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.

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

https://www.heb.com/static-page/meal-simple

I buy at least 3-4 of them a week because they're perfect for a single person who wants to eat in and maybe not prep as much but still wants a wide variety of meals to eat.

Even if I plot and plan to use all my cilantro in 3 days, all my arugula in 1 week, power through 3 bananas a day during my bunch's window of opportunity, I can still end up going out for dinner which throws everything out of schedule. Or maybe I forgot to pull out the chicken out of the freezer and into the marinade this morning, so there is now no point in cooking if I need to wait 2+ hours after I get home for my bird to thaw and flavor.

Mushrooms: place in a brown bag in the refrigerator. They will last more than a week. They slowly dry up and can be rehydrated like dried mushrooms.

Bananas: when they are about to ripen place in the refrigerator. The skin will turn brown and look miserable but the inside will be just fine. You'll gain two or three days more time to eat them.

Arugula,spinach and other salad greens: Put the leftovers in your lunch bag and snack at work.

I struggle with cheese - olive oil can work but it's awkward.

Fresh herbs I agree. It's one reason I tend to grow them. [ADDED: There are also a lot of frozen and freeze dried options these days that I often take advantage of.]

There are lots of meats you can pull out of the freezer and put in some water for 30 minutes or so.

I'm actually sympathetic to your basic point but it's just not something I find to be a huge problem.

Ah, so you're one of those people. Don't you realize you're condemning those poor banana bunches to an ignominous death in the dumpster? Nobody's going to buy a bunch with an uneven number on bananas. :(

Being serious though, I don't think you're violating any major taboo. I see people do the same thing all the time. You're actually performing a public service for all those people who want fewer bananas but are afraid to split the bunches themselves.

Older simpler technology makes for some good habits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_dehydrator

There was also a learning curve to preparing food for just myself to consume. The priorities are different from the family household I grew up in, so much of what I had learned didn't apply very well unmodified, to my adult life.

Families make the costly perishable ingredients go further by utilizing carbohydrates like pastas and breads as fillers.

I now make many of the same dishes I grew up eating, but without the pasta or bread, which I've entirely stopped purchasing to the very clear benefit of my health/weight.

When you dispense with the fillers, it's a lot easier to consume the perishable ingredients in one or two meals.

It definitely seemed strange at first to eat things like lentil or chicken soup or a meat ragu with pork ribs sans pasta or bread. But once acclimated, the recipes have changed a bit to be less liquidy while more meaty/beany with more veggies where applicable, and are very tasty and nutritious. It's basically decadence, and healthier than eating all the carbs.

As do many restaurants. I've (not very originally) joked that Tapas is Spanish for expensive and appetizers generally often seem pricey for the size of the portion. There are various reasons for this including the fact that there's a certain overhead to an individual order.

But it's also the case that typical main dishes tend to have a fair bit of "filler" that tapas/appetizers do not. At good restaurants, the rice or potatoes (or vegetables) may be nicely and even somewhat exotically prepared but the raw ingredients cost very little compared to the protein.

There's a few more features I need to add before I'd consider it MVP level and but it's getting close.

http://cookmatic.co

Basically you can paste in recipe URLs (so far only supports seriouseats and bonappetit) it parses the ingredient list and generates a shopping list combining everything you need to make all the recipes).

Future features include adjusting the portion size to scale up and down and combining recipes in a manner that minimizes ingredient waste when shopping

My meals are a bit repetitive (I often make, as you note, the same meal for four days) but that makes my life easier. But what has amazed me is it really doesn't take long to make the kind of meals I like to eat -- often 30 minutes an almost always less than 60. I can't be bothered making fancy sauces and the like, so I eat healthier than I probably ever have in my life. It's really a great deal to feed myself for four days for only a few bucks and for not much more time per meal than it would have taken to heat up a premade package.

Even my gf and her kids like my cooking which astonishes me.

I live in Palo Alto so can use the BBQ year round -- BBQ and Instant pot account for a lot of my cooking.

Dude. Leftovers. I used to make a couple of family-sized meals on the weekend to have for lunch and dinner throughout the week. I’d also dine out 2-3 times a week to mix it up a bit.

But it becomes problematic for me because I either have to eat the same meal 4 days in a row...

"Lunch and dinner throughout the week" is not what parent is looking for.

> I’d also dine out 2-3 times a week to mix it up a bit.

http://www.iamnotastalker.com/2011/06/28/the-father-of-the-b...

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.

I don’t understand the whole shopping part, it would seem to be pretty clear to me that any place that is serviced by Blue Apron should have a service for groceries to be delivered as well, in fact it’s highly unlikely that they won’t.

I order all my groceries online in London, primarily been using Ocado but Amazon has also now has much wider offering with Amazon Fresh since they offer their own, Morrisons and Planet Ogranic goods.

Every large supermarket chain here offers a delivery service, it also doesn’t cost anything extra but there is usually a minimum (usually £50) for that.

Many of them even would unpack the bags for you if you ask them.

If you really want to go to the recipe route then Ocado and many other groceries delivery services also do that so you can select a meal and how many people and they’ll add the ingredients for you to your shopping bag.

To me this seems a much better solution and service than Blue Apron.

Did you ever try one of these services? Because that's the opposite of our experience. My wife is the cook in our family, and she loved it. She learned by example...seeing the quantities, getting an understanding of how to handle ingredients, practicing different cooking techniques, different variations, different flavors, etc., etc., etc...

Not only that, but we didn't get every meal from the service...she used what she learned to really branch out and make all kinds of things she never would have attempted in the past.

We always knew we were paying a premium for the convenience and variety, but it's a trade-off a lot of busy families are willing to make. It allowed us to prepare something at home instead of getting fast food or going to a restaurant, which would have been even more expensive.

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.

The planning is week by week, and it doesn't have a best price thing, but it does pretty much everything else (recepies in app, you can tell it ahead of time you prefer to eat leftovers for lunch, each recipe has a prepare & cook time and asks for feed back). Also, it can send all the ingredient to Instacart in a single click, if that's your thing.

It's really changed the way I eat. I went from eating out for lunch and dinner almost every day, to cooking at home pretty much every night.

Everything was laid out for you, what to buy, the order to prep and cook, and in one weekend you'd have everything ready for a month's worth of meals

Learn to make half-a-dozen simple dishes from memory. Pasta with meat sauce. Simple dishes with chicken, pork, fish, or beef, and vegetables. Stuff you can throw together with basic staple ingredients, minimal prep work, and minimal utensils. This makes shopping easier and minimizes time to prepare meals.

Avoid kitchen gadgets. They are just an extra thing to clean and you'll rarely use them. Have a few good knives, a couple of cutting/prep boards, and a basic set of pots and pans and utensils and stick to recipies that work with that.

May I nominate one exception: a pressure cooker. This includes plug-in electric like the Breville Fast Slow Cooker. If you are able to chop carrots, you can make endless variety of stews, casseroles, soups and curries with straightforward recipes, minimal complexity, short cook times and not too much cleaning up afterwards. And they're the sort of dishes that make great leftovers.

They spent so much on advertising and promotions without improving their product offering.

Just come to my apartment and feed me like a baby bird.

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.

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.

I just got 2 free boxes from Missfresh (seems local to where I live) and Goodfood. I tried my first yesterday and god I wish it was worth it to keep doing because they shown me that I actually can cook something amazingly good. However I didn't expected to keep buying theses boxes because they are so incredibly expensive, 10$ CAD per portion is starting to be pretty close to a restaurant (a cheap one but still a restaurant).

Have you really did the math to confirm this? Is the UK that much more expensive in terms of food? HelloFresh in the UK does seems cheaper at £ 4.20 / meal but still I just can't believe feeding 1 person would cost 430$ CAD per month where you live.

But that of course is eating out. I can cook a dinner for two for less than £8, no problem - but it's not as far as you'd think. Like, super simple meals:

1) chicken breasts(£3) + pack of mushrooms(£1) + parsley(£0.80) + cream(£1) = £5.80

2) pork/beef mince(£3) + chopped tomatoes(£0.50) + celery(£1) + carrots(£1) = £5.50

3) beef mince(£3) + chopped tomatoes(£0.50) + black beans(£1) + feta(£1.50) = £6

And that doesn't include the cost of pasta/rice, spices....but those are easy to buy in bulk so I assume cost per meal is <£0.50 on those.

Now that we're off Hello Fresh we budget £200/month for food(but that includes lunches), and that's doing all our food shopping at Lidl, which is stupidly cheap compared to any of the larger supermarkets.

So yes, cooking by myself is cheaper(I don't think that's a surprise to anyone), but I still consider hello fresh to be money well spent just for learning how to cook well.

These services aren't about value. You can get mostly lower quality restaurant meals for about the same money. And you can cook much more cheaply at home if you want to.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How do you make money? How do you acquire customers cheaper than it costs to provide the service?

Instead, sell to grocery store chains that have existing infrastructure. In fact, you don't even build an app. Instead you offer an API that they can call when they want to implement this sort of functionality.

Optionally, you offer to do the integration (though this seems like it could make for an awful headache). Make sure the docs are good and the customer service is better.

The point is to give the grocery chains a value add that their competition doesn't have: a way to plan meals effectively and order all the ingredients.

There are some very relevant comments elsewhere in this thread that call out waste, which is a problem I'm not sure how to solve.

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.

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.

This critique makes no sense to me. Should amazon not recommend items online because you might purchase them from alibaba or walmart instead?

Whichever markets choose to make such a system would surely do so with the assumption that they are the best choice, and they will recommend their items. I doubt many consumers would go through the friction of comparison-shopping a whole list to find other things that are suitable substitutes.

Your comment to me seems akin to the silly statement "shoe stores should not display their wares in the window because consumers then might go buy them at other shoe shops for cheaper"

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

So about £5.50 with out discounting for the fact you're over buying

http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/

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

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.

In addition, whether or not they're "meal kits," you see more and more "one bowl meals" and the like (that you can add meat to if you're so inclined) in the produce section of grocery stores.

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.

1. Love to cook.

2. Are quite price sensitive.

The first group were never going to use blue apron. They have the skills and the interest to do it all themselves. The latter group is tricky to hold onto: margins must be relatively thin, and there’s a high probability that these users will learn how to assemble their own recipes to cut out even the razor thin margins that blue apron was making.

The result is a rotating user base, and extremely advertising costs to acquire new customers. This is probably why they’re on podcasts all the damn time.

To them, BlueApron is an entertainment expense. It gives them variety in their diet, and makes for a good time when preparing it. Often they'll have friends over and add in some sides or something to make it a dinner date with people they'd otherwise just go out to eat with.

If I were regularly cooking during the week with someone else, assuming we weren't regularly coming home too late, I could definitely see using these services off and on just for the sake of some variety.

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.

I'm not so sure. Even most people I know who have tried Blue Apron tend to either regress back to not cooking or they "graduate" to buying their own ingredients and planning their own meals. It's not like grocery delivery is that different or hard to do.

I actually think it is pretty great as a way to build the habit of cooking at home and to get comfortable enough in your kitchen. But it only takes about a month to do that. Afterwards it's so much cheaper and easier to just handle the recipes and cooking yourself. Once you get a feel for proportions and learn some staple recipes Blue Apron adds very little extra value and a lot of extra headache (no flexibility in the menus, fixed proportions, etc.) So there isn't much point in doing it.

Also, their vegetarian options too often tend to either be carbs + cheese or bland vegetables. I'd much rather just make Indian food at home.

It's a great way to learn how to cook, and though I cancelled a while ago, I do sometimes miss their precise portioning. That is probably Blue Apron's best long-term value for customers: accurate grocery delivery.

Blue Apron doesn't though. And it doesn't seem like they have much luck lowering their customer acquisition costs. There are a lot more options for feeding yourself at or below $10 per meal than there are for containing poop.

Diapers are a much more stable market, with predictable values in birth rates that can be used to expand or contract the business as needed. Excess supply can also be stored for an indefinite period of time.

With food and home cooked meals, you never know when someone is going to wake up decide they want to learn to cook. Do they decide to learn to cook when they are 18? When they get married? When they have kids? When they get diagnosed with some diet related health condition? There is too much uncertainty about when someone will enter the target segment for there ever to be a stable market. Excess supply also doesn't store well, it'll go bad before the market can absorb the excess supply ;)

Perishable goods have a very different business model than non-perishable goods ;)

I will probably pick up some stock in the next few months. Because I will put my money where my mouth is. (pun intended)

They are changing their business strategies and growing in different ways. (They sell prepackaged food in Costco in California).

I'm in the "former" category, where after about a month I realized (a) I like to eat more than I like to cook, and (b) the time it took me to prepare 3 meals a week made it actually more of a stress-inducing thing to me than a relaxing thing.

- Willing and able to cook for, ideally, more than one person

- Able to plan a week ahead for the most part

- OK with paying a non-trivial premium to have a lot of menu planning and shopping be handled by someone else

I tried Blue Apron and thought it was "OK" but I could never really make these meal kit services work out for me. t obviously works for some people though.

We considered it but it made no sense for us. It would save us a little money versus eating out all the time, but it doesn't solve the time problem (my wife and I both get home around 7:30 or 8:00 and need to get the family fed immediately). It reduces grocery shopping time, but we do that on the weekend where we actually have a couple of hours to spare, unlike after work.

I would rather see a high-end TV dinner service.

[1] And also apparently don't have any kids--paying $10 for an adult is one thing, paying $10 for a full meal for a child is another.

Am exploring that market at the minute, the model would be order on your morning commute, pick up freshly prepped ready meals from your transport hub on the way home.

Interested in talking to anyone who's looking for something in that space.

My fit foods went bankrupt not too long ago, but most have been transformed to local versions of the same company.

Your business model description sounds a bit similar.

Am planning it as "just a regular" food business, so not looking for the rocket-style growth it seems they were banking on. Interesting story of failure in the space though!

We eventually stopped due to many delivery issues we encountered. Our deliveries would frequently come one or even two days late and sometimes not at all. My favorite was when a weeks worth of deliveries all arrived on the same day.

This is interesting. If I understand your point, I think Kettlebell Kitchen[0] qualifies. I have friends that use that and love it.

But I'm sure there must be others out there. Does anyone else use a service like this? I've been thinking about using something like it for myself.

[0] https://www.kettlebellkitchen.com/

So a better product which solves a real problem needs to nail all three. It needs to be cheap, good (fresh, healthy and diverse) and quick.

Being quick involves subsidizing not only the meal prep but also the research involved in making good choices. Properly educating consumers on basic nutrition and using graphic labels to encode nutritional information at a glance.

Being good means sourcing fresh meat and vegetables. Properly flash freezing, separating, storing and shipping meals to maximize longevity and the area covered by each commissary kitchen.

Being cheap is the hard part. First, you and your shareholders have to be willing to put the consumer first. as Bezos did with Amazon. Profits are a side-effect of maximum efficiency, but the baseline is whether the customer is happy with the product.

You also have to reduce waste as much as possible by streamlining recipes and ingredients and measuring portions precisely. Reduce plastic use. If you ship meals with special packaging like refrigerants, encourage monthly rebates for customers who ship them back out in bulk.

It's not a hard problem, the issue is that of funding. Shareholders expect a certain margin or eventual buyout whereas the food industry has notoriously low margins to begin with. Existing convenience meal businesses tackle the higher end market as a result. But the convenience meal lifestyle is slowly becoming a necessity across demographics, and a company which tackles this issue smartly and aims for sub-$5 meals, and offers great bulk prices for monthly memberships, and is willing to not be raking in billions, will come out on top.

Yeah. Much as I like cooking, there are many evenings when I just want to pop something in the oven. I have a few options. (Have a great local turkey farm and there are a few traditional comfort food staples in the grocery store that I like.) But it would be nice to be able to just buy a frozen lasagna as good as the ones I sometimes make and freeze.

This is the one I've never been able to get past. For what these services cost, I can have someone else prepare my meal that will taste just as good or better. Why would I not do that?

I get if you're trying to learn to cook or something like that, but that only sounds like a temporary problem.

My family used Blue Apron for a while when we first had kids, and it was great for our lifestyle. We did move on to a service that optimizes grocery shopping so we can buy ingredients for a week's worth of meals in one shopping trip.

Edit: for those who asked, I am using thefresh20 now. It's pretty low-tech (just a weekly pdf). Besides being straightforward to shop for, it tells you how to prep stuff ahead of time. For example, bake 8 potatoes the first day and use half in a recipe today, half in a few days. Cook some pork chops today and save some for fried rice in a few days. Cook a pot of quinoa today and use it throughout the week.

There are a number of other services out there that allow you to customize things like servings/calories per meal and diet types but I am dubious about how well they could possibly optimize shopping and prep to use up a whole quanta of an ingredient over multiple recipes in the course of a week to be near the manually curated efficiency of fresh 20. If anyone has experience with those please let me know!

One of my favorite personal discoveries is to buy the whole broccoli, use the florets as a vegetable side, and the stems in a soup. The sturdier stems hold up better with the same flavor.

This article from BusinessInsider (2015) indicates that the average cost per meal at common "chain restaurants" starts at $12.17. Over half of the restaurants on the list have average meal prices in excess of $15. [1]

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-it-costs-to-eat-at-...

Where the hell are you shopping that you can self-construct a blue apron meal for $2.50?

$2.50 will get you the basil to use in the recipe and that is about it. Then you need the chicken ($7 minimum) and produce ($5-$7). The starches ($2-$5). Any one-off spices (could be $1 or $15 depending).

Sorry, but people who brag about eating for $2.50/meal either live in places with a dirt cheap cost of living or don't know how to add.

If you're cooking for a family, fine, but cooking for one or two? The food waste problem sucks, and you can't really get around it unless you like eating the same thing for days in a row.

But maybe the real problem here is lack of "cooking" knowledge. Grinding that cilantro up and mixing it with some garlic and olive oil will extend its life in the fridge for weeks. Or just freeze it, or dry it. Yes, food waste sucks, but that is because a lot of traditional skills have been lost. My wife thinks I'm weird for taking chicken/turkey bones/necks/etc and making stock, but it turns a pile of bones meat scraps into a nice soup.

This is also how to (apparently) run a profitable restaurant. Food rolls down from the fresh vegetables/meat, through the casserole stages until it ends up in a soup somewhere.

Really it doesn't take much effort, but really after a day of work + driving/etc I'm lucky if I have the motivation to tear open a frozen bag of stir fry.

I was at my dad's over Thanksgiving and we had a pretty good-size turkey. Saved some leftover meat for sandwiches. And then I made turkey soup and stock out of the carcass and some more of the leftover meat. Maybe this is considered weird by SV standards but I'm by no means a pioneer homesteader and this seems absolutely normal to me.

Maybe. For one thing, it depends on where you live. I guarantee you that I can cook better than pretty much anyplace within a 15 minute drive of my house. Secondly--and this is perhaps at least partly a reflection of how much I eat out when traveling on business--but, when I'm home, I mostly don't want to go out to a restaurant.

On the other hand, grocery shopping requires advance collaborative choice. Sometimes the choosing can take over an hour. Delegating one decider comes with its own hazards, and effectively binds the decider to also be the grocery shopper in order to execute appropriately.

Services like BlueApron solve for that by reducing the number of choices and removing the need to leave the house. If you don’t mind cooking / enjoy picking up new cooking skills, you optimize for stress-free time with your family.

Neither Blue Apron nor SNAP recipients could survive off of one another.

Sounds like they have a lot of high-tech labor costs for a fundamentally low-tech, low-margin business. They were all over my LinkedIn a year or two ago.

It may have a place at $5 per person per meal, all inclusive and even that it is questionable for the majority of the market.

Who are the most moon-shot long-term visionaries of the investment market, where their actual investments will exponentially benefit a large group of humans positively over time, aside rom bill gates

Not a replacement. I also think snap is bullshit. For example, you cant buy toiletries with it and you cant buy things which are cooked.

The best cooked deal of anything is a $5 rotisserie chicken at costco.

And snap users can never get those.

But it would be interesting if blue apron were to cater to larger groups, such as retirment homes, or elderly communities...

SNAP recipients, retirement homes and elderly communities discriminate on cost.

It's almost always more efficient to deal directly with a food distributor or wholesaler at that scale.

Expensive and the recipes took 2-3x longer than it says on the box.

Delicious food, but there was no leftovers. We finished the food and were still hungry. Cannot fathom using them as a meal provider.

The only thing I learned is that roasted beats and carrots are delicious. Don't need Blue Apron anymore.

As a company I wouldn't invest in them. The amount they spend on advertising (e.g. really pricey podcast advertising) with a high churn rate is concerning.

I half suspect there are motivations behind making the recipes for these services complex and a little exotic. If they had four ingredient recipes that took 10 minutes of prep, I daresay a lot of people would think "I'm paying 2x to 3x what I would pay in the grocery store for that???"

I'm glad to hear they're simplifying things though. The only reason I'd use something like this is if they did a lot of the pre-prep so it really is a quick meal on a weekday night when I really just don't have the energy to do more than minimal cooking. (Especially when there's so much in the grocery store that's partly prepped these days.)

To be honest it does work on me. I get a BA shipment here or there and it’s always because they’re using something I wouldn’t normally work with or see at the at the store.

I personally don’t mind most of the other common complaints, I tend to do a lot of scratch cooking so these are usually quick recipes in comparison. Likewise it tends to be cheaper per-meal than my normal dinners.

For me, it makes for a nice change of pace anyways and as I've mentioned in another comment the BA meals tend to be quicker/easier to prepare than my normal cooking so that's also a nice change of pace. I tend to order one shipment ever 2 months or so on average I'd guess.

> The only reason I'd use something like this is if they did a lot of the pre-prep so it really is a quick meal

That sounds like a different market than Blue Apron is going for. From what I've seen they seem to be focusing on people who like getting whole fruits and vegetables and you cut and peel them yourself. People who are interested in cooking, but don't necessarily have formal training. Other meal kits will probably be a better fit for a quick, weeknight meal with little to no prep.

You could eat steaks, fish sticks, brats, chicken, pork, chicken nuggets, fries, a huge variety of vegetables ready to be steamed from the frozen section. You could eat that every day and pay a quarter of what it costs for this stuff to be hand picked for you.

You don't even need to season any of it and it's delicious fried up in olive oil and butter and a little salt.

However, there are a lot of things like salmon, brats (as you say), etc. that mostly do just need a quick saute or bake. And vegetables can be very quick and simple as well.

However, some people do like the idea of more complex meals and some of those people find BA makes it a bit easier to get there.

I usually use fish sticks or other frozen fish for making fish sandwiches. 10 mins of cook time vs 60+ for fresh breaded baked fish. But to each their own!

I'd be more likely to bread and saute some flounder--which is a pretty quick meal too. (And flounder is sold in vacuum packed individual servings so it can definitely serve as a "what's in the freezer?" meal.)

I live in midtown Manhattan, and I could easily purchase 12 prepared meals per week of good quality for $9/meal.

In fact, that's one of the reasons I stopped using Blue Apron when I tried it - even before I factored in the cost of my time, it was slightly more expensive per meal than ordering delivery on Seamless. Once I factored in 15-30 minutes per meal (30-60 minutes divided by two servings), it was clearly way more expensive.

The other reason, though, was that I didn't live in a building with a doorman, and the last delivery window they had on weekdays was 6-8PM. I couldn't guarantee I'd be home by 6PM, and I wasn't thrilled with the idea of them just dumping a box of food on the stoop where anyone could take it.

One thing I've noticed that can improve prep times is taking a basic knife skills class. You'll notice grandmothers who have been cooking for decades are often pretty clunky with a knife. There are still some things that you have limited control over that will slow you down: counter space, kitchen layout, sink size, or what bowls and pots you have.

Years ago I feel like they had more leftovers. Usually, it was the side dish where they gave you a whole head of cabbage instead of half to prep. It was usually mentioned in the recipe. I had been meaning to look back to see if they amended the recipes when they repeated them removing the leftovers--but I haven't used Blue Apron in probably a year now.

I'm glad you learned that roasting vegetables are dead simple and delicious. I feel like growing up with canned and boiled vegetables this was somehow a well kept secret until recently. But there are other meal-kits out there that vary widely on complexity and prep time.

I'm good enough with a knife, that I use a knife hone daily.

Still took 2-3x longer than suggested. Not sure if I can blame the user.

I got faster making meals over time.

For me right now time is more important than money.

I don't think have ever eaten more roasted beets, carrots, cauliflower, kale and broccoli in the last two years, than I have in my life. (and enjoyed.)

To put this in perspective, if I go to the store and buy a 10 dollar meal, I'll be eating: porter house, slathered in butter and olive oil, asparagus fried in the juices, with a baked potato. I'll have also a side of chilean grapes and a slice of cheese cake for desert.

10 dollars is a crazy amount for a dinner. (Ok that might cost more like $15)

You head to the grocery store and buy whatever beef cut is on sale so if you're buying a porterhouse it's because it's $4-6. Your pantry is already stocked with butter, flour, eggs, sugar, and potatoes. You had some almost stale graham crackers lying around which is why you decided to make cheesecake. You hit up the store buy some asparagus, cream cheese, and whatever fruit is in season rounding out to about $10-12 bucks and you've pretty much got the meal with plenty of leftovers and leftover ingredients for whatever you do next.

You can spread a good cheese out over multiple meals to lower the cost but I'm not seeing how to get even a brie without going over budget here though.

Their chicken was generally very good and pork OK and I'm not a BA hater, though we did initially enjoy it and eventually stopped because the value simply wasn't remotely there for us.

This seems like a good opportunity to see if there is more labor (emotional or physical) that your wife is doing that she could use a hand with.

> My wife doesn't have nag me about what I what I want for the week's dinner

Meal planning is work. She is doing a job for the family. She is trying to include your preferences in the calculus of meal planning. Balancing nutrition, variety, individual preferences, cost, and difficulty is a non-trivial problem to solve every week.

When you say she is 'nagging' you about what you want for dinner, take a step back and consider what that is telling others (including your wife) about how much you value that work.

Tip from a long-time husband: If you often have the perception of your wife "nagging" you, there's probably a relationship-antipattern in effect that you'll want to deal with as soon as you have the emotional energy. IMO, perceived nagging can be the narrow end of a big wedge between a couple.

I value all my wife does around the house and for the family.

I did like not making dinner decisions, though, when the meals were things I liked.

Note: I haven't used the service in nearly four years.

[1] The Complete Cooking For Two Cookbook: https://shop.americastestkitchen.com/8da852d4663a41e4f978fa4...

EDITED: added link to book I was referring to

I've rarely seen a BA recipe use more than one pot and one pan, most, IME, use a single pan (often with a wipe-and-reuse step to do that.)

If anything, BA goes out of their way to minimize the required cooking vessels compared to most recipe sources (even America’s Test Kitchen, which is actually pretty good about not gratuitously using cookware.)

Of course, change before that I couldn't speak to.

Meal planning is work. Grocery shopping is work. Cooking is work. We've decided that cooking is the work we enjoy, and the other parts are work we'd rather pay someone to do for us. We are more than capable of putting together a meal plan, we just value our time more than money and have found the right service to pay to help us in that regard.

I've heard some people talk about why grocery delivery "won't work" in the US. There's a huge last-mile problem. For the first few years, Blue Apron was northern east-coast, then west-coast only. It took awhile to get most states covered. Another argument I've heard is that people like to pick their food. They're worried they'll get stuck with blemished/bruised food.

However, the only time I've used it was when I had a broken foot and, while I could drive to the store or pick up one or two things, doing a grocery shopping was difficult.

At least at the time, they'd invariably be out of something I needed for a recipe and/or they'd make substitutions that weren't really what I would have wanted. Quality was "OK." Normally, it's not a big deal for me to go to the store and I just didn't love the service in general.

Our local store's online service is actually one of the better ones I've tried in terms of finding things and getting the task done - but they fail in quality at the end.

Right now, the cost of my box includes all those steps. It also occasionally includes locally sourced meat, fish, dairy, or eggs. I can find information on the farms where those items came from easily.

I value that service enough to pay a small premium for it.

"No, you're wrong, it'd didn't solve that problem for you."

Wat? I'm able to evaluate a cost benefit scenario in the context of my own life quite adequately. The stuff we need from the store these days is staples, which we buy rarely in bulk.

There's definitely a time limit to this. As you get better at cooking, you get better at thinking of recipes that don't have ingredients that quickly spoil, and/or can be cooked from frozen, or can be frozen after cooking, or can be portioned out as part (let's say) half the meals you cook this week.

These habits accumulate, they don't appear all at once. Worse for a service like blue apron: cooking a lot of new recipes fosters that sort of thinking.

I think an important perspective to remember is that most styles of cooking were come up with by people who didn't have refrigeration, although they weren't as fragmented as we are (lots of single people and couples due to capitalist alienation.) When you tighten the constraint of the number of people being cooked for while loosening the constraint of how long ingredients will last and how long things you cook can be saved (without changing the taste much e.g. pickling and drying), things come out about even.

In my case it was a combination of that and quality problems. (This was Hello Fresh, not Blue Apron though). We had a lot of great meals, used the "family plan" so we'd have left overs, but there was some kind of inflection point where we started have regular issues with the meats. In a period of about 6 weeks we had 4 or 5 problems. Beef that was open and dropping it's liquid out. 3 chicken meals in a row where it gave off a foul odor of sulfur, indicating it had spoiled. We had issues with other fresh ingredients as well, though these were the only ones that ruined the meal completely.

Each time, Hello Fresh customer service was good in giving a refund and even a meal credit, but it was too much. You can't plan your meals when there get's to be a 1 in 3 chance your food is spoiled. We cancelled, but by that time we already had about 20 solid recipe cards for dishes we loved and could easily do ourselves, so we didn't bother looking for another meal service. Maybe we will if/when we get bored with our choices again, but it would probably be temporary given the premiums paid.

I'm looking towards Amazon's purchase of Wholefoods and what that might do for meal services to bring the cost down substantially, then I'd consider a regular subscription.

But it isn't so simple. I live in Canada and have used a couples of services and currently and semi-regular with makegoodfood (which I assume is very similar to Blue Apron). I'm a pretty decent cook and baker, have all of the cookware, and go to the grocery store relatively regularly, but still I make use of it because it isn't simply that they give me ingredients.

I like their menu. They constantly surprise me with good meals with great ingredients. Things that I would have never, in a million years, have chosen on my own. And the recipes (and thus, the meted out ingredients) have been almost perfect. This is a far cry from finding recipes online and replicating them -- this food vendor has been completely incentivized to make their creations perfect, versus recipe sites like AllRecipe where it's just user contributions, often with shockingly bad errors in some top recipes (pancakes with 3 1/2 tablespoons of baking powder to 1 1/2 cups of flour? Give me a break... 4.5 stars)

Cost wise there is no way I could go to the grocery store and buy the ingredients for less. I should say that I get the 4 meal versions (so the shipping is less a component of the price), but to get all of the often odd spices, small amounts of various things like odd ciders, vinegar, etc, it would be very pricey to replicate. Cooking interesting meals is expensive because you can't buy exactly what you need for most things. Not to mention that it wouldn't just be time consuming trying to find every oddball ingredient, it's stressful too. But every couple of weeks I get a box with very, very high quality meats, fish, perfectly portioned out spices and ingredients. It's so much nicer.

This is a bit like the "cloud server" versus "your own raw metal" discussions. In the end many underestimate the advantages of the former, and grossly underestimate the cost and inconvenience of the latter.

I'm not sure blue apron has any magic that can't be reproduced by everyone else.

>My wife doesn't have nag me about what I what I want for the week's dinner.

This line has been misinterpreted. My wife would normally ask me on Sunday, what we should have for dinner for the week. My response was usually "whatever is fine", which doesn't really help her. Blue Apron removes that question. My wife never "nagged" me, it was more my fault, because didn't give a good answer. So the overall process was an issue and mostly on my part.

After over ten years of marriage and a child and two dogs, it really becomes clear how important a partnership is.

My son is now learning to cook with me as well. Obviously, men can be in the kitchen as well. It's fun, even if I'm just a "blue apron cook".

I'm also adding this clarification because it's pretty slow here at work and I have to look busy...

For this particular stock, I'm apply the Peter Lynch strategy of investing in regards to Blue Apron. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/06/peterlynch.a... Mostly buy what you like and know.

All of my other trades are algorithmic...

That being said, the food/recipes were good but the portions were pretty small for two people. I think this would have been perfect when I was single and had a lot more time on my hands.

Not a bunch of half cooked stuff you slap together.

I think learning to cook is an excellent use for the service (but not maybe one they love long term)

Yes.

> Could someone who has never cooked use Blue Apron as a starting point to learn basic cooking skills?

Somewhat; it won't, e.g., teach you knife skills, which are important for both safety and speed in preparation, but it will give you exposure to a wide range of cooking techniques and what they produce.

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.e. It could easily become one.

"... company basically has two options. It can choose to trade on the Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board (OTCBB) or the pink sheets system...".

Some more [light] detail in linked 'article'[0].

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/delistingofshare...

It's also just generally a milestone that the company is really not doing well, so investors tend to sell and recover what they can.