Blue Apron just seems so unnecessary. You still have to do all the work! Just go to the grocery store and buy stuff there? You can get recipes online for free. I do all my shopping on Saturday at Trader Joe's and spend very little for lots of food which I then cook. There's so much wasted materials and trash with Blue Apron.

I don't get it, but then I don't have any trouble cooking for myself and my family. I didn't grow up learning how to cook. I spent a little bit of time figuring it out and then it became easy and didn't require a subscription to some sketchy company.

There's also no way that you're coming close to the prices at a supermarket when you're buying individual meal's worth ingredients instead of bulk, a bag of potatoes, or a bottle of seasoning instead of one potato and one pinch of whatever inside some single serving plastic wrapping.

> Blue Apron just seems so unnecessary. You still have to do all the work!

Not to mention the impact of the packaging materials and shipping. I can't speak to Blue Apron but my daughter used Freshly for a bit and I was shocked to the point of laughter at what was showing up at our house once a week: a big cardboard box with this thick, plastic-wrapped insulating material fitted to all six faces, and inside were nestled six individual meals, also packaged in cardboard with some plastic. My daughter told me they claim some level of recyclability for the insulating material, and of course the box can probably be shredded and re-boxified, but I bet 90+ percent goes right in the can and out to the curb.

Certainly not as much, but there is still quite a lot of invisible packaging you don't see up the grocery store supply line.

Just about everything in the grocery store comes in a big cardboard box.

However grocery stores and other businesses in that chain have bailers for the cardboard and other processes to insure recycling.

blue apron's fault is trying to enter a space too easily replicated by others including the very grocery stores who have everything mostly in place except for the recipes.

it wasn't long after services like Blue Apron came about and were newsworthy before many grocery stores started having prepackaged fresh items you could mix and match for a quick meal.

And just about everything that Blue Apron or any of these other companies package comes with similar invisible packaging, so the delta is still the same per amount of veggies. Or is your point something different that I missed?

Also note that the delta is a big big percentage of the base packaging, and I am willing to bet it's over 100%, if not 500%, just cause there are so many packages made from few large boxes.

Plus the existing physical stores have the advantage of economies of scale. I always wonder what that means for the whole B2C e-commerce supply chain compared to individual traffic to brick and mortar stores.

> but I bet 90+ percent goes right in the can and out to the curb

Source? Or are you just speculating based on nothing?

Just to elaborate: The comment is basically saying they are lying without any proof of such. Is it OK to blatantly and unfoundedly accuse companies of fraud like that?

This isn't an accusation of fraud. Note that the post you quoted includes the words "I bet", so you should know its speculation. Accusing them of fraud would be claiming the packaging materials aren't recyclable. Note that the OP's claim is that most of the packaging probably doesn't get recycled. I don't find this at all far-fetched, as many people who are environmentally conscious enough to care about recycling everything will also be bothered by the amount of packaging material.

Recyclable materials that end up in a landfill are no better than non-recyclables in that same landfill, as even organic materials don't really decompose in a landfill.

> Just to elaborate: The comment is basically saying they are lying

The comment absolutely does not accuse them of lying. They claim the material is recyclable, not that it is actually being recycled. I don't contest their claim that it can be recycled, and I simply speculate that most of it isn't.

It's the same reason, I sometimes still like to watch classic television; rather than choosing specific programmes to watch, I want them curated for me. And while television channels offer a mediocre experience on average, watching something I wouldn't have picked myself is a way to expand my horizons.

In the same vein, Blue Apron and Hello Fresh, I'd imagine, are there to expand your horizons in terms of culinary options. If it's just me going to the grocery store, then I'll just get for any old recipe I know.

They both remind me of a Danish company, Aarstiderne, which has been around since 1999, where the sales pitch is fresh organic vegetables with curated recipes by chefs every week. Particularly in 1999, when organic vegetables were harder to come by - even in Denmark, it made a lot of sense. Now they have so many different subscription choices (that offer different kinds of culinary experiences), that it's akin to picking the channel on television, but letting the programmers pick the programmes.

That's the appealing thing to me, it's actually less the convenience.

Download their online recipes and do a rand on them.

It's 100% about convenience. They offer nothing more than you picking up your own food. Plus they ship as much packaging as food so it's probably far from being the most ecological solution.

The problem with that approach is that often they include ingredients in very small quantities that most people won't have, and buying the ingredient yourself requires getting a container with 1000x the amount you need. Even if it's cheap, people balk at that.

But yes, the packaging is insanely wasteful, not to mention the ecological cost of shipping itself.

I definitely cooked more often when I had a HelloFresh subscription. And when I do cook now, the variety of things I make is much smaller.

>The problem with that approach is that often they include ingredients in very small quantities that most people won't have, and buying the ingredient yourself requires getting a container with 1000x the amount you need. Even if it's cheap, people balk at that.

This is more of a problem with how fucked American supermarkets are and how much food wasted is generated not just by too much being packaged. I go out of my way to shop at Asian supermarkets because at least I can buy alot of produce individually and not massive bags of shit that'll spoil before I can eat it like American supermarkets push.

That's interesting because, by the nature of needing to appeal to everyone, I find Hello Fresh recipes to be very safe and often quite bland tasting. If you already know how to cook it's easy to make them tasty according to your preferences but if you don't I suspect people just churn out middling-tasting food.

I have no experience with Hello Fresh, but Aarstiderne in Denmark strives on making their offerings uncommon. They arrange their subscriptions by how difficult they are. Of course, there is no 'chef' level, so to speak, because if you're at that point, you don't really need something like this.

But as someone who is reasonable acceptable at cooking, I do like the idea of something where I can get outside my comfort zone.

Everything you said is accurate, but that doesn't mean there isn't a place in the market for Blue Apron.

People are paying for convenience. Think of it like a house cleaning service. You don't NEED to hire someone to clean your house, but it makes your life a little easier and for some, that's worth it.

Except this is like buying a small package of cleaning utilities for one cleaning and then cleaning the house with it yourself. In your analogy, the cleaning service would be ordering food from a restaurant.

The utility here is very marginal, and there are alternatives that make your life even easier.

You need to understand that people do irrational things all the time but feel like they get a positive benefit from it. Meal kit delivery is easier than picking out recipes yourself and then buying ingredients yourself. It's certainly not easier than ordering takeout from a restaurant. But there's the "feel good factor" of doing the cooking yourself but removing some of the prep and decision-making. It's not all about utility; emotion factors in heavily sometimes.

With services like Blue Apron and HelloFresh, you're paying for convenience. Perhaps you don't want to go to the grocery store, look up recipes, etc.

As a terrible cook I love that they do all the work of finding an achievable recipe and shopping for all the (sometimes obscure) ingredients. I've improved my cooking skills significantly as a result and I'm almost ready to move on from them now.

Agreed, I've tried blue apron, home chef, and green chef and it has been an overall positive experience

It's a valid first choice. Once you order and see what you get and understand how it's made reordering would be a challenge. The problem is the product teaches you how you don't need the product.

I am surprised that M&S did not make it work in the USA - M&S food stores would seem a natural fit for Cities like NYC.

I have a coworker who puts in fairly insane hours and he and his wife do Blue Apron every single day.

They haven't missed a day in a few years. I only realized the importance of Blue Apron in his life when he told me he does about 8-10 hours at work and 2-8 hours at home most days.

Blue Apron affords them the time to get to even be a family.

I would still just do Whole Foods delivery and cook together if that’s what they’re after. It sounds like they’ve memorized the recipes if they really cook them that much.

Or order take out and save even more time and share dinner together.

> I spent a little bit of time figuring it out

And yeah I dont want to do that! :)

I’m glad Blue Apron and other services are like “hey thats a valid perspective and is underserved” instead of being dismissive

Isn't this a re-run of 'Dropbox is unnecessary when we have rsync'?

Except the average Joe has no idea what rsync is let alone how to set it up. Not sure we can say the same thing about grocery shopping

You can criticise a company without being in a Dropbox<>rsync situation. Especially when that company is not doing so well.

I hate shopping and I hate having to constantly figure out what to cook.

I use an equivalent in my country and it's worth any premium I'm paying.

Me, too. I already owned a bunch of cookbooks and knew how to cook before I started this sort of service. I still hate shopping and planning, after years of getting a box.

The introductory pricing was a reasonable deal for two people. We learned some new recipes (always nicely-printed and savable) and the meals were always tasty. But once the introductory pricing was over, and once we got tired of the obscene amount of packaging we had to throw away, we stopped it. Chalk up another churned customer.

Glad you like it and hope the price continues to be reasonable as they continue to cut expenses while trying to maintain food quality :)

For me I eat a very peculiar diet so I usually just pick up yogurt and fresh bread from the grocery store on my way home from work, and when I'm feeling particularly lazy I will order steamed chicken and steamed broccoli from the local Chinese shop who really have this amazing technique of steaming that I seem unable to grasp!!

Sometimes I feel for a company like that that at least 60% of their spend is on podcast advertising.