11 ms·

Meal Kits Have a Smaller Carbon Footprint Than Grocery Shopping, Study Says

40 points by taude 8y ago

bfrydl 8y ago
> But store meals required purchasing food in larger quantities than necessary (think a 12-pack of hamburger buns for a two-person meal). This is the key, and one of the reasons I love Blue Apron. The meals come in such exactly portioned amounts that the only thing left when I'm done eating is the packaging. There is zero food waste, ever. (Incidentally, this makes an effective weight-loss diet if your problem is overeating like me.) That being said, I wonder if Blue Apron would still come out ahead of home cooking if you did not attempt to make the same meals but instead more typical home cooked meals. Blue Apron recipes on average are more varied and have more ingredients than what a person would normally cook, so I wonder if the extra food waste is more a consequence of trying to reproduce them.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  Freezers are a thing.
  - jbob2000 8y ago
    There's an energy cost to keep food frozen for weeks or months at a time. It's common for houses to have multiple fridges and freezes, you wouldn't need to do this if food was delivered when you wanted to eat.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - lostmsu 8y ago
      Do you think many users of that service sell their fridges?
      - jbob2000 8y ago
        No, but it may prevent them from buying a second or third.
        craftyguy 8y ago
        Do you have any data on how many households have more than one fridge and more than one freezer? I cannot think of any friends/relatives (at least a few dozen people) who have multiples of both.
    - jjeaff 8y ago
      Having more stuff in your freezer actually costs less. Due to the higher thermal mass that takes longer to warm up when the freezer is off. So if more food delivery means less stuff in the freezer, it's going to take more energy. And let's be honest, no one is going to ditch their freezer entirely for something like blue apron.
      - jbob2000 8y ago
        My brother just moved into an apartment and wants to get a chest freezer so he can store more frozen food. But there's really nowhere to put it, so he has to go out grocery shopping more often then not. People who already have freezers won't ditch them, why get rid of something that works. This will be a generational change - younger generations will never get secondary freezers because they'll be big consumers of meal kits.
    - slowmovintarget 7y ago
      One good snowstorm or something else that interrupts delivery... No food for your family. Seems like it makes society more brittle. Kind of like internet everything.
craftyguy 8y ago
Blue Apron was name dropped quite a lot in that article... Who sponsored this study?
- ctulek 8y ago
  I couldn’t find anywhere including the article. NPR has a disclaimer though that one of their sponsors is Blue Apron. The research reads so weak, though. For instance, they don’t count CO2 emission caused by transportation! They just bought the same ingredients at a grocery store, cooked the same meal themselves and compared the numbers! They also assume that you eat all of the meal kit. So many assumptions, hard to replicate methods, arbitrary exclusions. Even if this was not sponsored, pretty bad “research” anyways.
  - bryanlarsen 8y ago
    From the article: "Of course, shipping meal kits to millions of households causes emissions. But these kits are delivered alongside other mail on normal routes, and the researchers found that this last stage of distribution accounted for 11% of grocery store meal emissions but only 4% for meal kits."
    - jjeaff 8y ago
      By that logic, only that one letter at the very end of the delivery route is responsible for any of the co2 emissions from package delivery. Everything else is just along for the ride, since they were going by anyway.
      - SilasX 8y ago
        Bingo! This is one of my pet peeves! If you want to accurately measure the cost of sending a package (or passenger, or data packet), for any reasonable purpose, you can't use the "just one more" test. You have to say, "what if I increased the load by a million units? Okay, the unit cost should be regarded as a millionth of that." Here's a great application of the concept when Netflix tried to use the "just one more" model: [1] >The green marketing gurus at Netflix go even further, arguing that the mail is going to be delivered to your house anyway, so the environmental cost of delivering one of their DVDs is effectively zero. ... Here, the Green Lantern feels Netflix may be overplaying its hand just a little: Eventually, the addition of new mail into the system adds up, requiring more trucks, greater strain on the mail-sorting system, and so on. Since we can’t identify the impact of one extra piece of mail, we’re better off averaging the cost of delivering the mail over each item. [1] https://slate.com/technology/2008/08/is-your-netflix-queue-destroying-the-environment.html https://slate.com/technology/2008/08/is-your-netflix-queue-d... It was discussed on HN too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414173
illegalsmile 8y ago
Ultimately changing consumer behavior and the way we shop is the way to reduce the carbon footprint and waste, not delivery food services. Even being aware that everything has an environmental cost can make a difference in how one purchases food. Eat less meat. Make delis, bakeries, butchers, etc... more available in the grocery store so instead of buying six chicken breasts you can buy two. Same for hamburger buns, go to the bakery and buy individual buns. Make grocery stores donate their food or compost it rather than throw it out. Save and more importantly eat leftovers! While obviously not for everyone, shop for a few days not a week or two. More grocery stores need to provide a local Blue Apron alternative so I can go in and pick up a few boxes with whatever else I need.
astazangasta 8y ago
The assumption that meal kits cause less food waste is dubious. This is exactly why we stopped getting Blue Apron - we found that we only ate 1 out of 3 kits we got, and our fridge would pile up with unused raw ingredients we would hope to be able to use before they spoiled. In the end we decided the combination of trash and food waste was too much and went back to groceries full time.
ricardobeat 8y ago
Still no good if you’re trading carbon emissions for a lot more plastic in the environment. You cannot offset / undo plastics.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sct202 8y ago
There are a lot of assumptions with the rate of emissions in regards to transportation to the store and food waste as result of overbuying that make this study hard to believe. Meal kits don't fully replace all your food for a week, so it is unlikely to eliminate a whole trip to the store so those emission savings that they are counting towards the meal kits are suspect. And then the waste statistics will vary heavily on the person and household characteristics. I've known people who procrastinate on making the meal kits and throw the whole thing out or let their roommates pick over whatever hasn't rotten. In addition, since some things with Blue Apron come pre-cut or picked, I wonder how the researchers measured waste at Blue Apron's kit production facilities, where some parts of the vegetables/meat aren't used in any recipe or waste from over-ordered produce. Edit: More details are here https://news.umich.edu/those-home-delivered-meal-kits-are-greener-than-you-thought-new-study-concludes/ https://news.umich.edu/those-home-delivered-meal-kits-are-gr...
- thatoneuser 7y ago
  It stands to reason that bulk preparation of these meals would lead to dramatic reduce in waste compared to individuals. It would be an obvious metric to monitor.
dzhiurgis 8y ago
What if you buy meal kit in a supermarket (common here in NZ)? I feel it's the delivery that's worst part of these. Grabbing one while you shop or on a way back from work seems genius. Ultimately these companies don't really have a moat. Most supermarkets deliver to your home or carry their own set of kits...
esotericn 8y ago
There's a whole class of article like this one that rub me the wrong way for reasons I can't quite explain. It's basically taking a theoretical "average person" who just happens to be very wasteful and extrapolating in the headline, heavily implying something which isn't actually the case. I don't waste food unless you include things like chopping the end off an onion because it could theoretically have been used in a soup. Actual waste, the sort of 'throwing away a burger' the article describes, just doesn't happen to me. Beyond that, logically a person who cares about their carbon footprint does not waste (significant amounts of) food. X is bigger than Y if you stretch X.
- c22 8y ago
  I used to be good at not wasting food until I had kids. A toddler will ask for a burger, confirm they want a burger, and then not eat any of it. Or they'll just eat the cheese. You can save it in a tupperware in the fridge and they might take a bite from it in the next few days but eventually you will have to throw it out. If you try to eat the burger the child will cry.
codinger 7y ago
Who funded the study?
corodra 7y ago
You know what this feels like? Remember that guy who was some economics professor in NYC that laid the claim that public libraries are terrible for the economy or some other nonsense and that it's best to just let Amazon sell people books instead. Plus, he roughly said something along the lines of "It'll be good for their stock price too". Remember that jackass? Feels like he's at it again. And the math and logic used in this drives me insane. It's like the same logic "Oh, it's cheaper to buy half an ounce of taco seasoning instead of a pound. The half ounce pack is only a dollar. A pound is 5 dollars." Makes me want to rip my hair out and scream.
- nwah1 7y ago
  The company that produces the meal kits can buy all the ingredients in bulk. They can portion all the ingredients perfectly so that there's no waste. They don't need to staff, light, heat, cool, and stock any stores. And you don't need to go to the store and back, which means less emissions. The argument is perfectly sensible, when we're comparing to normal cooking in American households. Maybe compared to a Mexican cookout for your whole extended family and neighborhood, it isn't as good, but that's not the most relevant comparison in a typical US context.
  - corodra 7y ago
    They can buy in bulk... unlike grocery stores? Portioning food for you at a premium because you can’t adult? Goto the store and back? Like, pick up a head of garlic, go home, then pick up carrots, go home, etc? Most folks in America do a one day shop to pick up groceries for the week. Because individually wrapped foods is so less wasteful than buying even minimal bulk. What I love about this, it’s people who never grew up poor who try to tell people how to live cheaper and frugal. It’s amazingly stupid. I grew up white trash poor. You know how you keep costs down? Buy in bulk and cut out the middle men as much as possible. Meal kit companies are another middle man with plenty of overhead both financially and environmentally. These kits typically cost $10 and I still have to cook? Most of these are of the $3 to $4 range if you buy it all yourself sensibly at the store.
    - 7y ago
gonyea 7y ago
Meal kits waste an incredible amount of plastic. Using it felt immoral.
thatoneuser 7y ago
I think people are being way too dismissive of this. There is a ton of waste that goes on getting you your groceries. Walmart is notorious for fucking small farmers by rejecting huge quantities of pre agreed on produce. Once in the store some % gets tossed out before it even gets to the inside shelves. Then you have the amount the consumer wastes. I'm not necessarily saying this is a good take because that seems like a fuck ton of plastic they use, but I could see it being overall relatively a more efficient way.
- taude 7y ago
  I'd assume that the store throwing out some of the waste before hitting shelves would likely be done by the meal prep companies too. But agree on the consumer waste
m0llusk 7y ago
It used to be that much of what was bought at a grocery would come in basic paper or plastic wrapping. Now much of my work is with residential maintenance and these meal kits are a huge problem at every level. They are huge boxes that get delivered by big trucks, but there is not enough delivery parking or storage. Then they generate a bunch of waste which is supposed to be mostly recyclable but ends up going out as one big mess of garbage with the boxes not broken down and all of the items unsorted and mixed together with wet garbage. The situation reminds me of the flushable wipes crisis that snuck up on everyone despite plenty of early warnings.

40 points by taude 8y ago

> But store meals required purchasing food in larger quantities than necessary (think a 12-pack of hamburger buns for a two-person meal). This is the key, and one of the reasons I love Blue Apron. The meals come in such exactly portioned amounts that the only thing left when I'm done eating is the packaging. There is zero food waste, ever. (Incidentally, this makes an effective weight-loss diet if your problem is overeating like me.) That being said, I wonder if Blue Apron would still come out ahead of home cooking if you did not attempt to make the same meals but instead more typical home cooked meals. Blue Apron recipes on average are more varied and have more ingredients than what a person would normally cook, so I wonder if the extra food waste is more a consequence of trying to reproduce them.

craftyguy 8y ago
Freezers are a thing.
- jbob2000 8y ago
  There's an energy cost to keep food frozen for weeks or months at a time. It's common for houses to have multiple fridges and freezes, you wouldn't need to do this if food was delivered when you wanted to eat.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - lostmsu 8y ago
    Do you think many users of that service sell their fridges?
    - jbob2000 8y ago
      No, but it may prevent them from buying a second or third.
      - craftyguy 8y ago
        Do you have any data on how many households have more than one fridge and more than one freezer? I cannot think of any friends/relatives (at least a few dozen people) who have multiples of both.
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    Having more stuff in your freezer actually costs less. Due to the higher thermal mass that takes longer to warm up when the freezer is off. So if more food delivery means less stuff in the freezer, it's going to take more energy. And let's be honest, no one is going to ditch their freezer entirely for something like blue apron.
    - jbob2000 8y ago
      My brother just moved into an apartment and wants to get a chest freezer so he can store more frozen food. But there's really nowhere to put it, so he has to go out grocery shopping more often then not. People who already have freezers won't ditch them, why get rid of something that works. This will be a generational change - younger generations will never get secondary freezers because they'll be big consumers of meal kits.
  - slowmovintarget 7y ago
    One good snowstorm or something else that interrupts delivery... No food for your family. Seems like it makes society more brittle. Kind of like internet everything.

craftyguy 8y ago

Blue Apron was name dropped quite a lot in that article... Who sponsored this study?

ctulek 8y ago
I couldn’t find anywhere including the article. NPR has a disclaimer though that one of their sponsors is Blue Apron. The research reads so weak, though. For instance, they don’t count CO2 emission caused by transportation! They just bought the same ingredients at a grocery store, cooked the same meal themselves and compared the numbers! They also assume that you eat all of the meal kit. So many assumptions, hard to replicate methods, arbitrary exclusions. Even if this was not sponsored, pretty bad “research” anyways.
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  From the article: "Of course, shipping meal kits to millions of households causes emissions. But these kits are delivered alongside other mail on normal routes, and the researchers found that this last stage of distribution accounted for 11% of grocery store meal emissions but only 4% for meal kits."
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    By that logic, only that one letter at the very end of the delivery route is responsible for any of the co2 emissions from package delivery. Everything else is just along for the ride, since they were going by anyway.
    - SilasX 8y ago
      Bingo! This is one of my pet peeves! If you want to accurately measure the cost of sending a package (or passenger, or data packet), for any reasonable purpose, you can't use the "just one more" test. You have to say, "what if I increased the load by a million units? Okay, the unit cost should be regarded as a millionth of that." Here's a great application of the concept when Netflix tried to use the "just one more" model: [1] >The green marketing gurus at Netflix go even further, arguing that the mail is going to be delivered to your house anyway, so the environmental cost of delivering one of their DVDs is effectively zero. ... Here, the Green Lantern feels Netflix may be overplaying its hand just a little: Eventually, the addition of new mail into the system adds up, requiring more trucks, greater strain on the mail-sorting system, and so on. Since we can’t identify the impact of one extra piece of mail, we’re better off averaging the cost of delivering the mail over each item. [1] https://slate.com/technology/2008/08/is-your-netflix-queue-destroying-the-environment.html https://slate.com/technology/2008/08/is-your-netflix-queue-d... It was discussed on HN too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414173

illegalsmile 8y ago

Ultimately changing consumer behavior and the way we shop is the way to reduce the carbon footprint and waste, not delivery food services. Even being aware that everything has an environmental cost can make a difference in how one purchases food. Eat less meat. Make delis, bakeries, butchers, etc... more available in the grocery store so instead of buying six chicken breasts you can buy two. Same for hamburger buns, go to the bakery and buy individual buns. Make grocery stores donate their food or compost it rather than throw it out. Save and more importantly eat leftovers! While obviously not for everyone, shop for a few days not a week or two. More grocery stores need to provide a local Blue Apron alternative so I can go in and pick up a few boxes with whatever else I need.

astazangasta 8y ago

The assumption that meal kits cause less food waste is dubious. This is exactly why we stopped getting Blue Apron - we found that we only ate 1 out of 3 kits we got, and our fridge would pile up with unused raw ingredients we would hope to be able to use before they spoiled. In the end we decided the combination of trash and food waste was too much and went back to groceries full time.

ricardobeat 8y ago

Still no good if you’re trading carbon emissions for a lot more plastic in the environment. You cannot offset / undo plastics.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

sct202 8y ago

There are a lot of assumptions with the rate of emissions in regards to transportation to the store and food waste as result of overbuying that make this study hard to believe. Meal kits don't fully replace all your food for a week, so it is unlikely to eliminate a whole trip to the store so those emission savings that they are counting towards the meal kits are suspect. And then the waste statistics will vary heavily on the person and household characteristics. I've known people who procrastinate on making the meal kits and throw the whole thing out or let their roommates pick over whatever hasn't rotten. In addition, since some things with Blue Apron come pre-cut or picked, I wonder how the researchers measured waste at Blue Apron's kit production facilities, where some parts of the vegetables/meat aren't used in any recipe or waste from over-ordered produce. Edit: More details are here https://news.umich.edu/those-home-delivered-meal-kits-are-greener-than-you-thought-new-study-concludes/ https://news.umich.edu/those-home-delivered-meal-kits-are-gr...

thatoneuser 7y ago
It stands to reason that bulk preparation of these meals would lead to dramatic reduce in waste compared to individuals. It would be an obvious metric to monitor.

dzhiurgis 8y ago

What if you buy meal kit in a supermarket (common here in NZ)? I feel it's the delivery that's worst part of these. Grabbing one while you shop or on a way back from work seems genius. Ultimately these companies don't really have a moat. Most supermarkets deliver to your home or carry their own set of kits...

esotericn 8y ago

There's a whole class of article like this one that rub me the wrong way for reasons I can't quite explain. It's basically taking a theoretical "average person" who just happens to be very wasteful and extrapolating in the headline, heavily implying something which isn't actually the case. I don't waste food unless you include things like chopping the end off an onion because it could theoretically have been used in a soup. Actual waste, the sort of 'throwing away a burger' the article describes, just doesn't happen to me. Beyond that, logically a person who cares about their carbon footprint does not waste (significant amounts of) food. X is bigger than Y if you stretch X.

c22 8y ago
I used to be good at not wasting food until I had kids. A toddler will ask for a burger, confirm they want a burger, and then not eat any of it. Or they'll just eat the cheese. You can save it in a tupperware in the fridge and they might take a bite from it in the next few days but eventually you will have to throw it out. If you try to eat the burger the child will cry.

codinger 7y ago

Who funded the study?

corodra 7y ago

You know what this feels like? Remember that guy who was some economics professor in NYC that laid the claim that public libraries are terrible for the economy or some other nonsense and that it's best to just let Amazon sell people books instead. Plus, he roughly said something along the lines of "It'll be good for their stock price too". Remember that jackass? Feels like he's at it again. And the math and logic used in this drives me insane. It's like the same logic "Oh, it's cheaper to buy half an ounce of taco seasoning instead of a pound. The half ounce pack is only a dollar. A pound is 5 dollars." Makes me want to rip my hair out and scream.

nwah1 7y ago
The company that produces the meal kits can buy all the ingredients in bulk. They can portion all the ingredients perfectly so that there's no waste. They don't need to staff, light, heat, cool, and stock any stores. And you don't need to go to the store and back, which means less emissions. The argument is perfectly sensible, when we're comparing to normal cooking in American households. Maybe compared to a Mexican cookout for your whole extended family and neighborhood, it isn't as good, but that's not the most relevant comparison in a typical US context.
- corodra 7y ago
  They can buy in bulk... unlike grocery stores? Portioning food for you at a premium because you can’t adult? Goto the store and back? Like, pick up a head of garlic, go home, then pick up carrots, go home, etc? Most folks in America do a one day shop to pick up groceries for the week. Because individually wrapped foods is so less wasteful than buying even minimal bulk. What I love about this, it’s people who never grew up poor who try to tell people how to live cheaper and frugal. It’s amazingly stupid. I grew up white trash poor. You know how you keep costs down? Buy in bulk and cut out the middle men as much as possible. Meal kit companies are another middle man with plenty of overhead both financially and environmentally. These kits typically cost $10 and I still have to cook? Most of these are of the $3 to $4 range if you buy it all yourself sensibly at the store.
  - 7y ago

gonyea 7y ago

Meal kits waste an incredible amount of plastic. Using it felt immoral.

thatoneuser 7y ago

I think people are being way too dismissive of this. There is a ton of waste that goes on getting you your groceries. Walmart is notorious for fucking small farmers by rejecting huge quantities of pre agreed on produce. Once in the store some % gets tossed out before it even gets to the inside shelves. Then you have the amount the consumer wastes. I'm not necessarily saying this is a good take because that seems like a fuck ton of plastic they use, but I could see it being overall relatively a more efficient way.

taude 7y ago
I'd assume that the store throwing out some of the waste before hitting shelves would likely be done by the meal prep companies too. But agree on the consumer waste

m0llusk 7y ago

It used to be that much of what was bought at a grocery would come in basic paper or plastic wrapping. Now much of my work is with residential maintenance and these meal kits are a huge problem at every level. They are huge boxes that get delivered by big trucks, but there is not enough delivery parking or storage. Then they generate a bunch of waste which is supposed to be mostly recyclable but ends up going out as one big mess of garbage with the boxes not broken down and all of the items unsorted and mixed together with wet garbage. The situation reminds me of the flushable wipes crisis that snuck up on everyone despite plenty of early warnings.