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Seriously though. Blue Apron made me seethe with anger the first time I saw an ad for it. If you can afford Blue Apron, you can afford to buy 3x as much food an

Seriously though. Blue Apron made me seethe with anger the first time I saw an ad for it. If you can afford Blue Apron, you can afford to buy 3x as much food and have control over your ingredient choice by just going to your goddamn supermarket. Yeah, recipes are great. Yeah, tutorial videos are great. But that's what the internet is supposed to be for. You don't need some hipster wannabe "chef" assembling boxes of ingredients 200 miles away to decide what you're eating tonight, do you? That box will come with 10 little vacuum sealed plastic pouches, a bunch of packing material, instructions you could have found online, and a whole host of other crap you don't need that's just making waste for waste's sake. If you already have access to a kitchen, a decent set of cooking equipment (which you need regardless of whether you go for Blue Apron or not) is only a few hundred bucks, and the "basics" (pasta, rice, potatoes, onions, garlic, spices, veggie oil, olive oil, vinegar, flour, sugar, salt) are maybe 50 bucks more. Then, for less than a months' worth of meals from Blue Apron, you're set to start cooking for life. My fiancee and I spend a grand total of 100 bucks a week, give or take, on groceries. This is in southern California, and usually including a cheap bottle of wine. We could spend even less if we wanted, but we're cooking some gourmet shit at home and constantly have leftovers, while generating 1/2 the trash of any of our neighbors thanks both to reusable containers for everything and composting. You can do SO MUCH better than Blue Apron, both in health and in environmental impact. The same thing applies to Juicero: If I really want to start making fruit juice, I'll buy myself a decent juicer and get fresh, local fruit because it will always be cheaper than whatever they're sending out in their little pouches. I'd rather spend a couple hundred bucks on a quality machine (or better, just make smoothies since they're better for you and use the money I saved not buying a Juicero to buy a Vitamix) than buy into some cult hype bullshit.

nilkn 10y ago
With all due respect, I think you've completely missed the point of something like Blue Apron. It's not about saving money at all. It's for folks who enjoy cooking, but want to completely avoid trips to the grocery store or at least greatly simplify those trips. There's also a fun element of surprise since it not only takes out the grocery store trips but even basic meal planning. That said, the one point I agree with you on is Blue Apron's generation of trash. It's wildly wasteful in that sense because so many of their ingredients are individually wrapped and packaged.
hibikir 10y ago
Their market is people that don't cook all that often, and want to cook relatively fancy things. It's people that cook so rarely that they throw away half of the groceries they buy, because they don't cook enough, and the dishes they make don't make sense together, from a home economics perspective. I do my best to cook traditional Northern Spanish food for myself (well, as close as I can given the available ingredients). There's very little food waste, precisely because so many recipes either use long lived ingredients, or just reuse them. Some are built using another dish's leftovers as an ingredient. This makes it very easy to just have an idea of the stock we need for certain kinds of ingredients, and make a high percentage of the shopping list just an exercise of comparing what we have with our ideal stock. This only works, however, because we aren't really looking at dishes individually, and we cook almost every meal. Someone that cooks once a week, and isn't thinking about efficiency, in either ingredients or time spent preparing, will end up spending a whole lot more and eat less. Unfortunately, there's no money in teaching people how to understand a kitchen like this, and how to add recipes that will both add variety while minimizing waste.
- fancy_pants 10y ago
  This is an interesting idea, especially for someone like me who cooks nearly every meal but still watches rarely-used ingredients die a slow fridge death. Are there any books you would recommend specifically for this kind of reusable cooking plan?
- Qwertystop 10y ago
  I generally end up just making one or two simple dishes a week with lots of leftovers. Old standbys: One jar tomato sauce, one pound ground turkey, some peas, cook it all together and pour over pasta. One large yellow onion, bit more than a pound of chicken, three or four bell peppers, stir-fry and serve on rice. Each of those makes about half a week of meals (not counting breakfast) using exact multiples of the unit size of the ingredients in the grocery store, so nothing gets a chance to go bad. I too would be quite interested in how to design a recipe structure for less waste without that sort of restriction, though.
GuiA 10y ago
The people who use Blue Apron and such are mostly educated, wealthy people who would order takeout/delivery otherwise, but are now cooking. I also think getting ingredients at your doorstep from some VC backed startup with YouTube recipes on how to cook them is one of the most privileged things you can do, but at least people are cooking. Anything to get more americans cooking is a good thing, in the grand scheme of things.
- nameless912 10y ago
  I mean...yes, you're right, in the grand scheme of things more people cooking is an objectively good thing. I just wish we didn't need this bullshit to get us there.
CobrastanJorji 10y ago
I'm not a good cook, but I like the idea of cooking. I don't have time to plan a week of meals. I want someone to tell me what I need, and if they can also send me exactly what I need so that I don't get it wrong, that's fantastic. It may be so fantastic that I am willing to pay twice as much as it might cost in the grocery store. I'm sure with a bit of culinary expertise and experience I could probably do it all on my own, but I don't have that experience, and I don't really have the time to acquire it, but I sure don't want to order out every night. I haven't tried it, but Blue Apron sounds pretty great to me. I can cook but I don't need to worry about having no real idea what I'm doing? Good deal. That is way more approachable than doing a bunch of independent learning.
- finid 10y ago
  There's a business idea in your comment.
alexbecker 10y ago
I couldn't care less about the recipes and tutorials; for me the thing that such a service provided was small portions of ingredients. At the time I ate at work for all of my meals during the week, and so needed to cook maybe 3 meals/week (for one person). There's no other way I've found to get 1tbsp of butter, or flour, or 1 green onion. So for me it eliminated a fair amount of food waste. That being said now that I don't get free food from work, I'll be buying groceries and cooking often enough to use the larger portions.
compiler-guy 10y ago
A significant part of the Blue Apron value proposition (and I am not a subscribed or otherwise interested--I cook for myself, mostly from scratch), is: "You don't have to think or plan anything." And that is where your one paragraph about how easy it is to cook for yourself falls down. You have to think up a menu. You have to find a menu (and hope it is good), plan, get ingredients, get the right odds and ends and figure out portions. That is all fairly easy to do (and I do it myself), but not cost-free. If you have more money than emotional energy and time, the Blue Apron value proposition may appeal to you. I hate the amount of waste it produces too, but "waste for wastes' sake" is not what is going on there.
- justinator 10y ago
  > "You don't have to think or plan anything." Yeah, and you lose a lot of what makes cooking cooking. You put effort into something, your satisfaction goes up. Extend this to how you live your life, and learn the secrets of being happy.
  - nilkn 10y ago
    I think it depends what aspects of "cooking" you value. Some people really enjoy the meal planning part. Some people really enjoy picking out fruits and vegetables at the store. But others don't like planning out meals for the whole week and find grocery store trips stressful and frustrating (maybe their local store is incredibly busy). Blue Apron has a value proposition for those in the latter category who also enjoy the part of cooking that starts once you've got the grocery bags in your kitchen.
  - compiler-guy 10y ago
    I assume you don't grow all your own produce, or slaughter your own meat. My extended family does (at least mostly) and they would claim that I would have a more satisfying life if I did as well. Where one draws the line at doing it all on your own depends on time available, motivation, and opportunity cost. I'm not going to judge people whose utility function is different than mine.
  - thatswrong0 10y ago
paulcole 10y ago
Believe it or not, some people are not sensitive to price and are not looking to do more work to save money.
bradleyjg 10y ago
Whenever I make a recipe I end up guiltily throwing away a ton of food two weeks later. Is that better or worse than throwing away lots of packaging? What am I supposed to do with 90% of the smallest bunch of scallions the supermarket will sell me after I use the 10% the recipe calls for? I know, I know, I'm supposed to have 5 other recipes that I either know or can invent at the drop of a hat that just happen to use all the same ingredients. But how realistic is that for those of us that aren't amateur chefs and don't really want to become one?
- jodrellblank 10y ago
  Scallions are a weakly flavoured savoury salad vegetable, eat them. Put them in your face and chew. At the risk of turning you into an "amateur chef", eat something else with them like mayo or cheese or potato. Literally posting on the internet as if eating non-gourmet food was not even the most absurd idea you've heard of, but something that you haven't even heard of. ?! It's not a jar of aniseed, it's a small crunchy onion often served as a small crunchy onion. It's like asking "what can I do with this pear if I don't have any liqueur to poach it in? I'll just chuck it"
  - numnum 10y ago
    This made my day. I created N account just to up-vote.
tedmiston 10y ago
> The same thing applies to Juicero: If I really want to start making fruit juice, I'll buy myself a decent juicer and get fresh, local fruit because it will always be cheaper than whatever they're sending out in their little pouches. It's different because making fresh juice is more time and labor intensive than "just buying a juicer" (try it... I did). Want bananas in your orange juice like Dole sells? Now you need to combine that juicer with a blender, etc. Peeling a bunch of oranges by hand takes time. Making fresh juice by hand is completely not worth it.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> If you can afford Blue Apron, you can afford to buy 3x as much food and have control over your ingredient choice by just going to your goddamn supermarket. If you ignore time costs, sure; pre-measured ingredients in the quantity necessary for the recipe provided is a huge time saver. Yes, it creates waste, but it's not without utility.
fnord123 10y ago
Why not just get a staff mixer? They're really useful for smoothies and soups. They take up less space and cleanup is a doddle. Winner winner chicken dinner.
- Neliquat 10y ago
  Immersion blender?
  - fnord123 10y ago
    TIL, they have a lot of names. Immersion blender, wand mixer, hand mixer, etc. But, yes.
wkrause 10y ago
I was planning to give Blue Apron a whirl, but decided against it for the reasons mentioned. Plus my wife is a picky eater. Instead I use a service called plantoeat which lets me import my own recipes and optimize my grocery store runs. Once you get a good rotation going it helps with the problem of over buying certain ingredients.
rconti 10y ago
We did Blue Apron for a few months, and I rather liked it. Believe it or not, some of us just aren't creative enough to spend tons of time thinking up recipes, or looking them up, and ensuring we have enough of every ingredient for every meal. We still eat almost all of our meals at home, with or without Blue Apron, but it substantially improved the quality of the average meal. The problem with Blue Apron is that they made meals complicated for the sake of being complicated. Way too many sauces to make, things to reduce, things to mix, etc. Every meal took at least 2x what they claimed it would take, and it seemed to take tons of dishes just because of how needlessly complex they made them. We're using Gobble now, which is billed more as 15min meals and usually only dirty a couple of dishes. I vastly prefer it. I don't like the trash aspect of it, I'll give you that.

nilkn 10y ago

With all due respect, I think you've completely missed the point of something like Blue Apron. It's not about saving money at all. It's for folks who enjoy cooking, but want to completely avoid trips to the grocery store or at least greatly simplify those trips. There's also a fun element of surprise since it not only takes out the grocery store trips but even basic meal planning. That said, the one point I agree with you on is Blue Apron's generation of trash. It's wildly wasteful in that sense because so many of their ingredients are individually wrapped and packaged.

hibikir 10y ago

Their market is people that don't cook all that often, and want to cook relatively fancy things. It's people that cook so rarely that they throw away half of the groceries they buy, because they don't cook enough, and the dishes they make don't make sense together, from a home economics perspective. I do my best to cook traditional Northern Spanish food for myself (well, as close as I can given the available ingredients). There's very little food waste, precisely because so many recipes either use long lived ingredients, or just reuse them. Some are built using another dish's leftovers as an ingredient. This makes it very easy to just have an idea of the stock we need for certain kinds of ingredients, and make a high percentage of the shopping list just an exercise of comparing what we have with our ideal stock. This only works, however, because we aren't really looking at dishes individually, and we cook almost every meal. Someone that cooks once a week, and isn't thinking about efficiency, in either ingredients or time spent preparing, will end up spending a whole lot more and eat less. Unfortunately, there's no money in teaching people how to understand a kitchen like this, and how to add recipes that will both add variety while minimizing waste.

fancy_pants 10y ago
This is an interesting idea, especially for someone like me who cooks nearly every meal but still watches rarely-used ingredients die a slow fridge death. Are there any books you would recommend specifically for this kind of reusable cooking plan?
Qwertystop 10y ago
I generally end up just making one or two simple dishes a week with lots of leftovers. Old standbys: One jar tomato sauce, one pound ground turkey, some peas, cook it all together and pour over pasta. One large yellow onion, bit more than a pound of chicken, three or four bell peppers, stir-fry and serve on rice. Each of those makes about half a week of meals (not counting breakfast) using exact multiples of the unit size of the ingredients in the grocery store, so nothing gets a chance to go bad. I too would be quite interested in how to design a recipe structure for less waste without that sort of restriction, though.

GuiA 10y ago

The people who use Blue Apron and such are mostly educated, wealthy people who would order takeout/delivery otherwise, but are now cooking. I also think getting ingredients at your doorstep from some VC backed startup with YouTube recipes on how to cook them is one of the most privileged things you can do, but at least people are cooking. Anything to get more americans cooking is a good thing, in the grand scheme of things.

nameless912 10y ago
I mean...yes, you're right, in the grand scheme of things more people cooking is an objectively good thing. I just wish we didn't need this bullshit to get us there.

CobrastanJorji 10y ago

I'm not a good cook, but I like the idea of cooking. I don't have time to plan a week of meals. I want someone to tell me what I need, and if they can also send me exactly what I need so that I don't get it wrong, that's fantastic. It may be so fantastic that I am willing to pay twice as much as it might cost in the grocery store. I'm sure with a bit of culinary expertise and experience I could probably do it all on my own, but I don't have that experience, and I don't really have the time to acquire it, but I sure don't want to order out every night. I haven't tried it, but Blue Apron sounds pretty great to me. I can cook but I don't need to worry about having no real idea what I'm doing? Good deal. That is way more approachable than doing a bunch of independent learning.

finid 10y ago
There's a business idea in your comment.

alexbecker 10y ago

I couldn't care less about the recipes and tutorials; for me the thing that such a service provided was small portions of ingredients. At the time I ate at work for all of my meals during the week, and so needed to cook maybe 3 meals/week (for one person). There's no other way I've found to get 1tbsp of butter, or flour, or 1 green onion. So for me it eliminated a fair amount of food waste. That being said now that I don't get free food from work, I'll be buying groceries and cooking often enough to use the larger portions.

compiler-guy 10y ago

A significant part of the Blue Apron value proposition (and I am not a subscribed or otherwise interested--I cook for myself, mostly from scratch), is: "You don't have to think or plan anything." And that is where your one paragraph about how easy it is to cook for yourself falls down. You have to think up a menu. You have to find a menu (and hope it is good), plan, get ingredients, get the right odds and ends and figure out portions. That is all fairly easy to do (and I do it myself), but not cost-free. If you have more money than emotional energy and time, the Blue Apron value proposition may appeal to you. I hate the amount of waste it produces too, but "waste for wastes' sake" is not what is going on there.

justinator 10y ago
> "You don't have to think or plan anything." Yeah, and you lose a lot of what makes cooking cooking. You put effort into something, your satisfaction goes up. Extend this to how you live your life, and learn the secrets of being happy.
- nilkn 10y ago
  I think it depends what aspects of "cooking" you value. Some people really enjoy the meal planning part. Some people really enjoy picking out fruits and vegetables at the store. But others don't like planning out meals for the whole week and find grocery store trips stressful and frustrating (maybe their local store is incredibly busy). Blue Apron has a value proposition for those in the latter category who also enjoy the part of cooking that starts once you've got the grocery bags in your kitchen.
- compiler-guy 10y ago
  I assume you don't grow all your own produce, or slaughter your own meat. My extended family does (at least mostly) and they would claim that I would have a more satisfying life if I did as well. Where one draws the line at doing it all on your own depends on time available, motivation, and opportunity cost. I'm not going to judge people whose utility function is different than mine.
- thatswrong0 10y ago

paulcole 10y ago

Believe it or not, some people are not sensitive to price and are not looking to do more work to save money.

bradleyjg 10y ago

Whenever I make a recipe I end up guiltily throwing away a ton of food two weeks later. Is that better or worse than throwing away lots of packaging? What am I supposed to do with 90% of the smallest bunch of scallions the supermarket will sell me after I use the 10% the recipe calls for? I know, I know, I'm supposed to have 5 other recipes that I either know or can invent at the drop of a hat that just happen to use all the same ingredients. But how realistic is that for those of us that aren't amateur chefs and don't really want to become one?

jodrellblank 10y ago
Scallions are a weakly flavoured savoury salad vegetable, eat them. Put them in your face and chew. At the risk of turning you into an "amateur chef", eat something else with them like mayo or cheese or potato. Literally posting on the internet as if eating non-gourmet food was not even the most absurd idea you've heard of, but something that you haven't even heard of. ?! It's not a jar of aniseed, it's a small crunchy onion often served as a small crunchy onion. It's like asking "what can I do with this pear if I don't have any liqueur to poach it in? I'll just chuck it"
- numnum 10y ago
  This made my day. I created N account just to up-vote.

tedmiston 10y ago

> The same thing applies to Juicero: If I really want to start making fruit juice, I'll buy myself a decent juicer and get fresh, local fruit because it will always be cheaper than whatever they're sending out in their little pouches. It's different because making fresh juice is more time and labor intensive than "just buying a juicer" (try it... I did). Want bananas in your orange juice like Dole sells? Now you need to combine that juicer with a blender, etc. Peeling a bunch of oranges by hand takes time. Making fresh juice by hand is completely not worth it.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> If you can afford Blue Apron, you can afford to buy 3x as much food and have control over your ingredient choice by just going to your goddamn supermarket. If you ignore time costs, sure; pre-measured ingredients in the quantity necessary for the recipe provided is a huge time saver. Yes, it creates waste, but it's not without utility.

fnord123 10y ago

Why not just get a staff mixer? They're really useful for smoothies and soups. They take up less space and cleanup is a doddle. Winner winner chicken dinner.

Neliquat 10y ago
Immersion blender?
- fnord123 10y ago
  TIL, they have a lot of names. Immersion blender, wand mixer, hand mixer, etc. But, yes.

wkrause 10y ago

I was planning to give Blue Apron a whirl, but decided against it for the reasons mentioned. Plus my wife is a picky eater. Instead I use a service called plantoeat which lets me import my own recipes and optimize my grocery store runs. Once you get a good rotation going it helps with the problem of over buying certain ingredients.

rconti 10y ago

We did Blue Apron for a few months, and I rather liked it. Believe it or not, some of us just aren't creative enough to spend tons of time thinking up recipes, or looking them up, and ensuring we have enough of every ingredient for every meal. We still eat almost all of our meals at home, with or without Blue Apron, but it substantially improved the quality of the average meal. The problem with Blue Apron is that they made meals complicated for the sake of being complicated. Way too many sauces to make, things to reduce, things to mix, etc. Every meal took at least 2x what they claimed it would take, and it seemed to take tons of dishes just because of how needlessly complex they made them. We're using Gobble now, which is billed more as 15min meals and usually only dirty a couple of dishes. I vastly prefer it. I don't like the trash aspect of it, I'll give you that.