I wouldn't be surprised if "Pack the box back up and burn a bunch more jet fuel sending it back to New York" turns out to be even worse than just sending it all to the landfill.

Given that they require air mailing boxes full of (mostly, by weight) frozen liquids all over the place on a weekly basis, I'm not convinced that these meal kit services can ever be made sustainable. Compared to that cost, worrying about recycling and whether their food suppliers are organic or not seems like it's probably just bikeshedding.

It might be cool to see what a company like Imperfect Produce could come up with in this space.

We subscribed to Terra’s Kitchen after trying a few services including Blue Apron and Freshly.

Terra’s Kitchen, in addition to using non-disposable, durable vessels and cold packs that you return, also pre-chops and pre-preps many of the ingredients so meal prep and cleanup is truly 20-30 mins, which is half the time (or less) than Blue Apron.

Here are the vessels they use: https://www.terraskitchen.com/how-it-works/

Highly recommend.

I wonder if the added cost is worth it as far as freshness and quality are concerned. I know I'm not the typical case, but I never got a bad shipment from Blue Apron when I was using it. I really wish I could continue to use it but I just can't justify the amount of waste that piles up over just going to the store myself. I spend almost as much time unpacking and prepping everything for recycling.

So Terra's Kitchen basically sends customers a mini fridge filled with raw ingredients?

I wouldn't be surprised to see local distribution through grocery stores (whole foods/ralphs) dominate the subscription meal space over the next few years due to better distribution margins and economies of scale.

This is how it works where I lived in Europe. All the big grocery store chains have their own food subscription boxes, and instead of having it delivered home you can also just pick it up at your local supermarket on you way home from work.

Yes, this is how we do it here in sweden, perfect way of getting rid of the food that is getting close to the best before date without lowering the price. Also easier to sell vegetables that don't look so good.

I stull preffer to select mu goods by myself, it's well spent time away from the keyboard stress and I get to decide how much waste I want to produce by using my 10 year old cotton bags and let the fruit and veggies use their own packaging, that is anyway best for freshness.

That's where I was wondering about Imperfect Produce. It's a company that buys up fruits and veggies that the local distributor couldn't sell to the grocery stores for whatever reason, and delivers a weekly box of whatever they have to subscribers.

Our experience thus far has been that the produce sometimes has some cosmetic issues, but as often as not the only thing wrong with it is that it's just not the size that consumers typically expect, or the distributor just had excess stock. The food is almost always fresher, because it's coming straight from the distributor rather than sitting around on supermarket shelves for a while before you buy it.

Even when delivering, there are minor to moderate efficiencies related to route planning and sometimes electric cars. Electric freezer cars are used, relatively efficient. (dry ice is too expensive and dangerous)

Certainly they could be at least as sustainable as any grocery store; they’d just need to create more, smaller distribution centers closer to their customers. The DCs can get their supplies locally or via bulk shipments (and sort out recycling on-site) and then assemble the meal kits and add ice for the last mile.

Transporting ingredients in bulk to the DCs is more efficient than transporting a bunch of individually packaged and individually cooked meal kits.

It is amazing how often humans continue to essentially create new problems that are easily solvable on their own. A culture of convenience and throw-away (not my problem) or "I don't have the time for x" is why we keep having mountains of waste. Anyone who is concerned with waste can make the conscious choices to eliminate or reduce that waste in a lot of areas of their life.

1. Buy real food and cook it 2. Grow food or contribute to local co-op or farms 3. Make stuff you use all the time 4. Bring your own containers/bags

Usually these are the only options for a lot of things. But there are other cases where just having consumers fed up with companies like in the case above you can shift market incentives with your choice. Lush is a good example of this for instance.

It's a combined effort, you have to not be lazy and actually care about the choices you are making with where you spend your money and companies will respond to the demand. Sometimes it takes more effort, or you can just not buy X and see if you can either make your own alternative or not need X at all.

There are tons and tons of homemade things you can do to eliminate waste by just making it yourself. I've found it generally comes to a few constant categories where I generally produce the most waste.

- Food + Beverages - Hygenics

Sure there are the other areas where I produce trash, but those two categories are the ones where waste is produced every single day so the impact is a lot higher. The solution is relatively straightforward, make more things by hand or purchase goods closer to raw form (Lush seems to be a great example of one that can replace just about all of my hygenic material waste). And second, make more recipes by hand closer to the raw material ingredients and bring your own containers.

> Buy real food and cook it > Bring your own containers/bags

I eat out once a fortnight for dinner and once a week for lunch, and cook the rest of the time. The vast majority of what I buy is fresh food (fruit, vegetables, some small amounts of dairy, meat and pulses). Everything I buy is packaged in single use plastics. My lunch today, the tomatoes came in a cardboard box that was wrapped in plastic, the cucumber was shrink wrapped, the pitta breads came individually wrapped. There are two supermarkets I can choose from and both of them suffer the same problem. All the meat comes in disposable trays with a film covering, and a plastic inlet. Technically the tray is recyclable if I remove the meat and the inside tray and wash it, but my recycling services won't accept it in case it's contaminated by food.

My plastic toothpaste container comes in a cardboard box. My biodegradable bin liners come with a plastic wrapper to protect them.

This isn't something that I can fix, I don't have the option to buy unpackaged goods, or to provide my own containers.

* Toothpaste can be made and or bought from places like Lush where the alternatives can be zero waste. It's a bit out of the ordinary but there are options that even I'm surprised by it.

* Just about all produce/fruit is available without plastic wrapping (except for berries I've found, which is quite annoying). I think the only non-plastic option here is to just try and grow the fruit yourself. Or otherwise take the plastic and grind it into pellets to use for something else. There's some neat stuff related to this. I've also seen this as an option for most local farmers:

https://myplasticfreelife.com/2011/05/irritated-with-plastic...

* Meat is next to impossible for this, but I've found meat available raw in paper wrapping when you get it in some places. This is usually in a place like Whole Foods, but even then the meat comes in a plastic covering like you mention.

I totally see what you're saying, I think I'm just looking at areas where large quantities of everyday plastic waste is avoidable. For instance, when eating out it's not unheard to bring your own container for leftovers instead of having them give you a styrofoam container for the food. And of course I say all this also realizing that a lot of people might not have access to all this ^ :(

For toothpaste, I had a look on the lush website [0]. For me to switch to that, I would be spending 6 times what I currently am on toothpaste, and would also need to travel an extra 3 miles to get to my nearest lush store.

> Just about all produce/fruit is available without plastic wrapping

Maybe if you're shopping in farmers markets. I shop in high street supermarkets, and it _isn't_ available. I have a choice of buying a 1kg bag of onions, or not buying onions. I can buy a 3 pack of bell peppers, or not buy bell peppers. I can buy a 6 pack of Golden Delicious apples, or I can not buy apples. I do try and buy less packaging, but unfortunately the odds are stacked against me.

[0] - https://uk.lush.com/products/tooth-fairy

Meat is easy for me, I just head to the butcher that’s next to the shops. Not only is it cheaper and higher quality, but the only plastic used is the extremely thin bag they wrap the meat in, and they’re happy to use paper instead if you bring it!

There's only one butcher (amazingly) in the area that I live in, and it's only open 8:30 - 5:30 Monday through Friday, which doesn't work for anyone working full time.

I think this is something that depends on the country. As someone used to buy raw food (without any plastic) I get surprised every time I travel to some more "civilized" countries where plastic is every where!

Anwyay, even in the fruit & vegetable shop, most of people pick small plastic bags to put and weight the food. I am one of the few ones that puts everything on the same bag.

We tried a local alternative to Blue Apron. They hand delivered to our doorstep. It was pretty well done and organized. Packaging didn't seem particularly wasteful to me. Might be worth checking around to see if anyone local is more friendly that way.

We did this as well. They would drop off essentially a gym bag full of food and ice packs on week one. Starting on week 2, you leave the bag, ice packs, and rinsed containers on your porch and they pick it up as they drop off the next batch. It worked great!

They eventually shut down the food part of their business to sell their food business software to other businesses, so we started using Sun Basket. Everything they send is locally recyclable, though I wonder how many people do it. I'm thinking of canceling because they've started including ads for unrelated stuff in their shipments. (This week some meal was "sponsored by" some stupid movie that comes out next week. Ugh.) Other than that, I've been fairly happy with their work.

Who did you end up using?

Not sure of the name. Some mom-and-pop startup in Utah County. My wife saw a coupon or ad for them and decided to try it out.

I quite liked the convenience and food and recipes, but my nagging guilt over the packaging waste and transportation waste of individually packaged and shipped food, even when recycling, is the reason I stopped taking Blue Apron. Shipping the recycling back to them didn't seem like a net positive either.

But at least they tried! I feel bad picking on Blue Apron when single using plastic water bottles are everywhere.

Don't get trapped in the fallacy of what-about-ism. Just because plastic bottles are a nuisance already present everywhere doesn't give other entities a license to produce more trash.

This is what Blue Apron recommends for "recycling" their freezer packs:

"We recommend cutting the ice pack open and disposing of the gel in the trash. You can then recycle on your own or send back to us!" [1]

Yes, you take the stuff out of the freezer pack bag and put it into a new bag, and recycle the old bag. Where does the new bag go? In the trash.

[1] https://twitter.com/blueapron/status/652141163948847104?lang...

This exact same thing happened with Amazon Fresh. Used to have a way to return ice packs, now you cannot. The instructions are the same: cut the pack, drain gel, recycle?

In Seattle, Amazon Fresh was using dry ice for a while. My friends and I would just cut up the block of dry ice and use it to smoke our cocktails.

Blue Apron's cold packs are ridiculous. The goop leaks onto the food, they're a nightmare to dispose of, and they're heavy; probably 75% of the weight of a BA box is the cold packs. If they used dry ice, the boxes would be much lighter weight -- saving on shipping costs -- and they would simply evaporate rather than needing to be trashed.

It might not be feasible for them. Shippers place pretty strict limits on how much dry ice can go onto one of their planes, on account of not wanting to suffocate the air crew mid flight.

Interesting. Didn't know this. And you're absolutely right: https://about.van.fedex.com/blog/dry-ice-shipments-in-air-tr...

Fortunately, people have built-in biological CO2 detectors. If it is just flight crew (no passengers), they all have oxygen masks they can use if the CO2 suffuses the cabin.

Umm, surely you can see that's a little crazy?

I'm all for environmental awareness - but it's a bit like the people saying, oh, why do you not use re-usable containers for everything, or do you really need to dishwash everything?

Things like food safety, and not making your customers sick are enshrined in law - and that's a good thing.

Even at my work, they aren't allowed to re-serve/re-heat things that have been served once, due to cross-contamination.

>[...]do you really need to dishwash everything?

You don't! Unless you have flies and cockroaches infested kitchen, some stray bacteria left after just water-washing will be much less harmful than eating the stuck-on-surface dishsoap (which does not rinse off completely, since it's hydrophobic). I have an even worse opinion of people constantly bleaching their countertops. shudder

As an anecdote, I once had a misfortune of living with a guy who would never rinse off the dishsoap from the dishes at all, just leave them out to dry still covered in suds!

Soaps and detergents are not hydrophobic. They are part hydrophilic and part lipophilic which is how they pull lipids into the water when you wash something.

I don't see what your reply has to do with my comment.

You're saying the CO2 risk is OK, because they have oxygen masks.

That's like saying, increasing the risk of crashing a car is OK, because we'll have airbags.

What I'm saying is (unless you're PETA), the welfare and safety of your fellow human beings will trump most other things.

There's a reason the crew already has oxygen masks.

The masks are there to survive sudden cabin decompression at high altitudes where the atmosphere is too thin to breath. There is only enough oxygen to last a few minutes.

Further reading: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travel-truths/truth-about...

> Fortunately, people have built-in biological CO2 detectors.

They’re not that sensitive, though, and the symptoms are ambiguous.

The CO2 would enter the food, and make it taste like a weird kind of seltzer.

Is all the food air sealed?

CO2 doesn't really go into anything to any significant degree unless it's under pressure.

And yet it did when I had food cooled by dry ice. So what counts more, what actually happened, or the theory?

The reason is that if the item is cold (especially right above freezing) you don't need much pressure to get CO2 to dissolve.

The food was weird it was all tingly and fizzy on the tongue. Kind of like the flavor of flat seltzer.

Solubility of CO2 in water at 0C and roughly atmospheric pressure is about 0.001337 mole fraction [0]. CO2 molecules are 44/18 times heavier than water molecules, so that's about 3.3g of CO2 dissolved in a liter of water. Carbonated water is usually specified in "volumes of CO2". One mole of gas at STP has a volume of about 22.4L, so one liter of CO2 weighs about 2g. "Lightly carbonated" is usually considered about two volumes of dissolved CO2, so 4g/L, which isn't much higher than 3.3g. Assuming the packaging is sealed well enough to maintain a high percentage of CO2 within, and the temperature is low enough, it looks plausible that there would be a noticeable change in taste/mouth-feel. This is confirmed by a study I found showing average taste threshold for dissolved CO2 in water of 0.26g/L [1].

[0] http://sites.chem.colostate.edu/diverdi/all_courses/CRC%20re... [1] https://home.zhaw.ch/yere/pdf/Teil16%20-%20Expression%20of%2...

The theory supports ars. Calculate before you downvote.

One exception: fermenting liquids can become super-saturated with CO2 even if fitted with an air-lock to vent the CO2 to atmospheric pressure. This might cause a rather messy surprise if you add powdered yeast nutrient to an ongoing fermentation and give it a lot of nucleation points.

I’ve experienced this issue just a tiny bit with my delivery of dip’n’dots with dry ice, but more noticeably when putting dry ice in a cocktail.

It is really noticeable in drinks with direct exposure to all that gas and ice. Solid food in a box? I don’t have as much experience with that, so I’m not sure.

> There is a solution here.

Rant: the solution is to learn how to read a recipe and cook without a paint by numbers erector set that has an unreasonable packaging:food ratio.

I’m fine with these services as a ‘gateway drug’ to independently cooking for yourself, but they’re insane as a long term thing.

(Not to mention that I have no idea how they stay viable in the long term, given their customer acquisition costs. If anyone makes it work in the long term it will be Amazon/Whole Foods.)

That's nonsense. I have formal culinary training and Blue Apron was never about needing to learn how to read a recipe and cook with "a paint by numbers erector set". It was almost exclusively about the convenience and ease of recycling what was sent.

You're projecting.

No,i agree with parent. What is so damn hard about picking a recipe and then ordering produce/goods from your local grocery accordingly? It seems wasteful to use a service like that purely for convenience.

Great. That's your prerogative. With Blue Apron, I didn't have to leave the house so it was incredibly convenient, the food was good, the variety of recipes was good, and I got to cook with ingredients that I never would have picked out on my own or that just aren't available at my local grocery store.

Convenience is the major factor but there are all kinds of pros to the Blue Apron service that I would continue to benefit from if it wasn't just for the incredibly wasteful packaging and processing. If they just shipped all that stuff without all the wrapping, I'd be fine with that. I've done farm boxes before that didn't need all the plastic.

It's much less wasteful to have many meals made up at once than for everyone to invent ad hoc meals. Also you just get enough of each ingredient for the meal instead of having to buy whatever unit size the grocery store feels like selling.

Doesn't address the bigger issue, but Sun Basket is for now a relatively environmentally-friendly one - a relatively small amount of paper/cardboard packaging only.

I was just fuming at the heavy coolant bags they ship in their packages that are not recyclable and recommended to be thrown in the trash. This is not progress.