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Always seemed a strange business model. Appealing to people who "want to cook", but doing so by turning yourself into a production-line assembler. Like saying your want to learn carpentry, by buying some Ikea flat-pack.

What confused me (and makes me think I've overlooked something) is why nothing more interesting has come along from the supermarkets. In the UK at least, they're all online and deliver - but they all seem to stick to "buy your ingredients and we'll deliver them". I'd quite enjoy one that let you browse recipes and would stick all the ingredients in your basket - but then added some intelligence. e.g. You add the "roast chicken weekend meal" to your cart, and it asks "are you going to eat all that chicken?" For £5 extra would you like to add some bacon, creme-fraiche, tarragon, frozen-pastry & peas to enable you to make a lovely pie on Monday? Or asks "what's in your fridge" - here are some recipes and prices for things to use it up? Could even add some intelligence - I don't like mushrooms, so when recommending a chicken pie and providing a recipe, switches something else into my basket & recipe (leeks are lovely). Or would further adjust the recipe - you said you needed to feed 8 at the weekend, so I picked the larger lump of meat, and have adjusted the cooking time in the recipe. Or "Do you own a pressure cooker, a freezer and have 2 hours free this weekend to batch cook some chilli" Or... basically Blue Apron and the rest seem to be trying to solve a real problem, completely the wrong way.

I think the biggest problem for me as a single person is the way most stuff sold in supermarkets is designed for family meals. Which is fair, families probably represent a significant portion of their customer base.

But it becomes problematic for me because I either have to eat the same meal 4 days in a row (or freeze it) or only use half of the ingredients and shove the rest in the cupboard, or throw it away because its perishable

I wouldn't mind a service that works out a set of meals you can make for the week that makes the best use of ingredients (minimises waste) and brings some variety.

I suspect the economics don't work out on it though

> Appealing to people who "want to cook", but doing so by turning yourself into a production-line assembler. Like saying your want to learn carpentry, by buying some Ikea flat-pack.

That's not a great analogy. It was far more than assembly...with Ikea products, you don't cut the wood to size, or carve joints, or even use glue. With Blue Apron and the other in this space, you do everything except the shopping. so you will learn how to handle a knife, different cooking techniques, etc.

The real value add was in removing the need for keeping a stocked pantry and doing grocery shopping. Many recipes used ingredients that it was inconvenient or impossible to buy in small quantities, or that were hard to find at a standard megamart.

Still too much work!

How about you give me a list of meals, I pick 50 or 100 of them, and then you give me a shopping list for the month including where to get it at the best price, taking advantage of bulk purchasing and overlapping ingredients. Then email/text/notify me every day with the recipe for dinner that night. I'll keep the left overs and use them for lunches.

This should minimize time for planning and cost of meals, two things Blue Apron largely fails to do.

It'd also be nice if I could get a further notification asking me how long it took me to prepare, so the service can get an idea for how long it takes me to cook and help me plan dinners accordingly - maybe giving me faster alternative alongside the normal dinner plan.

I really enjoyed Blue Apron. For a very long time I wanted to learn to cook, but didn't know where to start, and cookbooks where always intimidating because they usually assumed you already knew how to cook.

Blue Apron doesn't assume any of that.

I also liked the idea of "cooking good food", but for me it was a case of not knowing what good food was. With Blue Apron sending me tasty meals to make, I was able to learn by example about what worked and what I liked.

I thought it was great. I eventually cancelled though, once I was just cooking on my own entirely.

Tbf, I have done one of those boxes(Hello Fresh) for nearly 2 years and I has absolutely definitely taught me how to cook, purely through repeated experience. It goes beyond being able to follow a recipe - after cooking nearly 500 meals I have enough experience to make delicious meals without looking at timers or measuring everything down to a gram.

Plus, each meal works out much cheaper than eating out. So for me personally this was money extremely well spent. I also live in the UK.

You make a good point that Blue Apron only teaches you how to assemble ingredients, but not to shop for them. They are two separate skills. But most people who don't know how to cook are bad at both, and Blue Apron gets rid of one of the highest friction parts and lets people dive right into the actual cooking part of, well, cooking.

Getting people unafraid of assembling ingredients and heating food and cleaning after is a good first step. If you didn't grow up cooking and shopping and cleaning, there's a lot to mentally unpack before you make a meal. If you have no basis for how to plan anything ("Would you like to add extra meat for $5") extra options quickly get confusing.

>"are you going to eat all that chicken?" For £5 extra would you like to add some bacon, creme-fraiche, tarragon, frozen-pastry & peas to enable you to make a lovely pie on Monday? Or asks "what's in your fridge" - here are some recipes and prices for things to use it up?

The fact that Blue Apron doesn't really do that is why I cancelled my subscription. I hated the way they would send all these tiny single-use things. Too much plastic and too much food waste.

Rather than sending me kits, I would prefer if they would essentially do my shopping for me. Planning meals and ensuring I have the right ingredients on hand is annoying and I would love some help with it. But I don't need all the ingredients in one box.

Kroger is starting to do these meal kits. They are within 5 feet of the door and serve two, and all cook in 20 minutes.

I just don't get the point, though. I can move past the box and into the Kroger, using the box as a shopping list, and buy the exact same ingredients for half the price, only now I must spend 5 minutes dicing a tomato instead of slicing open a plastic bag containing diced tomato.

The best way to get quicker in the kitchen is to cook with common ingredients, and prep things in tandem. Keeping your cooking within a certain cultural palate is a good way to limit the amount of different fresh ingredients you need to maintain, and simplify your cooking.

I work in this space, so I may have some insight. The short answer is sort of tautological or whatever the term is: Nobody is doing the recipe thing because nobody does the recipe thing.

Think about it this way: Amazon has how many billions of dollars? And they haven't done the recipe thing yet... why? The answer is probably simpler than you think: that's not how consumers choose what to buy [in sufficient quantities to make unit economics positive].

Your reasoning as to why Blue Apron's model is weird is spot on: it's weird because that's not how consumers actually shop and cook. If they did, it wouldn't be weird and Blue Apron would be doing much better.

You have just described a value-add B2B SaaS; offers integration into existing retailer's online shopping portals.

If this doesn't exist, give it six months and it will. If you want to try and swing something like this and need an extra set of hands, my email is in my profile.

There's a lot of innovation opportunity, some of which you already noted. Some chains are already doing it, but most aren't. The most basic service that most aren't doing is curbside pickup. That's the biggest missed opportunity. I'd never go anywhere else. Most grocery stores that I've seen doing that offer it for free. Add in a delivery option for a charge and you take a massive chunk out of Amazon Fresh's market, and I'd put more faith in a local supermarket than the online model of Walmart.

Agreed on the meal plan delivery services. I tried one of them and it was horrible. They have cheap, small portions of ingredients, and even left out ingredients when I used them. Probably out of stock, and didn't want to refund my sale and have even more oddball ingredients leftover. They were unapologetic.

Worse yet, they're rather tasteless if you actually know how to cook. My wife is beyond most chefs because she grew up in a Latin country. A Latin person who grew up in the kitchen with mom and grandma is pretty much the best place to get food in the world.

You could write an algorithm for everything, someone from a culinary culture will never be duplicated or surpassed in our lifetimes. You'd need a hell of a finely-tuned general purpose robot to taste test your food and adjust a recipe to your tastes as a human can.

There are a number of apps and web sites that do what you ask. My favorite one (from the old iPhone days, now discontinued) would let you input the ingredients you have on hand, and it would suggest what you can make with them.

They seem to come and go. I think the problem for a supermarket to adopt something like this is that you can use it to make a list using one market's superior app, then do your actual shopping at another market.

Have you never seen Tesco Real Food? https://realfood.tesco.com/recipes/vegan-shepherds-pie.html - hit the "shop ingredients" button and it'll offer to add the relevant ingredients to your online shopping basket.
> Appealing to people who "want to cook", but doing so by turning yourself into a production-line assembler.

That's because you ignore the true reason why it's interesting. I got 800 games on Steam but when goes time to play, god it's awful. Never had this issue before having that many games. Recipes suffer from the choice overload.

Personally I also love it to try new ingredients. When it's part of a full meal, some ingredients "scare" me less.

> Like saying your want to learn carpentry, by buying some Ikea flat-pack.

No holes were predrilled in the yu choy I got in my recipes yesterday. It would be closer to get a few boards that you have to cut/trim/drill yourself, which as far as I know, seems to be a great way to learn.

> I'd quite enjoy one that let you browse recipes and would stick all the ingredients in your basket - but then added some intelligence.

It's weird but I don't trust my supermarket to offer me great recipes. I trust them to offer me food, but not great recipes. Even more so considering their goals is to sell food, not sell recipes.

> Or asks "what's in your fridge"

I agree but this always come down to the laziness out of me. Lazy me can easily click on an image that seems like a great meal, but way less on a adding every single things I may have in my fridge.

> Blue Apron and the rest seem to be trying to solve a real problem, completely the wrong way.

I personally think you just don't really understands whats the real problem.

> For £5 extra would you like to add some bacon, creme-fraiche, tarragon, frozen-pastry & peas

Is food really cheap in the UK? This would be impossible in the US, the tarragon alone could cost half that.

Every super market in NZ sells the kind of kit that Blue Apron et al delivers. So basically Blue Apron does just delivery.

That said I've never bought the kit there - they seem to be the same for weeks.

it wasn't strange to me that they packing ingredients to prepare at home, what was strange is trying to get by on an idea easily replicated by businesses local and with a more direct connection to the same customer.

there was nothing blue apron or similar really was able to do to set themselves apart from what a grocery chain could do, less even.

A friend of mine is actually trying to implement the intelligence you described. We’re also based in the U.K.
I've seen meal kits in stores here in the Boston area, Wegman's I think.
All of that boils down to 'looking up a recipe, buying ingredients, and cooking them' :) i.e. the hassle we want to avoid.

I do agree however, that grocery stores will own this category.

Reasons it's not happening yet:

1) Grocery store chains tend to not be very innovative

2) The 'behaviour' of such things is still maybe niche. Most people will take the 'pre cooked'. It's like books: few people actually read.

3) My bet is that small, local providers like Blue Apron end up proving such things. Some of them will grow, but mostly we'll see a lot of players and a lot of brands, just like everything else in food.

Blue Apron is a rational premise, just not quite sticky enough for the price.

After 10 years of marriage, my wife thought it would be helpful for me to start cooking, as she was getting stressed out with our 2 years old.

We used Blue Apron as the starting point.

I can't tell you how much time we save in planning meals and trips to the store. My wife doesn't have nag me about what I what I want for the week's dinner. The quality of the food and the time saved is well worth the price. I know there are some disadvantages about Blue Apron such as waste, carbon food print etc...

Cooking with Blue Apron is now extremely relaxing for me as I cook and just tune into NPR or teach my son to cook. Out of 100 meals I would say that we only had maybe one that was mediocre.

I suspect Blue Apron will survive as it will probably be taken over or bought out. It's kinda the leader of the pack and the market will eventually consolidate. It also helps that I might have helped I bought about $1000 discounted gift cards at Costco.

"Securities traded on a national stock exchange, regardless of price, are exempt from regulatory designation as a penny stock"[1]

Blue Apron is on the NYSE

[1]"SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION 17 CFR Part 240" https://www.sec.gov/rules/final/34-51983.pdf

I feel like grocery stores could easily compete with blue apron for much lower costs. Just ration the food they already have in stock in little packages. Charge a little more than you would otherwise for the employees time picking recipes and combining them into the packages. I would happily use this service at local grocery stores. But compared to grocery stores and cooking from scratch blue apron is too expensive for me.

edit: Blue apron is currently $7.50 - $9.99 per serving. I cook delicious food for myself regularly for less than $4 per serving if I make enough to have leftovers for a day or two. It really seems to me that grocery stores could eat blue apron alive with their lowered costs to provide this same service.

I recently subscribed to a different box service, which does all the food prep work for you (chopping/dicing/slicing, making sauces). It generally takes us 20-30 minutes less to prep, cook and clean over Blue Apron. IMO this is the main value prop Blue Apron is missing.

For me, Blue Apron is really only solving for time spent looking up a recipe. In most cases, I'm already going to the grocery store each week. So, where's the value in spending $80/week? If you can shave off the time I spend in the kitchen, that's what I want to pay for. I suspect most people subscribe, love the new recipes they would typically pass over from the internet. And then a month in realize "I'm not saving any time by doing this... I don't want to spend an hour or more in the kitchen tonight... Let's just get take out.".

Aside from that, Blue Apron's fulfillment execution is very wonky. Missing/Bad/Broken ingredients, late boxes (which spoil if not delivered timely), and excessive packing.

Thanks to inflation, penny stocks are now stocks that trade under $5.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pennystock.asp

Also, penny stocks tend to be fairly illiquid with very marginal market cap and tend to trade on OTC/pink sheets and not on major stock exchanges.

So blue apron is penny stockish, but not quite there yet. We'll have to see if NYSE gives Blue Apron the boot.

Blue Apron is a perfect example of a company that has no moat. Anyone could compete with them -- other delivery startups, Amazon, grocery stores, etc.

There is also no obstacle to Blue Apron customers jumping ship to a competitor. That contributes to making a moat impossible, but it also means Blue Apron and services like it are probably going to be commoditized and forced into a race to the bottom on prices, so I wouldn't expect their future profit margins to be very good.

The only way Blue Apron can differentiate itself is by offering better recipes and better customer service than its competitors. But their competitors can easily become equally good at those things.

Overall it's not a good investment because even if the business manages to survive, it won't be able to make very much money for its shareholders. I guess you could buy the shares cheap and hope Blue Apron will be acquired.

Maybe we're seeing now that burning up hundreds of millions in VC cash to try to acquire users with free meals isn't really a viable business model? After being annoyed hearing them on every podcast I ever listened to for awhile, I signed up for the sole purpose of getting free meals, nothing else. I have a grocery store a mile from my house, I don't need a startup sending me food to cook. I did enjoy the free meals, though! Thank you VCs!
Somewhat OT but do any of these services let you opt into deliveries rather than opt out? As someone who might consider trying out a few meals now and then on a week when I'm not traveling/busy, the menus look appealing, etc. I'd be potentially interested. But I don't want to have to be constantly opting out and/or canceling my subscription (which I'm sure would get messed up sooner or later). It really is a dark pattern that makes me even less likely to use any of these services than I otherwise would.
As someone who's very un-knowledgeable about the stock market - is there something special about the $1 mark? Isn't it arbitrary how the total market value of the company is divided into individual shares?
I once worked for their biggest competitor - HelloFresh - as a door-to-door salesperson and I have to say... the way we were told to pitch to potential customers was terrible. We were told to sign up the customer and then then opt-out of delivery for a period of 5 weeks so the customer forgets that they’re still subscribed. The salespeople - mostly ~20 year olds - were also heavily exploited and the wages and commissions not paid. I’m lucky I got out quick because otherwise they pressure you to stay because most of your colleagues become your friends and they then peer pressure you...

I’ll assume it’s quite similar to BlueApron... but I don’t know for sure...

I thought about doing some subscription cooking service before but I recently joined the New York Times free 6 month trial and I didn't know/expect how useful their recipe section is. Takes most of the anxiety of choosing what to cook. For those who know how to cook, I highly recommend trying it out and following their weekly/daily suggestions. With this and the grocery delivery services, it doesn't make financial sense to join subscription food services. Though admittedly, I was taught how to cook at a young age so it's easier for me to follow the recipes.
Honestly, it's just a lame business model.

It's sort of like when you see the college kid who doesn't know how to do laundry. It's amusing, but even the most inept and lazy individual doesn't need alot of time to learn how to fold pants. In the food space, if you have the money to have pre-packaged groceries fedexed to your home to save time... why wouldn't you just get takeout?

My wife did a personal chef business with a friend when she got out of school. They would cook meals for dentists and doctors and deliver it. The most insane customers even had clean silverware and plates delivered, and one asked paid a 5x markup for them to go to Williams Sonoma and buy a fully outfitted fancy Thanksgiving dinner, with place settings and all. (ie. "Make it look like the catalog, please")

Blue Apron appeals to some middle ground of harried people, but the customer isn't rich enough to pay a wacky markup for burgers and isn't getting enough done to save a ton of time!

While I enjoyed the trial, the food was great, and the freezer packs they ship with the food have found a new life keeping things in my cooler nice and cold, i can't say that i'm surprised at all. Cancelling the service required jumping through numerous hoops, ultimately requiring me to call them to cancel.
I love Blue Apron but get how they are not exactly profitable. Almost every single week they leave an item out of my box and the customer support resolution is to credit my account $40... for like a $3 head of broccoli. I am not complaining obviously, but yeah, fix the missing ingredients.
Hello Fresh is down ~48% since its IPO in July. In that same period, Blue Apron is down ~70%. Blue Apron is doing even worse than the competitors.
How well is papa Murphy’s doing? I found it really odd that I get the ingredients home and then cook again. Now Blue Apron is just making a generic company out of the papa Murphy model. I don’t find it attractive. When I saw that they are going public it just felt like a way to cash out of their short term popularity.
I stopped using blue apron because I can't stand having a subscription to everything. I travel with some frequency and it's just a hassle to have to plan that ahead. All I want to do is order a box for next week without thinking about when I can cancel again for the following week.
When the economy goes down, the first thing we stop spending money on is luxury stuff. See it as a sign.
I considered trying one of these but I realized I'm not going to get all my at-home meals (or any drinks, snacks, paper towels, etc.) from them. Which means I'm still making a weekly trip to the grocery store. So where's the convenience?
Blue Apron customer here, family of two, three meals a week for the past two years.

I like BA a lot, but I don't see anything about BA that is unique to them. There's probably 5 other options in my area. I stick with BA largely due to momentum.

For those curious:

Pros:

- No food waste. Grocery shopping inevitably resulted in large amounts of food getting tossed due to expiration (or even space concerns).

- "Forced" variety. I have had a _ton_ of meals and ingredients I would have never gotten if I wasn't doing BA. Things I've never heard of and wouldn't know to ask for. Now that I know of them, I bring them into some of my non-BA cooking too. Part of this is just just breaking habits. Before BA there were about 10 meals I was making a lot - I liked them I know how, etc., this meant I was only eating the ingredients in these meals which was probably not "complete nutrition."

- Learning a few "tricks." While the actual BA meals are cook by numbers, the specific steps often contain general purpose info. Random example: Before BA I never cooked with garlic, just never thought of it, but most BA meals use it. Now I use more garlic when I cook non-BA meals.

- Portion control. If I cook from a supermarket (and buy in super market portions) I inevitably make more than a meal, and inevitably _eat_ more than a meal. BA means I make and eat the suggested amount.

- No grocery shopping. I'm not a big fan of shopping and my wife hates grocery shopping, not having to do it is a plus.

- Less eating out. BA isn't cheap, but it's cheaper than most restaurants I'd go to. Having already paid for BA meals encourages eating them at home.

- Fast. The food isn't easier to prepare and certainly doesn't cook faster, but having exactly the right ingredients all together means I don't have to spend time assembling (or googling alternatives when I realize I forgot something).

- Fun. I look cooking, and I like BA cooking. Probably not for everyone, but there you have it.

Cons:

- Not cheap.

- Bummer when you don't like the meal. (Rare, but it happens.) Worse when you _know you're not going to like it_ but it was you're only option. Example: The texture of kale bugs me and sometimes you can't get a meal without it.

- Doesn't scale for guests.

Note: I don't buy the argument that BA packaging is bad. It's almost all recyclable. But I live in an area that makes recycling pretty easy so that might not be generalizable.

APRN's Q3 filings are ominous-- although margins are decent at 33%, they've never been profitable and their customer base decreased 25% Sept. 2017 to Sept. 2018.
Loved it but quality problems continued to rise. Quality consistency is core to customer retention.
Just reverse split: less shares, same market cap = higher price. wow no more penny stock status
Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, Plated, and all the other food prep deliver services are a hack. A disgusting, wasteful hack.

Calling someone using Blue Apron a cook is like calling someone doing a "paint by numbers" a painter. I'm not trying to be a cooking snob but I get really sick of people praising BA/Plated/etc as some amazing concept or a huge time saver. It's neither, it's for people who want food delivery (as in UberEats, Grubhub, etc) with extra steps.