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Blue Apron lays off more workers

nradov 8y ago
I considered using Blue Apron a while back but their portions are just too small. Maybe that's not a problem for most of their customers but I exercise a lot and need at least 3100kcal (with a high fraction of protein) most days to avoid losing weight. I might consider it again if they offered a larger option.
neonate 8y ago
http://outline.com/https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-apron-lays-off-more-workers-1542148447 http://outline.com/https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-apron-l...
untog 8y ago
Can't help but feel like Blue Apron and its competitors are the next generation of Groupon and its competitors. Burnt through VC funding competing with each other only to find out the actual market for their product isn't that great. But thanks for all the free trials, VC investors! I've had a few above average dinners out of it.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  Cough Moviepass cough
  - baddox 8y ago
    It’s slightly different, since Moviepass has a huge market (selling dollars for quarters), just not a very profitable one.
  - jonwachob91 8y ago
    Moviepass didn't mess up on the size and demand of their market. They messed up in assessing the moat they thought they had. When the movie theaters saw how successful they were, it was too easy for them to raise the prices on moviepass and introduce their own product offering.
- kalleboo 8y ago
  Where I'm from all the big grocery store chains have a variant of a Blue Apron style service. Seems like a feature not a product.
  - jrochkind1 8y ago
    I wonder if that would have a higher chance of actually being profitable here in the U.S., charging about the same but cutting out the expensive to-your-door delivery. Although there's probably more food wastage. The article mentioned Blue Apron (and competitors) are trying to increase sales at grocery stores, maybe some of them can survive like that if that works.
    - ahi 8y ago
      I have seen it in grocery stores here in the midwest.
    - magic_beans 8y ago
      I did always wonder why Blue Apron didn't just partner with grocery stores. It makes so much more sense, and my little grocery store in New Amazon HQ, Queens does not have any type of meal kits.
    - flukus 8y ago
      > I wonder if that would have a higher chance of actually being profitable here in the U.S., charging about the same but cutting out the expensive to-your-door delivery. From what I've seen it doesn't help, the in store ones cost almost as a restaurant anyway, But at least a restaurant solves the time consuming part (cooking, cleaning), if your in the store then getting everything packaged together only saves a few minutes. This is in Australia with a higher minimum wage, I imagine it would make an even smaller difference in the US.
      - ghaff 8y ago
        I don’t really have good restaurant options around where I live though. I’d prefer to cook at home a lot of the time. But I sometimes prefer it to be a minimum of planning and prep. But this is the conundrum. If I can pick up a few ingredients, even if there’s some waste, and throw together a meal quickly the meal kits may not add much.
- zbrox 8y ago
  I know about them only from the numerous podcast commercials. Here in the Nordics all supermarket chains have had that service for a while now and it's quite convenient. I can see the value of it but all these supermarkets have their supply chain built and they started a similar service in no time. So I can't see how Blue Apron can compete in Europe for example.
- DoubleGlazing 8y ago
  I think a bigger problem which these services don't get is that if you live in a reasonably sized city then you will have a huge range of takeaway/delivery food options. The amount of people who want to cook and prepare a nice meal is probably a lot less than the amount of people who just want to buy, eat and enjoy a nice meal. I live in Dublin, not exactly the biggest of cities, but I can't think of a single type of food that I can't order through one of the various home delivery apps available to me. No need to cook food or be constrained by a predetermined set of menus. It's hard to make the case for a meal in a box service when you can order just about any food imaginable from your phone and it will be delivered within 30 minutes.
  - anongraddebt 8y ago
    It's bordering on out-of-control in some U.S. cities. About six months ago, I briefly stopped while in the middle of cleaning our apartment and realized the majority of our 'trash' was food delivery detritus. We've been spending $500-$700 a month on food delivery this year, and I only see that increasing in the future. I can regularly obtain a $1 (sometimes less) delivery fee by selecting among Uber Eats/GrubHub/DoorDash/etc. The pricing blood-bath between restaurants (and delivery companies) combined with convenience-induced laziness has me doing nutty things like order a $6 froyo from a place ~100 meters away. Speaking of Blue Apron, I recently threw out half of an unopened meal kit of theirs that convenience-induced laziness had caused to rot away in the fridge. The delivery trend is strong. Not sure it's a net positive society-wide habit.
    - zanny 8y ago
      Cooking is hard, requires a lot of hardware to do, and is an acquired skill that takes a lot of blunt learning of a lot of minute details about how certain ingredients interact. In the same way you don't ask everyone to learn to repair car engines or diagnose medical issues modern society puts a lot of pressure on specialization of hard work like cooking. That being said the true optimization would be that most people be content to eat in cafeteria style settings where there are limited options and the chefs are using whatever is freshest and most affordable and availability is fixed (even if you just grab and go with the food). There is a trade off between menu diversity, the prices you pay for it, and how good it can actually be where 16+ hour open restaurants with several page menus (including fast food) are making concessions on freshness / shortcuts in preparation to provide their diversity and availability. I think a lot of this relates to how we are in a transnational period for density. In the coming decades I am almost certain we will trend globally towards packing people into apartment / condo style living in city cores because the trends of sprawl and mcmansion single families that are going to be inherited by unmarried or childless descendants without the incomes to support them falls apart. Right now trying to build up a "local" kitchen you can go to three times a day for regular, good, healthy and diverse meals isn't feasible because the density isn't there to get them to walkable convenience, but I hope rising density makes them a possibility. At those kinds of scales it becomes a technical probability we might just get short range delivery drones where the kitchens advertise via app or notification whats on the menu and you just select what you want and a lil bot brings it to you a la room service but optimized in the aforementioned ways to make it more sustainable.
- mathattack 8y ago
  They’ve also kept several of my favorite podcasts afloat, though I haven’t heard them advertise as much since the IPO. Maybe their customer acquisition costs got ahead of them.
  - cptskippy 8y ago
    They changed their target demographics, now they sponsor mechanical engineering channels on YouTube.
- SonicSoul 8y ago
  I believe they’re solving a real problem. For people that want a healthy meal but don’t want to spend $ on farm to table type restaurant. Although I do see quite a few more healthy options sprouting up in NYC I can’t speak for more suburban areas. Point being is a lot people care about ingredients, food prep (i.e. those brussel sprouts are not that healthy if cooked in re-used vegetable oil). The tricky part with this business model is making the food taste good is an art form and not easy to boil down to a simple 9 step formula. Also difficult is keeping all the ingredients fresh and portioned / ready to cook while keeping the price lower than it would be to go out and eat.
  - WhompingWindows 8y ago
    You don't save that much, especially after the cheap trial. If you know what you're doing, a run to the grocery store will actually be much cheaper. I think it's more for people who want a home-cooked meal but don't want to go shopping or find a recipe.
    - acdha 8y ago
      We were a great example: some family members gave us a Green Chef subscription while we were both home on parental leave and it was a great way to eat better while having very little free time / energy.
    - SonicSoul 8y ago
      I don't believe savings is the primary goal. to me main benefits are: > control of food prep > control of ingredients > having ultra fresh cooked meal > less packaging waste ?
  - acdha 8y ago
    I don't think the question is whether they're solving a problem but how profitable the market is: VC bubble thinking tends to chase high-margin businesses but this seems like something where anyone in it long-term will need to be comfortable with far more modest margins similar to what the restaurant industry has, especially since they can't make up a low-profit entree by selling high-profit alcohol and soda.
- Symmetry 8y ago
  Unlike Groupon they're providing value on net. The problem is that they didn't have any sort of moat to protect them from competition and when that competition arrived they weren't prepared for their market share to go down.
- screye 8y ago
  Just curious. How much does one meal (per person) come out to be ? If I am correct, they are targeting a relatively well off crowd and not the general populace. Are their margins large enough to get by on just rich-ish customers ?
  - anonu 8y ago
    Blue apron was about $10 per person... $60 for 3 2-person meals. I think that's a reasonable price to pay for blue apron convenience. Yes, you might be able to source the ingredients for less. But you lose out on time there, as well as right sizing of ingredients.
- bpp 8y ago
  Wow, was thinking of this exact comment. 100% correct. (Somehow the online mattress craze seems immune to the same downfall.)
  - joe5150 8y ago
    the online mattress store business model can't be any stranger than the brick-and-mortar mattress store business model. I'd love to read more about that.
- PretzelFisch 8y ago
  I don't see the value of Blue Apron over take out. The do the shopping but none of the prepwork so they don't solve the lack of time to prep and cook issue. I would rather sing up for a service that planned a monthly menu and delivered the meal ready to eat or reheat.
sjroot 8y ago
I am actively job interviewing and I have talked to a lot of startups. One of things I always ask my interviewer is whether or not the company is profitable. If you get to be that large of a company (100 workers => 4% of staff => ~2500 employees) and you are not making a profit, there is something wrong. Bringing all of those people onboard seems like a waste of investor money. That said, I am a fan of Blue Apron and I do hope that their figure out a way to operate in a profitable manner soon. Edit: as replies point out, profitability isn’t a great indicator for the success of a company. While it is fair game to ask, there are other better indicators (churn and burn, existing customer base, etc) that give a better picture. My point was that I think a company at this size should be profitable or working aggressively to make that possible. I think Blue Apron is laying these people off to accomplish that.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
  Don't think that's necessarily a really good metric in this day and age, as there are "good" kinds of unprofitability and "bad" kinds of unprofitability. Amazon was unprofitable for most of its existence until relatively recently. Most successful startups are unprofitable, and these days with the "winner take all" mentality of most VCs a company would be penalized for being profitable too early. I think a much better metric, especially for early stage companies, is their growth rate, their customer acquisition cost, and very importantly, their customer churn rate. Blue Apron's churn rate coupled with their high CAC has always been a giant flashing red flag.
  - ashelmire 8y ago
    > Most successful startups are unprofitable What a bizarre world we live in where this is said seriously and everyone would agree with it. There’s a vc bubble and it’s going to pop. And we will all suffer for it.
    - hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
      Why do you think it's bizarre? It's also true. The whole reason Silicon Valley is the center of the entrepreneurial and tech universe is because it's the place that best merges technical talent with access to capital. If startups could be profitable from the get go, VCs wouldn't need to exist in the first place.
tyingq 8y ago
IPO in June 2017 at ~$10 per share. Closed today at $1.22 ...ouch.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I think this means Mission Accomplished for the investors. Suck out all the value from the company and then dump it on retail investors by going public.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    People keep not understanding or appreciating this point. This is precisely what Uber is in the middle of doing right now too, and to some extent probably what Spotify did, and the future value of those two is by no means clear or stable. As long as they can can prop up the valuation for a short time, they can capitalize shortly after an IPO and externalize the losses on unwitting millions of people who came to own some unicorn stock because they were auto-enrolled in the 2055 retirement mix of some bottom scraping asset manager that charges high fees on a portfolio with loose definitions of what it can invest in.
    - dcow 8y ago
      Where I grew up “pump and dump” was a dirty term.
  - TuringNYC 8y ago
    There have been winners and losers on the tech IPOs of the past 5yrs. I'm curious how you differentiate the losers from the winners since some of the tech IPOs have done quite well. (although, to be fair, Blue Apron is an obvious case of the next groupon.)
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      I think the general trend is to IPO much later at a very high valuation so the company needs to be an enormous success for retail investors to just break even. There is just not much upside left. It's also bad for regular employees. They have to stay on for very long before can make some money.
empath75 8y ago
I like their recipes but it’s just a grotesquely wasteful way to ship food around. Ultimately this business belongs in grocery stores. I’d happily drive down to Wegmans once a week to pick up 3-4 locally packaged blue apron style meals.
- ghaff 8y ago
  In the scheme of things, most likely including going to restaurants, I have trouble working up too much outrage about the packaging and shipping. That said, I agree with your broader point. I'm not sure why more stores (some do) don't have more kits. Planning for the next week in a way that includes picking 3 meals that will involve at least a modest amount of effort doesn't work for me--and I like to cook generally. I get that they appeal to people who like to cook but want some structure (and home delivery) around it. But it seems a pretty niche market. I got Blue Apron once. It was "OK." And, while I've thought about it, I've never ordered from any of these services again.
  - nemothekid 8y ago
    I used Blue Apron for a couple month. I’m hardly a “save the earth” type - but one of the reasons I’ve been skipping the service is the huge amount of cardboard and plastic ships with each box. I must have 8 full extra heads of garlic lying around. The “ice packs” are a pain in the neck to get rid of and it doesn’t feel right to dump that stuff in the trash. However I will admit I got tired of the selection. Usually there will only be one meal that I’m actually looking forward to eating and the other 2 are unappetizing enough for me to just eat out.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      I reuse a lot of the plastic bags. But I imagine I'd run out of use for ice packs after a while. Given the amount of cardboard I have to take to recycling from Amazon and elsewhere, I'm not sure a bit more makes much of a difference. But the menus mostly don't excite me that much. And if I'm going to spend that much effort I have tons of cookbooks and online recipes. Your experience sounds like the one week I tried it. There was a pretty good recipe. An OK recipe. And then some obnoxiously complex hamburger recipe that wasn't even all that great.
towndrunk 8y ago
Maybe I'm just not their target but I want to pick my own veggies and meat. I don't want to leave it up to a minimum wager tossing whatever in my box as it heads down the line.
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  You're getting downvoted, but this was an issue for me as well. I'll go through half a dozen ribeyes before picking the one I like the looks of. Same for produce - I'll pick certain onions, good looking broccoli, the non-slimy mushrooms. This is at a high-end grocery store (Wegmans), too.
  - incomplete 8y ago
    i used blueapron a lot when my wife was finishing her dissertation and we were remodeling our house... the quality of the ingredients is actually much higher than i would have expected, and (imho) at the minimum as good as you'll get at wegman's. blue apron (or any service like this) needs to have the best quality food in the box, otherwise it's just not worth it... and at ~$10/person per meal, it had BETTER have good ingredients. anyways, we just cancelled our blue apron account... it was definitely pricey, and where we live (berkeley ca) there are myriad amazing options for groceries. it served it's purpose when we needed it, tho. it's sad to see them failing, but they chose a very difficult business model, so i'm not entirely surprised. :(
  - paulcole 8y ago
    This is one of the big complaints against Blue Apron. They buy a ton of produce, sort out the good looking ones to send to customers and just throw away the stuff that doesn’t look good.
  - jrochkind1 8y ago
    When I first started using Blue Apron a year plus ago, I found the meat to be generally pretty high quality, as good or better as what I could get at the standard grocery store picking it out myself (rather than a "premium" one like whole foods or whatever), and better than Trader Joe's'. (around me, the standard grocery store has pretty crappy meat). My sense is that meat quality has been going down, but I dunno, maybe it's exactly the same meat and the novelty has just worn off. My sense is also that Blue Apron has historically had higher quality ingredients than some competitors, but I can't say that for sure, and am not sure it continues to be true.
jrochkind1 8y ago
I'm a Blue Apron customer, I like it pretty okay. But I've thought for a while that: A) I wouldn't pay any more than I am now for it (in fact, I keep looking around for cheaper alternatives, but there aren't any, probably because...) B) I suspect they can't make a profit at what they charge. (especially cause as time goes on, I skip more and more weeks, further cutting into their per-acquired-customer revenue. Either I'm just getting tired of it, or my suspicions that each month the ingredients get cheaper and cheaper are correct, perhaps in response to B above). I don't expect them (or their competitors) to stay around.
- PenguinCoder 8y ago
  Spot on with my thoughts and experience recently as well. I do like the pre prepped aspect, but I can't justify the costs and quantity of food/portions any longer.
  - jrochkind1 8y ago
    Yeah the portions have gotten smaller too, you think?? I thought so too.
- rogem002 8y ago
  My food delivery service (Ocado) at some point added a "Here is a recipe, want to add the ingredients to your shop" button. For me that totally halted my desire to use services like Blue Apron.
usaphp 8y ago
I've used 4-5 services similar to Blue Apron, the issue with them for me is that we got tired by being limited to 3-4 recipes per week to choose from, and most of those is just different variation of pasta. Also I don't want to pay ~$9 for their pasta dish and also cook and wash dishes after it. Even if someone who is making minimum wage - they will waste ~30 minutes cooking + ~15 minutes washing dishes and cleaning the kitchen after, so it's about $15 on top of the $9 portion, and you still have to go to grocery because their food is mostly for dinner and for 2-4 times a week because they have limited number of recipes. On top of that I want to be able to spontaneously decide what I want to eat today, and not being forced to choose my food 2 weeks before. Maybe that works for someone, but whenever we try it just gets really boring and annoying after 3-4 weeks of usage.
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  I think Blue Apron is really the king of these services, on the 2-person-meals option there are now usually 8 options to choose from (they increased from 6 a couple months ago), only 2 max of which are pasta. Most weeks there's a steak option, a fish option, or both, and there's always a couple non-pasta chicken options. I think the steak options are becoming somewhat rarer, there used to be one every single week. A while ago they stopped charging different prices for different options. (So of course, I usually try to get the ones that look like the most expensive ingredients). I think that, along with increasing the number of options every week, was probably in response to customer feedback on pain points... but both those things also cut into their profitability. My sense is that they've been reducing the cost of the ingredients accordingly, trying to catch up. I don't mind the time to cook and clean myself, the whole point for me is I _want_ to be cooking... it's just SO convenient not to have to do menu planning and shopping. And most of the meals cook quicker than what I'd cook myself (you can follow them like a zombie barely realizing what you're doing, for better or worse, ha). I'm willing to pay for that... to a point. If the ingredients and recipes are good. And they are correctly charging the right price for me -- in that any higher, and I'd cancel, they've got me at my max ha. Even $15/meal is probably less than I'd pay at any restaurant/carry out that wasn't terribly unhealthy, including gratuity and tax.
  - 8y ago
perseusprime11 8y ago
Stitchfix will be here in the same boat in a few years.
drdeadringer 8y ago
The number of podcasts I listen to has mushroomed the past several years. Shortly ago, it seemed like half of them were brimming with Blue Apron sponsorship ads bordering on "Two Starbucks on every corner". Thankfully that's stopped, and now I know why. Perhaps their ad push didn't work as intended and/or expected. [Of course, the new ad blitz is for someone else.] Personally, I'm currently just not one of their target markets although on paper I probably should be. If/when I move further away than 1 block from a grocery store [I lucked out, a lot], and/or want to eat more complicated prep-time food, and/or have less time or ability to shop for ingredients [and somehow a simple grocery-delivery service just won't cut it] for some ever-increasingly complicated prep-time food, I'll might see the light.
- rtpg 8y ago
  If i didn’t listen to podcasts I’d have no idea the electric toothbrush market is so big The target market for this stuff feels so slim. Either you’re in this “too time constrained to shop, not too time constrained to make food at home” sliver, or in the “don’t want to menu plan” market. In the latter, you pay for this menu planning value add with, what, 30% surplus on the ingredients? Only to be replaceable by a recipe app, basically
  - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
    >If i didn’t listen to podcasts I’d have no idea the electric toothbrush market is so big Made me laugh. I agree. I have yet to figure out what’s wrong with the Sonicare, seems great. Luckily I listen to podcasts (mostly electronics) that don’t do inline advertisements. When I hear them in other shows I can usually tell they are coming with the awkward segue that seems to be common MO.
    - krrrh 8y ago
      Quip toothbrush seems like it was born out of a pitch based on flashing the Dollar Shave Club exit numbers in front of a wide-eyed VC. Honestly hard to understand how they can compete with cheap knockoff sonicare heads from Amazon, but they’ll spend a lot of money finding out.
throwaway427 8y ago
Literally eating a Blue Apron as I read this. This is too bad, I just started doing Blue Apron and I really like it. I'm actually a good cook but I get stuck in a rut with respect to cooking the same things over and over again so it's been nice to have some enforced variety, especially when it comes to sides or bowl/hashes. The quality is good, the prices seems fair. Just seems like a fraught model.
- jordache 8y ago
  ok yeah to sprinkle in some varieties.. why would the mass market stick to it? it simply doesn't provide lasting value prop
  - throwaway427 8y ago
    I mean I don't think the economics work out for a publicly traded company, hence my saying the model is fraught. Certainly there is a non-trivial market for it though.
- edoceo 8y ago
  Just get a random recipe subscription?
  - throwaway427 8y ago
    It's not an issue of ideas, it's an issue of wastage and cost. And cost might even be a wash but at least now I don't have to watch a whole bottle of gochujang or horseradish or bag of farro go to waste because I wanted to try this one recipe I saw on NYT cooking and you can't get those things in perfectly sized amounts.
    - unexpected 8y ago
      I feel the exact same way - maybe that's the pain point a business needs to be solving - making much smaller bottles of one-off ingredients!
readhn 8y ago
I suspected blue apron would fail. i did try it - and i had two major annoyances: 1. Wasteful Packaging - seemed like a waste of materials / cooler / all the plastic containers. (imagine 10,000s of these shipped everywhere and ending up in dumpsters) 2. I still have to cook! Im paying these guys more than i have to for basic ingredients and i STILL HAVE TO WASTE TIME and COOK! Where is the convenience? Most of the people in our circles tried it for fun and recipes, 1-2-3 months then bam most quit. This business model is a total failure. Local grocery stores did start carrying meal kits. But what i REALLY MISS is the guacamole kit from TJ! I wonder why TJ REALLY stopped carrying it... That said thanks VCs for "free" food!
beerlord 8y ago
I think there is a legitimate role for Government or Not-For-Profit here: Rather than providing money handouts to the worst off citizens, why not just cut out the middleman and offer basic prefab housing and cheap nutritious meals instead? Instead of shipping individual groceries to middle-class hipsters, why not just cut out the middleman and cook the food instead? Such a restaurant scheme already operates in India (called 'subsidised canteens'), and is used by all classes there since its cheap and reliable. The meals aren't free - they cost a few cents. I'd happily eat almost every meal at such a restaurant which offered no-frills service, a simple (and probably vegetarian) menu, and very low cost. The menu could be coordinated with seasonally and locally available ingredients, and would probably offer a single choice of food, changed daily. It would be like a soup-kitchen - but the need to pay a buck, and the presence of the middle classes, would make it acceptable for everyone. I think if organised well enough, it could actually be more efficient that having everyone cooking at home - better logistics for the use of ingredients, less food waste, less water wasted in cleaning dishes, etc. Not too mention the better division of labour by having dedicated cooks doing the work with professional-grade equipment, rather than everyone spending ages to do it at home (and for a lot of poor people, they lack the equipment or skills to cook proper meals).
- TylerE 8y ago
  > Rather than providing money handouts to the worst off citizens, why not just cut out the middleman and offer basic prefab housing and cheap nutritious meals instead? They did this. Ever hear of government cheese? Turns out, the g'ovt isn't a very good grocer. Thus food stamps, and later EBT.
- mruts 8y ago
  Why doesn’t the government cut out the middle man on every industry? History has definately shown us that the government is much better at central planning than a free market.
drcode 8y ago
To me, the real appeal to me of meal services are "long tail" nutritional preferences- For instance, if you eat a strict ketogenic diet, you can get meal kits for that as well. It's difficult to make your own ketogenic meals solely via your own grocery shopping and recipe research... but I can now eat pretty tasty meals with minimal effort in 2018 via meal services.
- bdcravens 8y ago
  It seems the recently swarm of meal kits companies are "me too"s that offer even less choices, but are trying to compete on price ($5 vis-a-vis Blue Apron's $10 per meal)
- eclipxe 8y ago
  Which do you prefer for Keto?
  - drcode 8y ago
    I'm pretty happy with "green chef".
- wutbrodo 8y ago
  That's interesting to hear; I'm not in ketosis, but have a pretty non-standard diet from an American perspective[1], and part of what's kept me doing grocery/cooking from scratch and away from meal kits and other similar solutions is that they seem pretty poorly tailored to my bare minimum of a healthy diet. A friend gave me a $30 referral discount to HelloFresh and I tried out one shipment and gave up on it, for pretty much precisely this reason. I guess I should take a deeper look at their options for special types of diets, or maybe even > It's difficult to make your own ketogenic meals solely via your own grocery shopping and recipe research I'm surprised to hear this even more. Have you tried Googling "keto recipes [other search terms]" and meal-planning around it? If you've already tried this, I don't intend this to be patronizing; I'm actually relatively new to cooking most of what I eat, which means things like meal planning are actually pretty new to me. I've just found it to be a really effective way to organize frequent cooking, and once you build up a bit of a repertoire of recipes, it doesn't really take any extra time beyond putting the ingredients and Instacart order together. [1] Which it turns out means simply "getting enough protein and fiber to not be super unhealthy"....
awicklander 8y ago
We signed up for Blue Apron and Sun Basket. Time after time, the actual food provided by blue apron was inferior. Often close to rotten. This isn’t a complicated story( Blue Apron delivers food with instructions but the food isn’t very good.
- pfranz 8y ago
  I wonder if that's a regional thing? I haven't used Blue Apron in 6 months, but often the ingredients would last probably twice as long as most ingredients from the local grocer. It also tended to show up around 10-11am and be fine by the time I got home between 8-9pm in the box.
tjpnz 8y ago
What would prevent a supermarket chain from implementing their own weekly boxes and offer them in store or for delivery using their own established logistics? With the access they have to vendors they would be able to offer more range, fresher ingredients and better prices while still being able to make a profit. I don't live in the US but I've seen what they've been doing on YouTube with sponsorships and limited time offers - they must be taking a huge hit.
- bm1362 8y ago
  I would totally buy recipe kits from a refrigerator in Whole Foods if that was an option. There’d be no wasted packaging, you still get the satisfaction of cooking and it’s mostly just a marketing gimmick on things already in the store.
  - SomewhatLikely 8y ago
    As pointed out elsewhere in the comments, Kroger chains already have this if you want to check it out.
- krrrh 8y ago
  Nothing. Here’s a photo I took of a kit in a German grocer just outside an U-bahn station, about 4 years ago: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ktemanrhxruxi3r/2014-12-23%2014.34.08.JPG?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/ktemanrhxruxi3r/2014-12-23%2014.34... I took the picture for a friend who was looking into a meal kit play at the time. Seeing it executed so well I couldn’t imagine how a subscription service could compete. They had about 4-6 meal displays like this amongst the regular groceries.
  - stevenhuang 8y ago
    That's amazingly well executed indeed, and the first one I've seen a picture of at that. I wish the local grocers here in Ontario (Loblaws) would do something similar.
- Shivetya 8y ago
  Supermarket chain, hell restaurant chains are getting into this. Chik-fil-a has meal kits that are not their standard fare but obviously chicken that you can buy to take home. Grocery stores seem to have exploded in options in the produce section of fresh vegetables combined with seasonings and such and the meat sections are doing the same. Walk into a Publix (Southern state grocer) and there are meal planning cards at the entrance and even daily demos of some of the meals.
anonytrary 8y ago
Maybe -- just maybe, the market for services like Blue Apron and Eatwith just doesn't exist. They are both romantic ideas, and it's very possible that they that would have taken off in the 1940s (provided we had the same technology), but it's clear that they have been outpaced by the busy world of today.
checker659 8y ago
Ashwin Ramdas's satirical video on Blue Apron is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDMfDwDUxKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDMfDwDUxKE
misiogames 8y ago
call me old fashion, but dinner (which is the only meal I have at home) is more than just the process to put energy into the body, it's a family ritual that provides additional value via the cohesion and collaboration required by the family members to make it happen, and this ritual starts when, after work the family members got to go out of their way home to personally select the best products they can find, which they will bring home, this part is annoying, but is part of the whole thing. And for the days when we don't want to cook, or want something different, meal delivery is super effective. These offering are in a middle ground with just a little value as a novelty.
cardamomo 8y ago
Given this downward trend with the rising trend of "luxury" apartments including more and more amenities, I wonder if the next new thing will be building-exclusive, fully-managed micro-farms with produce delivery directly to your fridge.
g105b 8y ago
I never understood business models like this in the first place. Those who like to cook don't have a problem buying ingredients themselves. Those who don't like cooking don't mind spending the same amount as a Blue Apron subscription to order takeaway. The target audience consists of people who would theoretically like to cook, but don't know how to read a recipe book and/or don't want to go shopping or use online grocery shopping.
- Merad 8y ago
  I think this is an often understated point when discussing meal services. In my experience with Blue Apron and Hello Fresh there were some good and interesting meal choices (often ethnic dishes that I hadn't tried before), but probably 50% of the menu boiled down to simple dishes like "some variation of spaghetti with salad" or "chicken breast with a simple sauce and basic veggies." People who already know how to cook are going to realize how much they're overpaying for these simple dishes, and people who learn to cook thanks to the service will come to realize it unless they avoid the grocery store entirely. Ultimately the complex/exotic dishes just aren't offered enough to offset paying $10/ small portion for the more simple dishes.
- cpt1138 8y ago
  At least for me personally this is a gross oversimplification. While we do like cooking, we don't like planning or shopping for ingredients. We also don't like buying a head of red cabbage and using 1/8 of it and throwing out the rest. There are jars of god knows what in the fridge that are a year old or more that were bought for 1TB of something in a recipe. Also the recipes BA does seem to me like eating in a good restaurant 3 times a week. Take out doesn't even play in the same ballpark.
noer 8y ago
(non-delivery) Food is a really tough space to compete in. Acquisition costs are relatively high and usually require you to give some amount of product away. Because you're trying to get people to switch from a known quantity (whatever someone buys to prepare themselves) or to make more time for cooking (over prepared food or food delivery), you need to make sure that first experience is excellent and hope that you're going to get a very good number of people to actually pay for the service when it isn't free. From my experience (work for an investor in and did product/acquisition/marketing for a food startup), there are very few people who will say no to a free meal, but converting those people is hard and there are a ton of variables that are hard to control for. The biggest thing that is tough to plan for is each person's taste. For example, if you pick a free meal and you don't like it will you really buy another one?
JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
Everyone I know that tried these (including myself) starts getting them piling up uncooked and rotting and cancels. A month or two of product testing would have told them this model can't succeed. After that, it was just how long can we fool the VCs?
lechiffre10 8y ago
Typical problem of "path to least resistance" which is also the reason Amazon succeeded so well by recommending products ( Netflix does the same with show recommendations) We are by nature prone to take the path that requires the least effort so Cooking vs Ordering food ( which arguably has been made a LOT easier with the likes of Postmates,foodora, Uber eats etc...) means that people will have a tendency to order food instead of cook. Especially when you consider the amount of competition among these food delivery companies and the discounts/promotions they throw at users to retain their business.
lolsal 8y ago
I have tried Blue Apron and switched over to Green Box and I really like both of them. I am a really decent cook, but I mostly cook for 2 people so the value of these services to me is the convenience of just-what-you-need serving-size bits of rarer oddities like a small hunk of a special cheese, 3 shoots of green onions, a small bunch of fresh rosemary, exactly the right amount of this sauce or that seasoning, etc. Often unless my partner and I are doubling-down on a specific ingredient for a week or more, a lot of random things end up spoiling before we can use them up. I think in the end since we're paying more for the ingredients, and generating more waste/recycling, it ends up being a wash on total consumption.
ArrayList 8y ago
Good, it's a pretty useless service. Has anyone considered, um, looking up recipes and um, going to the store, buying the stuff, and cooking?
gricardo99 8y ago
I just saw a new meal kit display at my local supermarket, which to me makes the most sense and was always going to be a huge looming threat, if not guaranteed killer, to the meal kit startups.

I considered using Blue Apron a while back but their portions are just too small. Maybe that's not a problem for most of their customers but I exercise a lot and need at least 3100kcal (with a high fraction of protein) most days to avoid losing weight. I might consider it again if they offered a larger option.

neonate 8y ago

http://outline.com/https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-apron-lays-off-more-workers-1542148447 http://outline.com/https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-apron-l...

untog 8y ago

Can't help but feel like Blue Apron and its competitors are the next generation of Groupon and its competitors. Burnt through VC funding competing with each other only to find out the actual market for their product isn't that great. But thanks for all the free trials, VC investors! I've had a few above average dinners out of it.

raverbashing 8y ago
Cough Moviepass cough
- baddox 8y ago
  It’s slightly different, since Moviepass has a huge market (selling dollars for quarters), just not a very profitable one.
- jonwachob91 8y ago
  Moviepass didn't mess up on the size and demand of their market. They messed up in assessing the moat they thought they had. When the movie theaters saw how successful they were, it was too easy for them to raise the prices on moviepass and introduce their own product offering.
kalleboo 8y ago
Where I'm from all the big grocery store chains have a variant of a Blue Apron style service. Seems like a feature not a product.
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  I wonder if that would have a higher chance of actually being profitable here in the U.S., charging about the same but cutting out the expensive to-your-door delivery. Although there's probably more food wastage. The article mentioned Blue Apron (and competitors) are trying to increase sales at grocery stores, maybe some of them can survive like that if that works.
  - ahi 8y ago
    I have seen it in grocery stores here in the midwest.
  - magic_beans 8y ago
    I did always wonder why Blue Apron didn't just partner with grocery stores. It makes so much more sense, and my little grocery store in New Amazon HQ, Queens does not have any type of meal kits.
  - flukus 8y ago
    > I wonder if that would have a higher chance of actually being profitable here in the U.S., charging about the same but cutting out the expensive to-your-door delivery. From what I've seen it doesn't help, the in store ones cost almost as a restaurant anyway, But at least a restaurant solves the time consuming part (cooking, cleaning), if your in the store then getting everything packaged together only saves a few minutes. This is in Australia with a higher minimum wage, I imagine it would make an even smaller difference in the US.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      I don’t really have good restaurant options around where I live though. I’d prefer to cook at home a lot of the time. But I sometimes prefer it to be a minimum of planning and prep. But this is the conundrum. If I can pick up a few ingredients, even if there’s some waste, and throw together a meal quickly the meal kits may not add much.
zbrox 8y ago
I know about them only from the numerous podcast commercials. Here in the Nordics all supermarket chains have had that service for a while now and it's quite convenient. I can see the value of it but all these supermarkets have their supply chain built and they started a similar service in no time. So I can't see how Blue Apron can compete in Europe for example.
DoubleGlazing 8y ago
I think a bigger problem which these services don't get is that if you live in a reasonably sized city then you will have a huge range of takeaway/delivery food options. The amount of people who want to cook and prepare a nice meal is probably a lot less than the amount of people who just want to buy, eat and enjoy a nice meal. I live in Dublin, not exactly the biggest of cities, but I can't think of a single type of food that I can't order through one of the various home delivery apps available to me. No need to cook food or be constrained by a predetermined set of menus. It's hard to make the case for a meal in a box service when you can order just about any food imaginable from your phone and it will be delivered within 30 minutes.
- anongraddebt 8y ago
  It's bordering on out-of-control in some U.S. cities. About six months ago, I briefly stopped while in the middle of cleaning our apartment and realized the majority of our 'trash' was food delivery detritus. We've been spending $500-$700 a month on food delivery this year, and I only see that increasing in the future. I can regularly obtain a $1 (sometimes less) delivery fee by selecting among Uber Eats/GrubHub/DoorDash/etc. The pricing blood-bath between restaurants (and delivery companies) combined with convenience-induced laziness has me doing nutty things like order a $6 froyo from a place ~100 meters away. Speaking of Blue Apron, I recently threw out half of an unopened meal kit of theirs that convenience-induced laziness had caused to rot away in the fridge. The delivery trend is strong. Not sure it's a net positive society-wide habit.
  - zanny 8y ago
    Cooking is hard, requires a lot of hardware to do, and is an acquired skill that takes a lot of blunt learning of a lot of minute details about how certain ingredients interact. In the same way you don't ask everyone to learn to repair car engines or diagnose medical issues modern society puts a lot of pressure on specialization of hard work like cooking. That being said the true optimization would be that most people be content to eat in cafeteria style settings where there are limited options and the chefs are using whatever is freshest and most affordable and availability is fixed (even if you just grab and go with the food). There is a trade off between menu diversity, the prices you pay for it, and how good it can actually be where 16+ hour open restaurants with several page menus (including fast food) are making concessions on freshness / shortcuts in preparation to provide their diversity and availability. I think a lot of this relates to how we are in a transnational period for density. In the coming decades I am almost certain we will trend globally towards packing people into apartment / condo style living in city cores because the trends of sprawl and mcmansion single families that are going to be inherited by unmarried or childless descendants without the incomes to support them falls apart. Right now trying to build up a "local" kitchen you can go to three times a day for regular, good, healthy and diverse meals isn't feasible because the density isn't there to get them to walkable convenience, but I hope rising density makes them a possibility. At those kinds of scales it becomes a technical probability we might just get short range delivery drones where the kitchens advertise via app or notification whats on the menu and you just select what you want and a lil bot brings it to you a la room service but optimized in the aforementioned ways to make it more sustainable.
mathattack 8y ago
They’ve also kept several of my favorite podcasts afloat, though I haven’t heard them advertise as much since the IPO. Maybe their customer acquisition costs got ahead of them.
- cptskippy 8y ago
  They changed their target demographics, now they sponsor mechanical engineering channels on YouTube.
SonicSoul 8y ago
I believe they’re solving a real problem. For people that want a healthy meal but don’t want to spend $ on farm to table type restaurant. Although I do see quite a few more healthy options sprouting up in NYC I can’t speak for more suburban areas. Point being is a lot people care about ingredients, food prep (i.e. those brussel sprouts are not that healthy if cooked in re-used vegetable oil). The tricky part with this business model is making the food taste good is an art form and not easy to boil down to a simple 9 step formula. Also difficult is keeping all the ingredients fresh and portioned / ready to cook while keeping the price lower than it would be to go out and eat.
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  You don't save that much, especially after the cheap trial. If you know what you're doing, a run to the grocery store will actually be much cheaper. I think it's more for people who want a home-cooked meal but don't want to go shopping or find a recipe.
  - acdha 8y ago
    We were a great example: some family members gave us a Green Chef subscription while we were both home on parental leave and it was a great way to eat better while having very little free time / energy.
  - SonicSoul 8y ago
    I don't believe savings is the primary goal. to me main benefits are: > control of food prep > control of ingredients > having ultra fresh cooked meal > less packaging waste ?
- acdha 8y ago
  I don't think the question is whether they're solving a problem but how profitable the market is: VC bubble thinking tends to chase high-margin businesses but this seems like something where anyone in it long-term will need to be comfortable with far more modest margins similar to what the restaurant industry has, especially since they can't make up a low-profit entree by selling high-profit alcohol and soda.
Symmetry 8y ago
Unlike Groupon they're providing value on net. The problem is that they didn't have any sort of moat to protect them from competition and when that competition arrived they weren't prepared for their market share to go down.
screye 8y ago
Just curious. How much does one meal (per person) come out to be ? If I am correct, they are targeting a relatively well off crowd and not the general populace. Are their margins large enough to get by on just rich-ish customers ?
- anonu 8y ago
  Blue apron was about $10 per person... $60 for 3 2-person meals. I think that's a reasonable price to pay for blue apron convenience. Yes, you might be able to source the ingredients for less. But you lose out on time there, as well as right sizing of ingredients.
bpp 8y ago
Wow, was thinking of this exact comment. 100% correct. (Somehow the online mattress craze seems immune to the same downfall.)
- joe5150 8y ago
  the online mattress store business model can't be any stranger than the brick-and-mortar mattress store business model. I'd love to read more about that.
PretzelFisch 8y ago
I don't see the value of Blue Apron over take out. The do the shopping but none of the prepwork so they don't solve the lack of time to prep and cook issue. I would rather sing up for a service that planned a monthly menu and delivered the meal ready to eat or reheat.

sjroot 8y ago

I am actively job interviewing and I have talked to a lot of startups. One of things I always ask my interviewer is whether or not the company is profitable. If you get to be that large of a company (100 workers => 4% of staff => ~2500 employees) and you are not making a profit, there is something wrong. Bringing all of those people onboard seems like a waste of investor money. That said, I am a fan of Blue Apron and I do hope that their figure out a way to operate in a profitable manner soon. Edit: as replies point out, profitability isn’t a great indicator for the success of a company. While it is fair game to ask, there are other better indicators (churn and burn, existing customer base, etc) that give a better picture. My point was that I think a company at this size should be profitable or working aggressively to make that possible. I think Blue Apron is laying these people off to accomplish that.

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
Don't think that's necessarily a really good metric in this day and age, as there are "good" kinds of unprofitability and "bad" kinds of unprofitability. Amazon was unprofitable for most of its existence until relatively recently. Most successful startups are unprofitable, and these days with the "winner take all" mentality of most VCs a company would be penalized for being profitable too early. I think a much better metric, especially for early stage companies, is their growth rate, their customer acquisition cost, and very importantly, their customer churn rate. Blue Apron's churn rate coupled with their high CAC has always been a giant flashing red flag.
- ashelmire 8y ago
  > Most successful startups are unprofitable What a bizarre world we live in where this is said seriously and everyone would agree with it. There’s a vc bubble and it’s going to pop. And we will all suffer for it.
  - hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
    Why do you think it's bizarre? It's also true. The whole reason Silicon Valley is the center of the entrepreneurial and tech universe is because it's the place that best merges technical talent with access to capital. If startups could be profitable from the get go, VCs wouldn't need to exist in the first place.

tyingq 8y ago

IPO in June 2017 at ~$10 per share. Closed today at $1.22 ...ouch.

maxxxxx 8y ago
I think this means Mission Accomplished for the investors. Suck out all the value from the company and then dump it on retail investors by going public.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  People keep not understanding or appreciating this point. This is precisely what Uber is in the middle of doing right now too, and to some extent probably what Spotify did, and the future value of those two is by no means clear or stable. As long as they can can prop up the valuation for a short time, they can capitalize shortly after an IPO and externalize the losses on unwitting millions of people who came to own some unicorn stock because they were auto-enrolled in the 2055 retirement mix of some bottom scraping asset manager that charges high fees on a portfolio with loose definitions of what it can invest in.
  - dcow 8y ago
    Where I grew up “pump and dump” was a dirty term.
- TuringNYC 8y ago
  There have been winners and losers on the tech IPOs of the past 5yrs. I'm curious how you differentiate the losers from the winners since some of the tech IPOs have done quite well. (although, to be fair, Blue Apron is an obvious case of the next groupon.)
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    I think the general trend is to IPO much later at a very high valuation so the company needs to be an enormous success for retail investors to just break even. There is just not much upside left. It's also bad for regular employees. They have to stay on for very long before can make some money.

empath75 8y ago

I like their recipes but it’s just a grotesquely wasteful way to ship food around. Ultimately this business belongs in grocery stores. I’d happily drive down to Wegmans once a week to pick up 3-4 locally packaged blue apron style meals.

ghaff 8y ago
In the scheme of things, most likely including going to restaurants, I have trouble working up too much outrage about the packaging and shipping. That said, I agree with your broader point. I'm not sure why more stores (some do) don't have more kits. Planning for the next week in a way that includes picking 3 meals that will involve at least a modest amount of effort doesn't work for me--and I like to cook generally. I get that they appeal to people who like to cook but want some structure (and home delivery) around it. But it seems a pretty niche market. I got Blue Apron once. It was "OK." And, while I've thought about it, I've never ordered from any of these services again.
- nemothekid 8y ago
  I used Blue Apron for a couple month. I’m hardly a “save the earth” type - but one of the reasons I’ve been skipping the service is the huge amount of cardboard and plastic ships with each box. I must have 8 full extra heads of garlic lying around. The “ice packs” are a pain in the neck to get rid of and it doesn’t feel right to dump that stuff in the trash. However I will admit I got tired of the selection. Usually there will only be one meal that I’m actually looking forward to eating and the other 2 are unappetizing enough for me to just eat out.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    I reuse a lot of the plastic bags. But I imagine I'd run out of use for ice packs after a while. Given the amount of cardboard I have to take to recycling from Amazon and elsewhere, I'm not sure a bit more makes much of a difference. But the menus mostly don't excite me that much. And if I'm going to spend that much effort I have tons of cookbooks and online recipes. Your experience sounds like the one week I tried it. There was a pretty good recipe. An OK recipe. And then some obnoxiously complex hamburger recipe that wasn't even all that great.

towndrunk 8y ago

Maybe I'm just not their target but I want to pick my own veggies and meat. I don't want to leave it up to a minimum wager tossing whatever in my box as it heads down the line.

ceejayoz 8y ago
You're getting downvoted, but this was an issue for me as well. I'll go through half a dozen ribeyes before picking the one I like the looks of. Same for produce - I'll pick certain onions, good looking broccoli, the non-slimy mushrooms. This is at a high-end grocery store (Wegmans), too.
- incomplete 8y ago
  i used blueapron a lot when my wife was finishing her dissertation and we were remodeling our house... the quality of the ingredients is actually much higher than i would have expected, and (imho) at the minimum as good as you'll get at wegman's. blue apron (or any service like this) needs to have the best quality food in the box, otherwise it's just not worth it... and at ~$10/person per meal, it had BETTER have good ingredients. anyways, we just cancelled our blue apron account... it was definitely pricey, and where we live (berkeley ca) there are myriad amazing options for groceries. it served it's purpose when we needed it, tho. it's sad to see them failing, but they chose a very difficult business model, so i'm not entirely surprised. :(
- paulcole 8y ago
  This is one of the big complaints against Blue Apron. They buy a ton of produce, sort out the good looking ones to send to customers and just throw away the stuff that doesn’t look good.
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  When I first started using Blue Apron a year plus ago, I found the meat to be generally pretty high quality, as good or better as what I could get at the standard grocery store picking it out myself (rather than a "premium" one like whole foods or whatever), and better than Trader Joe's'. (around me, the standard grocery store has pretty crappy meat). My sense is that meat quality has been going down, but I dunno, maybe it's exactly the same meat and the novelty has just worn off. My sense is also that Blue Apron has historically had higher quality ingredients than some competitors, but I can't say that for sure, and am not sure it continues to be true.

jrochkind1 8y ago

I'm a Blue Apron customer, I like it pretty okay. But I've thought for a while that: A) I wouldn't pay any more than I am now for it (in fact, I keep looking around for cheaper alternatives, but there aren't any, probably because...) B) I suspect they can't make a profit at what they charge. (especially cause as time goes on, I skip more and more weeks, further cutting into their per-acquired-customer revenue. Either I'm just getting tired of it, or my suspicions that each month the ingredients get cheaper and cheaper are correct, perhaps in response to B above). I don't expect them (or their competitors) to stay around.

PenguinCoder 8y ago
Spot on with my thoughts and experience recently as well. I do like the pre prepped aspect, but I can't justify the costs and quantity of food/portions any longer.
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  Yeah the portions have gotten smaller too, you think?? I thought so too.
rogem002 8y ago
My food delivery service (Ocado) at some point added a "Here is a recipe, want to add the ingredients to your shop" button. For me that totally halted my desire to use services like Blue Apron.

usaphp 8y ago

I've used 4-5 services similar to Blue Apron, the issue with them for me is that we got tired by being limited to 3-4 recipes per week to choose from, and most of those is just different variation of pasta. Also I don't want to pay ~$9 for their pasta dish and also cook and wash dishes after it. Even if someone who is making minimum wage - they will waste ~30 minutes cooking + ~15 minutes washing dishes and cleaning the kitchen after, so it's about $15 on top of the $9 portion, and you still have to go to grocery because their food is mostly for dinner and for 2-4 times a week because they have limited number of recipes. On top of that I want to be able to spontaneously decide what I want to eat today, and not being forced to choose my food 2 weeks before. Maybe that works for someone, but whenever we try it just gets really boring and annoying after 3-4 weeks of usage.

jrochkind1 8y ago
I think Blue Apron is really the king of these services, on the 2-person-meals option there are now usually 8 options to choose from (they increased from 6 a couple months ago), only 2 max of which are pasta. Most weeks there's a steak option, a fish option, or both, and there's always a couple non-pasta chicken options. I think the steak options are becoming somewhat rarer, there used to be one every single week. A while ago they stopped charging different prices for different options. (So of course, I usually try to get the ones that look like the most expensive ingredients). I think that, along with increasing the number of options every week, was probably in response to customer feedback on pain points... but both those things also cut into their profitability. My sense is that they've been reducing the cost of the ingredients accordingly, trying to catch up. I don't mind the time to cook and clean myself, the whole point for me is I _want_ to be cooking... it's just SO convenient not to have to do menu planning and shopping. And most of the meals cook quicker than what I'd cook myself (you can follow them like a zombie barely realizing what you're doing, for better or worse, ha). I'm willing to pay for that... to a point. If the ingredients and recipes are good. And they are correctly charging the right price for me -- in that any higher, and I'd cancel, they've got me at my max ha. Even $15/meal is probably less than I'd pay at any restaurant/carry out that wasn't terribly unhealthy, including gratuity and tax.
- 8y ago

perseusprime11 8y ago

Stitchfix will be here in the same boat in a few years.

drdeadringer 8y ago

The number of podcasts I listen to has mushroomed the past several years. Shortly ago, it seemed like half of them were brimming with Blue Apron sponsorship ads bordering on "Two Starbucks on every corner". Thankfully that's stopped, and now I know why. Perhaps their ad push didn't work as intended and/or expected. [Of course, the new ad blitz is for someone else.] Personally, I'm currently just not one of their target markets although on paper I probably should be. If/when I move further away than 1 block from a grocery store [I lucked out, a lot], and/or want to eat more complicated prep-time food, and/or have less time or ability to shop for ingredients [and somehow a simple grocery-delivery service just won't cut it] for some ever-increasingly complicated prep-time food, I'll might see the light.

rtpg 8y ago
If i didn’t listen to podcasts I’d have no idea the electric toothbrush market is so big The target market for this stuff feels so slim. Either you’re in this “too time constrained to shop, not too time constrained to make food at home” sliver, or in the “don’t want to menu plan” market. In the latter, you pay for this menu planning value add with, what, 30% surplus on the ingredients? Only to be replaceable by a recipe app, basically
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  >If i didn’t listen to podcasts I’d have no idea the electric toothbrush market is so big Made me laugh. I agree. I have yet to figure out what’s wrong with the Sonicare, seems great. Luckily I listen to podcasts (mostly electronics) that don’t do inline advertisements. When I hear them in other shows I can usually tell they are coming with the awkward segue that seems to be common MO.
  - krrrh 8y ago
    Quip toothbrush seems like it was born out of a pitch based on flashing the Dollar Shave Club exit numbers in front of a wide-eyed VC. Honestly hard to understand how they can compete with cheap knockoff sonicare heads from Amazon, but they’ll spend a lot of money finding out.

throwaway427 8y ago

Literally eating a Blue Apron as I read this. This is too bad, I just started doing Blue Apron and I really like it. I'm actually a good cook but I get stuck in a rut with respect to cooking the same things over and over again so it's been nice to have some enforced variety, especially when it comes to sides or bowl/hashes. The quality is good, the prices seems fair. Just seems like a fraught model.

jordache 8y ago
ok yeah to sprinkle in some varieties.. why would the mass market stick to it? it simply doesn't provide lasting value prop
- throwaway427 8y ago
  I mean I don't think the economics work out for a publicly traded company, hence my saying the model is fraught. Certainly there is a non-trivial market for it though.
edoceo 8y ago
Just get a random recipe subscription?
- throwaway427 8y ago
  It's not an issue of ideas, it's an issue of wastage and cost. And cost might even be a wash but at least now I don't have to watch a whole bottle of gochujang or horseradish or bag of farro go to waste because I wanted to try this one recipe I saw on NYT cooking and you can't get those things in perfectly sized amounts.
  - unexpected 8y ago
    I feel the exact same way - maybe that's the pain point a business needs to be solving - making much smaller bottles of one-off ingredients!

readhn 8y ago

I suspected blue apron would fail. i did try it - and i had two major annoyances: 1. Wasteful Packaging - seemed like a waste of materials / cooler / all the plastic containers. (imagine 10,000s of these shipped everywhere and ending up in dumpsters) 2. I still have to cook! Im paying these guys more than i have to for basic ingredients and i STILL HAVE TO WASTE TIME and COOK! Where is the convenience? Most of the people in our circles tried it for fun and recipes, 1-2-3 months then bam most quit. This business model is a total failure. Local grocery stores did start carrying meal kits. But what i REALLY MISS is the guacamole kit from TJ! I wonder why TJ REALLY stopped carrying it... That said thanks VCs for "free" food!

beerlord 8y ago

I think there is a legitimate role for Government or Not-For-Profit here: Rather than providing money handouts to the worst off citizens, why not just cut out the middleman and offer basic prefab housing and cheap nutritious meals instead? Instead of shipping individual groceries to middle-class hipsters, why not just cut out the middleman and cook the food instead? Such a restaurant scheme already operates in India (called 'subsidised canteens'), and is used by all classes there since its cheap and reliable. The meals aren't free - they cost a few cents. I'd happily eat almost every meal at such a restaurant which offered no-frills service, a simple (and probably vegetarian) menu, and very low cost. The menu could be coordinated with seasonally and locally available ingredients, and would probably offer a single choice of food, changed daily. It would be like a soup-kitchen - but the need to pay a buck, and the presence of the middle classes, would make it acceptable for everyone. I think if organised well enough, it could actually be more efficient that having everyone cooking at home - better logistics for the use of ingredients, less food waste, less water wasted in cleaning dishes, etc. Not too mention the better division of labour by having dedicated cooks doing the work with professional-grade equipment, rather than everyone spending ages to do it at home (and for a lot of poor people, they lack the equipment or skills to cook proper meals).

TylerE 8y ago
> Rather than providing money handouts to the worst off citizens, why not just cut out the middleman and offer basic prefab housing and cheap nutritious meals instead? They did this. Ever hear of government cheese? Turns out, the g'ovt isn't a very good grocer. Thus food stamps, and later EBT.
mruts 8y ago
Why doesn’t the government cut out the middle man on every industry? History has definately shown us that the government is much better at central planning than a free market.

drcode 8y ago

To me, the real appeal to me of meal services are "long tail" nutritional preferences- For instance, if you eat a strict ketogenic diet, you can get meal kits for that as well. It's difficult to make your own ketogenic meals solely via your own grocery shopping and recipe research... but I can now eat pretty tasty meals with minimal effort in 2018 via meal services.

bdcravens 8y ago
It seems the recently swarm of meal kits companies are "me too"s that offer even less choices, but are trying to compete on price ($5 vis-a-vis Blue Apron's $10 per meal)
eclipxe 8y ago
Which do you prefer for Keto?
- drcode 8y ago
  I'm pretty happy with "green chef".
wutbrodo 8y ago
That's interesting to hear; I'm not in ketosis, but have a pretty non-standard diet from an American perspective[1], and part of what's kept me doing grocery/cooking from scratch and away from meal kits and other similar solutions is that they seem pretty poorly tailored to my bare minimum of a healthy diet. A friend gave me a $30 referral discount to HelloFresh and I tried out one shipment and gave up on it, for pretty much precisely this reason. I guess I should take a deeper look at their options for special types of diets, or maybe even > It's difficult to make your own ketogenic meals solely via your own grocery shopping and recipe research I'm surprised to hear this even more. Have you tried Googling "keto recipes [other search terms]" and meal-planning around it? If you've already tried this, I don't intend this to be patronizing; I'm actually relatively new to cooking most of what I eat, which means things like meal planning are actually pretty new to me. I've just found it to be a really effective way to organize frequent cooking, and once you build up a bit of a repertoire of recipes, it doesn't really take any extra time beyond putting the ingredients and Instacart order together. [1] Which it turns out means simply "getting enough protein and fiber to not be super unhealthy"....

awicklander 8y ago

We signed up for Blue Apron and Sun Basket. Time after time, the actual food provided by blue apron was inferior. Often close to rotten. This isn’t a complicated story( Blue Apron delivers food with instructions but the food isn’t very good.

pfranz 8y ago
I wonder if that's a regional thing? I haven't used Blue Apron in 6 months, but often the ingredients would last probably twice as long as most ingredients from the local grocer. It also tended to show up around 10-11am and be fine by the time I got home between 8-9pm in the box.

tjpnz 8y ago

What would prevent a supermarket chain from implementing their own weekly boxes and offer them in store or for delivery using their own established logistics? With the access they have to vendors they would be able to offer more range, fresher ingredients and better prices while still being able to make a profit. I don't live in the US but I've seen what they've been doing on YouTube with sponsorships and limited time offers - they must be taking a huge hit.

bm1362 8y ago
I would totally buy recipe kits from a refrigerator in Whole Foods if that was an option. There’d be no wasted packaging, you still get the satisfaction of cooking and it’s mostly just a marketing gimmick on things already in the store.
- SomewhatLikely 8y ago
  As pointed out elsewhere in the comments, Kroger chains already have this if you want to check it out.
krrrh 8y ago
Nothing. Here’s a photo I took of a kit in a German grocer just outside an U-bahn station, about 4 years ago: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ktemanrhxruxi3r/2014-12-23%2014.34.08.JPG?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/ktemanrhxruxi3r/2014-12-23%2014.34... I took the picture for a friend who was looking into a meal kit play at the time. Seeing it executed so well I couldn’t imagine how a subscription service could compete. They had about 4-6 meal displays like this amongst the regular groceries.
- stevenhuang 8y ago
  That's amazingly well executed indeed, and the first one I've seen a picture of at that. I wish the local grocers here in Ontario (Loblaws) would do something similar.
Shivetya 8y ago
Supermarket chain, hell restaurant chains are getting into this. Chik-fil-a has meal kits that are not their standard fare but obviously chicken that you can buy to take home. Grocery stores seem to have exploded in options in the produce section of fresh vegetables combined with seasonings and such and the meat sections are doing the same. Walk into a Publix (Southern state grocer) and there are meal planning cards at the entrance and even daily demos of some of the meals.

anonytrary 8y ago

Maybe -- just maybe, the market for services like Blue Apron and Eatwith just doesn't exist. They are both romantic ideas, and it's very possible that they that would have taken off in the 1940s (provided we had the same technology), but it's clear that they have been outpaced by the busy world of today.

checker659 8y ago

Ashwin Ramdas's satirical video on Blue Apron is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDMfDwDUxKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDMfDwDUxKE

misiogames 8y ago

call me old fashion, but dinner (which is the only meal I have at home) is more than just the process to put energy into the body, it's a family ritual that provides additional value via the cohesion and collaboration required by the family members to make it happen, and this ritual starts when, after work the family members got to go out of their way home to personally select the best products they can find, which they will bring home, this part is annoying, but is part of the whole thing. And for the days when we don't want to cook, or want something different, meal delivery is super effective. These offering are in a middle ground with just a little value as a novelty.

cardamomo 8y ago

Given this downward trend with the rising trend of "luxury" apartments including more and more amenities, I wonder if the next new thing will be building-exclusive, fully-managed micro-farms with produce delivery directly to your fridge.

g105b 8y ago

I never understood business models like this in the first place. Those who like to cook don't have a problem buying ingredients themselves. Those who don't like cooking don't mind spending the same amount as a Blue Apron subscription to order takeaway. The target audience consists of people who would theoretically like to cook, but don't know how to read a recipe book and/or don't want to go shopping or use online grocery shopping.

Merad 8y ago
I think this is an often understated point when discussing meal services. In my experience with Blue Apron and Hello Fresh there were some good and interesting meal choices (often ethnic dishes that I hadn't tried before), but probably 50% of the menu boiled down to simple dishes like "some variation of spaghetti with salad" or "chicken breast with a simple sauce and basic veggies." People who already know how to cook are going to realize how much they're overpaying for these simple dishes, and people who learn to cook thanks to the service will come to realize it unless they avoid the grocery store entirely. Ultimately the complex/exotic dishes just aren't offered enough to offset paying $10/ small portion for the more simple dishes.
cpt1138 8y ago
At least for me personally this is a gross oversimplification. While we do like cooking, we don't like planning or shopping for ingredients. We also don't like buying a head of red cabbage and using 1/8 of it and throwing out the rest. There are jars of god knows what in the fridge that are a year old or more that were bought for 1TB of something in a recipe. Also the recipes BA does seem to me like eating in a good restaurant 3 times a week. Take out doesn't even play in the same ballpark.

noer 8y ago

(non-delivery) Food is a really tough space to compete in. Acquisition costs are relatively high and usually require you to give some amount of product away. Because you're trying to get people to switch from a known quantity (whatever someone buys to prepare themselves) or to make more time for cooking (over prepared food or food delivery), you need to make sure that first experience is excellent and hope that you're going to get a very good number of people to actually pay for the service when it isn't free. From my experience (work for an investor in and did product/acquisition/marketing for a food startup), there are very few people who will say no to a free meal, but converting those people is hard and there are a ton of variables that are hard to control for. The biggest thing that is tough to plan for is each person's taste. For example, if you pick a free meal and you don't like it will you really buy another one?

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago

Everyone I know that tried these (including myself) starts getting them piling up uncooked and rotting and cancels. A month or two of product testing would have told them this model can't succeed. After that, it was just how long can we fool the VCs?

lechiffre10 8y ago

Typical problem of "path to least resistance" which is also the reason Amazon succeeded so well by recommending products ( Netflix does the same with show recommendations) We are by nature prone to take the path that requires the least effort so Cooking vs Ordering food ( which arguably has been made a LOT easier with the likes of Postmates,foodora, Uber eats etc...) means that people will have a tendency to order food instead of cook. Especially when you consider the amount of competition among these food delivery companies and the discounts/promotions they throw at users to retain their business.

lolsal 8y ago

I have tried Blue Apron and switched over to Green Box and I really like both of them. I am a really decent cook, but I mostly cook for 2 people so the value of these services to me is the convenience of just-what-you-need serving-size bits of rarer oddities like a small hunk of a special cheese, 3 shoots of green onions, a small bunch of fresh rosemary, exactly the right amount of this sauce or that seasoning, etc. Often unless my partner and I are doubling-down on a specific ingredient for a week or more, a lot of random things end up spoiling before we can use them up. I think in the end since we're paying more for the ingredients, and generating more waste/recycling, it ends up being a wash on total consumption.

ArrayList 8y ago

Good, it's a pretty useless service. Has anyone considered, um, looking up recipes and um, going to the store, buying the stuff, and cooking?

gricardo99 8y ago

I just saw a new meal kit display at my local supermarket, which to me makes the most sense and was always going to be a huge looming threat, if not guaranteed killer, to the meal kit startups.