I think Blue Apron is really the king of these services, on the 2-person-meals option there are now usually 8 options to choose from (they increased from 6 a couple months ago), only 2 max of which are pasta.

Most weeks there's a steak option, a fish option, or both, and there's always a couple non-pasta chicken options. I think the steak options are becoming somewhat rarer, there used to be one every single week.

A while ago they stopped charging different prices for different options. (So of course, I usually try to get the ones that look like the most expensive ingredients). I think that, along with increasing the number of options every week, was probably in response to customer feedback on pain points... but both those things also cut into their profitability. My sense is that they've been reducing the cost of the ingredients accordingly, trying to catch up.

I don't mind the time to cook and clean myself, the whole point for me is I _want_ to be cooking... it's just SO convenient not to have to do menu planning and shopping. And most of the meals cook quicker than what I'd cook myself (you can follow them like a zombie barely realizing what you're doing, for better or worse, ha). I'm willing to pay for that... to a point. If the ingredients and recipes are good. And they are correctly charging the right price for me -- in that any higher, and I'd cancel, they've got me at my max ha.

Even $15/meal is probably less than I'd pay at any restaurant/carry out that wasn't terribly unhealthy, including gratuity and tax.

>Even $15/meal is probably less than I'd pay at any restaurant/carry out that wasn't terribly unhealthy, including gratuity and tax.

15$ a meal is pure insanity for 400-600 kcals, I eat 6-8lbs of chicken a week and my weekly grocery bill is right around 50$.

I live in Indiana, the average household income is $45,943, even just one person earning that you're taking home 35,482$ a year which is about 97$ a day which makes just 1 of these meals a day 10.2% of your net income.

Most of the country is not tech workers drawing high 5 and low 6-figure incomes.

Right, but the person I was replying to was comparing it to prepared food.

I think more Americans may eat prepared food more often than you think (and Blue Apron or similar services are usually 2-3 meals a week, which is far from every meal).

But I agree it looks like the price they would need to charge to be profitable is not a price there is a sufficient market for.

They're usually around 800 Cals, FWIW.

I agree that it's overpriced, but I tried it discounted and found it reasonable aside from that.

> Even $15/meal is probably less than I'd pay at any restaurant/carry out that wasn't terribly unhealthy, including gratuity and tax.

If they want mass appeal then they need to have to include people in their market who can't afford to eat out for every meal.

> so it's about $15 on top of the $9 portion

Only if they're missing out on work by cooking their food. It's only an opportunity cost if there's an opportunity.

It doesn't cost me $400 every time I go to bed for the night.

I get your general point, that bits and pieces of time can't be converted directly into one's wage, since those bits and pieces can't be trivially converted into work for that same wage. But this calculation is still pretty valid under certain circumstances, at the very least as a floor: if you're not in a situation where you want more hours at work but can't get them[1], then you are in fact deciding that the marginal value of another hour of your work isn't

A couple of the caveats here are:

a) The market generally has a discrete floor on contiguous blocks of time: as a reductio ad absurdum, I generally can't sell alternating 30 seconds of work out of every minute and then add that up to 1/2 time. A related concept is that there are fixed costs associated with setting up this exchange.

b) For exempt employees, more hours of work don't translate directly into more pay, though depending on the incentive structure of the firm, they may translate stochastically (e.g. working harder to get a raise). The main point is that this relationship isn't continuous and it isn't frictionless.

That being said, it's really not a bad heuristic for trying to compare the value of time vs money. If I have a preference against spending my time on some task roughly on par with my preference for not working further, I can at the very least set a bound on what my time is worth: e.g. if I know I can reliably get software contracting work for an aftertax $120/hr (incl the time taken to secure the contracts), then it's somewhere between a heuristic and a tautology to say that I'm valuing a marginal hour of free time at >$120, which suggests that I should be willing to spend $120 on something that saves me from an hour of work that's comparably-unpleasant to doing an hour of contract work.

> It doesn't cost me $400 every time I go to bed for the night.

This is a particularly poor example, since ~8 hours is a contiguous enough block that you could get an entirely different job with a night shift, so yea, the opportunity cost is literally $400/sleep if that choice was feasible.

[1] which is actually a pretty common problem for low-wage workers much more so than high-wage workers

> This is a particularly poor example, since ~8 hours is a contiguous enough block that you could get an entirely different job with a night shift, so yea, the opportunity cost is literally $400/sleep if that choice was feasible.

If he's going to cut out sleeping, he might as well cut out eating entirely.

I doubt the original example was intended as actionable, since cutting out sleeping has far higher costs than the value of the labor. Its just a thought experiment.

> they will waste ~30 minutes cooking

Maybe it was just me but I always found Blue Apron to be 45 mins of cook time. If they could find a way to help me make a meal that was 80% as good in 50% of the time, I'd be a subscriber for life.

We used blue apron for almost a year, and another competitor for quite awhile as well. Blue Apron recipes seemed almost specifically designed to be hard to replicate and over-complicated. They always used strange ingredients you'd never have in your kitchen, far more pots and pans than necessary, took 2-3x the quoted time for my wife and I to prepare TOGETHER, and the pan-searing time for meats was always half of what was required to get it remotely cooked.

Very few Blue Apron meals were pasta, from what I can remember. If any.

I think the competitor, Gobble, was better by a fair bit, because less prep was required. But obviously that's a tradeoff.

> We used blue apron for almost a year, and another competitor for quite awhile as well. Blue Apron recipes seemed almost specifically designed to be hard to replicate and over-complicated. They always used strange ingredients you'd never have in your kitchen, far more pots and pans than necessary

Huh? Don't think I ever had BA need more than two pots/pans total (usually, at most one each, sometimes with the pan reused. Often just the pan.)

> took 2-3x the quoted time for my wife and I to prepare TOGETHER

Usually took slightly longer than quoted alone; but that's going to vary a lot by skill in the kitchen and equipment quality; if you have crappy or poorly maintained knives or poor knife skills, for instance, prep time goes way up.)

> and the pan-searing time for meats was always half of what was required to get it remotely cooked.

Cooking times IME were exact, or a little long; again, though, equipment (stove and cookware) play a role.

It was almost always 2 or 3 pans, and lots of prep bowls and the like. Sometimes I found out later they were unnecessary and the recipe should have just been worded differently.

I completely agree with you. Always a lot of pots/pans and I think I was a little embarrassed to admit it took me so much longer than their promised times, 2x to 3x was normal for us too. :(

I dont know how experienced you are cooking, but I have not had the same experience you have had with blue apron at all. Never took many pots or pans, and certainly never took 2-3x as long to pan-sear meats. My guess is you just aren't managing the heat appropriately. Their times are consistent with anything you would find with other recipes online.

We also did Gobble for about two weeks, there is no comparison in the quality of food, Blue Apron is SIGNIFICANTLY better. Gobble was FAR easier to prepare, for example, you would get pre-seasoned, and pre-prepared beef for a meal. Obviously that's very different than cooking a raw cut of meat yourself. But, as you pointed out, the tradeoff was in the quality of the finished food. Not even remotely close between the two.

I'm not particularly experienced (I've been cooking for years, of course, but it's hardly a hobby, more like a necessary evil), it's entirely possible we were doing something wrong. -- but it didn't seem to matter if I was using an Ikea pan or a cast iron pan I preheated for awhile; i was always on the verge of the smoke point of the oil and it still took way longer than suggested.

Blue Apron food was good; occasionally they gave us something nasty but we were usually able to toss it and just skip that one thing.

>i was always on the verge of the smoke point of the oil and it still took way longer than suggested.

So I used to struggle with this exact thing as well, and this is how I solved it. You have to remember that when you add the protein to the pan the temperature is going to drop by a large amount. So for me, as soon as I saw the first whisps of smoke off the oil, I would crank the heat up a bit and toss in the protein (or whatever I was starting with). You will be amazed what a difference in makes.

I think you just have to look around. https://www.gobble.com/ promises 15 cook times. There are also fully prepared meal delivery services like https://www.freshly.com/ or https://www.preppeddelivery.com/ where you just have to microwave the meals.

If you like cooking, the time spent might have a positive dollar value for you.

In my case, I do like cooking, but Blue Apron's subscription model became an endless treadmill that I stopped looking forward to after a couple months.

Even if you don't enjoy cooking, you could buy a 15 dollar speaker for the kitchen and put audiobooks or podcasts on while you cook so you don't feel like it is time wasted.

We (SWMBO and I) used to use a similar service, the meals were supposed to take 30 mins to prepare. I cook alot so I am no slouch in the kitchen but the reality was 45 minutes to an hour. I can’t always be bothered with that after a day at work, when I could whip something up in 15-20 mins from ingredients I have anyway. So we cancelled and still get these really cringy, attempted emotional manipulation emails begging us to come back... when your product is literally more work and more expensive than simply not having it, you don’t got a viable business model.