6 ms·

Blue Apron to Sell Meal Kits in Stores to Buttress Sagging Deliveries

27 points by uptown 9y ago

ndaiger 9y ago
I use Blue Apron sporadically; it can be a good thing on a busier week because it removes both menu planning and shopping while still letting you make home-cooked meals (take-out more than once a week or so gets really old). It can also be a great break when your go-to recipes feel too repetitive. But often one of the three recipes ends up being a dud, and if you forget to skip a week and get a bunch of stuff you don't feel like cooking it's an expensive and annoying obligation to prepare meals you didn't really want or make an ersatz recipe out of the ingredients they sent. There is absolutely zero chance I would go to a store to buy a Blue Apron box. Without the convenience of home delivery, it really loses its appeal.
- 013a 9y ago
  I agree. The biggest annoyance with Blue Apron is planning your deliveries. There might be a week you were planning to skip, for cost reasons or "too busy to even cook" reasons, but you forget until its too late. Or, you might forget to go in and select the recipes you want, so you get a couple good ones and one that you never would have ordered, wasting at least $20. But I think it depends on the cost of these in-store kits. It does remove the huge convenience advantage, but I still like the idea of meal prep kits. The problem with in-store is that this space is so easy to compete in, and now you're asking to go up against every other company that can find space on a store shelf, which is easier than maintaining a delivery network. Blue Apron's food isn't especially high quality and the recipes aren't especially amazing. They're great, but not great enough that I wouldn't switch to a competitor if the price or quality was better.
- fiter 9y ago
  I think it's good that they're exploring the trade-off between the convenience of home delivery versus the convenience of last minute decision to buy. If the meal kits were carried in corner stores or along the route from the subway to home, then they could satisfy someone who didn't plan ahead or whose plans changed.
berdon 9y ago
We just cancelled our Hello Fresh (which we loved) but if we can buy similar kits at the store we'll probably do so. Hello Fresh boxes are great but their subscription and forced delivery model just doesn't work with our schedule. We sporadically shift between cooking and eating out. They're not having a "send me a box now" option forced our hand in cancelling.
- mertd 9y ago
  > "send me a box now" So instant food delivery but you still have to cook it? That would be a very narrow market.
  - berdon 9y ago
    I had meant "Send me a box this week".
- dahdum 9y ago
  In the Bay Area I was using Good Eggs, organic grocery delivery which did meal kits on the side. Was great to have the flexibility of skipping weeks and adding regular items to the order, and they did next day delivery. After using them I was a lot less bullish on the future of these subscription sites. Whole Foods could launch a home grown line, delivered through Prime, and I’d use them day 1.
ukyrgf 9y ago
Publix already sells meal kits near me, including slowcooking kits and baking bags you just open one end of and toss in the oven. Seems like any grocery store with actually fresh meat and produce could easily compete with this, right?
5555624 9y ago
A store can easily undercut Blue Apron by providing homegrown meal kits, as soon as they see that they sell. Some grocery stores already do this (https://www.thefreshmarket.com/specials/little-big-meal https://www.thefreshmarket.com/specials/little-big-meal).
- scrooched_moose 9y ago
  Another: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2017/07/20/hy-vee-wants-tax-breaks-new-64-million-facility-ankeny/496951001/ https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2017/... Some individual stores have been doing it independently of corporate since at least 2016: https://www.facebook.com/events/968415496617260/ https://www.facebook.com/events/968415496617260/
- dnissley 9y ago
  Walmart's getting into that game as well: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/5/17081466/walmart-meal-kit-in-store-blue-apron-amazon https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/5/17081466/walmart-meal-kit-...
- deathweasel 9y ago
  Also HEB in Texas. Great product. https://www.heb.com/meal-simple-mch?cid=H-P-H-GOO-T_Meal-Simple_X_Exact--heb%20meal%20kit https://www.heb.com/meal-simple-mch?cid=H-P-H-GOO-T_Meal-Sim...
- mdesq 9y ago
  Publix does this at a few stores as well[1]. In my particular local Publix which doesn't have the full kits, they still have the recipes, ingredients, and even someone handing out prepared samples of one or two final products all in one place in the store. The ingredients are just normally packaged, not perfectly portioned out. 1. http://www.publix.com/recipes-planning/aprons-meal-kits http://www.publix.com/recipes-planning/aprons-meal-kits
sylens 9y ago
I tried Blue Apron but didn't stick with it because the recipes were actually pretty time consuming for the amount of food you prepared, and also because of the unreliable timing of the deliveries. If you live in the city, you need to be home for the deliveries to be made, and waiting for a FedEx truck to show up whenever is annoying. FreshDirect was much better since you can schedule a two-hour window for delivery.
- freshyill 9y ago
  Blue Apron is sooo time consuming. Everything arrives just rolling around in the box. You need to sort it, then find a place to put it in your own cabinets and refrigerator. Their time estimates for cooking are often off by half, and the recipes are hard to follow. I really don't like Blue Apron. Some of the others I like have the food for each meal all come in a single bag, so I don't have to keep track of it in my fridge. My wife usually handles these and she switches them up frequently, so I can't remember all of them, but my favorite is Terra's Kitchen, because it has the least waste, and short, accurate prep times. All the items are numbered to match the meal they're for.
pfarnsworth 9y ago
Stuff like this is a death spiral. It’s clearly a case of audience and revenues being bought by VC money, and is unsustainable without cash infusions. Yet early investors were able to sucker mutual funds and retail investors to buy their shitty stock. Another case of VCs winning and the general public losing. At some point we have to hold the mutual funds responsible for perpetuating this BS because they are the enablers for VCs to profit no matter how terrible the stock is. I wonder what this means about ride sharing. I actually believe it’s a game changer and it’s sustainable to profitability but stories like this make me wonder.
- zwieback 9y ago
  Wow, you sound bitter. It's true that huge amounts of money are wasted and perhaps investors being gypped but the question is whether crappy business models would be shaken out as quickly with conventional investment/banking strategies.
atomical 9y ago
I've ordered pre-made meals before. Having ingredients delivered doesn't make sense to me though. Enough energy to cook but not enough energy to go to the store? I'm sure there are a million excuses, but just buy some produce at the store people.
- conductr 9y ago
  Totally agree. Cooking/cleaning is the hard part, not shopping. Especially with grocery delivery available within <2 hours. Also, and I'm not overly "green" but, the amount of waste generated with a weekly shipment just felt excessive.
  - npongratz 9y ago
    Some people really, really, really hate shopping.
    - supreme_sublime 9y ago
      For me I'd say it more that I hate doing all 3 things. Shopping, cooking, and cleaning. Shopping is probably the worst because it involves the most decisions. So if I can cut that out of what I need to do, it makes cooking and cleaning that much easier. I mostly use instacart, but my parents have gotten me food delivery services as gifts and it is pretty nice. The thing I find frustrating about it however are the portions. I'm probably outside of the norm, but I don't mind eating the same thing all the time. I would love to cook a bunch all at once and eat it all week. With the portions offered, I can usually eat 2 of the meals as a single meal.
- jowiar 9y ago
  It’s not about “just buy some produce”. It’s “decide what I want to eat, go to the store, find the ingredients that turn into said meals, wait in a 15 minute checkout line, haul things home”. For me, Blue Apron lowers the time commitment of cooking at home below that of “go out for a quick dinner”. At the end of a day at a desk, I enjoy doing completely brainless work with my hands for a half hour or so, but the cognitive load of figuring out what to cook is more than I care to do on a regular basis. Also, depending on where you are, urban grocery shopping is often a terrible experience.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
Not a bad idea in spirit, but the store's mark-up might be too much to make it worthwhile. I like the idea of Blue Apron in spirit, but the sheer amount of waste it produces in the delivery boxes turned me off. One thing it does well is providing only as much of said ingredient as you need. I recently tried to get into Chinese cooking, and before I made my first two or three dishes I had to run out and buy Hoisin sauce, chili garlic sauce, oyster sauce, Chinese rice wine, and minced ginger. That's quite a bit of an initial investment before I even decide whether I like the food or not. So if I can pay a little extra upfront just to get whatever amount of those sauces I need while I'm still in the trial phase, that would be nice. As someone else said, local grocery stores could probably do very well just by providing their own meal kits. Wegmans does this on occasion, although their stuff is usually assembled to the point where you simply bake it.
- skynetv2 9y ago
  but ... the cost of all those ingredients will still be significantly less than what you pay any meal delivery service, is it not? for a $1, you can get a bottle of Hoisin sauce.
  - dmschulman 9y ago
    All of those ingredients, with the exception of the garlic, will stay good for years as well. I find it infinitely more resourceful to have a well-stocked kitchen with ingredients that last a good while than to go out and buy a single serving of anything. I would never consider buying a specific spice or sauce "an investment" in a single type of dish given both the small cost and the viability of those items in other types of cooking. Hoisin is great when making hamburgers or chilis, for example.
  - AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
    I wish I could find Hoisin for a dollar. More like $3-4. And while that doesn't sound like much, again, when we're talking about buying a completely new set of sauces to make one dish, it's $3-4 multiplied by the 5 new sauces and condiments to be closer to $15-$20. And yes, if I use those ingredients regularly, then they quickly pay for themselves, as the Hoisin sauce lasts like 20 meals and the price per serving becomes fifteen cents a meal. But at the outset, if I decide I want to try Orange Chicken and it costs $20 + the cost of meat just to get the ingredient set, it's alot cheaper just to pay $11 and order some from a Chinese restaurant, no? If I like it, great, I can make it again. But if not, I've spent more money than I needed to and am left with five bottles of sauces I'll never use again. Case in point: I've got a recipe next week that calls for "dark soy sauce". I have no clue WTF that is or if it is sufficiently different in taste or texture that I can't just substitute my regular soy sauce in for the recipe.
harlanji 9y ago
Excellent. I can’t read it because of the pay wall, but the key value it brought, being one to always live blocks from a coop, was the sack of seasoning and the like in the right amount. Previous attempts at learning to cook had always lead to 80%+ waste in bottles of perishable sauces, seasonings, et. al. BA/Plated overall are a Godsend, this headline sounds like a good step given the holiday pileups/reschedules and sometimes missed/misplaced deliveries.
atonse 9y ago
Ever since I got my FIRST Blue Apron box (two years ago maybe?), I felt they should've sold boxes in stores. I simply don't understand how they had such a blind spot for something so obvious. We used Blue Apron on and off for 2 months and just got tired of it. We loved the food but sometimes we just wanted to have our native cuisine. But some nights, you want to try something new impulsively, which is where having them available in grocery stores would've been great. Blue Apron also had seemingly slimy tactics (even if they weren't, they felt that way). Like for example, you had to cancel a week in advance for a delivery, but you could opt in for a delivery 2-3 days before the new week started. Also you couldn't just say "stop until I say start," but rather you had to login every 2 weeks to keep clicking "Skip delivery." All these things leave a bad taste in your mouth (pun fully, and proudly intended)
- darpa_escapee 9y ago
  > Blue Apron also had seemingly slimy tactics I've had similar experiences with Blue Apron and a couple of other similar businesses. They seem to rely on people forgetting and not caring enough to do chargebacks. It's turned me away from them for good.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Pretty much all of these meal services seem to prefer the default delivery option. I understand why the companies like to do this but it's a lousy pattern for anyone for whom these services are a very occasional thing.
- trendia 9y ago
  I had the same problem. Companies should be forced to make cancellation as easy as registration. When blue apron first started, you couldn't even cancel it through the web interface -- You had to send an email to request cancellation. edit: Blue Apron still uses these slimy tactics. I created a screenshot [0] of the Blue Apron cancellation page [1] (in case they change it.) Look at how difficult they make cancellation! The question is literally, "How do I cancel my account?" and the answer should be a simple button to cancel. Instead, the first paragraph tells you not to cancel, just delay, and then the third and fourth paragraphs are just additional needless text. Then, when you email them to cancel, they don't actually cancel your account -- they send you a link to the cancellation page. Why do they require you to email them to get the link? Why don't they just put it on the FAQ page? The answer is that they're using slimy tactics to increase friction and demotivate you from cancelling. [0] https://imgur.com/a/sJ16B https://imgur.com/a/sJ16B [1] https://support.blueapron.com/hc/en-us/articles/203146687-How-do-I-cancel-my-account- https://support.blueapron.com/hc/en-us/articles/203146687-Ho...
xbryanx 9y ago
The second Amazon starts offering these in Whole Foods I'm all over it. And I bet a bunch of other people will to. We do meal kits (Local Crate) and they're great, but always need a little augmenting (extra veg. mostly). So I'm already at the store a few times a week. The meal kits just simplify the process enormously. Marry the two and you've got a killer product.
- ghaff 9y ago
  It seems like something Whole Foods is missing out on. There's a local Whole Foods-like store I've swung by in town that carries their own kits.
ggg9990 9y ago
They can do whatever they want, it won’t matter in a few years when Amazon flattens them.
DoreenMichele 9y ago
I'm wondering if this (these meal in a box services) is just one of those wrongheaded approaches. There's some saying about "Cheap, good or fast: pick two." And it seems like services like this are shooting for all three or something. Yes, if you could do all three, sure, people would like to get that. But I don't see how there is profit in it. It seems like the target market is people who don't have time and energy to cook and don't have money to spare either. It's like they are secretly trying to solve the problem of the harried, overworked, underpaid 99 percent. And that's not really a business model. It's more like something that needs to be addressed by charities or government policy.
heavymark 9y ago
I had Blue Apron and at first loved it, but ultimately, their calories where far too high and didn't have any offerings for people on a diet or other health conscious concerns such as low sodium and such. Their food was tasty but by missing out over health conscious options, they missed a growing niche, and once Amazon or someone comes in with more options they will be done.
Aloha 9y ago
Its a service I might be interested in signing up for - but I refuse to make an account, so they can email me and nag me, to find out how much it might cost.

27 points by uptown 9y ago

I use Blue Apron sporadically; it can be a good thing on a busier week because it removes both menu planning and shopping while still letting you make home-cooked meals (take-out more than once a week or so gets really old). It can also be a great break when your go-to recipes feel too repetitive. But often one of the three recipes ends up being a dud, and if you forget to skip a week and get a bunch of stuff you don't feel like cooking it's an expensive and annoying obligation to prepare meals you didn't really want or make an ersatz recipe out of the ingredients they sent. There is absolutely zero chance I would go to a store to buy a Blue Apron box. Without the convenience of home delivery, it really loses its appeal.

013a 9y ago
I agree. The biggest annoyance with Blue Apron is planning your deliveries. There might be a week you were planning to skip, for cost reasons or "too busy to even cook" reasons, but you forget until its too late. Or, you might forget to go in and select the recipes you want, so you get a couple good ones and one that you never would have ordered, wasting at least $20. But I think it depends on the cost of these in-store kits. It does remove the huge convenience advantage, but I still like the idea of meal prep kits. The problem with in-store is that this space is so easy to compete in, and now you're asking to go up against every other company that can find space on a store shelf, which is easier than maintaining a delivery network. Blue Apron's food isn't especially high quality and the recipes aren't especially amazing. They're great, but not great enough that I wouldn't switch to a competitor if the price or quality was better.
fiter 9y ago
I think it's good that they're exploring the trade-off between the convenience of home delivery versus the convenience of last minute decision to buy. If the meal kits were carried in corner stores or along the route from the subway to home, then they could satisfy someone who didn't plan ahead or whose plans changed.

berdon 9y ago

We just cancelled our Hello Fresh (which we loved) but if we can buy similar kits at the store we'll probably do so. Hello Fresh boxes are great but their subscription and forced delivery model just doesn't work with our schedule. We sporadically shift between cooking and eating out. They're not having a "send me a box now" option forced our hand in cancelling.

mertd 9y ago
> "send me a box now" So instant food delivery but you still have to cook it? That would be a very narrow market.
- berdon 9y ago
  I had meant "Send me a box this week".
dahdum 9y ago
In the Bay Area I was using Good Eggs, organic grocery delivery which did meal kits on the side. Was great to have the flexibility of skipping weeks and adding regular items to the order, and they did next day delivery. After using them I was a lot less bullish on the future of these subscription sites. Whole Foods could launch a home grown line, delivered through Prime, and I’d use them day 1.

ukyrgf 9y ago

Publix already sells meal kits near me, including slowcooking kits and baking bags you just open one end of and toss in the oven. Seems like any grocery store with actually fresh meat and produce could easily compete with this, right?

5555624 9y ago

A store can easily undercut Blue Apron by providing homegrown meal kits, as soon as they see that they sell. Some grocery stores already do this (https://www.thefreshmarket.com/specials/little-big-meal https://www.thefreshmarket.com/specials/little-big-meal).

scrooched_moose 9y ago
Another: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2017/07/20/hy-vee-wants-tax-breaks-new-64-million-facility-ankeny/496951001/ https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2017/... Some individual stores have been doing it independently of corporate since at least 2016: https://www.facebook.com/events/968415496617260/ https://www.facebook.com/events/968415496617260/
dnissley 9y ago
Walmart's getting into that game as well: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/5/17081466/walmart-meal-kit-in-store-blue-apron-amazon https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/5/17081466/walmart-meal-kit-...
deathweasel 9y ago
Also HEB in Texas. Great product. https://www.heb.com/meal-simple-mch?cid=H-P-H-GOO-T_Meal-Simple_X_Exact--heb%20meal%20kit https://www.heb.com/meal-simple-mch?cid=H-P-H-GOO-T_Meal-Sim...
mdesq 9y ago
Publix does this at a few stores as well[1]. In my particular local Publix which doesn't have the full kits, they still have the recipes, ingredients, and even someone handing out prepared samples of one or two final products all in one place in the store. The ingredients are just normally packaged, not perfectly portioned out. 1. http://www.publix.com/recipes-planning/aprons-meal-kits http://www.publix.com/recipes-planning/aprons-meal-kits

sylens 9y ago

I tried Blue Apron but didn't stick with it because the recipes were actually pretty time consuming for the amount of food you prepared, and also because of the unreliable timing of the deliveries. If you live in the city, you need to be home for the deliveries to be made, and waiting for a FedEx truck to show up whenever is annoying. FreshDirect was much better since you can schedule a two-hour window for delivery.

freshyill 9y ago
Blue Apron is sooo time consuming. Everything arrives just rolling around in the box. You need to sort it, then find a place to put it in your own cabinets and refrigerator. Their time estimates for cooking are often off by half, and the recipes are hard to follow. I really don't like Blue Apron. Some of the others I like have the food for each meal all come in a single bag, so I don't have to keep track of it in my fridge. My wife usually handles these and she switches them up frequently, so I can't remember all of them, but my favorite is Terra's Kitchen, because it has the least waste, and short, accurate prep times. All the items are numbered to match the meal they're for.

pfarnsworth 9y ago

Stuff like this is a death spiral. It’s clearly a case of audience and revenues being bought by VC money, and is unsustainable without cash infusions. Yet early investors were able to sucker mutual funds and retail investors to buy their shitty stock. Another case of VCs winning and the general public losing. At some point we have to hold the mutual funds responsible for perpetuating this BS because they are the enablers for VCs to profit no matter how terrible the stock is. I wonder what this means about ride sharing. I actually believe it’s a game changer and it’s sustainable to profitability but stories like this make me wonder.

zwieback 9y ago
Wow, you sound bitter. It's true that huge amounts of money are wasted and perhaps investors being gypped but the question is whether crappy business models would be shaken out as quickly with conventional investment/banking strategies.

atomical 9y ago

I've ordered pre-made meals before. Having ingredients delivered doesn't make sense to me though. Enough energy to cook but not enough energy to go to the store? I'm sure there are a million excuses, but just buy some produce at the store people.

conductr 9y ago
Totally agree. Cooking/cleaning is the hard part, not shopping. Especially with grocery delivery available within <2 hours. Also, and I'm not overly "green" but, the amount of waste generated with a weekly shipment just felt excessive.
- npongratz 9y ago
  Some people really, really, really hate shopping.
  - supreme_sublime 9y ago
    For me I'd say it more that I hate doing all 3 things. Shopping, cooking, and cleaning. Shopping is probably the worst because it involves the most decisions. So if I can cut that out of what I need to do, it makes cooking and cleaning that much easier. I mostly use instacart, but my parents have gotten me food delivery services as gifts and it is pretty nice. The thing I find frustrating about it however are the portions. I'm probably outside of the norm, but I don't mind eating the same thing all the time. I would love to cook a bunch all at once and eat it all week. With the portions offered, I can usually eat 2 of the meals as a single meal.
jowiar 9y ago
It’s not about “just buy some produce”. It’s “decide what I want to eat, go to the store, find the ingredients that turn into said meals, wait in a 15 minute checkout line, haul things home”. For me, Blue Apron lowers the time commitment of cooking at home below that of “go out for a quick dinner”. At the end of a day at a desk, I enjoy doing completely brainless work with my hands for a half hour or so, but the cognitive load of figuring out what to cook is more than I care to do on a regular basis. Also, depending on where you are, urban grocery shopping is often a terrible experience.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

AdmiralAsshat 9y ago

Not a bad idea in spirit, but the store's mark-up might be too much to make it worthwhile. I like the idea of Blue Apron in spirit, but the sheer amount of waste it produces in the delivery boxes turned me off. One thing it does well is providing only as much of said ingredient as you need. I recently tried to get into Chinese cooking, and before I made my first two or three dishes I had to run out and buy Hoisin sauce, chili garlic sauce, oyster sauce, Chinese rice wine, and minced ginger. That's quite a bit of an initial investment before I even decide whether I like the food or not. So if I can pay a little extra upfront just to get whatever amount of those sauces I need while I'm still in the trial phase, that would be nice. As someone else said, local grocery stores could probably do very well just by providing their own meal kits. Wegmans does this on occasion, although their stuff is usually assembled to the point where you simply bake it.

skynetv2 9y ago
but ... the cost of all those ingredients will still be significantly less than what you pay any meal delivery service, is it not? for a $1, you can get a bottle of Hoisin sauce.
- dmschulman 9y ago
  All of those ingredients, with the exception of the garlic, will stay good for years as well. I find it infinitely more resourceful to have a well-stocked kitchen with ingredients that last a good while than to go out and buy a single serving of anything. I would never consider buying a specific spice or sauce "an investment" in a single type of dish given both the small cost and the viability of those items in other types of cooking. Hoisin is great when making hamburgers or chilis, for example.
- AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
  I wish I could find Hoisin for a dollar. More like $3-4. And while that doesn't sound like much, again, when we're talking about buying a completely new set of sauces to make one dish, it's $3-4 multiplied by the 5 new sauces and condiments to be closer to $15-$20. And yes, if I use those ingredients regularly, then they quickly pay for themselves, as the Hoisin sauce lasts like 20 meals and the price per serving becomes fifteen cents a meal. But at the outset, if I decide I want to try Orange Chicken and it costs $20 + the cost of meat just to get the ingredient set, it's alot cheaper just to pay $11 and order some from a Chinese restaurant, no? If I like it, great, I can make it again. But if not, I've spent more money than I needed to and am left with five bottles of sauces I'll never use again. Case in point: I've got a recipe next week that calls for "dark soy sauce". I have no clue WTF that is or if it is sufficiently different in taste or texture that I can't just substitute my regular soy sauce in for the recipe.

harlanji 9y ago

Excellent. I can’t read it because of the pay wall, but the key value it brought, being one to always live blocks from a coop, was the sack of seasoning and the like in the right amount. Previous attempts at learning to cook had always lead to 80%+ waste in bottles of perishable sauces, seasonings, et. al. BA/Plated overall are a Godsend, this headline sounds like a good step given the holiday pileups/reschedules and sometimes missed/misplaced deliveries.

atonse 9y ago

Ever since I got my FIRST Blue Apron box (two years ago maybe?), I felt they should've sold boxes in stores. I simply don't understand how they had such a blind spot for something so obvious. We used Blue Apron on and off for 2 months and just got tired of it. We loved the food but sometimes we just wanted to have our native cuisine. But some nights, you want to try something new impulsively, which is where having them available in grocery stores would've been great. Blue Apron also had seemingly slimy tactics (even if they weren't, they felt that way). Like for example, you had to cancel a week in advance for a delivery, but you could opt in for a delivery 2-3 days before the new week started. Also you couldn't just say "stop until I say start," but rather you had to login every 2 weeks to keep clicking "Skip delivery." All these things leave a bad taste in your mouth (pun fully, and proudly intended)

darpa_escapee 9y ago
> Blue Apron also had seemingly slimy tactics I've had similar experiences with Blue Apron and a couple of other similar businesses. They seem to rely on people forgetting and not caring enough to do chargebacks. It's turned me away from them for good.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Pretty much all of these meal services seem to prefer the default delivery option. I understand why the companies like to do this but it's a lousy pattern for anyone for whom these services are a very occasional thing.
trendia 9y ago
I had the same problem. Companies should be forced to make cancellation as easy as registration. When blue apron first started, you couldn't even cancel it through the web interface -- You had to send an email to request cancellation. edit: Blue Apron still uses these slimy tactics. I created a screenshot [0] of the Blue Apron cancellation page [1] (in case they change it.) Look at how difficult they make cancellation! The question is literally, "How do I cancel my account?" and the answer should be a simple button to cancel. Instead, the first paragraph tells you not to cancel, just delay, and then the third and fourth paragraphs are just additional needless text. Then, when you email them to cancel, they don't actually cancel your account -- they send you a link to the cancellation page. Why do they require you to email them to get the link? Why don't they just put it on the FAQ page? The answer is that they're using slimy tactics to increase friction and demotivate you from cancelling. [0] https://imgur.com/a/sJ16B https://imgur.com/a/sJ16B [1] https://support.blueapron.com/hc/en-us/articles/203146687-How-do-I-cancel-my-account- https://support.blueapron.com/hc/en-us/articles/203146687-Ho...

xbryanx 9y ago

The second Amazon starts offering these in Whole Foods I'm all over it. And I bet a bunch of other people will to. We do meal kits (Local Crate) and they're great, but always need a little augmenting (extra veg. mostly). So I'm already at the store a few times a week. The meal kits just simplify the process enormously. Marry the two and you've got a killer product.

ghaff 9y ago
It seems like something Whole Foods is missing out on. There's a local Whole Foods-like store I've swung by in town that carries their own kits.

ggg9990 9y ago

They can do whatever they want, it won’t matter in a few years when Amazon flattens them.

DoreenMichele 9y ago

I'm wondering if this (these meal in a box services) is just one of those wrongheaded approaches. There's some saying about "Cheap, good or fast: pick two." And it seems like services like this are shooting for all three or something. Yes, if you could do all three, sure, people would like to get that. But I don't see how there is profit in it. It seems like the target market is people who don't have time and energy to cook and don't have money to spare either. It's like they are secretly trying to solve the problem of the harried, overworked, underpaid 99 percent. And that's not really a business model. It's more like something that needs to be addressed by charities or government policy.

heavymark 9y ago

I had Blue Apron and at first loved it, but ultimately, their calories where far too high and didn't have any offerings for people on a diet or other health conscious concerns such as low sodium and such. Their food was tasty but by missing out over health conscious options, they missed a growing niche, and once Amazon or someone comes in with more options they will be done.

Aloha 9y ago

Its a service I might be interested in signing up for - but I refuse to make an account, so they can email me and nag me, to find out how much it might cost.