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.
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.