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Blue Apron, Struggling to Woo Investors, Lowers Price Range for IPO
- datamingle 9y agoBad news for podcasts
- dpflan 9y ago:)
- Upvoter33 9y agothis was my reaction exactly. who knew the vc community was actually just supporting podcasting. it's kind of like how NCAA football incidentally supports the olympics.
- ssharp 9y agoSeveral major podcast producers have taken VC investments, so VC's supporting other VC's!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- giobox 9y agoI'm sure Squarespace can pick up the slack :P
- tenpies 9y agoI'm sure Dollarshaveclub will pick up the slack. ;)
- ErikHuisman 9y agoCan i interest you in an free audio book? audible.com
- colmvp 9y agoDon't worry, they'll continue advertising underwear, online learning, apps, and speakers.
- uptown 9y agoThey'll rest easy on their casper mattresses.
- seanwilson 9y agoHmm, why is it that Blue Apron, Audible, Casper, Dollar Shave Club etc. are so common on podcasts for ads? Conversion rates are especially good for those kinds of businesses?
- TylerE 9y agoThe crucial hipster demographic. (Not joking, btw)
- shostack 9y agoThe Exponent podcast did an episode on this. The short answer is they all share a high LTV and can succeed with podcast ads on a direct response basis. So despite the outrageous CPMs some podcasts charge these days, they can still find it profitable.
- abrkn 9y agoSurely chocolate coated berries will pick up the slack
- code4tee 9y agoThey are a middleman that could be easily bypassed by bigger players, and investors are calling them out on that. Also, customer retention and cost of customer acquisition remains a big issue. No reason why Amazon couldn't just tack on nice recipes to their food delivery service and the acquisition of Whole Foods makes that direction even more likely. Blue Apron is in a dangerous and precarious spot and that's being reflected in the lowering of valuations. We're going to see more "disrupters being disrupted" as value chain consolidation continues to evolve.
- treehau5 9y agoIronically, part of their pitch to customers is "By cutting out the middle man and delivering ingredients at their freshest." I also see it from my own perspective: As blue apron gets millennials cooking again, more and more of them will remember what the grocery store was for -- as they will now experiment with recipes on their own, buy their own ingredients, maybe attend a farmers market or two and meet the growers of their food and support local farms. As grocery stores become more convenient to check in/out, Blue Apron's value goes further and further down.
- kchoudhu 9y agoIs it just me, or has every farmer's market I've ever been to been a terrible disappointment? The produce isn't as reliable as a good grocery store, and when it is, there's never enough of it. Sample size: New York (Brooklyn and Manhattan) and Los Angeles. FWIW, cooking isn't an interesting side hobby for me: I cook pretty every meal my family eats from scratch, and it's hard enough planning and executing 21 meals a week without dealing with artisinal suppliers.
- timmaah 9y agoJust you. Some smaller towns farmer's markets are amazing.
- virmundi 9y agoPoint 1: that probably depends on your farm's markets. Indianapolis has one ever Wednesday. Being in the heart of the heartland, it's pretty good. Down side is it closes too early for folk that work on the ring of Indy (I465 to downtown is about 30 minutes, so it's hard to hit up on a lunch HOUR). Point 2: I'm working on getting that 21 meals planned fixed. Unfortunately, it's just me and my wife, who's a Social Worker by training. Going to be a while since it literally took me 4 months to get the security system in place. Look for a Shown HN.
- deegles 9y agoI think the future will be industrial sized kitchens that cover a large neighborhood, with individual meals delivered by drone to your home or apartment within a few minutes. I could imagine apartments with no or minimal kitchens built to rely on that. Throw in some high quality reusable containers and you have much higher efficiency and sustainability than any current meal delivery service.
- JBReefer 9y agoIsn't that just called "Seamless" or "Delivery"
- _delirium 9y agoBig discussion of Blue Apron's valuation, business model, competitive moat, etc. here yesterday, for those who missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14646679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14646679
- cosmotron 9y agoFor those hitting the WSJ paywall: https://t.co/6jFYZkEC6V https://t.co/6jFYZkEC6V It'll give you a Twitter referral which should bypass it.
- mcescalante 9y agoThanks, this works. I read somewhere that as of 2017, Twitter and Facebook referrers work for WSJ paywall, and that Google was removed sometime in 2016.
- gnicholas 9y agoMy side project Read Across The Aisle also has free unlimited access to WSJ, through a recently-launched partnership with them. I've made an iOS app and Chrome extension (both free). www.ReadAcrossTheAisle.com
- syshum 9y agoI have never seen what value Blue Apron provides, Their meals are overpriced for what you get from what I have seen, I fail to see their value over simply buying the stuff local and and finding a recipe online for free. for their $60 per week to get 6 small portion meals I can buy over 2x that number of meals shopping at my local store, + snacks and other household items
- Johnny555 9y agoI think for most of the people in their target market, if it saves them an hour (or more) of shopping, looking up recipes, etc per week, that more than makes up for the $60. I tried a couple of these services and while I liked the convenience, I couldn't stand the waste -- a couple dozen little plastic jars and baggies each week going into the recycling.
- hhmc 9y agoI suspect that the curation of recipes is appealing. Online recipes are notoriously hit or miss.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jarito 9y agoThe value of BlueApron isn't on a per meal price basis. As you mentioned, buying the ingredients yourself will be significantly less expensive. The value for Blue Apron for us: * I don't have to look through and choose recipes. * I don't have to spend a hour in the store, we pretty much just get staples (eggs, milk, etc) these days. * I don't throw away near as much food. We used to throw away around 50% of food purchases due to changing schedules / spoilage. We actually saved money moving to Blue Apron. * Blue Apron can include specialty ingredients that I won't normally have (e.g. I'm not routinely going to the Korean grocery). I like to cook. Blue Apron makes it easy to do that while exposing us to new and interesting recipes without committing a lot of time to the process. That's worth money.
- 9y ago
- j2bax 9y agoI'm surprised no one has made a meal delivery service catered specifically to Instant Pot owners/enthusiasts. Just imagine, all you need is an Instant Pot and whatever ingredients/recipes they send you and you can cook homemade meals. Go ahead someone, take this idea! :D
- oh_sigh 9y agoTovala is doing something very similar, but based around their own hardware which supports steaming, baking, and broiling
- ghaff 9y agoAt least a combi-oven like that can brown. The problem with traditional slow cookers is that the results you get by just dumping everything in and walking away aren't great. You really want to brown meat first, etc. Slow cookers are still useful but they're not a magical one pot device.
- gkop 9y agoInstant Pot is a combo slow cooker-pressure cooker. It can brown meat, too.
- Johnny555 9y agoI'd always hoped this concept took off, an IPO auction instead of a fixed price offering: https://wrhambrecht.com/openipo/ https://wrhambrecht.com/openipo/ I first learned about it during the Google IPO, but after that, I never saw any companies doing an auction IPO that I was interested in investing in.
- nkrisc 9y agoTheir recipes an instructions are nice. But their problem is after I did a trial run, I have the recipes and I'll just go get the ingredients at my local grocery. I can get recipes online for free or from the good cookbooks I already own. Any money I saved by getting just the amounts of ingredients you need is lost to them being an expensive middleman. Sure you might waste less but it's more money to me.
- greglindahl 9y agoSounds like you aren't in their target market.
- overcast 9y agoI'm not sure what the target market is. The half lazy? Too lazy to pick up a few ingredients, or go out to eat, but not lazy enough to actually cook it.
- greglindahl 9y agoI'm in their target market: I love cooking, and I'd rather spend my time just cooking than planning, shopping, and cooking.
- ghaff 9y agoBased on the comments here and elsewhere, there is a legitimate target market--which might be more charitably described as people who want to cook at home but don't have the time/inclination to do the other tasks required to cook. But I actually agree that the use case for these services is pretty narrow. I know they don't really work for me. If I could get quality grocery delivery where I live I might get meal kits as part of that but as a standalone offering the tradeoffs just aren't right. Every time I think about signing up for a delivery in a couple weeks I look at the recipes and go "Eh, maybe I'll just buy the ingredients for that next time I go shopping."
- gm-conspiracy 9y agoI can't get the same quality of ingredients locally (some are not available) without a tremendous amount of time spent traveling around town. As far as going out to eat, many of the meals rival anything I could pay to have served to me at a restaurant (as well as the time spent traveling). I'm not sure how valuable your time is, but mine is better spent having somebody deliver me the exact ingredients I need to create a delicious meal with minimal effort on my part (aside from cooking, which I enjoy). Maybe you enjoy waiting in lines and traveling? I do not.
- revmoo 9y agoDon't post paywalled content
- criddell 9y agoDo they have to have an IPO? Has the board been promising employees and investors that one is coming?
- sb8244 9y agoI ended up cancelling and vowing to never go back to their service after they didn't credit one of my "come back" coupons correctly. Not that it was the biggest deal, but they deliberately were doing something other than what they advertised and were completely unapologetic about it. That small act lost me as a potential customer to their competitors.
- spodek 9y agoThey create tremendous waste. https://grist.org/food/dear-blue-apron-youre-just-making-it-worse https://grist.org/food/dear-blue-apron-youre-just-making-it-... https://www.buzzfeed.com/ellencushing/these-are-the-trashy-consequences-of-blue-apron-delivery https://www.buzzfeed.com/ellencushing/these-are-the-trashy-c... Promoting reusing or recycling all their packaging obfuscates that there is so much of it.
- jarcoal 9y agoGlad someone posted this. It's the main reason I don't use them, or even get take out from a restaurant.
- imh 9y agoYeah I loved Blue Apron for a few weeks, but cancelled because there was an unreasonable amount of waste. I'm sure I'm not the only customer to do so.
- dyim 9y agoCurious about this - and I mean it in a 100% sincere way - how much waste does Blue Apron generate, and why is it unreasonable? How does it stack up to other common forms of waste generated by households?
- ghaff 9y agoBasically, there are a bunch of plastic bags, an ice pack, some mylar-type bubble wrap, and the cardboard box. Personally, I find the waste complaints overblown. I suspect you'd find a whole lot more waste with restaurant cooking for example and I actually reuse a fair bit of the BA packaging for other purposes. There are other services that have more of a focus on reusable containers but I have to wonder how much boils down to virtue signaling. I'm a bit skeptical that a reusable insulated package that UPS needs to make an extra trip to pickup is really that much less wasteful than what BA does.
- pessimizer 9y ago
- WheelsAtLarge 9y agoI think there's definitely a market for the service but ultimately it needs to fit the everyday household better. They should have a Blue Apron section in all supermarkets. In the market, we mostly have a choice of cooking from scratch or fully cooked. Having TV dinners everyday does not work for most and starting from scratch is always painful. A middle ground section would do wonders. Additionally, the fact that they can get squeezed from suppliers, delivery services and supermarkets makes it a hard for it to stay independent as a company. I bet it will eventually get acquired.
- ghaff 9y agoApparently some chains are starting to do this and I've also seen them at a "organic" urban grocer. I agree with you though. Stores already carry a lot of semi-prepped vegetables, marinated meat and the like. Selling an everything you need kit with a recipe card seems a pretty logical next step.
- schreiaj 9y agoPublix is starting that (or I'm just noticing it) they have recipe cards around their stores with what to get to make it. Couple with their shop for you service and it's basically blue apron.
- gehwartzen 9y agoYup, at probably half the cost.
- gehwartzen 9y agoThe middle ground is probably this: The baseline expectation is you stock some basics; oils, vinegars, spices, etc. Then you select 7 "meals" from Whole Foods website or wherever and they package the main ingredients (meats, veg, herbs,) and send them to you or you pick it up.
- notadoc 9y agoI really don't see how Blue Apron is superior to, let's imagine for a moment, Amazon next-day delivering Whole Foods to your house with a couple of recipes included. What am I missing here? I personally think a much better model is high quality cooked or pre-cooked food delivered to your home. Deliver cooked restaurant quality food rapidly, like the ultimate take-out. Or just pop something in the oven for 20 min, etc. Cooking is time consuming and often annoying, the major pain point (for me and most people I know anyway) is not going to a grocery store once a week or finding recipes which are abundant online, it's the actual act of cooking for 30-60 minutes, for every dinner (or lunch), before 5 or 10 minutes of eating. Maybe I'm the wrong target demographic, who knows.
- ghaff 9y ago>Maybe I'm the wrong target demographic These services are for people who want to cook but feel they benefit from having someone else handle most of the planning and the shopping. In urban locations, there are tons of options to have take-out delivered.
- throwaway91111 9y agoSure. But even then what does blue apron give over blue apron recipes + ingredients delivered by whole foods? Someone else decides what you eat; you just gotta be home and willing to cook. On top of that maybe they'd stop putting kale in everything because it's so damn cheap to source.
- notadoc 9y ago> On top of that maybe they'd stop putting kale in everything because it's so damn cheap to source. Kale is extraordinarily trendy right now, that's probably the other reason it'd be included
- zippergz 9y agoThe planning part is what you're missing. If I order from Whole Foods, I have to decide what to order. If I sign up for Blue Apron, they decide for me. Exactly what I need, no more and no less, shows up on my door weekly. No thinking required. Of course, whether that's a big benefit (or even interesting) to you or not will vary, but I think it's a material difference. (FWIW we tried Blue Apron for a little while and thought it was ok, but the pain points they solve aren't big pain points for us. And we found that the recipes we kind of hit or miss for our tastes. So we canceled a long time ago.)
- emodendroket 9y agoI'm not convinced the market for people who like cooking but can't be troubled to choose their own ingredients is really that big.
- city41 9y agoI'm not sure that's really the market BA and the like are after. It's more "people who are busy, but sick of eating out all the time"
- emodendroket 9y ago...But they also want to cook, but don't mind paying the same price as a prepared meal, and also don't want any choice in what they eat.
- mothers 9y agoif blue apron IPOs it'll be sunk within 5 years. their product is useless[]. people who want to pay a premium on food and still cook it? sounds like the downsides of a restaurant, food delivery and grocery, all in one. a really good food delivery service with options to click a receipe and all have the quantity(ies) of all of the necessary foods added into your cart will kill this whole microshopping silliness. most who seriously want to cook probably want to choose their own ingredients. [] actually, people who want ridiculously complex meals, but for some strange reason want to cook it instead of buying it already made might like this.
- gm-conspiracy 9y agoMy partner and I have tried several of the meal delivery services (Plated, Home Chef, Hello Fresh) for over a year now. We have not bothered to try Blue Apron, despite the aggressive marketing and less-than-enthusiastic recommendations. We live in an area where it is inconvenient to find the variety and quality of meats and vegetables available. It is very obvious to me, that operationally, there are significant differences in the material handling and logistics from each provider. We now mostly rely on Home Chef. It's variety of ingredients and recipes rivals that of Plated, but its packaging is more thoughtful, like Hello Fresh. In my experience, Home Chef has the most accurate order packaging, as well (missing or wrong items). I would put my money on Home Chef.
- Overtonwindow 9y agoThere was a really good article in Medium about this.[0] Basically the Blue Apron model is too easy to duplicate. As more competition enters the space, the higher the costs for recruiting new customers, to the point where it's no longer profitable. 0. https://medium.com/@byrnehobart/the-slow-motion-trainwreck-facing-the-meal-kit-industry-345f14df45ad https://medium.com/@byrnehobart/the-slow-motion-trainwreck-f...
- ghaff 9y agoIt's not just the number of competitors although there are a lot of those. It's also that, as they try to expand, new customers will tend to be less of a match for their target demographic. It will take more advertising, discounts, etc. to reel them in and, once they do, they're likely to use the service less frequently or drop it entirely.
- dang 9y agoYes, discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14646679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14646679. We miss you byrneseyeview!
- oliv__ 9y agoI think it's so sad that people can't cook on their own and need a kit to be able to make anything for themselves. I don't know I feel like one can throw anything in a pan with some olive oil and salt and it's always delicious...
- desheikh 9y agoI've done Chefs Plate and Good Food here in Toronto, and while they are great, for people like me living in the city, the delivery is not the most convenient aspect. My local Supermarket chain, could just put up a rack with meal kits, and destroy most of their market.
- geodel 9y agoIt kind of makes sense. With the condition of economy I don't think there will be growing market for fancy meal-kits. For ~9 dollars a kit they put $54M losses last year. This means price need to rise significantly if they need to make money. At say $15 I wonder how many current customer will still see value in kit. Also in my mails I increasingly see ads/coupons from local grocery stores for quick to prepare meal boxes. May be they are catching up on this trend.
- blairanderson 9y agoEveryone here is like "can't believe anyone would use this because XYZ" but not one reason has made sense. I have been using blue apron for more than 2 years. I'd say It's the highest quality meal at its price point. It makes it so I don't have to think about picking a recipe and selecting ingredients on Instacart or whatever.
- ghaff 9y agoI suspect it's because, as you basically indicate, it's a fairly narrow use case. Want to cook but don't want to think about recipes and picking up the ingredients. I suspect most people want either 1. A prepared meal or 2. Flexibility in selecting and preparing a meal. The services are fine and in a somewhat different situation I'd probably use them more. But I understand why a lot of folks don't really get their purpose.
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoSame boat. As are most of my foodie friends. Some nights you go out, some nights you hire a cook and some nights you Blue Apron. They've certainly captured a market with upsell and aspirational potential.