Have you ever tried printing out a recipe online, driving to the grocery store, and picking up all the ingredients? It's a pain in the ass. Try finding tandoori spice rub, or pink lemons, or dried currants. Chances are your local supermarket doesn't have one or two ingredients, so you leave it our or sub it, but that makes a difference in the taste. On top of that, you're usually forced to buy much more than you need for any given recipe, making it pretty wasteful, and more expensive than it should be. Not to mention all the time wasted physically moving around the supermarket, driving, gas to the supermarket, etc.
The recipes taste great and they're easy to follow. I routinely have better meals cooking blue apron than going out to eat. For me, this is a much faster, cheaper, and better solution. That's not to say this is a great business, personally I think anyone can copy this service, in particular larger companies, so I probably wouldn't buy the stock.
Made the Chiles Rellenos last night, sure I could get a can of tomato paste for fifty cents, but I only needed a 4th of the can. When I made the catfish curry, I was thinking to myself, where do I even buy curry? Apparently I can go on Amazon and get a 5 pack of 12-serving cans.
I don't think the plastic mass I have to deal with is good, but I also threw out a bunch of my roommate's moldy leftovers while cooking my Blue Apron meal.
As I said in a comment yesterday, I suspect that Blue Apron deliberately puts somewhat oddball ingredients, often in small quantities, in their recipes precisely to discourage people from thinking "Oh, I can just pick these up at the grocery store."
I now know what ramps are for example. (They're pretty much scallions :-))
I guess that is the other difference for me, I am no interested in these complex meals with these odd ingredients.
Give me a protein, some greens or steamed veggies, maybe a baked potato and a salad I am good to go...
Anymore I am getting to the Meal Prep Sunday style of cooking where I make a batch of something, then reheat it through out the week.
I like simple good meals.
The value for Blue Apron for us:
* I don't have to look through and choose recipes.
* I don't have to spend a hour in the store, we pretty much just get staples (eggs, milk, etc) these days.
* I don't throw away near as much food. We used to throw away around 50% of food purchases due to changing schedules / spoilage. We actually saved money moving to Blue Apron.
* Blue Apron can include specialty ingredients that I won't normally have (e.g. I'm not routinely going to the Korean grocery).
I like to cook. Blue Apron makes it easy to do that while exposing us to new and interesting recipes without committing a lot of time to the process. That's worth money.
Google: quick and easy <protein> skillet with <what i have in a fridge>
> * I don't have to spend a hour in the store, we pretty much just get staples (eggs, milk, etc) these days.
In less than 6 months of cooking you would get entire pantry of all kinds of dry and canned ingredients needed by buying them in a reasonably sized containers as needed or as the opportunity presents itself
> I don't throw away near as much food. We used to throw away around 50% of food purchases due to changing schedules / spoilage. We actually saved money moving to Blue Apron.
That just means you are overbuying/overcooking. After 6 months of cooking a cost of a "complex" BA like meal without BA should be $2-3 per person even in the most expensive markets in the US.
Blue Apron's cost can never match a cost of buying protein/pantry/vegetable items on sale as neither BA has the infrastructure and volume to match grocery chains nor does it have other ways of squeezing the margins.
Now, you may decide that you do not want to have a pantry or use Google or know that $0.49-0.59 is a good price for chicken thighs and $0.99 is a good price for whole chicken in NYC or that you should not buy turmeric at Chelsea market because it is 4x the price at any other grocery store and that's why you would use BA. The problem is that there are just not enough people like you to make BA profitable, especially now with Amazon buying Whole Foods.
These are your most expensive ingredients in NYC today in a non-upscale ( and non-ethnic ) supermarkets. At best you are getting 1/4lb per portion. All other ingredients would barely make a dollar if you don't buy a precious single onion and instead buy a bag of onions or instead of getting a single carrot, you buy a small bags of carrots.
Obviously you don't buy salmon when it is $16/lb as you know that at some point over next few weeks it would be $11/lb. The last one that I got at Chelsea market was $9.99/lb because they did not correctly predict how many were going to be bought as fillets and sushi so they wanted to offload the last two at the end of the day before getting another 10 next morning.
BA cost of raw ingredients is at best 5-10% better than yours when you walk into a random supermarket and just buy non-insanely priced items.
I've cooked and bought groceries in NYC several times and while the prices are definitely competitive with some hunting, the 99c whole chicken I found was total garbage and basically was like water and salt.
My step-dad used to swear he couldn't tell a difference between the $1.99 special chicken and the regular stuff I bought that was $4 - 6.99. To me the $1.99 tastes like eating saline solution (I've had saline injections, it tasted like that to me). Maybe it's just a question of taste.
Now, curated recipe lists without having to buy the groceris through them is a subscription service I'd pay for. I already subscribe to Bon Appetit for the recipes.
Not having to entertain in a grocery cart or plan meals around ingredients that can't be bought in small quantities is even better. I suppose it depends a bit on the types of things you like to eat.
Occasionally there is one that I'll have a snack afterwards, but I tend to have a pretty big appetite and find the quantity fine.
Take it a step further, buy pre-made meals from someplace like ICON meals and you just have to heat them up.
I tried a couple of these services and while I liked the convenience, I couldn't stand the waste -- a couple dozen little plastic jars and baggies each week going into the recycling.
Its it's not a food product it's a lifestyle product.
As a food product it's no different from buying cheap prechopped supermarket produce and throwing it in a pan. Saves a few minutes or an hour a week at the expense of having to be at home to get the delivery.
As a lifestyle product it's an effortless way to feel like you are cooking for yourself, being healthier, not shovelling readymeals or takeaway food into your mouth so you feel better about yourself. Also the fact you pay quite a lot for it gives you incentive to actually follow the routine.
However I can see someone just starting out being tricked by one of the many crap recipes out there and just simply wanting the convenience of a quality recipe with the exact ingredients.
Food Wishes, Serious Eats, Cooking With Dog, America's Test Kitchen, Maangchi, the forums of pizzamaking.com
Bon Appetit recipes tend to be good when I make them, but they publish a lot of recipes and often times they aren't for food I actually want to make. Good Eats was nice when I was initially learning how to cook, but he sometimes goes over board, especially his weird unitasker rule. The correct rule should be to always critically evaluate bringing a new tool into kitchen, don't clutter it up with a lot of items you will rarely use, and make sure the tool is as easy as possible to keep clean.
The value proposition is, primarily, saving time shopping, meal planning, and portioning-out ingredients.
Whether this is sufficient to justify the cost depends on how you value your time, and whether you find value in spending it on those a activities.
But yeah, I guess if you have celiac's or live with someone with celiac's you're just kind of shit out of luck for Blue Apron.
Their meals are overpriced for what you get from what I have seen, I fail to see their value over simply buying the stuff local and and finding a recipe online for free.
for their $60 per week to get 6 small portion meals I can buy over 2x that number of meals shopping at my local store, + snacks and other household items