most of which are retail stores. Here's why I don't trust retail stores (Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowes, Safeway, etc...): while they do a great job of marketing their 'recycling programs' most of what we put into their recycle bins just end up in their normal dumpsters which defeats the purpose.
They've been actively working on that for almost a decade [1]. Most (all?) cushioning in my packages is now heavy brown paper or plastic air bags, a significant improvement from the days of packing peanuts and bubble wrap. I'd like to see the air bags go away too.
That's nice, I was not aware that UPS would take them. My local grocery store have a program for plastic bags, but reusing them is of course much more efficient.
The problem is, if you want to cheaply ship cheap stuff quickly, you need to reduce costs. So no time to have your packers pick from 20 sizes of boxes; just toss everything in a huge box. No time to handle returns of broken shipments; just stuff those huge boxes with tons of air bags. No time to actually check what's in the boxes (towels or a vase) because you need to pack 200 boxes an hour to break even.
If "we" want to stop trashing the world, first we need to show we are willing to pay for that.
> If "we" want to stop trashing the world, first we need to show we are willing to pay for that.
This is the typical supply-side dodge. Consumers have little to no power here. I can't dictate to Amazon or major shipping companies (I do buy AMZN's frustration-free when I can).
What option is there? Do you propose I compete with the packaging with my own offering?
That's the dodge right there. Easy as a supplier to simply say "we provide what the consumer wants" to justify all business decisions. Courage, that is.
This is normally where the government or watchdog organizations get involved - those have been gutted or defanged in the past few decades... by business interest group lobbying.
Not just Amazon... almost all delivery services (pharmacy, google shopping express, etc)
The sole exception I found was amazingly, Safeway's grocery delivery service where the person showed up with a box, walked in, unloaded in my kitchen then took the box with him. Of course, you need to be present for that, but something equivalent for non-perishable delivery would be a huge sanity saver for me.
Some of these companies do. Terra's Kitchen for example. That said, I'm skeptical that shipping a reusable container back to the company which then has to clean it before it's reused genuinely reduces environmental impact versus some plastic bags (much of which I reused the one time I got Blue Apron).
We've recently tried out Terra's Kitchen primarily because they ship the meals in a reusable container that is returned to them. There's still a small amount of plastic that we have to dispose of, but the overall amount of waste seems to be dramatically lower than the competitors.
My guess is that the returning of the supplies could result in a lower carbon footprint. The whole delivery system is optimized for getting products from supplier to receiver, so there's a decent amount of unused capacity for getting items back into the delivery system. The "last mile" delivery trucks progress from full to near empty throughout the day and likely already pass or get super close to homes that could be returning packaging thus keeping the vehicle near capacity throughout the day. Once back into the delivery network the returning packaging should fill existing extra capacity especially as it get's closer to the supplier where they're already shipping out a much higher volume than they are receiving. Just a guess, but that's how I've rationalized it ;)
When I found out that Tile offers mail-in recycling for their trackers, I wondered the same thing. Perhaps this service is offered to assuage the guilty conscience of people who would like to buy a tracker but feel bad about buying something they'll throw away. But if it's something that can be recycled by the company (again, at what cost?), then it goes from being disposable to "reusable".
> plastic bags inside aluminum+plastic bags inside cardboard boxes with more plastic.
All recyclable, what's the problem here?
> Please, invent some form of reusable container that can be easily stored and delivered back so we can stop trashing the Earth.
So is the real issue that you're concerned with reducing waste (recyclable at that!) that's visible to you, consequences be damned? Because I'm not so sure shipping back an empty food container is better for the earth than recycling it.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, in that order is what you should aim for. It still takes a lot of energy to recycle something and much less to reuse it as is or not use it in the first place
Again, this assumes that shipping an empty container however many miles uses less energy. BA has three, count 'em, three distribution centers for the entire country. If I live in Florida, what do you think has a lower carbon footprint? Recycling my BA waste, or shipping it to New Jersey?
That aphorism is true in general but reuse might still fall short here and it's most true when you're dealing with the recipient reusing the item themselves not shipping it back to be reused. To get the it back to Amazon or whatever meal service sent the boxes will require a second trip by your house to pick up the used items, the entire trip back to the warehouse where the food boxes are packed (which is probably not local unless Amazon gets into this in a big way, and smaller companies can't afford the huge build out of local packing and distribution when there's so little customer lock in), then finally the energy to fully wash and sanitize them before shipping out again.
In one single trip you can take an old container and deliver a new one with food. Also, Amazon owns Whole Foods, so I don't see why the warehouse couldn't be local. Finally, recycling plastic and glass usually requires washing the material.
Washing for recycling doesn't have to be nearly as thorough or sanitary as washing for reuse though. And yeah that might work for Amazon but no one else has the infrastructure to do local delivery like that. Even with whole foods local they'll still probably need to expand staff or food prep areas to make it work.
You can reuse the boxes, thermal bags, and ice packs just fine. My folks stitched together a bunch of the thermal bags to cover their tomato plants during the winter / early spring.
The smaller bags are problematic, though some of them are also reusable (if they have a zipper or equivalent mechanism for resealing). The little bottles/jars are also reusable, though I've yet to actually find a use for them.
Actually Amazon Fresh is just this! They use local trucks to deliver the food. The food is placed inside a tote bag which contains reusable foam cushions and ice packs. You end up returning everything on the next delivery cycle. The downside is if you have a small apartment, it requires a bit of storage room.
Kind of off topic, but for most of my childhood the mantra was "recycle everything, because plastic and food garbage in landfills takes centuries and centuries to break down"
With the new awareness that atmospheric CO2 is the main environmental problem facing the world (rather than giant landfills, which are un-aesthetic but not really a big deal), I've wondered whether this logic makes sense anymore.
Isn't a giant landfill full of carbon-based food, carbon-based plastic, and carbon-based paper a good form of carbon sequestration? Obviously it just buys us time, because it'll decompose in a few centuries, but hopefully by the time that happens we'll have better methods of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
Isn't plastic basically a byproduct of oil production? I'm not super familiar with the market, but my understanding was that gasoline was the main drivers of drilling, not the market for plastic.
It seems to me that recycling would just drop the price of plastic and encourage use elsewhere, but burying it underground would remove the byproduct.
Every petroleum product was a waste product at some point until they discovered a use for it. If no one used oil for anything but gasoline, I expect drillers would pump the distillation remains back down into old wells.
There are several reasons to want to reduce the number and size of landfills. First, landfills are very oxygen-poor, which promotes the growth of anaerobic bacteria. The bacteria produce methane, rather than CO2 when breaking down waste. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 (though it doesn't stay in the atmosphere as long). Second, greenhouse gases are released in the extraction of petrochemicals. Reducing the new plastic created would reduce this effect. Lastly, landfills can have an immediate negative effect on the environment surrounding them if solvents and heavy metals leach out of the landfill.
Maybe, but they have to make a new plastic bag if they don't recycle your old one. Energy is required to make that new bag, which means CO2 is created that way too.
The best thing you can do is to not need so much energy in the first place. If you must travel use high efficiency transport. (shipping counts as travel). Make sure your housing is well insulated.
The next best thing store carbon: start forest and grass fires. A regular forest/grass fire will burn cold enough that a lot of carbon is converted to charcoal - permanently sequestrated carbon. Note that regular is key here. If you don't light a new fire every year fuel builds up until you get a hot fire.
All of the packaging that is used to typical meal kit companies can be easily stored and could easily be returned and is mostly reusable and what isn't is reccylcable; the one time up-front cost of setting up a recovery process probably hasn't been seen as being as valuable as working on scaling out subscriptions, though.
But there's nothing really that needs invented here.
I agree with this. We struggle with how to dispose of the tremendous amount of waste created by our weekly delivery as we don't have a very large trash bin at our house.
Blue Apron and Hello Fresh need to figure out how to make their services more sticky. At some point we've collected enough meals that we like where we can just go to the local grocery store to pick up the ingredients and make it ourselves.
Both of these services sell convenience, but it is hard to keep selling that to existing users who grow weary of the amount of waste and the simplicity of just grabbing everything they need to make these meals on their own. Amazon's meal-kit could help solve this if they just add the ingredients to shopper's grocery list automatically and it's ready to be picked up at their next trip. Delivery is a non-starter in my opinion. It didn't work for grocery.com back in the early dotcom days, and it's not working now.
Haha. We partially signed up to broaden our culinary literacy. My Wife doesn't cook and when I cool it's typically something very simple. Blue Apron has helped give both my Wife and I more confidence to try new things.
Hello Fresh has improved a lot on this front in the 2 months we've subscribed. Individual meals are packed in paper bags. The aluminum insulation layer has been replaced with a biodegradable material packed in lightweight plastic. I believe they said recent improvements have reduced the size of a meal box by greater than 20%. It's still not perfect (the ice packs seem awfully wasteful, if unavoidable until refrigerated trucks become widespread), but it's dramatically better.
I've tried a few meal kit companies (blue apron and hello fresh) and I was underwhelmed by the product and the service.
Whole Foods ingredients + Amazon delivery = game over for most of these meal kit companies.
They would be able to provide users added levels of customization and probably same day or next day delivery whereas with most meal kit companies, you have to lock in your menu for the week the prior week, which is inconvenient if plans change.
Ultimately, I'm excited about this move as I shop at whole foods regularly and look forward to the ease of delivery that Amazon provides.
I wonder where Amazon will target next; they've already targeted grocery and meal kit delivery and revealed plans to compete with Zillow and Redfin this week in real estate. Which industry is next?
An article called "The Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry" relates how the meal-kit industry faces the same problem(s) as Groupon:
"The problem Groupon faced was that their initial success validated a model that anyone could copy, and everyone who copied it increased both Groupon’s cost of customer acquisition and its churn rate."
Yes, ideally in a competitive market for something that is a "commodity" type of good, profits fall to (near) zero. Not what VC investors are looking for.
This was heavily predicted around here, and seems like a natural direction for Amazon (with very little effort.)
It'll be interesting to see who else steps into this market. Hopefully there will be a focus on local pick ups to eliminate even more of the footprint.
Ideally we'd see something similar to the CSA shares where you get a rubbermaid bin once per week with everything packed in something similar to Mason jars (with an initial deposit to ensure people are playing along.)
This is a fantastic opportunity for local supermarkets and grocery stores to dedicate a section to 'What's for dinner?' -- where all of the ingredients are grouped together with a small recipe card and a link to a video, or something along those lines.
This is why Amazon purchased Whole Foods. I've been trying to get my regional WF competitor (New Season Market) to do these meal kits and have them delivered with Amazon Prime for the past 18 months. They could have killed this game and without all of the wasted packaging. I am going to continue to chip away at them.
As someone who has used and enjoyed meal kits (Good Eggs, not Blue Apron), I don't think this is a slam dunk for Amazon. Meal kits are a lot more than recipes and portioning.
I have 2 small kids so meal planning is hard to do consistently. I can whip up a chicken breast and veggie, but what I get from Good Eggs is seasonal recipes and fresh produce sourced directly from local farmers PLUS prepared elements including marinated meat and sauces.
So when I cook a meal kit I'm getting a much better meal (more like a dinner party meal) for about the same effort as a barebones meal I would make otherwise.
I have used Instacart and bought prepared stuff from Whole Foods, and there just isn't a comparison. In SF, I often get or see old/bruised produce in Whole Foods which used to be consistently good.
I am not fan of Blue Apron, but just ability to have this kind of stupid patents is clearly anti-business and would support any measure to get rid of those.
I don't think they are interested in competing on price, the value proposition is that they save you time, and the effort of meal planning. But they are pitching themselves as cheaper than eating out, and with at least the illusion the food is healthier (plus a pinch of the IKEA effect since you cooked it yourself).
I've used Blue Apron. They don't save any time at all. What I saved in shopping I lost in meal prep. I quickly went back to the prepped food at my local grocery store, which is also much cheaper.
People who really wish to trade money for time would just eat at restaurants.
People initially subscribe for lots of reasons but long term subscribers may see the value proposition as this: More expensive in cash cost, less expensive in opportunity cost.
An even better question is why don't many grocery stores offer Blue Apron style meal kits? They could offer it much cheaper (while still getting better margins on them compared to regular groceries) and have them available for pickup. If they were able to bring the cost to $3-5 a meal (which seems doable) I'd use them all the time.
Please use your local grocery store. I am 31, live in Manhattan and shop once a week for groceries. All these food startups are not solving any real problems, its Webvan all over again.
Not wanting to spend my precious time researching on the internet for a good recipe, going to the grocery store to pick up items for said recipe, and them prepping the ingredients before the cooking process even starts is a "real problem" that is very much solved by these services.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadAmazon has a logistics network capable of doing same-day delivery at lower-than-Blue-Apron's costs. Amazon will ship locally rather than cross-country using dry ice. Purchasing ingredients in Whole Foods' massive quantities will lower costs further. Coupling that with their huge warchest, Amazon can crush Blue Apron by offering a competing service at far below cost for years.
If Amazon plays this as aggressively as they did eCommerce, I don't see any way for Blue Apron to win on their own.
As has been pointed out, Blue Apron fails to mark its territory in any meaningful way and only had power from first movers advantage. That power is gone now.
My understanding is that this is a strong suggestion that their niche is being invaded by a formidable player.
Both brand images are associated with cheap crap. I don't want to eat cheap crap.
A good filter to start with is only products fulfilled by Amazon, and a step further, only Prime products. Granted, the due diligence still sucks, but I spend several thousands of dollars a year on Amazon products, and aside from the products that I know are cheap (like $4 phone cases) I've never had any issues.
Wal-Mart also happens to be among the few grocers in my area that consistently stocks plantains (which are among my favorite foods, especially when fried and served with refried beans and sour cream).
But branding goes a long way, and they'll undoubtedly position this differently than the above.
Blue Apron spends a fortune acquiring new customers, possibly up to $460 per sign up as of recently [1]. I bet the percentage of Blue Apron subscribers that are also Prime members is amazingly high. Amazon doesn't have to pay a dollar to advertise to these people, let alone $460.
[1] https://www.recode.net/2017/6/1/15727182/blue-apron-ipo-s1-a...
Their advantage would of course be their world class distribution/fulfillment tech, but also the fact that the costs of the food parts are mostly sunk already into the Whole Foods biz.
They only need to figure out meals that last 7 days (chilled) with natural ingredients only, but since freshly(acquired by nestle) did it, it's possible.
Or maybe there's some patent here, and it's really hard to achieve otherwise, and that's why nestle bought them.
No sane investor would be pumping money into them until they know what and how Amazon would be looking at this market.
I think over next few years we would see a total implosion of meal-kit industry with the exception being whoever operates Whole Foods on a national scale. On a regional level grocery stores and small grocery chains would offer the local meal kit service as for them the costs of expanding into that market locally is tiny.
I don't think so. Meal kits are a niche business fighting against mass market competitors already so nothing changes with the Amazon entry.
If anything having an established player like amazon advertising meal kits increases market awareness and gets people interested.
No one is going to have a monopoly of the food business, ever. It just doesn't work that way.
- Grocery delivery seems to generally be gaining a bit of momentum in the US, at least close in to major urban centers, as a lot of people get more and more comfortable with buying things online.
- Grocery chains are beginning to take notice of meal kits. Most of them already sell a fair bit of prepped but uncooked food. Creating packaged bundles with a recipe card is a pretty small incremental step.
Amazon now has regional distribution centers in every major city. They have a network of vendors, they have a fleet of delivery trucks and contract drivers. Blue Apron is F'ed.
Instead what we have now is Amazon not just eating Whole Foods but taking away the customers from the meal-kit industry by taking them back into Whole Foods. So it is Amazon's global logistics + Amazon ops + Whole Foods supply chain in food business + Wholefoods profitability v. upstart with at best a couple of warehouses, some engineers, and a dozens minimum wage paid workers assembling kits. The pie available for the upstarts just became much smaller.
For Whole Foods entering a national meal-kit business is a no brainer. It has the needed footprint that dwarfs their meal-kit competitors, it has the logistics of the supply chain and places to distribute the deliveries out of ( Whole Foods stores ) and it has a brand familiar with and trusted by the same people who are targets of the meal-kit offerings. Blue Apron simply won't be able to complete with 2-3 hour delivery from Whole Foods. Not to mention every single thing that one needs to create the most complicated Blue Apron recipe is available at pretty much every Whole Foods immediately. Oh, and Whole Foods is profitable already. Oh, and they can make even more money upcharging.
Who can compete with Whole Foods? Your neighborhood grocery store. Why? Detailed local knowledge means knowing exactly who buys what, who lives where and when they are home. Delivery windows of 15 minutes. Prices lower than the prices at Whole Foods.
[Late addition below:]
The other advantage that local grocery stores/small chains would have over the nation-wide chain is that being Ramen Profitable after all costs is a great result for a stable business not looking at expansion.
http://imgur.com/pnMMj
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ConAgra_brands
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yum!_Brands
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBS_S.A.
We aren't there yet, but the trend line is pretty clear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIcE4OvnqAY
Cargill might be big at 100B+ revenue (global) per year but US food expenditures are 1.5T+ per year, so even a company as huge as Cargill is capturing < 10% of the US market. Hardly a monopoly.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-expenditures.asp...
The traditional food distribution system is massively wasteful but all of that waste is hidden so it is easier to ignore.
Like, can we just talk, sometimes?
And there's lots of waste throughout in those cases even when it's not visible.
It's hard to quantify any of that but, plastic bags or not, I suspect Blue Apron is relatively environmentally friendly.
https://www.wired.com/2016/07/us-throws-away-much-half-food-...
That's really hard to estimate; did Blue Apron (etc) users previously buy a lot of groceries, cook some of them, then throw the rest of the food away as it rotted? Or did they simply cook less, and rely more on delivery, restaurants, or putting more work into planning their meals?
https://sealedair.com/product-care/recycling-bubble-wrap-pla...
You can also use Amazon boxes to donate used clothes and household items:
http://givebackbox.com/amazon
Took a look at sealedair's 'program'. I could be wrong, but it looks like it's just links to other organizations' directories of local recycling programs; most of which are retail stores. Here's why I don't trust retail stores (Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowes, Safeway, etc...): while they do a great job of marketing their 'recycling programs' most of what we put into their recycle bins just end up in their normal dumpsters which defeats the purpose.
> The deflated cells can be sent to any of a number of Sealed Air locations where they will be recycled back into LDPE
If you're in the US, send them here:
[1] https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/zhr3q9mgfqub33r
Nice one! I hadn't thought of this, but I'll start doing it now.
If "we" want to stop trashing the world, first we need to show we are willing to pay for that.
This is the typical supply-side dodge. Consumers have little to no power here. I can't dictate to Amazon or major shipping companies (I do buy AMZN's frustration-free when I can).
What option is there? Do you propose I compete with the packaging with my own offering?
Consumers blame suppliers, suppliers blame consumers. No one has to do anything. Long live the status quo! :)
That's the dodge right there. Easy as a supplier to simply say "we provide what the consumer wants" to justify all business decisions. Courage, that is.
This is normally where the government or watchdog organizations get involved - those have been gutted or defanged in the past few decades... by business interest group lobbying.
The sole exception I found was amazingly, Safeway's grocery delivery service where the person showed up with a box, walked in, unloaded in my kitchen then took the box with him. Of course, you need to be present for that, but something equivalent for non-perishable delivery would be a huge sanity saver for me.
http://www.terraskitchen.com/how-it-works/
Plus now recycling minded folks are likely to go by WF more frequently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milkman
http://pocketcultures.com/2012/01/25/argentinean-customs-hav...
All recyclable, what's the problem here?
> Please, invent some form of reusable container that can be easily stored and delivered back so we can stop trashing the Earth.
So is the real issue that you're concerned with reducing waste (recyclable at that!) that's visible to you, consequences be damned? Because I'm not so sure shipping back an empty food container is better for the earth than recycling it.
The smaller bags are problematic, though some of them are also reusable (if they have a zipper or equivalent mechanism for resealing). The little bottles/jars are also reusable, though I've yet to actually find a use for them.
I find they're handy for travel, picnics, etc. although admittedly if I used Blue Apron repeatedly I'd probably end up drowning in them.
With the new awareness that atmospheric CO2 is the main environmental problem facing the world (rather than giant landfills, which are un-aesthetic but not really a big deal), I've wondered whether this logic makes sense anymore.
Isn't a giant landfill full of carbon-based food, carbon-based plastic, and carbon-based paper a good form of carbon sequestration? Obviously it just buys us time, because it'll decompose in a few centuries, but hopefully by the time that happens we'll have better methods of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
It seems to me that recycling would just drop the price of plastic and encourage use elsewhere, but burying it underground would remove the byproduct.
The best thing you can do is to not need so much energy in the first place. If you must travel use high efficiency transport. (shipping counts as travel). Make sure your housing is well insulated.
The next best thing store carbon: start forest and grass fires. A regular forest/grass fire will burn cold enough that a lot of carbon is converted to charcoal - permanently sequestrated carbon. Note that regular is key here. If you don't light a new fire every year fuel builds up until you get a hot fire.
But there's nothing really that needs invented here.
Blue Apron and Hello Fresh need to figure out how to make their services more sticky. At some point we've collected enough meals that we like where we can just go to the local grocery store to pick up the ingredients and make it ourselves.
Both of these services sell convenience, but it is hard to keep selling that to existing users who grow weary of the amount of waste and the simplicity of just grabbing everything they need to make these meals on their own. Amazon's meal-kit could help solve this if they just add the ingredients to shopper's grocery list automatically and it's ready to be picked up at their next trip. Delivery is a non-starter in my opinion. It didn't work for grocery.com back in the early dotcom days, and it's not working now.
heh. welcome to a chef's world.
Whole Foods ingredients + Amazon delivery = game over for most of these meal kit companies.
They would be able to provide users added levels of customization and probably same day or next day delivery whereas with most meal kit companies, you have to lock in your menu for the week the prior week, which is inconvenient if plans change.
Ultimately, I'm excited about this move as I shop at whole foods regularly and look forward to the ease of delivery that Amazon provides.
I wonder where Amazon will target next; they've already targeted grocery and meal kit delivery and revealed plans to compete with Zillow and Redfin this week in real estate. Which industry is next?
"The problem Groupon faced was that their initial success validated a model that anyone could copy, and everyone who copied it increased both Groupon’s cost of customer acquisition and its churn rate."
https://medium.com/@byrnehobart/the-slow-motion-trainwreck-f...
It'll be interesting to see who else steps into this market. Hopefully there will be a focus on local pick ups to eliminate even more of the footprint.
Ideally we'd see something similar to the CSA shares where you get a rubbermaid bin once per week with everything packed in something similar to Mason jars (with an initial deposit to ensure people are playing along.)
This is a fantastic opportunity for local supermarkets and grocery stores to dedicate a section to 'What's for dinner?' -- where all of the ingredients are grouped together with a small recipe card and a link to a video, or something along those lines.
I have 2 small kids so meal planning is hard to do consistently. I can whip up a chicken breast and veggie, but what I get from Good Eggs is seasonal recipes and fresh produce sourced directly from local farmers PLUS prepared elements including marinated meat and sauces.
So when I cook a meal kit I'm getting a much better meal (more like a dinner party meal) for about the same effort as a barebones meal I would make otherwise.
I have used Instacart and bought prepared stuff from Whole Foods, and there just isn't a comparison. In SF, I often get or see old/bruised produce in Whole Foods which used to be consistently good.
Then however bad, it kind of is legitimate practice to put pressure on them. I need to read more carefully next time.
People who really wish to trade money for time would just eat at restaurants.