The really negative news was the issues they are having bringing the new facility in Lindon online and at peak efficiency. This is causing issues with rolling out new products they see vital to their business. Because of this they will likely post a decline in revenues y/y for Q3.
In light of that news I can see why Matt Wadiak, their previous COO, recently "stepped down".
I live in the Bay Area and Blue Apron is on thin ice with us right now. Their quality control got really bad right around the time of their IPO. Now nearly every week we have missing ingredients and/or leaking containers. We had no problems for 2 years and now it's pretty much constant! They are always pretty responsive with a credit commensurate to what the damage to the meal is, but this is basically the worst possible time for them to be screwing up like this.
I've noticed the same in the NYC area: the last few weeks I've had ingredients crushed which has never happened before.
They've also been spamming me with discounts to the wine club only to tell me that they can't legally deliver in NY when I tried to sign up. Don't they know where I live?
I hope they can recover because I do truly like the product and I think they're the best right now (a margin better than Hello Fresh, leagues better than Plated)
I live in New York City, and we are entirely satisfied and impressed nightly with Sun Basket. It doesn't have nearly the reach or brand awareness as some of the bigger players, but it's everything I've ever wanted in one of these services. Worth checking out.
They addressed this in the conference call. In essence they want to make sure that order fulfillment is staying at high enough quality levels. And they've struggled lately operationally which has caused issues with that. I'd expect they turn it around soon.
I almost worked for them. Turned them down, but got far enough in the process to learn that their dev teams were mostly made up of juniors, and they were keen on bringing in more senior people to up the quality. That was about 9 months ago, my guess is that the process hasn't been going smoothly.
I dunno about that. In my experience, their website is actually one of the better parts of the experience. It's really easy to skip weeks, change menus, set up a recycling pickup, etc. It works on mobile too and I've never really had any issues with the tech side of it. The only issues we've ever had are with the manual and/or delivery aspects of the service. Other than that, I really like it. It's pricey, but I'd rather put the money into meals that I enjoy where I feel like I'm also learning something and eating something I "made" and Blue Apron fits that bill for me.
I had a positive experience with a Blue Apron, but had similar quality issue with Purple Carrot. Most of the produce would arrive in a partially rotten state and sometimes ingredients were missing or the bottle of some liquid hadn't been fully closed and leaked over everything. I switched to Sun Basket and so far, so good.
It's like they all use the same name generator for their companies that goes [Color related qualifier] [Food related noun].
Some of the rejected candidates before they settled on Blue Apron: "Orange Orange", "Sky Aubergine", "Yellow Spatula", "The-color-of-a-lawnchair-that's-been-out-in-the-rain-too-long Cucumber".
Or perhaps the best time, they have IPO'd, the original investors got their money back plus extra, the founders made a tidy sum and if it all falls to pieces it is the institutional investors who will take the hit. Now they are a public company they will be looking at their bottom line so the easiest/fastest way to improve that is to cut costs.
Same here. Our package came 2 days late. The meat and perishables... perished. At least they gave us a voucher. But whatever they did to cut costs/speed up delivery/prepare for IPO was executed very poorly.
I joined for about six months and dropped them last week. Third shipment in a row with missing ingredients.
On the plus side, it put me in the regular habit of cooking together with my wife. We love many of the recipes, which are freely available on their website...we've already started "re-doing" many meals by picking up the ingredients on regular shopping trips.
EDIT: One other thought - the whole market seems a lot like the GroupOn craze in some ways. It's an idea that consumers are attracted to, but the economics and excess competition make the whole concept fragile.
> One other thought - the whole market seems a lot like the GroupOn craze in some ways.
Yeah, Groupon is a great comparison IMO. Huge initial growth, but spending a bunch of money to acquire each customer doesn't work once a bunch of copy-cat competitors enter the market.
I also wonder how many folks drop off once they've learned some basic cooking skills from the recipes - chopping, searing, getting the right proportions, etc.
I dropped them for two reasons after using them for nearly a year. First, these meals actually take longer to prepare and way longer to clean up after than what I normally make. The food is very good, but the instructions are written by someone who (a) seems to have a gourmet kitchen at their disposal and (b) doesn't do dishes after. No, I am not going to chop all six veggie ingredients into six separate bowls, just to combine them in the next step. Also, I'm not going to chop everything up front just to realize that the garlic goes in at the last step for 30 seconds before the dish is ready.
The second was an issue I had repeatedly with the meat and fish ingredients: I had several weeks where meat/fish packaging was open when I got the shipment and the contents went bad. I emailed them every time, but at some point I got tired of having to immediately go to the grocery store to find the right quantity of pork or cod or whatever to complete the meal.
Realistically, their 35 minute meals always took me closer to an hour once all was said and done. There almost never were any leftovers (yeah two medium sized sweet potatoes don't go too far for four people). Finally, the price was just a little too high.
I keep a few of the recipe cards and try to make those once in a while, but mostly I am just back to regular grocery shopping now.
I've not used Blue Apron, but I recently cancelled Hello Fresh for these exact same reasons. Interesting business model, but I think Blue/Fresh will be out of business within the next year or two.
I've been a happy user of the service for about a year. I've never had any problems with missing or poorly packaged ingredients, but have had shipping delays maybe once every six weeks or so, often resulting in a refund.
At any rate, wanted to point out that they recently expanded the number of meals you can choose from in a given week and introduced new "faster to prepare" meal options, so they are definitely listening to that criticism. Note that I haven't tried any of these.
Meanwhile I've found that what helps a lot on cutting down extraneous dishes is just to read the entire recipe card a couple of times before starting so I know what's coming up and which steps can be cut down or combined to save dishes. It also helps to make the whole thing go quicker and feel less stressful during time sensitive portions.
The benefit is that the ingredients that are already in the pan aren't being overcooked or burned while you're busy chopping the other ones; that's a concern that "normal people" have.
The tradeoff is dishes; sometimes you can get around this by just using a giant cutting board and setting pre-chopped ingredients off to one side of it (instead of in separate bowls).
The problem is not mise en place itself, that is important to not burn or overcook various ingredients, it is that they have you mise en place _everything_ when you might be taking 3 of those ingredients and putting them into a bowl. That's a waste of time and dishes.
Just say: chop these 3 things and add them to the same bowl you are going to marinate next
This applies to any recipe, though? It's not hard to just read the next step, especially when every ingredient name is in bold. Hell, it never even actually says to put things in individual bowls.
I dunno, I've followed many where they explicitly tell you to put in same mixing bowl. Things are written in a more logical order.
> It's not hard to just read the next step
It's not always the next step, sometimes its one of the last as its a raw salad of some sort with a quick marinade or simple dressing.
> Hell, it never even actually says to put things in individual bowls.
On every recipe they provide you it is formatted with picture on left and steps on the right. Every recipe prep shows individual bowls of cut ingredients.
So it may not _say_ to put them in individual bowls but it always shows you you should put them in individual bowls.
It's a minor gripe the original poster had (and I share) you shouldn't have to study the recipe. It's not hard to just say cut up x,y,z and place into same mixing bowl. I want to pull out all the ingredients and start cooking and do my best to meet their advertised time, not spend more time planning their recipe.
I'm sure many people have made the same mistake, pictures speak a 1000 words after all.
Or just read ahead and figure out what you can and should not pipeline. When I see I need to cook rice for 20 mins I know that I can wait to chop the garnish
I read the entire recipe through once to get a feel for what I must do before cooking and what I can delay. This hasn't proven to be an issue for me. Even if you just make it as-written, you're killing what, an extra 5-10 minutes? I pour a nice glass of wine or a beer and turn the cooking into a fun experience instead of viewing it as a waste of time.
For the recipes that I cook multiple times I have figured out optimal pan/bowl management, including reusing dirty bowls or pans if it doesn't hurt. For example for rice pudding I whip the egg whites in the bowl that will be used to store the final pudding, saving 1 bowl. IMO recipes should include a bowl/pan strategy, as well as a time management strategy to interleave steps (e.g. whip the egg whites while the rice is boiling).
When I make a recipe I like, I've gotten in the habit of rewriting it with consideration for minimizing time and dishes preparing. Like, if I know the meat has to brown for a few minutes before adding garlic+ginger+peppers, I'll say to start browning meat, then chop g+g+p together. Or if I know vinegar needs to be used in three different mixes, I'll start a bowl of each mix at the time vinegar is first needed so I only need to worry about it once.
It's good to write this yourself since you work it into your head...and also because such instructions could appear a bit batshit if you didn't write them!
I also cleanly distinguish the "shopping list" part of the recipe (which has it's own standard structure organized by pantry, fresh, spices, and unique ingredients) and the "cooking" part, which provides measurements in the cooking text without needing to refer to the ingredient list. It's a small thing, but I really hate scanning ingredient lists every time I need a measurement in the middle of cooking.
In the example given, the ingredients were immediately combined into one bowl, at the same time, in the next step. No French philosophical doctrine justifies that.
That's just not true. Normal people who understand and utilize this concept turn out meals much faster and much better than the ones who do not. It does take time to get it - but when it does it just clicks.
To expand on this: It helps with timing things (no need to rush to chop something) and also helps ensure you're organized and have all of your ingredients.
I liked Matt Levine's opinion on Blue Apron yesterday:
>Here is my theory, though: Blue Apron is a tech company in the sense that its product is not meals, or ingredients, but simulacrum. What it delivers is the idea of creating a home-cooked meal from fresh ingredients, without the tedious shopping and chopping work that that would otherwise require. What Blue Apron delivers is not exactly convenience -- ordering takeout is a lot more convenient -- but the perception that you are doing something complicated and real and primal while you are actually, through the miracle of technology, doing something much easier. Blue Apron is a virtual-reality company.
These quotes make for a nice dramatic effect, but the reality is much simpler:
Cooking & cleaning is a much bigger time investment than shopping for ingredients. In 10 minutes in a grocery store I can buy enough food for 10-15 meals, which would take hours to cook (in aggregate). The comparison stands even when you include driving to the store (before any pedants try to be contrarian)
Blue Apron is optimizing the smaller part of the time pie required for eating, but at a higher cost than delivery (that optimizes the larger part of the pie for less money, usually)
That's why takeout is a decades-proved business model and Blue Apron is a VC-subsidized non-business.
Well, yes, of course it assumes that, because providing value to the customer should be somewhere in the business model.
If it's not, it'll eventually become a non-business.
1. There's nothing that suggests the ingredients are less common. But if you're a Blue Apron user, feel free to list some of the ingredients you were not able to find at a grocery store.
1.5: you can learn new recipes 10 different ways already, without having to subscribe to any "X as a service".
2. Nothing that suggests an average person can cook better or faster than takeout, which suggests the takeout provides value to the customer.
My comment was saying that you're assuming time-saving is the only value, and was pointing out that's not true. I'm even willing to believe it might be the most important source of value by a long shot -- I wasn't arguing against your conclusion; I was pointing out an assumption made by the argument you stated.
Regarding 1. It's not that the ingredients are less common per se. It's that using BA means that people ended up using some less commonly used ingredients. They were introduced to new things that they hadn't used before and wouldn't have sought out on their own. They liked that.
Regarding 1.5 - obviously, but the thing is there is greater convenience (that some ppl prefer) with not having to select the recipes, get the ingredients, portion them out. For some people that different in convenience makes the difference between whether they do it or not. So treating this issue as if it was purely a matter of whether it was possible or not doesn't make sense.
Regarding 2, I have heard people say they have been able to make high quality meals that they wouldn't usually have made that are better than most takeaway.
3 is most definitely relevant, because it's an example of a non-speed-based kind of value it provides to some people - getting the kind of meal they would only otherwise get at a restaurant but at home. Most takeaway can't do that.
There was previously a free website called notakeout.com, which has since gone under (there's currently something else on the domain that's completely unrelated).
What they did was provide daily dinner recipes for fancy-restaurant type meals, with instructions, wine pairing, and shopping list. If you're an omnivore, you could simply print the day's page, stop at the grocery store on the way home, and cook whatever it was.
It seems to me that this represents about 80% of the value of Blue Apron at no cost (I think they had a for-pay email service, or something?).
It depends on your type of grocery store -- maybe gourmet stores carry things like freekah (a type of African grain) and odd varieties of fruit (like Meyer lemons), but I hadn't even heard of these things before joining Blue Apron. It's not a perfect service -- I agree with other posters saying the instructions could be made better, but I've found it quite educational.
> In 10 minutes in a grocery store I can buy enough food for 10-15 meals
In the universe I inhabit there's no way that's true. I spend a great deal of time in the grocery store just finding things, then looking at the choices to figure out what's the best deal / doesn't contain Yellow #5 / isn't expired already and on and on.
Oh and...add to that the time to phone the wife to find out if when she wrote "Onion" on the list did that mean Yellow Onion or White Onion or Red Onion or Sweet Wallah Wallah Onion or Scallion and how many of them...
Couldn't the same kind of argument be made about buying ingredients from the grocery store to make meals?
"What making meals from store-bought ingredients delivers is not exactly convenience -- ordering takeout is a lot more convenient -- but the perception that you are doing something complicated and real and primal while you are actually, through the miracle of technology, doing something much easier [than harvesting your vegetables, slaughtering and butchering your own animals, grinding your own flour, etc]"
I don't butcher my own animals, but I do purchase half a cow in the fall from a local farmer here in Idaho. In the end it comes out to roughly $6 a pound for grass fed beef. Much cheaper than the grocery store since grass fed ground beef is $6 a pound. I also do that with a pig (whole, $750 total after butchering fees) and chickens (not economical, but tastes better). I also get to see the animals as they grow and are fed when I visit. More time consuming but I know exactly how the animals are treated and fed.
When I grew up in India, we didn't have "supermarkets" to process food, we would go to a market which had butchers, fishmongers etc. The butchers usually had live chickens that they would slaughter right in front of you. I believe they use the halal method where they slit the throat of the chicken and then put it in a box. The chicken knows whats happening when its fetched from the overcrowded cage, so it cries a very loud, pitiful scream.... that caused me much alarm as a little kid to hear it scream in pain :( :( :(.
Depends what you're dealing with - plenty of things like cakes are weirdly cheaper for me to buy than to buy the ingredients for.
Preservation matters - the cutting up of vegetables for meal kits is a form of processing that reduces their shelf life, and therefore increases cost and waste.
Well, there is buy in bulk and sell at a cheaper price than it takes to buy a limited amount of ingredients and prepare. I mean that's economics 101. The preservatives are really just to extend shelf life but you find that a lot of places are just going preservative free as much as possible.
Actually probably not. You have to get the wheat (or grow it/harvest it) and then raise the animal/butcher it, save the excess. Will you eat everything before it spoils or otherwise goes bad?
> What it delivers is the idea of creating a home-cooked meal from fresh ingredients, without the tedious shopping and chopping work that that would otherwise require.
Clearly, he's never used Blue Apron, since they have you do the chopping work.
> What Blue Apron delivers is not exactly convenience -- ordering takeout is a lot more convenient -
Takeout requires me to leave my house; that is often less convenient than Blue Apron.
Delivery is arguably more convenient, though where I live the non-pizza choices without hefty delivery fees on top of restaurant prices are limited.
Leave the bars when they close at 2:00 a.m and take an Uber home; call UberEATS for McDonald's because you're too drunk to drive. I don't know if it's true or not; but, my local McDonald's does a lot of UberEATS business between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m.
it's a lot. most restaurants will deliver for free (if you're in their radius, and order above a minimum $ threshold) and you can optionally tip the driver a buck or two if you feel like it. $5 is a lot considering the competitors costs (basically $0).
I used Blue Apron for a while, and didn't have quality issues but the meals were definitely a hassle. I got fed up with every recipe requiring that I pick tiny leaves off tiny herb stems. I don't have a sous-chef to dump that kind of stuff onto!
After I quit Blue Apron, I tried Hello Fresh. Their recipes were a lot simpler to follow, and tasted just as good, but I had serious quality issues. By the time I quit, I determined that 11% of the meat packages I had received were punctured, and started leaking when they defrosted. If the punctures happened after they were frozen and sealed they were probably safe to eat, but I had no way of knowing that.
The thing I hate most about Blue Apron is the fact that their recipes are written like a novel. No one needs paragraphs of text to cook a chicken. Recipes have always been step-by-step numbered. Instead, Blue Apron crams 20 different steps into 3 sentences and calls it “Step 1.” When you’re moving back and forth between the stove, fridge, and where you have the recipe, it’s impossible to figure out where you left off without re-reading.
I agree with you. I used them off and on over 3 months and our family had a similar assessment.
We chose the 2 person meal plan because if our (even if nutritionally adventurous) 5 & 7 year olds didn't like the meal, we didn't want way too much leftovers. I'm the only person who has any dedication to leftovers (lunch about 3 times a week).
Portion wise, it felt like 2 person meal plan was usually ok for 3 adults so we'd often supplement with an extra chicken breast or something and spread the sauce thin.
Nutritionally, if felt like a TON of SALT & OIL. Mind you, it's not always bad thing, but I'm currently trying to keep my blood pressure, A1C, HDL, & LDL numbers in check and this always felt like it was harmful to that goal though I didn't check and measure if it was. I did lose weight however, on those weeks which is an odd dichotomy maybe.
In terms of recipe selection, sometimes, it felt like the recipes were just one or two minor ingredients off from being copies of a previous recipe. It did change the flavor, but for me, is that really a different recipe?
I too also had issues with the produce. Bad garlic, bad potatoes, etc.
And yes, there was the cost. $60/week felt just a little high to do that much of the work yourself as well as all of the clean up.
My wife is a one pan/pyrex/crockpot kind of cooker (and she did a stint in cooking school!). I'm more adventurous with the techniques, cooking styles, and willing to try foods of other origins. But, like IgorPatola mentioned, sometimes, specifying early on that you need so many prep dishes and/or X more are recommended, would be a huge help to the clean up part of the process or doing some pre-planning.
> but I'm currently trying to keep my blood pressure, A1C, HDL, & LDL numbers in check
For that you may also explore a vegan diet, though you do need to continue to be aware of salt and oil in recipes, but in general avoiding avoiding mal products goes a long way
> The food is very good, but the instructions are written by someone who (a) seems to have a gourmet kitchen at their disposal and (b) doesn't do dishes after
I got exactly the reverse impression; the recipes go out of their way to minimize the number of pieces of cookware required (both per recipe, by reuse, and across recipes), which both caters to those without a well-studied kitchen and minimizes the work of dishes.
They are obsessive about mis en place, which can use a few more prep bowls than strictly necessary, but prep bowls are easy cleanup, pots and pans are the time consuming items. (OTOH, mis en place is pretty much the secret key to efficient meal preparation, especially with multiple components, that many home cooks overlook. It's better to be slightly overboard with it than the alternative.)
I agree with many of your points. I didn't have an issue with the time or complexity - I cook most nights and spend a lot of time doing it so this wasn't an issue.
My biggest problems were that #1 it's expensive relative to what I would pay to buy my own ingredients (especially for no leftovers), and #2 a lot of waste in the process. Specifically regarding waste, a lot of extra shipping packaging and each individual item is often individually wrapped in plastic. I get that they might not have any easy choices, but it seemed excessive and after a while it didn't sit well with me.
At the end of the day, I view this as an occasional luxury and not an everyweek thing like they want it to be. It's considerably more sustainable to go to the local farmer's market and grocer to pick up healthy, locally-grown produce and meats that are fresher and cheaper.
The recipe cards are by far the best part and I will give them a lot of credit for crafting some real tasty meals. I have made several meals more than once on my own with the recipe card.
Fwiw I find their meals take me less time just because left to my own devices I tend to make more complicated affairs.
However your comment about preprepping everything, aka mise en place, actually does improve your cooking experience in the long run once you get used to doing it. Sure some things you can multitask on but it's not always possible to say how long it'll take you to chop up that garlic and maybe you timed it wrong
Anecdotally I disagree with mise en place. Chopping all the things and then putting them in a separate bowls to be used later has never been faster for me than chopping things as I need them and throwing them into a pan that is already cooking the thing I just chopped.
I theorize that all recipes are written with mise en place in mind because many recipe writers have experience in the restaurant world and that is how things are done there. There is a prep time to chop everything before the busy times and then when orders come in they can quickly fire all the chopped ingredients, so the actual cook time to table is fast when time is most important but the overall time is slower, but it does matter because the prep time occurs when people are not waiting for food.
Again this is all theory and I could be super wrong.
You're absolutely correct that a true mise en place, for most dishes, is more of a hyperoptimization for people who aren't cooking on a line. Things like quick stir fries are an exception, mind you.
I started, as most people do, prepping as I go. My cooking sucked. Not just because I prepped as I went, but partially so. I'd get to step 3 and see for step 4 I needed chopped onions, so I'd start chopping onions. But step 3 was supposed to cook for less time than it took me to chop onions, so step 3 went on too long. In this sense, a full mise en place helped me get better at the actual cooking parts.
As time went on I developed better cooking habits. I'd understand the full recipe prior to cooking. I had a better body of experience to estimate how long chopping those onions would take so I could plan ahead on if I should be doing it ahead of time or while some step < 4 was going on. I also had a better conception of the economies of scale in that perhaps it would be faster prepping items A, B, and C at the same time instead of separately but item D didn't matter.
Once you get to that point I think you're absolutely correct in that a hybrid model is better overall, but I think one needs to go the full mise en place route first to develop better cooking chops (pardon the pun) prior to going that route.
I had the exact same experience. I thought the main selling point of these services was to save time, but I never felt I was saving time. And the amount of dishes and pans I had to clean up after was obnoxious.
If someone can make a service that focuses on using a single pan/dish per meal, I'm interested.
It may be a great habit in a restaurant where you always have more work in the queue, but for home cooking it makes a lot of sense to interleave cooking with chopping. It saves time not just because the cooking and chopping happens in parallel, but also because you don't need to get six bowls and wash them afterwards. The exception is if you know that you won't be able to chop quickly enough, e.g. wok.
I suspect that the unit economics of this business aren't profitable at the moment.
It's possible that the pro forma looked nice based on quotes from suppliers. I've tried several of these meal kit companies and they all suffer from basic logistics and quality problems. I suspect it's a hard business with hidden costs and lots of unknown unknowns.
This is why I and others[0] believe Amazon will use its purchase of Whole Foods to change the fundamentals of this business and provide the infrastructure companies like Blue Apron need to do this profitably. Before Amazon fulfillment existed ecommerce was a logistical mother fucker. I worked at a number of startups in the late 90's and early 00's that struggled with this. I think there are a lot of similarities here.
If there's one thing Amazon has going for them, it's figured out logistics at scale. The economics of a service like this start to look a lot better when your delivery rates are dirt cheap _and_ you can selectively serve zip codes with highest demand.
Serving sparse suburban or rural areas doesn't make sense with ingredient delivery.
The UK equivalent of this is Hello Fresh [1]. I've never tried them, but they were clearly spending a lot on marketing and sending people door to door. The thing is, for the price I could just buy the necessary ingredients at my local supermarket.
I was tempted just so I didn't have to think about what to cook, but I find Yummly [2] to be a great inspiration and helps me to try new dishes.
The real issue with these services is that it is unclear what value they actually provide. If you want to cook yourself and save money, you could just get the ingredients yourself (or have them delivered by a service like Amazon Fresh). If you want to save time, you either go out to eat or order take-out. In contrast, Blue Apron and their like combine the worst of both worlds: high prices and no time savings.
BTW, Hello Fresh is actually one of the companies funded by the infamous Samwer brothers and their Rocket Internet. They operate in several European countries, and they have been offering large discounts. I don't imagine they're not burning through a lot of cash because of that.
The value is that, for people who want a home cooked meal, it's extremely convenient to have all the grocery shopping and portioning done for you while still getting the feeling, however real it may be, that you're cooking and preparing your own food. I like knowing exactly what's in the meals that I prepare and it's worth it to me (and actually a bit of a time saver) to not have to go grocery shopping for every meal. It started off as taking a bit of time, but now that I've been cooking them regularly for a while I'm actually at the point where the time estimates are pretty accurate.
For me personally, the value proposition is not having to think about cooking _until I start cooking_.
I just come home to matching ingredients and can start cooking at any time (which I mostly enjoy doing and is relaxing). It also saves time that I would need to decide on recipes and make lists and go shopping (all of which I don't like and stresses me out).
Its not about saving the maximum amount of time, but getting rid of the unpleasant parts around cooking at home. And eating out is much more expensive (where I live, maybe except the junkiest of junkfood), so this is an acceptable compromise.
i was one of the customers who dropped in q2 after using the service for about 6 months.
I really enjoyed the product, and never had an issue with quality.
for me cost was primary reason for cancelling. Buying ingredients saves me about $100 a month. Even with Blue Apron I had to go to the grocery store weekly for lunch and breakfast food, so it was a "nice to have luxury", not something that saved time or money.
I worry that Blue Apron is going to have a hard time making the economics of custom acquisition vs. life time value work if high churn is a permanent thing.
My wife and I are currently back to using _none_ of these services for much the same reasons as everyone else (prep time, dirty dishes, small portion sizes) but I will say Blue Apron is by far the best of the lot. Their instructions made the most sense, didn't require us to scale them ourselves, the food tasted wonderful, and I learned new techniques. The rest of the services have a lot of catching up to do, so if even Blue Apron is in trouble, maybe this model isn't so sustainable at all.
It's not clear they have a long term sustainable business model. They clearly have a problem with the cost of customer acquisition running up against the lifetime value of a customer. If they can't fix that then the model is dead.
Execution issues are just adding fuel to the fire.
Better than these services would be a site that tells you how to shop for meals and prepare them in bulk -- sort of "make your own meal kits". It would be more efficient, healthier, and more educational.
Platejoy[1] does this. I did their trial a while back and they've got some great meal ideas. One thing I like about this, is that there's no potential waste compared to Blue Apron and the like. Also being able to specify dietary restrictions and stuff while getting a nice grocery list was pretty great (:
While yes, I can spend time researching things, picking things out, etc. all for free, sometimes I do just want the experience to be catered. Add on top of that an automated, weekly/bi-weekly grocery list was pretty damn cool. Otherwise, I typically end up making the same boring meals I already know.
I didn't continue with them because my boyfriend is a pretty amazing cook, so I just leave cooking to him instead haha
Better yet, if supermarkets would bundle produce and meats into ready-to-prepare packages to compete with meal delivery. The one reason why I still buy meal delivery is because I hate wasting food and figuring out what to make. I don't need 50 lbs of spinach, a whole farm's worth of chive, and I can never find serrano chilis or hoison sauce, for example.
I've only tried Blue Apron once. I was watching a friend's cat while he was out of town, and I grabbed his most recent order so it wouldn't go to waste.
I don't remember which recipe it was, except to say it was a chicken recipe - probably with quinoa. Six of the eight steps included "Salt and Pepper to taste". Fortunately, my wife and I both cook regularly, so we knew that would have been a terrible idea.
I only seasoned the chicken once, and nothing else, and the dinner came out great. My friend cooks often as well, so I assume he just skips the unnecessary steps if they show up as well. His wife is just learning, though, which is why they were using Blue Apron. I'd have to assume she may end up over-seasoning from time to time if that's how the recipes normally go.
As someone who already eats home-cooked meals almost daily, I couldn't imagine paying that price. But overall the idea makes a lot of sense, provided execution is perfect. It seems, reading the rest of this thread, that hasn't been the case of late.
That's actually a very normal technique and one of the reasons professionally cooked food tastes so much better than most home cooked food. Frequent salting at different points of cooking improves the overall flavour of the dish, and seasoning ingredients separately can help with coverage.
Additionally something seasoned at the start of cooking won't be "salty" like if you were to add salt directly on the food after its plated.
You don't add a crap ton of salt 5 times, just a pinch here and there and the outcome is great.
Same thing happened with my SO. She's not big into cooking but wanted to try her hand at one of the meals and she kept salting things like she would normally salt them. I told her to only salt to taste and she took issue with that. Once I showed her the how-to videos on the site, though, she saw exactly what I was saying and now she can actually cook pretty decently. :)
This is like the one cooking tip I don't stop blathering about in fact. Always season each ingredient individually. Both ensures that the salt is distributed well and makes it easier to get the desired amount in the end product.
I understand what you mean about salting throughout the process, but I [somewhat] disagree that it won't be salty. I've nothing scientific to offer about this opinion, but I feel that we build a tolerance to salt and end up over-salting over time.
A little less than a decade ago, I went almost a month eating only home-cooked meals without any added salt. It wasn't a health thing, but rather an effort to try to learn what my food actually tasted like.
After that, Everything tasted far too salty (including my own cooking when adding any salt) - to the point where I could barely taste the food properly. My tolerance has risen since, but I like to keep my seasoning moderate for that reason.
Then again, I'll also throw a whole stick of butter into pasta sauce on rare occasion - a trick I learned from another chef friend. It took my wife a while to realize why she liked my pasta sauce so much more than her own, and she's definitely a far more seasoned cook than I am.
I tried it once. Having half of my ingredients arrive either opened or spoiled (and I started my entry into the world of jobs as an apprenticed oriental chef) immediately turned me off.
If I still worked as an AIB inspector I'd be going straight to their warehouses right now and running a top-to-bottom run-through.
That's a good point. looks like they took the lowest historical price vs the IPO, without regard for current situation. Far from "total return". Good catch.
This company is not a tech company, so it shouldn't be valued as one. It's on par with a local restaurant.
Second, the company produces enormous amounts of plastic pollution from packaging. Why should we pollute our planet so the CEO can make $1 more on the stock market?
More plastic than a super market does? And can you not just recycle the plastic containers?
If the world switched to services like Blue Apron/Hello Fresh/etc. rather than shopping in super markets, I wonder if we would overall produce more or less pollution? Super markets use a lot of energy and have a lot of waste.
Super markets certainly have their problems, for reasons you've said. However, you can choose not to put your groceries in any plastic from the supermarket, if you wish. I have done exactly that for a while now and it's easily doable, you just have to be a little choosy about what you buy.
If people switched to shopping at local farmer's markets - so food wouldn't be shipped around at all - we would produce much less pollution and have much sustainable agriculture than either of those options.
Local agriculture usually costs a lot more energy and land than large scale agriculture or agriculture in a climate that is best suited for the plant. The transportation costs are a rounding error for many products. Organic products are particularly terrible in this respect.
It's the softer plastics that are sometimes harder to recycle. Hard containers are pretty easy, but some places can't accept their ubiquitous plastic bags with one green onion in them (not kidding on that point).
They give you the option to mail the recyclables back to them for recycling, since they know many municipalities don't offer curbside service for recycling.
Blue Apron needs to be a service offered by local grocery stores. You pick up (or sure, are delivered) one of many boxes that grocery stores assemble from their local inventory. There's 10 or so different options, always readily available, with a full meal of supplies and instructions inside.
The objective is to show you that, "hey, cooking great stuff is within your realm of capability! It's fun and empowering. You don't have to be like Waterluvian over there who walks past all the produce and butcher every time because he has no clue how to make something of it all." After meal 10 or whatever, that's it, there's no more, you've graduated the "Get a Taste of Cooking" program. Now you move on to more traditional grocery shopping with your new added confidence and practice that will ideally see you buying more produce and fewer frozen dishes.
Wait, does your local Safeway/King-Soopers/Albertsons/Publix not already do that? It's right next to the 'deli' section of mine, styrofoam packs (like what meats come in) and plastic wrapped, all the stuff inside. Yeah, they don't have the instructions, but it's not too hard to figure out what to do.
None of those companies exist in my country. But no, I haven't seen it done here. Though 80% of a product is 0% of a product, so just a box of ingredients isn't quite what I'm getting it. What I'm talking about is the whole shebang and the design to drive you towards being able to wield the full power of your grocery store.
That being said, I wish we at least had what you describe :)
Oh, my bad, I didn't know. Hmm, maybe you could talk to the manager of your store and suggest it. It's not too hard for the folks there to just pack it all up like BlueApron or how we do it here. Plus, they could charge +10% or so to do that, essentially free money for them. I'd bet the manager would be pretty happy to do it. Then again, this a US perspective, so YMMV.
Our Publix does this with even a free sample of the food (entree and side) and a recipe card. But of course they're going to use gourmet ingredients and run you $25-30 if you need them all and buy off the endcap.
I've been with them for 2+ years and am hooked. We use Green Chef as well for 6 meaks per week.
Everyone complains about the lack of convenience but it saves me mind capacity more than anything and I never have to go to the store. We also like variety in food. Recipes show up, I cook for 30 minutes and we have family meals.
$20/meal to feed three adults and a toddler is a bargain to me as well.
I prefer Blue Apron to others and cringe to think they might make it easier. Note, I could barely cook before and took twice as long. I just use a giant cutting board and a favorite spatula and knife and occasionally use more than one pan. I also overlap things like preheating the pans and chopping while things cook.
We recreate some of the meals but have a hard time getting the quantities to match up. It usually means I have to make a double batch for guests or have leftovers and need to stock the pantry with various sauces and vinegars.
It's been great to read this thread. I never understood the value. As someone who can cook and grocery shop decently, it's not cheaper and only marginally better than what I normally whip up. And there's no question about convenience when it's compared to delivery (although, I live in SF, so my delivery options are more than most).
How much would it cost to have a chef supply and prepare dinner 5 nights a week for a family of 4? I don't mean takeout from a restaurant. I mean "home cooked meals".
One other thing I forgot to mention, last week, Blue Apron offered me $30 to rejoin (I already had a $10 credit I threw away). I thought it was interesting and then I saw this HN post. Probably not a coincidence. :/
It never seemed like a sustainable business model. After a year you build up enough skills that you no long need them. Also I can source ingredients locally more inexpensively and fresher.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadIn light of that news I can see why Matt Wadiak, their previous COO, recently "stepped down".
They've also been spamming me with discounts to the wine club only to tell me that they can't legally deliver in NY when I tried to sign up. Don't they know where I live?
I hope they can recover because I do truly like the product and I think they're the best right now (a margin better than Hello Fresh, leagues better than Plated)
Some of the rejected candidates before they settled on Blue Apron: "Orange Orange", "Sky Aubergine", "Yellow Spatula", "The-color-of-a-lawnchair-that's-been-out-in-the-rain-too-long Cucumber".
On the plus side, it put me in the regular habit of cooking together with my wife. We love many of the recipes, which are freely available on their website...we've already started "re-doing" many meals by picking up the ingredients on regular shopping trips.
EDIT: One other thought - the whole market seems a lot like the GroupOn craze in some ways. It's an idea that consumers are attracted to, but the economics and excess competition make the whole concept fragile.
Yeah, Groupon is a great comparison IMO. Huge initial growth, but spending a bunch of money to acquire each customer doesn't work once a bunch of copy-cat competitors enter the market.
I also wonder how many folks drop off once they've learned some basic cooking skills from the recipes - chopping, searing, getting the right proportions, etc.
The second was an issue I had repeatedly with the meat and fish ingredients: I had several weeks where meat/fish packaging was open when I got the shipment and the contents went bad. I emailed them every time, but at some point I got tired of having to immediately go to the grocery store to find the right quantity of pork or cod or whatever to complete the meal.
Realistically, their 35 minute meals always took me closer to an hour once all was said and done. There almost never were any leftovers (yeah two medium sized sweet potatoes don't go too far for four people). Finally, the price was just a little too high.
I keep a few of the recipe cards and try to make those once in a while, but mostly I am just back to regular grocery shopping now.
At any rate, wanted to point out that they recently expanded the number of meals you can choose from in a given week and introduced new "faster to prepare" meal options, so they are definitely listening to that criticism. Note that I haven't tried any of these.
Meanwhile I've found that what helps a lot on cutting down extraneous dishes is just to read the entire recipe card a couple of times before starting so I know what's coming up and which steps can be cut down or combined to save dishes. It also helps to make the whole thing go quicker and feel less stressful during time sensitive portions.
>I'm not going to chop everything up front just to realize that the garlic goes in at the last step
This is the concept of "mise en place" and is actually a great habit to get into, I understand the concern about dishes though.
The tradeoff is dishes; sometimes you can get around this by just using a giant cutting board and setting pre-chopped ingredients off to one side of it (instead of in separate bowls).
Just say: chop these 3 things and add them to the same bowl you are going to marinate next
source: frustrated Blue Apron customer :)
I dunno, I've followed many where they explicitly tell you to put in same mixing bowl. Things are written in a more logical order.
> It's not hard to just read the next step
It's not always the next step, sometimes its one of the last as its a raw salad of some sort with a quick marinade or simple dressing.
> Hell, it never even actually says to put things in individual bowls.
On every recipe they provide you it is formatted with picture on left and steps on the right. Every recipe prep shows individual bowls of cut ingredients.
So it may not _say_ to put them in individual bowls but it always shows you you should put them in individual bowls.
It's a minor gripe the original poster had (and I share) you shouldn't have to study the recipe. It's not hard to just say cut up x,y,z and place into same mixing bowl. I want to pull out all the ingredients and start cooking and do my best to meet their advertised time, not spend more time planning their recipe.
I'm sure many people have made the same mistake, pictures speak a 1000 words after all.
It's good to write this yourself since you work it into your head...and also because such instructions could appear a bit batshit if you didn't write them!
I also cleanly distinguish the "shopping list" part of the recipe (which has it's own standard structure organized by pantry, fresh, spices, and unique ingredients) and the "cooking" part, which provides measurements in the cooking text without needing to refer to the ingredient list. It's a small thing, but I really hate scanning ingredient lists every time I need a measurement in the middle of cooking.
>Here is my theory, though: Blue Apron is a tech company in the sense that its product is not meals, or ingredients, but simulacrum. What it delivers is the idea of creating a home-cooked meal from fresh ingredients, without the tedious shopping and chopping work that that would otherwise require. What Blue Apron delivers is not exactly convenience -- ordering takeout is a lot more convenient -- but the perception that you are doing something complicated and real and primal while you are actually, through the miracle of technology, doing something much easier. Blue Apron is a virtual-reality company.
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/view/articles/2017-08-09/yogur...
Cooking & cleaning is a much bigger time investment than shopping for ingredients. In 10 minutes in a grocery store I can buy enough food for 10-15 meals, which would take hours to cook (in aggregate). The comparison stands even when you include driving to the store (before any pedants try to be contrarian)
Blue Apron is optimizing the smaller part of the time pie required for eating, but at a higher cost than delivery (that optimizes the larger part of the pie for less money, usually)
That's why takeout is a decades-proved business model and Blue Apron is a VC-subsidized non-business.
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That being said, I do agree with it being a virtual reality company. And by that I mean a company that can't really exist in actual reality.
I've never used it but I've heard people say how they like it because
- they get to learn new recipes using less-common ingredients
- have good quality meals (which take out often doesn't provide, if we are considering time saving)
- they, sometimes at least, prefer eating at home.
If it's not, it'll eventually become a non-business.
1. There's nothing that suggests the ingredients are less common. But if you're a Blue Apron user, feel free to list some of the ingredients you were not able to find at a grocery store.
1.5: you can learn new recipes 10 different ways already, without having to subscribe to any "X as a service".
2. Nothing that suggests an average person can cook better or faster than takeout, which suggests the takeout provides value to the customer.
3. Completely irrelevant to the points at hand.
Regarding 1. It's not that the ingredients are less common per se. It's that using BA means that people ended up using some less commonly used ingredients. They were introduced to new things that they hadn't used before and wouldn't have sought out on their own. They liked that.
Regarding 1.5 - obviously, but the thing is there is greater convenience (that some ppl prefer) with not having to select the recipes, get the ingredients, portion them out. For some people that different in convenience makes the difference between whether they do it or not. So treating this issue as if it was purely a matter of whether it was possible or not doesn't make sense.
Regarding 2, I have heard people say they have been able to make high quality meals that they wouldn't usually have made that are better than most takeaway.
3 is most definitely relevant, because it's an example of a non-speed-based kind of value it provides to some people - getting the kind of meal they would only otherwise get at a restaurant but at home. Most takeaway can't do that.
What they did was provide daily dinner recipes for fancy-restaurant type meals, with instructions, wine pairing, and shopping list. If you're an omnivore, you could simply print the day's page, stop at the grocery store on the way home, and cook whatever it was.
It seems to me that this represents about 80% of the value of Blue Apron at no cost (I think they had a for-pay email service, or something?).
In the universe I inhabit there's no way that's true. I spend a great deal of time in the grocery store just finding things, then looking at the choices to figure out what's the best deal / doesn't contain Yellow #5 / isn't expired already and on and on.
Oh and...add to that the time to phone the wife to find out if when she wrote "Onion" on the list did that mean Yellow Onion or White Onion or Red Onion or Sweet Wallah Wallah Onion or Scallion and how many of them...
"What making meals from store-bought ingredients delivers is not exactly convenience -- ordering takeout is a lot more convenient -- but the perception that you are doing something complicated and real and primal while you are actually, through the miracle of technology, doing something much easier [than harvesting your vegetables, slaughtering and butchering your own animals, grinding your own flour, etc]"
The miracles of technology and labor specialization! You can pay someone money in order to have them partially process your food before you cook it!
Preservation matters - the cutting up of vegetables for meal kits is a form of processing that reduces their shelf life, and therefore increases cost and waste.
So, for similar meals, is Blue Apron. At least where I live.
Clearly, he's never used Blue Apron, since they have you do the chopping work.
> What Blue Apron delivers is not exactly convenience -- ordering takeout is a lot more convenient -
Takeout requires me to leave my house; that is often less convenient than Blue Apron.
Delivery is arguably more convenient, though where I live the non-pizza choices without hefty delivery fees on top of restaurant prices are limited.
That's what I was referring to already.
I just can't see paying a delivery fee for McDonald's
For special “eating out, but at home” events, no.
After I quit Blue Apron, I tried Hello Fresh. Their recipes were a lot simpler to follow, and tasted just as good, but I had serious quality issues. By the time I quit, I determined that 11% of the meat packages I had received were punctured, and started leaking when they defrosted. If the punctures happened after they were frozen and sealed they were probably safe to eat, but I had no way of knowing that.
We chose the 2 person meal plan because if our (even if nutritionally adventurous) 5 & 7 year olds didn't like the meal, we didn't want way too much leftovers. I'm the only person who has any dedication to leftovers (lunch about 3 times a week).
Portion wise, it felt like 2 person meal plan was usually ok for 3 adults so we'd often supplement with an extra chicken breast or something and spread the sauce thin.
Nutritionally, if felt like a TON of SALT & OIL. Mind you, it's not always bad thing, but I'm currently trying to keep my blood pressure, A1C, HDL, & LDL numbers in check and this always felt like it was harmful to that goal though I didn't check and measure if it was. I did lose weight however, on those weeks which is an odd dichotomy maybe.
In terms of recipe selection, sometimes, it felt like the recipes were just one or two minor ingredients off from being copies of a previous recipe. It did change the flavor, but for me, is that really a different recipe?
I too also had issues with the produce. Bad garlic, bad potatoes, etc.
And yes, there was the cost. $60/week felt just a little high to do that much of the work yourself as well as all of the clean up.
My wife is a one pan/pyrex/crockpot kind of cooker (and she did a stint in cooking school!). I'm more adventurous with the techniques, cooking styles, and willing to try foods of other origins. But, like IgorPatola mentioned, sometimes, specifying early on that you need so many prep dishes and/or X more are recommended, would be a huge help to the clean up part of the process or doing some pre-planning.
For that you may also explore a vegan diet, though you do need to continue to be aware of salt and oil in recipes, but in general avoiding avoiding mal products goes a long way
I got exactly the reverse impression; the recipes go out of their way to minimize the number of pieces of cookware required (both per recipe, by reuse, and across recipes), which both caters to those without a well-studied kitchen and minimizes the work of dishes.
They are obsessive about mis en place, which can use a few more prep bowls than strictly necessary, but prep bowls are easy cleanup, pots and pans are the time consuming items. (OTOH, mis en place is pretty much the secret key to efficient meal preparation, especially with multiple components, that many home cooks overlook. It's better to be slightly overboard with it than the alternative.)
My biggest problems were that #1 it's expensive relative to what I would pay to buy my own ingredients (especially for no leftovers), and #2 a lot of waste in the process. Specifically regarding waste, a lot of extra shipping packaging and each individual item is often individually wrapped in plastic. I get that they might not have any easy choices, but it seemed excessive and after a while it didn't sit well with me.
At the end of the day, I view this as an occasional luxury and not an everyweek thing like they want it to be. It's considerably more sustainable to go to the local farmer's market and grocer to pick up healthy, locally-grown produce and meats that are fresher and cheaper.
The recipe cards are by far the best part and I will give them a lot of credit for crafting some real tasty meals. I have made several meals more than once on my own with the recipe card.
However your comment about preprepping everything, aka mise en place, actually does improve your cooking experience in the long run once you get used to doing it. Sure some things you can multitask on but it's not always possible to say how long it'll take you to chop up that garlic and maybe you timed it wrong
Again this is all theory and I could be super wrong.
You're absolutely correct that a true mise en place, for most dishes, is more of a hyperoptimization for people who aren't cooking on a line. Things like quick stir fries are an exception, mind you.
I started, as most people do, prepping as I go. My cooking sucked. Not just because I prepped as I went, but partially so. I'd get to step 3 and see for step 4 I needed chopped onions, so I'd start chopping onions. But step 3 was supposed to cook for less time than it took me to chop onions, so step 3 went on too long. In this sense, a full mise en place helped me get better at the actual cooking parts.
As time went on I developed better cooking habits. I'd understand the full recipe prior to cooking. I had a better body of experience to estimate how long chopping those onions would take so I could plan ahead on if I should be doing it ahead of time or while some step < 4 was going on. I also had a better conception of the economies of scale in that perhaps it would be faster prepping items A, B, and C at the same time instead of separately but item D didn't matter.
Once you get to that point I think you're absolutely correct in that a hybrid model is better overall, but I think one needs to go the full mise en place route first to develop better cooking chops (pardon the pun) prior to going that route.
If someone can make a service that focuses on using a single pan/dish per meal, I'm interested.
It's possible that the pro forma looked nice based on quotes from suppliers. I've tried several of these meal kit companies and they all suffer from basic logistics and quality problems. I suspect it's a hard business with hidden costs and lots of unknown unknowns.
This is why I and others[0] believe Amazon will use its purchase of Whole Foods to change the fundamentals of this business and provide the infrastructure companies like Blue Apron need to do this profitably. Before Amazon fulfillment existed ecommerce was a logistical mother fucker. I worked at a number of startups in the late 90's and early 00's that struggled with this. I think there are a lot of similarities here.
0: https://stratechery.com/2017/amazons-new-customer/
If there's one thing Amazon has going for them, it's figured out logistics at scale. The economics of a service like this start to look a lot better when your delivery rates are dirt cheap _and_ you can selectively serve zip codes with highest demand.
Serving sparse suburban or rural areas doesn't make sense with ingredient delivery.
I was tempted just so I didn't have to think about what to cook, but I find Yummly [2] to be a great inspiration and helps me to try new dishes.
1. https://www.hellofresh.co.uk/ 2. https://www.yummly.co.uk/
BTW, Hello Fresh is actually one of the companies funded by the infamous Samwer brothers and their Rocket Internet. They operate in several European countries, and they have been offering large discounts. I don't imagine they're not burning through a lot of cash because of that.
I just come home to matching ingredients and can start cooking at any time (which I mostly enjoy doing and is relaxing). It also saves time that I would need to decide on recipes and make lists and go shopping (all of which I don't like and stresses me out).
Its not about saving the maximum amount of time, but getting rid of the unpleasant parts around cooking at home. And eating out is much more expensive (where I live, maybe except the junkiest of junkfood), so this is an acceptable compromise.
I really enjoyed the product, and never had an issue with quality.
for me cost was primary reason for cancelling. Buying ingredients saves me about $100 a month. Even with Blue Apron I had to go to the grocery store weekly for lunch and breakfast food, so it was a "nice to have luxury", not something that saved time or money.
I worry that Blue Apron is going to have a hard time making the economics of custom acquisition vs. life time value work if high churn is a permanent thing.
Execution issues are just adding fuel to the fire.
While yes, I can spend time researching things, picking things out, etc. all for free, sometimes I do just want the experience to be catered. Add on top of that an automated, weekly/bi-weekly grocery list was pretty damn cool. Otherwise, I typically end up making the same boring meals I already know.
I didn't continue with them because my boyfriend is a pretty amazing cook, so I just leave cooking to him instead haha
[1] https://www.platejoy.com/
Though it needs a CSA mode so you can tell it I got way too much swiss chard and it needs to be cooked..
I don't remember which recipe it was, except to say it was a chicken recipe - probably with quinoa. Six of the eight steps included "Salt and Pepper to taste". Fortunately, my wife and I both cook regularly, so we knew that would have been a terrible idea.
I only seasoned the chicken once, and nothing else, and the dinner came out great. My friend cooks often as well, so I assume he just skips the unnecessary steps if they show up as well. His wife is just learning, though, which is why they were using Blue Apron. I'd have to assume she may end up over-seasoning from time to time if that's how the recipes normally go.
As someone who already eats home-cooked meals almost daily, I couldn't imagine paying that price. But overall the idea makes a lot of sense, provided execution is perfect. It seems, reading the rest of this thread, that hasn't been the case of late.
Additionally something seasoned at the start of cooking won't be "salty" like if you were to add salt directly on the food after its plated.
You don't add a crap ton of salt 5 times, just a pinch here and there and the outcome is great.
A little less than a decade ago, I went almost a month eating only home-cooked meals without any added salt. It wasn't a health thing, but rather an effort to try to learn what my food actually tasted like.
After that, Everything tasted far too salty (including my own cooking when adding any salt) - to the point where I could barely taste the food properly. My tolerance has risen since, but I like to keep my seasoning moderate for that reason.
Then again, I'll also throw a whole stick of butter into pasta sauce on rare occasion - a trick I learned from another chef friend. It took my wife a while to realize why she liked my pasta sauce so much more than her own, and she's definitely a far more seasoned cook than I am.
If I still worked as an AIB inspector I'd be going straight to their warehouses right now and running a top-to-bottom run-through.
Second, the company produces enormous amounts of plastic pollution from packaging. Why should we pollute our planet so the CEO can make $1 more on the stock market?
If the world switched to services like Blue Apron/Hello Fresh/etc. rather than shopping in super markets, I wonder if we would overall produce more or less pollution? Super markets use a lot of energy and have a lot of waste.
If people switched to shopping at local farmer's markets - so food wouldn't be shipped around at all - we would produce much less pollution and have much sustainable agriculture than either of those options.
The objective is to show you that, "hey, cooking great stuff is within your realm of capability! It's fun and empowering. You don't have to be like Waterluvian over there who walks past all the produce and butcher every time because he has no clue how to make something of it all." After meal 10 or whatever, that's it, there's no more, you've graduated the "Get a Taste of Cooking" program. Now you move on to more traditional grocery shopping with your new added confidence and practice that will ideally see you buying more produce and fewer frozen dishes.
That being said, I wish we at least had what you describe :)
I love when people/companies with money are trying an idea I have. It makes me feel smart ;)
Everyone complains about the lack of convenience but it saves me mind capacity more than anything and I never have to go to the store. We also like variety in food. Recipes show up, I cook for 30 minutes and we have family meals.
$20/meal to feed three adults and a toddler is a bargain to me as well.
I prefer Blue Apron to others and cringe to think they might make it easier. Note, I could barely cook before and took twice as long. I just use a giant cutting board and a favorite spatula and knife and occasionally use more than one pan. I also overlap things like preheating the pans and chopping while things cook.
We recreate some of the meals but have a hard time getting the quantities to match up. It usually means I have to make a double batch for guests or have leftovers and need to stock the pantry with various sauces and vinegars.
Then I found freshly, which sends pre-made meals, and I love it.
Meal kits are going to be a big business. But they're going to come from your grocery store, your office cafeteria, or Amazon. That's it.