Meal planning is work. Grocery shopping is work. Cooking is work. We've decided that cooking is the work we enjoy, and the other parts are work we'd rather pay someone to do for us. We are more than capable of putting together a meal plan, we just value our time more than money and have found the right service to pay to help us in that regard.

I've heard some people talk about why grocery delivery "won't work" in the US. There's a huge last-mile problem. For the first few years, Blue Apron was northern east-coast, then west-coast only. It took awhile to get most states covered. Another argument I've heard is that people like to pick their food. They're worried they'll get stuck with blemished/bruised food.

However, the only time I've used it was when I had a broken foot and, while I could drive to the store or pick up one or two things, doing a grocery shopping was difficult.

At least at the time, they'd invariably be out of something I needed for a recipe and/or they'd make substitutions that weren't really what I would have wanted. Quality was "OK." Normally, it's not a big deal for me to go to the store and I just didn't love the service in general.

Our local store's online service is actually one of the better ones I've tried in terms of finding things and getting the task done - but they fail in quality at the end.

Right now, the cost of my box includes all those steps. It also occasionally includes locally sourced meat, fish, dairy, or eggs. I can find information on the farms where those items came from easily.

I value that service enough to pay a small premium for it.

"No, you're wrong, it'd didn't solve that problem for you."

Wat? I'm able to evaluate a cost benefit scenario in the context of my own life quite adequately. The stuff we need from the store these days is staples, which we buy rarely in bulk.

There's definitely a time limit to this. As you get better at cooking, you get better at thinking of recipes that don't have ingredients that quickly spoil, and/or can be cooked from frozen, or can be frozen after cooking, or can be portioned out as part (let's say) half the meals you cook this week.

These habits accumulate, they don't appear all at once. Worse for a service like blue apron: cooking a lot of new recipes fosters that sort of thinking.

I think an important perspective to remember is that most styles of cooking were come up with by people who didn't have refrigeration, although they weren't as fragmented as we are (lots of single people and couples due to capitalist alienation.) When you tighten the constraint of the number of people being cooked for while loosening the constraint of how long ingredients will last and how long things you cook can be saved (without changing the taste much e.g. pickling and drying), things come out about even.

In my case it was a combination of that and quality problems. (This was Hello Fresh, not Blue Apron though). We had a lot of great meals, used the "family plan" so we'd have left overs, but there was some kind of inflection point where we started have regular issues with the meats. In a period of about 6 weeks we had 4 or 5 problems. Beef that was open and dropping it's liquid out. 3 chicken meals in a row where it gave off a foul odor of sulfur, indicating it had spoiled. We had issues with other fresh ingredients as well, though these were the only ones that ruined the meal completely.

Each time, Hello Fresh customer service was good in giving a refund and even a meal credit, but it was too much. You can't plan your meals when there get's to be a 1 in 3 chance your food is spoiled. We cancelled, but by that time we already had about 20 solid recipe cards for dishes we loved and could easily do ourselves, so we didn't bother looking for another meal service. Maybe we will if/when we get bored with our choices again, but it would probably be temporary given the premiums paid.

I'm looking towards Amazon's purchase of Wholefoods and what that might do for meal services to bring the cost down substantially, then I'd consider a regular subscription.

But it isn't so simple. I live in Canada and have used a couples of services and currently and semi-regular with makegoodfood (which I assume is very similar to Blue Apron). I'm a pretty decent cook and baker, have all of the cookware, and go to the grocery store relatively regularly, but still I make use of it because it isn't simply that they give me ingredients.

I like their menu. They constantly surprise me with good meals with great ingredients. Things that I would have never, in a million years, have chosen on my own. And the recipes (and thus, the meted out ingredients) have been almost perfect. This is a far cry from finding recipes online and replicating them -- this food vendor has been completely incentivized to make their creations perfect, versus recipe sites like AllRecipe where it's just user contributions, often with shockingly bad errors in some top recipes (pancakes with 3 1/2 tablespoons of baking powder to 1 1/2 cups of flour? Give me a break... 4.5 stars)

Cost wise there is no way I could go to the grocery store and buy the ingredients for less. I should say that I get the 4 meal versions (so the shipping is less a component of the price), but to get all of the often odd spices, small amounts of various things like odd ciders, vinegar, etc, it would be very pricey to replicate. Cooking interesting meals is expensive because you can't buy exactly what you need for most things. Not to mention that it wouldn't just be time consuming trying to find every oddball ingredient, it's stressful too. But every couple of weeks I get a box with very, very high quality meats, fish, perfectly portioned out spices and ingredients. It's so much nicer.

This is a bit like the "cloud server" versus "your own raw metal" discussions. In the end many underestimate the advantages of the former, and grossly underestimate the cost and inconvenience of the latter.