Seriously though. Blue Apron made me seethe with anger the first time I saw an ad for it. If you can afford Blue Apron, you can afford to buy 3x as much food and have control over your ingredient choice by just going to your goddamn supermarket. Yeah, recipes are great. Yeah, tutorial videos are great. But that's what the internet is supposed to be for. You don't need some hipster wannabe "chef" assembling boxes of ingredients 200 miles away to decide what you're eating tonight, do you? That box will come with 10 little vacuum sealed plastic pouches, a bunch of packing material, instructions you could have found online, and a whole host of other crap you don't need that's just making waste for waste's sake.

If you already have access to a kitchen, a decent set of cooking equipment (which you need regardless of whether you go for Blue Apron or not) is only a few hundred bucks, and the "basics" (pasta, rice, potatoes, onions, garlic, spices, veggie oil, olive oil, vinegar, flour, sugar, salt) are maybe 50 bucks more. Then, for less than a months' worth of meals from Blue Apron, you're set to start cooking for life.

My fiancee and I spend a grand total of 100 bucks a week, give or take, on groceries. This is in southern California, and usually including a cheap bottle of wine. We could spend even less if we wanted, but we're cooking some gourmet shit at home and constantly have leftovers, while generating 1/2 the trash of any of our neighbors thanks both to reusable containers for everything and composting. You can do SO MUCH better than Blue Apron, both in health and in environmental impact.

The same thing applies to Juicero: If I really want to start making fruit juice, I'll buy myself a decent juicer and get fresh, local fruit because it will always be cheaper than whatever they're sending out in their little pouches. I'd rather spend a couple hundred bucks on a quality machine (or better, just make smoothies since they're better for you and use the money I saved not buying a Juicero to buy a Vitamix) than buy into some cult hype bullshit.

Their market is people that don't cook all that often, and want to cook relatively fancy things. It's people that cook so rarely that they throw away half of the groceries they buy, because they don't cook enough, and the dishes they make don't make sense together, from a home economics perspective.

I do my best to cook traditional Northern Spanish food for myself (well, as close as I can given the available ingredients). There's very little food waste, precisely because so many recipes either use long lived ingredients, or just reuse them. Some are built using another dish's leftovers as an ingredient. This makes it very easy to just have an idea of the stock we need for certain kinds of ingredients, and make a high percentage of the shopping list just an exercise of comparing what we have with our ideal stock.

This only works, however, because we aren't really looking at dishes individually, and we cook almost every meal. Someone that cooks once a week, and isn't thinking about efficiency, in either ingredients or time spent preparing, will end up spending a whole lot more and eat less. Unfortunately, there's no money in teaching people how to understand a kitchen like this, and how to add recipes that will both add variety while minimizing waste.

This is an interesting idea, especially for someone like me who cooks nearly every meal but still watches rarely-used ingredients die a slow fridge death. Are there any books you would recommend specifically for this kind of reusable cooking plan?

I generally end up just making one or two simple dishes a week with lots of leftovers.

Old standbys: One jar tomato sauce, one pound ground turkey, some peas, cook it all together and pour over pasta. One large yellow onion, bit more than a pound of chicken, three or four bell peppers, stir-fry and serve on rice.

Each of those makes about half a week of meals (not counting breakfast) using exact multiples of the unit size of the ingredients in the grocery store, so nothing gets a chance to go bad.

I too would be quite interested in how to design a recipe structure for less waste without that sort of restriction, though.

With all due respect, I think you've completely missed the point of something like Blue Apron. It's not about saving money at all. It's for folks who enjoy cooking, but want to completely avoid trips to the grocery store or at least greatly simplify those trips. There's also a fun element of surprise since it not only takes out the grocery store trips but even basic meal planning.

That said, the one point I agree with you on is Blue Apron's generation of trash. It's wildly wasteful in that sense because so many of their ingredients are individually wrapped and packaged.

A significant part of the Blue Apron value proposition (and I am not a subscribed or otherwise interested--I cook for myself, mostly from scratch), is:

"You don't have to think or plan anything."

And that is where your one paragraph about how easy it is to cook for yourself falls down. You have to think up a menu. You have to find a menu (and hope it is good), plan, get ingredients, get the right odds and ends and figure out portions.

That is all fairly easy to do (and I do it myself), but not cost-free. If you have more money than emotional energy and time, the Blue Apron value proposition may appeal to you.

I hate the amount of waste it produces too, but "waste for wastes' sake" is not what is going on there.

> "You don't have to think or plan anything."

Yeah, and you lose a lot of what makes cooking cooking.

You put effort into something, your satisfaction goes up. Extend this to how you live your life, and learn the secrets of being happy.

I think it depends what aspects of "cooking" you value.

Some people really enjoy the meal planning part. Some people really enjoy picking out fruits and vegetables at the store. But others don't like planning out meals for the whole week and find grocery store trips stressful and frustrating (maybe their local store is incredibly busy). Blue Apron has a value proposition for those in the latter category who also enjoy the part of cooking that starts once you've got the grocery bags in your kitchen.

I assume you don't grow all your own produce, or slaughter your own meat. My extended family does (at least mostly) and they would claim that I would have a more satisfying life if I did as well.

Where one draws the line at doing it all on your own depends on time available, motivation, and opportunity cost. I'm not going to judge people whose utility function is different than mine.

> You put effort into something, your satisfaction goes up.

I enjoy menu planning, shopping, and cooking more than most people.

OTOH, I also enjoy ballroom dancing, and a variety of other non-cooking hobbies. Sometimes, I want to devote lots of time to cooking. Sometime, I want good food at home with the care I (or my wife) puts into cooking without the rest of the organizational and planning overhead. Blue Apron excels at the latter case. It's more packaging than I'd prefer, and than I need for the use case because I have a pantry well stocked with basic essentials (which is where the worst of Blue Apron's packaging excess tends to be), but for something that works in a diverse market and without gotchas, I see why they do it.

Everyone's different. You can't expect that everyone will derive the same satisfaction from the exact same activities as you.

We did Blue Apron for a few months, and I rather liked it. Believe it or not, some of us just aren't creative enough to spend tons of time thinking up recipes, or looking them up, and ensuring we have enough of every ingredient for every meal.

We still eat almost all of our meals at home, with or without Blue Apron, but it substantially improved the quality of the average meal.

The problem with Blue Apron is that they made meals complicated for the sake of being complicated. Way too many sauces to make, things to reduce, things to mix, etc. Every meal took at least 2x what they claimed it would take, and it seemed to take tons of dishes just because of how needlessly complex they made them.

We're using Gobble now, which is billed more as 15min meals and usually only dirty a couple of dishes. I vastly prefer it.

I don't like the trash aspect of it, I'll give you that.

I'm not a good cook, but I like the idea of cooking. I don't have time to plan a week of meals. I want someone to tell me what I need, and if they can also send me exactly what I need so that I don't get it wrong, that's fantastic. It may be so fantastic that I am willing to pay twice as much as it might cost in the grocery store.

I'm sure with a bit of culinary expertise and experience I could probably do it all on my own, but I don't have that experience, and I don't really have the time to acquire it, but I sure don't want to order out every night.

I haven't tried it, but Blue Apron sounds pretty great to me. I can cook but I don't need to worry about having no real idea what I'm doing? Good deal. That is way more approachable than doing a bunch of independent learning.

There's a business idea in your comment.

Whenever I make a recipe I end up guiltily throwing away a ton of food two weeks later. Is that better or worse than throwing away lots of packaging?

What am I supposed to do with 90% of the smallest bunch of scallions the supermarket will sell me after I use the 10% the recipe calls for? I know, I know, I'm supposed to have 5 other recipes that I either know or can invent at the drop of a hat that just happen to use all the same ingredients. But how realistic is that for those of us that aren't amateur chefs and don't really want to become one?

> If you can afford Blue Apron, you can afford to buy 3x as much food and have control over your ingredient choice by just going to your goddamn supermarket.

If you ignore time costs, sure; pre-measured ingredients in the quantity necessary for the recipe provided is a huge time saver.

Yes, it creates waste, but it's not without utility.

I couldn't care less about the recipes and tutorials; for me the thing that such a service provided was small portions of ingredients. At the time I ate at work for all of my meals during the week, and so needed to cook maybe 3 meals/week (for one person). There's no other way I've found to get 1tbsp of butter, or flour, or 1 green onion. So for me it eliminated a fair amount of food waste.

That being said now that I don't get free food from work, I'll be buying groceries and cooking often enough to use the larger portions.

The people who use Blue Apron and such are mostly educated, wealthy people who would order takeout/delivery otherwise, but are now cooking.

I also think getting ingredients at your doorstep from some VC backed startup with YouTube recipes on how to cook them is one of the most privileged things you can do, but at least people are cooking. Anything to get more americans cooking is a good thing, in the grand scheme of things.

I mean...yes, you're right, in the grand scheme of things more people cooking is an objectively good thing. I just wish we didn't need this bullshit to get us there.

Believe it or not, some people are not sensitive to price and are not looking to do more work to save money.

Why not just get a staff mixer? They're really useful for smoothies and soups. They take up less space and cleanup is a doddle. Winner winner chicken dinner.

Immersion blender?

TIL, they have a lot of names. Immersion blender, wand mixer, hand mixer, etc. But, yes.

I was planning to give Blue Apron a whirl, but decided against it for the reasons mentioned. Plus my wife is a picky eater.

Instead I use a service called plantoeat which lets me import my own recipes and optimize my grocery store runs. Once you get a good rotation going it helps with the problem of over buying certain ingredients.

> The same thing applies to Juicero: If I really want to start making fruit juice, I'll buy myself a decent juicer and get fresh, local fruit because it will always be cheaper than whatever they're sending out in their little pouches.

It's different because making fresh juice is more time and labor intensive than "just buying a juicer" (try it... I did). Want bananas in your orange juice like Dole sells? Now you need to combine that juicer with a blender, etc. Peeling a bunch of oranges by hand takes time. Making fresh juice by hand is completely not worth it.

I don't get people's irrational hate for just the trash they personally throw away. Most of your environmental footprint is based on being in a rich country, driving a car, flying on a plane and consuming food period. The amount of paper and plastic you throw away into your trash can is a rounding error. The fact that people complain about too many napkins and for take out food and how to recycle it is silly to me.

It is one of the few tangible things we do envirnmentally. Its all about intent and feelings. Honestly I would be happy if people would just make it to a trash can instead of the roadside or ocean.

Imho even recycling is mostly useless. The return, both environmental and economic, on everything but metal recycling is abysmal. Most plastic and paper processes are lucky to break even, with a few exceptions (hdpe comes to mind).

Both things you mention are interrelated. People want to feel like they are doing something tangible and we waste time and money on recycling even when it doesn't work. Stop recycling and calling blue apron to complain about waste. Instead spend that time calling your congress person to start a carbon tax or to stop farm subsidies. Doing something that feels like it helps is worse than doing nothing. At least when you do nothing, you know it.

>Stop recycling and calling blue apron to complain about waste. Instead spend that time calling your congress person to start a carbon tax or to stop farm subsidies.

Sorry, but I can't really agree with that line of thinking because it's basically throwing any and all personal responsibility out of the window.

While pushing for better/smarter regulation is an important part of the whole process, it's only one part of the whole process that involves many different parts.

On an individual basis recycling might only add up to a rounding error but the same could be said about many improvements in energy efficiency, the point here being that many of these rounding errors add up to a bigger actual impact.

If everybody thinks recycling is a waste of time and they should instead just lobby for carbon tax, then barely anybody will be more conscious about their waste production and how to prevent more needless waste from being produced, which is just as much of an actual issue (if not even more) as farm subsidies or carbon production.

It's estimated that by 2050 there will be more plastics swimming in the ocean than actual fish, we are on a steady course of turning this planet into a massive garbage dump.

> If everybody thinks recycling is a waste of time and they should instead just lobby for carbon tax, then barely anybody will be more conscious about their waste production and how to prevent more needless waste from being produced, which is just as much of an actual issue (if not even more) as farm subsidies or carbon production.

A huge percentage of it is a waste of time. It is a small positive for paper and aluminum. If this doesn't make people feel like they are doing their part, this adds up to a tiny benefit. However, it probably does make people feel like they are doing more then they actually are. The net effect could easily be negative. For many other things, recycling has no effect or a small negative effect on carbon. This does not add up to a bigger actual impact. It is only negative.

> if everybody thinks recycling is a waste of time and they should instead just lobby for carbon tax, then barely anybody will be more conscious about their waste production and how to prevent more needless waste from being produced, which is just as much of an actual issue (if not even more) as farm subsidies or carbon production.

I am saying this would be a good thing. People are way too conscious about their recycling when it has almost zero impact. Doing literally almost anything else, has a bigger impact in most cases.

> how to prevent more needless waste from being produced, which is just as much of an actual issue (if not even more) as farm subsidies or carbon production.

I don't know how you decide is needless waste but a carbon tax will cause everyone decide what they need vs don't need. Regardless, there is no chance that needless waste is as much of an issue as farm subsidies or global warming.

I didn't know that plastic like PE is worth money (my local garbage service manages to sell it) but cardboard has been worth as much as steel for a long time now.

Interesting. It's obvious that Blue Apron produces more trash than buying the ingredients the traditional way, but do you think it produces more trash than, say, ordering take-out?

I'm not a customer, but I've been thinking of trying it. Honest question.

Because when a restaurant buys vinegar, it comes in a gallon jug, if not a five gallon bucket. Hell, it might come in a 55 gallon drum. But then Blue Apron puts it in single 1 oz bottles and ships them all over the country, wasting a huge amount of packaging to supply commodity ingredients.

I get the basic concept, but I was thinking of all of the waste in the-take out packaging.

That said, the idea of getting a single ounce bottle of something any reasonable kitchen should already have (like vinegar) does feel pretty gross.

Take out dinner in itself is not a thrash concept. Something like Blue Apron is. A thrash concept producing thrash. You don't have to cook with takeout. You have to cook with Blue Apron, spend extra money on groceries and produce extra thrash when the entirety of it is avoidable. And if you are nearly a good cook and follow the instructions on a prepackaged thing, you surely can go and shop groceries and cook better meals. So this kinda solution is not for the lazy (take-out crowd) and neither for the home chefs.

Trash. Thrash is something else.

Take-out trash it pretty bad, but I'd imagine that packaging every ingredient individually is even worse. More surface area to cover, if nothing else.

1 quart of white vinegar = 80 cents for a supermarket brand. If you want organic Sprouts white vinegar it's $1.80. If you need something like rice wine vinegar, ~$2 for 12oz. Anyway, the point is that they must be making a huge mark up even if they charge 50 cents for 1 oz bottles of vinegar.

Don't people poach eggs? You need vinegar for that. Boil a pot of water, two capfuls of vinegar, crack 2 eggs into something like a 3/4 cup measure, turn heat off wait for water to stop aggressively boiling, lower the measuring cup of eggs so it partly submerges, tip it to empty the contents (you don't want to drop the eggs in from altitude), lid on the pot, set a timer for 5 or 6 minutes. Play around with the time. It'll take less time if you have a stove with residual heat: glass or coils. It'll take more time if you have gas or induction.

If you do it a bunch of times, you can figure out when they're done the way you like them just be jiggling the pot and seeing how the eggs move under water.

The fresher the egg the more it will hold together. If it flattens out on the bottom, oh well some eggs do that even with vinegar. You'll get over it.

Next start making homemade bread for your eggs. And now you'll be willing to pay $6 for really good eggs from chickens that eat insects. OK I'm carried away now...

I'm trying out Blue Apron right now. As far as packaging:

    * 1 big box
    * 1 "bubblewrap" cooler bag
    * 2 huge ice packs
    * Misc. plastic bags for produce
    * 3 small paper bags for "extras"

The box and the refrigeration setup are definitely wasteful (even ignoring the environmental cost of shipping it), but the packaging on the produce is pretty minimal.

How about instead of ordering takeout or blue apron, you go to the store and buy groceries? It literally takes less than 2 hours a week from planning meals to getting home.

Plus 4-7 hours of cooking and cleaning. Suddenly you just spent an entire work day on dinner.

I'll throw in the excellent 5 ingredients 10 minutes http://5ingredients10minutes.com/ from Jules Clancy, most of the recipes can be found for free on her blog at thestonesoup.com 10 minutes required a bit of training, but it's almost always easily cheaper, faster and better than random food for order.

There's really no need to spend 4-7 hours a week prepping food if all you want is a decent and healthy dinner - though spending time preparing something fancy for friends and family is a rewarding activity in it's own right, but that's an entirely different matter.

You do that with blue apron as well....? I dunno, cooking is an inherently relaxing experience for me and many others. I don't think Blue Apron is a better solution if you're making the "counting hours" argument, as for much less money I could do marginally more work and spend marginally more time. That's a win in my opinion.

It's really not marginally more work. I think it'd take me at least three hours a week to plan out meals like Blue Apron does and acquire all the ingredients myself. That's a ~42% increase in time spent if you wager 7 hours normally spent on cooking and cleaning.

But I also just flat-out don't like going to the grocery store, mainly because the one near me is so busy. It's great if I go at 11PM on a weeknight, but I'm usually too sleepy to do that. It's complete chaos on a Saturday or Sunday (and go too late on a Sunday and the produce section will be emptied out too).

I haven't used Blue Apron, but they do all the prep, which is often the biggest time suck in cooking something complex. Anyhow, if you find that part relaxing, I think that just means you're not Blue Apron's target customer. That's fine, but insufficient for making claims about whether or not Blue Apron is a good solution in general.

I would recommend trying PeachDish. https://www.peachdish.com/ We are the best quality meal kit company. We were voted best quality by Forbes and the New York Observer. I would be honored to be upvoted by the HN community. Thank you. I started it in my garage 4 years ago- the first year I was not sure about the food, and then met my business partner judith, who used to be president of slow food in the south east, and her husband is an organic farmer.

Thank you,

Hadi Founder, PeachDish - also use coupon code HADI

I do go to the store (and the farmers market) and buy groceries, and cook, all the time. I've recently been curious about Blue Apron as a relatively low-effort way to expand what I cook and how I cook it.

My wife and I have been using Plated and HelloFresh for over a year now. While the services are not cheap, I have found that it's a much better and cheaper option over the course of a week. The food tastes better than the things I would attempt to cook, but more importantly, I end up saving money on meals because I don't end up wasting ingredients or throwing away leftovers.

It seems at least a little debatable that Blue Apron is going the wrong direction, especially when you consider the decrease in food waste: https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/weeknight-dinner-20

Obviously it's not ideal, but it should be compared to current behavior, not ideal behavior.

> the decrease in food waste

Can we tell how much food waste Blue Apron is saving? I remember reading that they're extremely picky about what they're willing to ship out and end up wasting quite a bit to send out "perfect" ingredients.

Yeah I don't have any numbers, I'm just saying there's more to it than meets the eye. It looks wasteful, but that's because the waste happens to be very visible and tangible. Grocery stores and restaurants can be wasteful in less obvious ways.

Although food waste in a landfill is probably better than non-decomposable waste (all of Blue Aprons individual packaging) in a landfill.

Technically all of their packaging is recyclable, although I realize lots of people don't bother. You can also just mail the box back to them for free and let them deal with it.

bold statement. I'm assuming you mean the potential env. damage, correct? Have you done a thorough analysis on, say, Blue Apron's impact on the environment? for example, do people who use Blue Apron decrease usage of their car to go to restaurants? I'm not convinced it's as black and white as you imply it is

Has anyone actually analyzed things like "household share of total waste," or "food share of household waste," or impact of waste compared to other environmental problems? Generally when people rail against waste, I have a suspicion that it's focusing at a highly visible but ultimately trivial problem. But I don't know where to go to falsify my suspicions.

It's a hard problem and I'd like to know too.

When I was doing a MSc in environmental engineering we were careful to let the stakeholders decide what environmental problems are important based on their feelings and not try to prioritize ourselves. Part of it is practical, it's very hard to have stakeholder buy-in on problems they don't care about, but part of it is that I don't think there is consensus on how to do comparisons across problems. You have to make difficult value judgments. (How many kgs of CO2 is one beautiful pristine forest worth? etc.)

Some keywords you could look into are multi-criterion decision analysis and ecosystem services.

My intuition and back-of-the-envelope estimates say that household waste, recycling, and water use don't matter that much.

I'm not too popular with the environmental committee at work because I like to remind them that their annoying, time-consuming eco-friendly intervention of the week matters an order of magnitude less than switching a single meal per week from beef to a veggie alternative.

I think the big questions are: how big is your house? what type of energy do you use for heating/AC? how much do you drive/fly? do you eat animal products?

For most people the rest is comparatively not super consequential. (With some exceptions of course, there are hobbies that are 100x worse than others. People around here drive snowmobiles with 2-stroke engines, they are much less regulated and produce horrendous pollution compared to cars.)

So, I get sun basket delivery. It's like blue apron, more-or-less. more attention paid to reusable / recyclable / compostable packaging (everything is recyclable officially, although you may find that plastic film isn't accepted in many recycling bins), and everything is organic (which is something I am prepared to pay a premium for). It's also local to my region (although people can get it delivered across the country, mine doesn't travel far).

I love cooking. I cook six meals a week, the seventh is take-out or off the grid or something. Three of those six meals I cook a week are sunbasket, and those are weeknight meals where I don't have to go to the store ahead of time. I don't stress the meal plans, which means I can actually cook dinner and eat at a sane hour (say, 7pm) without having to leave work early or stress about starting cooking as soon as I'm able.

I also regularly alter recipes I get, as part of the "I love cooking" bit - I add ingredients, rearrange stuff, change out the process to make it easier / simpler / better. I'm able to express myself, cooking-wise, even though the recipe is mostly fixed. Price-wise, I end up spending about $10 per person per meal. That's around 140% of my average per person per meal cost when I just shop on my own (although there's an externality here: i get more actual meals when I shop for myself, because I usually cook for at least one lunch worth of leftovers when I shop, so up the price a bit more).

Personally? I'd be happy with a box of food where things weren't pre-measured and stuff (every N weeks they send you a new bottle of coconut vinegar or whatever), cutting down on the single-serving bags that hold a single clove of garlic or whatever. I'd also be happy with someone just shopping on my behalf, but these boxes are a real bargain compared to instacart prices, so there's that.

Not sure about blue apron. I use hello fresh. It's sourced locally and there's no waste in food. The box is recycled and the freezer pack they pick it up once I fill up a box full.

I do agree that the vinegar and a stuff like that is a waste. I would rather get a large bottle

For a good substitute at a much lower price with no ridiculous trash, you should checkout https://www.platejoy.com/.

We started using them a month or so ago and its been pretty good.

Disclaimer: My Fiance works with the husband of someone who works there. (Not sure if that is a real conflict of interest or not)

Blue Apron is a piece of junk, environmental issues aside. The whole concept of not telling someone they can only make a certain subset of meal combinations and not any 3 meals, only after they've taken your credit card is such a dark pattern. I refuse to give them business after that. I filed a complaint about this and they ignored it.