One of my biggest problems with meal kits was the huge amount of plastic waste with each one. Blue Apron was an example of this with little bottles of ketchup.

Look, I have ketchup already in my house. The meal kits need a way for you to check off the general staples like that. OK send me fermented garlic, but I have ketchup and vinegar don't waste the plastic sending me those.

It makes me wonder if there is just a lot better way of doing cookbooks. I know that Isa Chandra already has sections of her books for "a well-stocked pantry" that just gets you stocked up on the items that will be used and reused throughout her books (e.g., liquid smoke or tamari). Expanding off that idea and refactoring meal kits I think could really work in everyone's favor. Perhaps at a point in the subscription, you could just get larger items sent to you once that the kit provider knows will be used over and over in subsequent recipes since they're the planner.

I couldn’t find anywhere including the article. NPR has a disclaimer though that one of their sponsors is Blue Apron.

The research reads so weak, though. For instance, they don’t count CO2 emission caused by transportation! They just bought the same ingredients at a grocery store, cooked the same meal themselves and compared the numbers! They also assume that you eat all of the meal kit.

So many assumptions, hard to replicate methods, arbitrary exclusions.

Even if this was not sponsored, pretty bad “research” anyways.

From the article:

"Of course, shipping meal kits to millions of households causes emissions. But these kits are delivered alongside other mail on normal routes, and the researchers found that this last stage of distribution accounted for 11% of grocery store meal emissions but only 4% for meal kits."

By that logic, only that one letter at the very end of the delivery route is responsible for any of the co2 emissions from package delivery. Everything else is just along for the ride, since they were going by anyway.

Bingo! This is one of my pet peeves!

If you want to accurately measure the cost of sending a package (or passenger, or data packet), for any reasonable purpose, you can't use the "just one more" test. You have to say, "what if I increased the load by a million units? Okay, the unit cost should be regarded as a millionth of that."

Here's a great application of the concept when Netflix tried to use the "just one more" model: [1]

>The green marketing gurus at Netflix go even further, arguing that the mail is going to be delivered to your house anyway, so the environmental cost of delivering one of their DVDs is effectively zero. ... Here, the Green Lantern feels Netflix may be overplaying its hand just a little: Eventually, the addition of new mail into the system adds up, requiring more trucks, greater strain on the mail-sorting system, and so on. Since we can’t identify the impact of one extra piece of mail, we’re better off averaging the cost of delivering the mail over each item.

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2008/08/is-your-netflix-queue-d...

It was discussed on HN too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414173

Isn't there just some average value floating around out there to estimate the cost of an ounce-mile of mail?

At any rate, your food gets shipped from same place and ends up with you. Isn't the co2 going to be basically the same if that's to a grocery store first or to a big cooking joint? Assuming the locations are roughly similar.

I think you are being uncharitable - is there any reason to think they are using the specious logic you are imputing? The fact that the truck already has a route with a lot of packages means the emissions are lower even when you count the meal kits proportionally. And they didn't count the emissions as zero, right?

I've learned to never be charitable when it comes to corporate/marketing speak.

Yeah, their meal kits generate a ridiculous amount of waste.