Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/blue-apron-stock-price-tumbles-below-1-first-time-2018-12-1027818501

by pseudolus • 8 years ago

192 317 8 years ago

markets.businessinsider.com

"Securities traded on a national stock exchange, regardless of price, are exempt from regulatory designation as a penny stock"[1]

Blue Apron is on the NYSE

[1]"SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION 17 CFR Part 240" https://www.sec.gov/rules/final/34-51983.pdf

wgerard13• 8 years ago

NYSE has minimum share price/market cap requirements, so Blue Apron will get delisted if this continues for more than 29 consecutive trading days.

i.e. It could easily become one.

rixrax• 8 years ago

What happens when/if a company gets de-listed? Search engine gave me below[0]:

"... company basically has two options. It can choose to trade on the Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board (OTCBB) or the pink sheets system...".

Some more [light] detail in linked 'article'[0].

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/delistingofshare...

lgats• 8 years ago

What stops companies from repeatedly reverse-splitting the stock to keep it above $1?

Wowfunhappy• 8 years ago

This is still a very different statement from the one in the headline!

infecto• 8 years ago

Sure but its only a matter of time before they get delisted.

ChuckMcM2• 8 years ago

They will do a reverse split, perhaps 10:1 to get the stock back up in price.

wgerard13• 8 years ago

Doing a reverse split just to meet the share price requirements is generally viewed as a sign the company is spiraling out of control (i.e. investors will continue selling to cut their losses).

I don't have the numbers offhand, but I would wager a large sum that companies in trouble doing reverse splits just to meet listing requirements almost always continue tumbling downwards. For a recent example, see Helios and Matheson (MoviePass).

Companies that have successfully navigated reverse splits while publicly-listed (it's very common with pre-IPO companies for sure) are generally much larger and more well-known than Blue Apron (e.g. AIG), or in inherently risky businesses (e.g. Biotech companies).

webninja• 8 years ago

Investopedia and most finance textbooks define any security trading as less than a dollar as a penny stock. Here is why: If a stock listed on the NASDAQ fails to meet a closing bid price of $1 for at least 30 consecutive days, it is delisted. If a stock listed NYSE trades for under $1 for 29 consecutive days, the company must, within 10 days, submit a plan to the NYSE to move the stock into the $1 territory within a short period of time or it is delisted. The Nasdaq has 3430 companies. The NYSE has 3136 companies. The Amex has 322 companies. Together, the 3 make up well over 95% percent of the publicly traded stock market. Thus the problem with penny stocks is that they can be delisted and then you become a bag holder.

brianpgordon• 8 years ago

I thought the cutoff for penny stock was actually higher, like a few dollars.

jiveturkey• 8 years ago

well it’s BI so it’s a given that the headline is misleading or outright wrong

gammateam4• 8 years ago

Just reverse split: less shares, same market cap = higher price. wow no more penny stock status

matte_black• 8 years ago

Pisses off a lot of people.

Not sure why the downvotes. If you own a stock that has to resort to a reverse split that’s probably bad news for you, but invest however you want.

wgerard13• 8 years ago

Investors aren't stupid and realize a company doing a reverse split just to maintain the minimum share price is doomed.

See also: $HMNY.

gammateam4• 8 years ago

then thats what the article should be about, not an arbitrary share price metric

smallgovt2• 8 years ago

HMNY isn't a great comparison.

HMNY didn't really tank because they did a reverse split. They primarily tanked because they continued to dilute investors after their reverse split by issuing new shares and selling them to the public markets via their ATM offering.

Reverse splits cause further depression in share price, but pretty much any example other than HMNY would be better. i.e. Price dropping by 1000x after a split is not typical at all.

chad_strategic6• 8 years ago

After 10 years of marriage, my wife thought it would be helpful for me to start cooking, as she was getting stressed out with our 2 years old.

We used Blue Apron as the starting point.

I can't tell you how much time we save in planning meals and trips to the store. My wife doesn't have nag me about what I what I want for the week's dinner. The quality of the food and the time saved is well worth the price. I know there are some disadvantages about Blue Apron such as waste, carbon food print etc...

Cooking with Blue Apron is now extremely relaxing for me as I cook and just tune into NPR or teach my son to cook. Out of 100 meals I would say that we only had maybe one that was mediocre.

I suspect Blue Apron will survive as it will probably be taken over or bought out. It's kinda the leader of the pack and the market will eventually consolidate. It also helps that I might have helped I bought about $1000 discounted gift cards at Costco.

robertAngst2• 8 years ago

Dang, I had the opposite experience with Blue Apron. Never saved time.

Expensive and the recipes took 2-3x longer than it says on the box.

Delicious food, but there was no leftovers. We finished the food and were still hungry. Cannot fathom using them as a meal provider.

The only thing I learned is that roasted beats and carrots are delicious. Don't need Blue Apron anymore.

jonathanjaeger4• 8 years ago

They recently added meals that take 20-30min rather than 30-55min and it has made a world of difference, not to mention they expanded the menu. I also find some of the meals tastier because they're simpler rather than using too many ingredients. I still get the occasional bland one, but they have improved.

As a company I wouldn't invest in them. The amount they spend on advertising (e.g. really pricey podcast advertising) with a high churn rate is concerning.

chad_strategic6• 8 years ago

I agree that there is just enough food, maybe not enough. But then again, I'm dropping weight. So maybe a good thing.

I got faster making meals over time.

For me right now time is more important than money.

I don't think have ever eaten more roasted beets, carrots, cauliflower, kale and broccoli in the last two years, than I have in my life. (and enjoyed.)

chrisseaton3• 8 years ago

Delicious food, but there was no leftovers.

I don't understand why do you want leftover food?

pfranz3• 8 years ago

It's really tough to time a recipe. Especially, because Blue Apron has so many whole foods that need peeling and cutting--it's not like you just put it in the oven and set a timer. I do think their estimations are a bit idealistic. I've seen the prep times vary 2-3x depending on who in the family makes it.

One thing I've noticed that can improve prep times is taking a basic knife skills class. You'll notice grandmothers who have been cooking for decades are often pretty clunky with a knife. There are still some things that you have limited control over that will slow you down: counter space, kitchen layout, sink size, or what bowls and pots you have.

Years ago I feel like they had more leftovers. Usually, it was the side dish where they gave you a whole head of cabbage instead of half to prep. It was usually mentioned in the recipe. I had been meaning to look back to see if they amended the recipes when they repeated them removing the leftovers--but I haven't used Blue Apron in probably a year now.

I'm glad you learned that roasting vegetables are dead simple and delicious. I feel like growing up with canned and boiled vegetables this was somehow a well kept secret until recently. But there are other meal-kits out there that vary widely on complexity and prep time.

chad_strategic6• 8 years ago

I don't own any of this stock right now, but I have been keeping an eye on it.

For this particular stock, I'm apply the Peter Lynch strategy of investing in regards to Blue Apron. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/06/peterlynch.a... Mostly buy what you like and know.

All of my other trades are algorithmic...

beart• 8 years ago

I've never used Blue Apron and I'm curious - how much actual cooking do you do with a typical Blue Apron meal? Are you preparing, mixing, cutting, etc. or are you primarily mixing together already prepared ingredients and timing them as they cook? Could someone who has never cooked use Blue Apron as a starting point to learn basic cooking skills?

fetus8• 8 years ago

You are preparing, mixing, cutting and cooking everything yourself. You're given the raw ingredients just like you'd buy yourself at the grocery store and given an easy to follow recipe to do everything yourself. If you've never cooked before, you are definitely in their target demographic. The recipes are generally simple enough and explained well enough that it would teach you the basic cooking skills you lack.

brianwawok• 8 years ago

Its basically a trip to the grocery store + a print out of a recipe with nice pictures.

Not a bunch of half cooked stuff you slap together.

I think learning to cook is an excellent use for the service (but not maybe one they love long term)

dragonwriter3• 8 years ago

Are you preparing, mixing, cutting, etc.

Yes.

Could someone who has never cooked use Blue Apron as a starting point to learn basic cooking skills?

Somewhat; it won't, e.g., teach you knife skills, which are important for both safety and speed in preparation, but it will give you exposure to a wide range of cooking techniques and what they produce.

Bluecobra• 8 years ago

My experience from trying it out a few years ago is that you do all the work. Nothing comes prepared, so basically a box of ingredients + the recipe. I would think it would be a good way to learn how to cook. I hated this, and would rather have all the prep work done for me (e.g. diced onions instead of a whole raw onion). Also I didn't like all the packaging/ice packs/bubble wrap. It all seemed really wasteful compared vs. going to the store with reusable bags.

That being said, the food/recipes were good but the portions were pretty small for two people. I think this would have been perfect when I was single and had a lot more time on my hands.

spyspy• 8 years ago

The problem is the extremely small niche it fills. The market is people who have enough time and patience to cook their own meals, but not enough to grocery shop and look up a recipe. If you're new to cooking that's one thing, but I'd imagine many users eventually "outgrow" the service as they become more skilled and/or realize how much the convenience is costing.

Pfhreak5• 8 years ago

We use a similar service that's closer to a CSA + recipe cards. We get a basic recipe and a bunch of raw veggies/locally produced products.

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.

ineedasername• 8 years ago

Outgrow

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.

endorphone• 8 years ago

This is the sort of binary differentiation that has led to countless services being discounted on virtually identical criteria. AWS, for instance.

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.

ghaff22• 8 years ago

There's definitely a use case for these services. It's just a fairly narrow one.

- Willing and able to cook for, ideally, more than one person

- Able to plan a week ahead for the most part

- OK with paying a non-trivial premium to have a lot of menu planning and shopping be handled by someone else

I tried Blue Apron and thought it was "OK" but I could never really make these meal kit services work out for me. t obviously works for some people though.

samstave3• 8 years ago

Blue aprons should seek to have some subsidies from states or insurance where they can provide healthy meals to SnAP users, or elderly, or offer it to apartment complexes where they know how many units just want "blue apron sunday dinner" or something

rayiner• 8 years ago

It's targeting a narrow intersection of people who are rich enough to pay $10 per serving for a meal, have the time to cook every night, and are okay with the lack of customizability in ingredients.[1]

We considered it but it made no sense for us. It would save us a little money versus eating out all the time, but it doesn't solve the time problem (my wife and I both get home around 7:30 or 8:00 and need to get the family fed immediately). It reduces grocery shopping time, but we do that on the weekend where we actually have a couple of hours to spare, unlike after work.

I would rather see a high-end TV dinner service.

[1] And also apparently don't have any kids--paying $10 for an adult is one thing, paying $10 for a full meal for a child is another.

mawburn2• 8 years ago

OK with paying a non-trivial premium to have a lot of menu planning and shopping be handled by someone else

This is the one I've never been able to get past. For what these services cost, I can have someone else prepare my meal that will taste just as good or better. Why would I not do that?

I get if you're trying to learn to cook or something like that, but that only sounds like a temporary problem.

Pfhreak5• 8 years ago

my wife thought it would be helpful for me to start cooking, as she was getting stressed out with our 2 years old.

This seems like a good opportunity to see if there is more labor (emotional or physical) that your wife is doing that she could use a hand with.

My wife doesn't have nag me about what I what I want for the week's dinner

Meal planning is work. She is doing a job for the family. She is trying to include your preferences in the calculus of meal planning. Balancing nutrition, variety, individual preferences, cost, and difficulty is a non-trivial problem to solve every week.

When you say she is 'nagging' you about what you want for dinner, take a step back and consider what that is telling others (including your wife) about how much you value that work.

DoofusOfDeath• 8 years ago

Tangent:

Tip from a long-time husband: If you often have the perception of your wife "nagging" you, there's probably a relationship-antipattern in effect that you'll want to deal with as soon as you have the emotional energy. IMO, perceived nagging can be the narrow end of a big wedge between a couple.

scrumbledober• 8 years ago

HN: come for the engineering talk, stay for the relationship advice.

chad_strategic6• 8 years ago

There is a little more to the story, I just shortened the story for the sake of brevity. Cause technically I'm supposed be working on an API issue.

I value all my wife does around the house and for the family.

taude3• 8 years ago

I thought the Blue Apron recipes were too complicated, used too many pans to wash, and wasted too much packaging material. I found no time savings when was all said and done. I have an easy enough time following recipes from books like America's Test Kitchen cooking for two [1], etc, and spending 10 or 15 minutes planning meals each week. Plus, I probably spend quite a bit less, and if I meal plan correctly, I'll do some form of big-batch meal one night that then becomes leftovers or other meals...

I did like not making dinner decisions, though, when the meals were things I liked.

Note: I haven't used the service in nearly four years.

[1] The Complete Cooking For Two Cookbook: https://shop.americastestkitchen.com/8da852d4663a41e4f978fa4...

EDITED: added link to book I was referring to

jghn5• 8 years ago

My experience has been that most of the recipes I’ve received are single pot/pan recipes

dragonwriter3• 8 years ago

I thought the Blue Apron recipes were too complicated, used too many pans to wash, and wasted too much packaging material.

I've rarely seen a BA recipe use more than one pot and one pan, most, IME, use a single pan (often with a wipe-and-reuse step to do that.)

If anything, BA goes out of their way to minimize the required cooking vessels compared to most recipe sources (even America’s Test Kitchen, which is actually pretty good about not gratuitously using cookware.)

rdlecler1• 8 years ago

Agree with everything you said and I don’t think mealkits are the problem, BlueApron isn’t sufficiently addressing the biggest pain point—time. We used BlueApron but moved to Gobble. The dishes tastes better and it takes 1/2 to 1/3 the time to cook compared to BlueApron. That’s less dishes as well so cleanup is fast. I suspect BlueApron is suffering because competitors are better addressing customer needs, not because mealkits are a bad idea.

cflewis• 8 years ago

I think Blue Apron recipes are generally too fancy: check out Sun Basket. I like them more, and they are pretty good on the timings (if it says 20 mins, it's actually 20 mins).

naravara2• 8 years ago

I suspect Blue Apron will survive as it will probably be taken over or bought out. It's kinda the leader of the pack and the market will eventually consolidate. It also helps that I might have helped I bought about $1000 discounted gift cards at Costco.

I'm not so sure. Even most people I know who have tried Blue Apron tend to either regress back to not cooking or they "graduate" to buying their own ingredients and planning their own meals. It's not like grocery delivery is that different or hard to do.

I actually think it is pretty great as a way to build the habit of cooking at home and to get comfortable enough in your kitchen. But it only takes about a month to do that. Afterwards it's so much cheaper and easier to just handle the recipes and cooking yourself. Once you get a feel for proportions and learn some staple recipes Blue Apron adds very little extra value and a lot of extra headache (no flexibility in the menus, fixed proportions, etc.) So there isn't much point in doing it.

Also, their vegetarian options too often tend to either be carbs + cheese or bland vegetables. I'd much rather just make Indian food at home.

chad_strategic6• 8 years ago

Well... that's what makes a market... Differing opinions.

I will probably pick up some stock in the next few months. Because I will put my money where my mouth is. (pun intended)

They are changing their business strategies and growing in different ways. (They sell prepackaged food in Costco in California).

Retric• 8 years ago

As long as you have low customer acquisition costs you can still have a large stable business like this. Look at huggies diapers, some kids spend a lot longer in diapers than others but generally it’s a short but profitable window.

bduerst• 8 years ago

Yep - I'm in the latter. Did Blue Apron for about 9 months and then "graduated" to making my own recipes based on my experience cooking with them. Just last night I made gnocchi with a gorgonzola cream sauce.

It's a great way to learn how to cook, and though I cancelled a while ago, I do sometimes miss their precise portioning. That is probably Blue Apron's best long-term value for customers: accurate grocery delivery.

hn_throwaway_99• 8 years ago

Completely agree. Blue Apron occupies a very unstable niche, with high customer acquisition costs to boot.

I'm in the "former" category, where after about a month I realized (a) I like to eat more than I like to cook, and (b) the time it took me to prepare 3 meals a week made it actually more of a stress-inducing thing to me than a relaxing thing.

Waterluvian• 8 years ago

So my local grocery store chain is offering what blue apron does, except it's just their in house butchers and whatnot preparing the ingredients. Then you buy the kits the way you would groceries: off the shelf or online for pickup.

I'm not sure blue apron has any magic that can't be reproduced by everyone else.

whoisthemachine2• 8 years ago

I think this is their biggest weakness: grocery stores are all starting to offer this service, on demand. Grocery stores don't even need to devise the meals themselves, they can outsource that to a third party, and just handle the ingredient gathering component. On the other hand, this improves the utility of grocery stores greatly!

chad_strategic6• 8 years ago

I thought I would just add this for the record...

My wife doesn't have nag me about what I what I want for the week's dinner.

This line has been misinterpreted. My wife would normally ask me on Sunday, what we should have for dinner for the week. My response was usually "whatever is fine", which doesn't really help her. Blue Apron removes that question. My wife never "nagged" me, it was more my fault, because didn't give a good answer. So the overall process was an issue and mostly on my part.

After over ten years of marriage and a child and two dogs, it really becomes clear how important a partnership is.

My son is now learning to cook with me as well. Obviously, men can be in the kitchen as well. It's fun, even if I'm just a "blue apron cook".

I'm also adding this clarification because it's pretty slow here at work and I have to look busy...

megy• 8 years ago

Ok, but don't you usually go to the supermarket anyway? I don't quite see what the point is, how did you survive until this point? The only thing difference is you are buying some more ingredients.

apetresc• 8 years ago

As someone who's very un-knowledgeable about the stock market - is there something special about the $1 mark? Isn't it arbitrary how the total market value of the company is divided into individual shares?

wgerard13• 8 years ago

You'll get delisted from the NYSE if you fall below $1/share or below a certain market cap for more than 30 consecutive trading days.

Being delisted is generally a very bad sign, and it becomes much harder for shares to get traded.

planteen2• 8 years ago

This is correct. To add to this, you will sometimes see companies attempt to avoid delisting by reverse stock splits (e.g., 10 old shares become 1 new share).

thinkpad20• 8 years ago

Not a stock market expert by any means, but human psychology has a major impact here. That’s why stocks tend to find floors/ceilings at nice round numbers like multiples of ten or whatever. Likewise to a machine a number is a number but to a human who’s evaluating the stock, seeing something less than $1 is a red flag. Someone please correct me if I’m off!

planteen2• 8 years ago

The primary reason is $1 is the delisting threshold.

vincentmarle• 8 years ago

You can only bid up to a cent difference. So if every new bid changes the entire valuation of your company by at least 1% then it becomes very volatile.

evanpw• 8 years ago

The tick size for stocks less than $1 is $0.0001.

porpoisely• 8 years ago

Thanks to inflation, penny stocks are now stocks that trade under $5.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pennystock.asp

Also, penny stocks tend to be fairly illiquid with very marginal market cap and tend to trade on OTC/pink sheets and not on major stock exchanges.

So blue apron is penny stockish, but not quite there yet. We'll have to see if NYSE gives Blue Apron the boot.

wgerard13• 8 years ago

The SEC actually has a pretty concrete definition of what a "Penny Stock" is:

https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=f4effbf9fb932f767e...

That being said, there's also the common usage of the term which blue apron arguably falls under.

ngngngng3• 8 years ago

I feel like grocery stores could easily compete with blue apron for much lower costs. Just ration the food they already have in stock in little packages. Charge a little more than you would otherwise for the employees time picking recipes and combining them into the packages. I would happily use this service at local grocery stores. But compared to grocery stores and cooking from scratch blue apron is too expensive for me.

edit: Blue apron is currently $7.50 - $9.99 per serving. I cook delicious food for myself regularly for less than $4 per serving if I make enough to have leftovers for a day or two. It really seems to me that grocery stores could eat blue apron alive with their lowered costs to provide this same service.

joshstrange3• 8 years ago

Some already do this [0] and it's 10000x better than Blue Apron/Plated/Hello Fresh. Also they don't have the same perverse incentives that BA/P/HF have. Kroger might make a profit off their meal kits but they aren't 100% reliant on that revenue, in fact I'd bet they don't really care that much if you but the meal kit or all the parts of the meal kit because you are still buying it in their stores.

[0] https://www.kroger.com/b/preppared

ngngngng3• 8 years ago

That's really good to hear. I don't have Kroger near me now unfortunately. I might contact some local grocers and suggest this as I really think this model of cooking could improve my quality of life significantly.

zwieback• 8 years ago

Agree and it's already happening. At the higher-end stores where I live there are a whole bunch of meal-kit options when you enter the store.

behringer7• 8 years ago

Yeah at my store they have prepackaged sides and preseasoned meats, you just stick it in the oven really.

blang• 8 years ago

Like this: https://myedmondsnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/MVIMG_2...

diminoten• 8 years ago

This is like saying, "Why take your car to the mechanic? I do my own repair work and it's way cheaper!"

Blue Apron is for people who don't know what to buy at the grocery store. Grocery stores could definitely attack this by doing what you're suggesting, but part of this is the very concept that I can't walk into a grocery store, buy some chicken, and turn it into something tasty.

ngngngng3• 8 years ago

I think it's more like saying, why pay for a mechanic to be shipped to your house, when it's only a short drive to the mechanic.

Tiktaalik• 8 years ago

Yup this is already happening. Save-on-Foods in British Columbia has this and they also have their own food delivery service, so they're successfully replicating both Blue Apron and Instacart.

joshstrange3• 8 years ago

Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, Plated, and all the other food prep deliver services are a hack. A disgusting, wasteful hack.

Calling someone using Blue Apron a cook is like calling someone doing a "paint by numbers" a painter. I'm not trying to be a cooking snob but I get really sick of people praising BA/Plated/etc as some amazing concept or a huge time saver. It's neither, it's for people who want food delivery (as in UberEats, Grubhub, etc) with extra steps.

notyourday3• 8 years ago

They are there to separate fools from fool's money. Eventually they run out of fools that have money, which is why all of them if they do go public will become penny stocks.

freehunter• 8 years ago

Calling someone using Blue Apron a cook is like calling someone doing a "paint by numbers" a painter
I'm not trying to be a cooking snob

Yes, yes you are trying to be a cooking snob. If you had said "someone who uses Blue Apron is not a chef" you'd have a point, but then again no one ever said that. Someone who cooks is a cook. Someone who paints is a painter. There is a big difference between cook vs chef and painter vs artist.

Blue Apron is not McDonalds, they don't make your food for you. They give you a recipe and the raw ingredients, same as finding a recipe online and buying the raw ingredients from the store. And then you cook it. As any normal cook would do.

SlowRobotAhead• 8 years ago

There are definitely people a service like this makes sense for. The issue isn’t that someone following a recipe doesn’t match your expectation of a Parisian chef carefully selecting items at a hole-in-the-wall fromagerie on Rue Mouffetard.... it’s that Blue Apron’s model is simply too easy to copy.

My local Albertsons has meals in box ready to roll. Amazon is launching their service. There are the Blue Apron clones you listed.

BA’s stock price isn’t because they are “hacks” or because the idea is bad.

cityzen2• 8 years ago

Maybe we're seeing now that burning up hundreds of millions in VC cash to try to acquire users with free meals isn't really a viable business model? After being annoyed hearing them on every podcast I ever listened to for awhile, I signed up for the sole purpose of getting free meals, nothing else. I have a grocery store a mile from my house, I don't need a startup sending me food to cook. I did enjoy the free meals, though! Thank you VCs!

t0mas88• 8 years ago

The VCs don't mind, they got a great exit at the IPO. It's the employees and investors in the public markets that eventually paid for your free meals.

cityzen2• 8 years ago

Thanks employees and investors in the public market!

cde-v• 8 years ago

I love Blue Apron but get how they are not exactly profitable. Almost every single week they leave an item out of my box and the customer support resolution is to credit my account $40... for like a $3 head of broccoli. I am not complaining obviously, but yeah, fix the missing ingredients.

GrumpyNl• 8 years ago

When the economy goes down, the first thing we stop spending money on is luxury stuff. See it as a sign.

vkou2• 8 years ago

This is a sign, but their entire business model is pretty much dead on arrival, regardless of how well the economy is doing.

travelton2• 8 years ago

I recently subscribed to a different box service, which does all the food prep work for you (chopping/dicing/slicing, making sauces). It generally takes us 20-30 minutes less to prep, cook and clean over Blue Apron. IMO this is the main value prop Blue Apron is missing.

For me, Blue Apron is really only solving for time spent looking up a recipe. In most cases, I'm already going to the grocery store each week. So, where's the value in spending $80/week? If you can shave off the time I spend in the kitchen, that's what I want to pay for. I suspect most people subscribe, love the new recipes they would typically pass over from the internet. And then a month in realize "I'm not saving any time by doing this... I don't want to spend an hour or more in the kitchen tonight... Let's just get take out.".

Aside from that, Blue Apron's fulfillment execution is very wonky. Missing/Bad/Broken ingredients, late boxes (which spoil if not delivered timely), and excessive packing.

aakilfernandes• 8 years ago

Name of service please?

travelton2• 8 years ago

Gobble

goldcd2• 8 years ago

Always seemed a strange business model. Appealing to people who "want to cook", but doing so by turning yourself into a production-line assembler. Like saying your want to learn carpentry, by buying some Ikea flat-pack.

What confused me (and makes me think I've overlooked something) is why nothing more interesting has come along from the supermarkets. In the UK at least, they're all online and deliver - but they all seem to stick to "buy your ingredients and we'll deliver them". I'd quite enjoy one that let you browse recipes and would stick all the ingredients in your basket - but then added some intelligence. e.g. You add the "roast chicken weekend meal" to your cart, and it asks "are you going to eat all that chicken?" For £5 extra would you like to add some bacon, creme-fraiche, tarragon, frozen-pastry & peas to enable you to make a lovely pie on Monday? Or asks "what's in your fridge" - here are some recipes and prices for things to use it up? Could even add some intelligence - I don't like mushrooms, so when recommending a chicken pie and providing a recipe, switches something else into my basket & recipe (leeks are lovely). Or would further adjust the recipe - you said you needed to feed 8 at the weekend, so I picked the larger lump of meat, and have adjusted the cooking time in the recipe. Or "Do you own a pressure cooker, a freezer and have 2 hours free this weekend to batch cook some chilli" Or... basically Blue Apron and the rest seem to be trying to solve a real problem, completely the wrong way.

all22• 8 years ago

You have just described a value-add B2B SaaS; offers integration into existing retailer's online shopping portals.

If this doesn't exist, give it six months and it will. If you want to try and swing something like this and need an extra set of hands, my email is in my profile.

onlyrealcuzzo• 8 years ago

There's literally dozens of people who have tried to do this recently and failed, and dozens more still trying to do it.

How do you make money? How do you acquire customers cheaper than it costs to provide the service?

reaperducer• 8 years ago

There are a number of apps and web sites that do what you ask. My favorite one (from the old iPhone days, now discontinued) would let you input the ingredients you have on hand, and it would suggest what you can make with them.

They seem to come and go. I think the problem for a supermarket to adopt something like this is that you can use it to make a list using one market's superior app, then do your actual shopping at another market.

TheDong• 8 years ago

you can use it to make a list using one market's superior app, then do your actual shopping at another market

This critique makes no sense to me. Should amazon not recommend items online because you might purchase them from alibaba or walmart instead?

Whichever markets choose to make such a system would surely do so with the assumption that they are the best choice, and they will recommend their items. I doubt many consumers would go through the friction of comparison-shopping a whole list to find other things that are suitable substitutes.

Your comment to me seems akin to the silly statement "shoe stores should not display their wares in the window because consumers then might go buy them at other shoe shops for cheaper"

taude3• 8 years ago

I've seen meal kits in stores here in the Boston area, Wegman's I think.

internobody• 8 years ago

Mariano's in Chicagoland also sell meal kits now, as do the Amazon Go stores, one of which is conveniently next to a major train station.

ghaff22• 8 years ago

I've also seen them at a local organic-y place near Davis Square.

In addition, whether or not they're "meal kits," you see more and more "one bowl meals" and the like (that you can add meat to if you're so inclined) in the produce section of grocery stores.

padobson• 8 years ago

Still too much work!

How about you give me a list of meals, I pick 50 or 100 of them, and then you give me a shopping list for the month including where to get it at the best price, taking advantage of bulk purchasing and overlapping ingredients. Then email/text/notify me every day with the recipe for dinner that night. I'll keep the left overs and use them for lunches.

This should minimize time for planning and cost of meals, two things Blue Apron largely fails to do.

It'd also be nice if I could get a further notification asking me how long it took me to prepare, so the service can get an idea for how long it takes me to cook and help me plan dinners accordingly - maybe giving me faster alternative alongside the normal dinner plan.

_thejrk• 8 years ago

As a single father who sucks at everything kitchen.. i need dis.

paulgb• 8 years ago

Aside from the optimizing-where-to-buy part, this sounds like what https://mealime.com is attempting to do. I've only used it for one meal so far so but if you select multiple meals it creates a combined shopping list.

superfrank• 8 years ago

I came across platejoy (platejoy.com) a couple months ago while looking for a meal plan that would work around my food allergies and it check most of the boxes of what you are asking for.

The planning is week by week, and it doesn't have a best price thing, but it does pretty much everything else (recepies in app, you can tell it ahead of time you prefer to eat leftovers for lunch, each recipe has a prepare & cook time and asks for feed back). Also, it can send all the ingredient to Instacart in a single click, if that's your thing.

It's really changed the way I eat. I went from eating out for lunch and dinner almost every day, to cooking at home pretty much every night.

paulcole4• 8 years ago

Still too much work!

Just come to my apartment and feed me like a baby bird.

thisone2• 8 years ago

I once had a cookbook named 'once a month cooking' https://www.amazon.com/Once-Month-Cooking-Revised-Delicious/...

Everything was laid out for you, what to buy, the order to prep and cook, and in one weekend you'd have everything ready for a month's worth of meals

SIOADFNGIONIO• 8 years ago

"are you going to eat all that chicken?" For £5 extra would you like to add some bacon, creme-fraiche, tarragon, frozen-pastry & peas to enable you to make a lovely pie on Monday? Or asks "what's in your fridge" - here are some recipes and prices for things to use it up?

The fact that Blue Apron doesn't really do that is why I cancelled my subscription. I hated the way they would send all these tiny single-use things. Too much plastic and too much food waste.

Rather than sending me kits, I would prefer if they would essentially do my shopping for me. Planning meals and ensuring I have the right ingredients on hand is annoying and I would love some help with it. But I don't need all the ingredients in one box.

DanFeldman• 8 years ago

You make a good point that Blue Apron only teaches you how to assemble ingredients, but not to shop for them. They are two separate skills. But most people who don't know how to cook are bad at both, and Blue Apron gets rid of one of the highest friction parts and lets people dive right into the actual cooking part of, well, cooking.

Getting people unafraid of assembling ingredients and heating food and cleaning after is a good first step. If you didn't grow up cooking and shopping and cleaning, there's a lot to mentally unpack before you make a meal. If you have no basis for how to plan anything ("Would you like to add extra meat for $5") extra options quickly get confusing.

village-idiot• 8 years ago

That and the people who cook at home either:

1. Love to cook.

2. Are quite price sensitive.

The first group were never going to use blue apron. They have the skills and the interest to do it all themselves. The latter group is tricky to hold onto: margins must be relatively thin, and there’s a high probability that these users will learn how to assemble their own recipes to cut out even the razor thin margins that blue apron was making.

The result is a rotating user base, and extremely advertising costs to acquire new customers. This is probably why they’re on podcasts all the damn time.

war1025• 8 years ago

There are several people I know who have used BlueApron for 2+ years. They are all married, no kids. They enjoy cooking, but they just as much enjoy going out to eat. They have steady, good paying jobs, so they are not price sensitive.

To them, BlueApron is an entertainment expense. It gives them variety in their diet, and makes for a good time when preparing it. Often they'll have friends over and add in some sides or something to make it a dinner date with people they'd otherwise just go out to eat with.

underwater• 8 years ago

Your categories match my experience living in Silicon Valley, but outside of that bubble is not accurate at all. In the real world most people I know cook at home by default. Ordering take out or eating out is the exception, even if they're not foodies (or poor).

djhworld• 8 years ago

I think the biggest problem for me as a single person is the way most stuff sold in supermarkets is designed for family meals. Which is fair, families probably represent a significant portion of their customer base.

But it becomes problematic for me because I either have to eat the same meal 4 days in a row (or freeze it) or only use half of the ingredients and shove the rest in the cupboard, or throw it away because its perishable

I wouldn't mind a service that works out a set of meals you can make for the week that makes the best use of ingredients (minimises waste) and brings some variety.

I suspect the economics don't work out on it though

staticautomatic• 8 years ago

Cue Steve Martin hot dog bun rant.

echevil• 8 years ago

You can buy stuff in much smaller portions in most Japanese grocery stores, which I think is much better. There are also some grocery stores that have the option to buy unpacked produce, like Wholefoods.

hmcdona1• 8 years ago

In Texas, H-E-B sells exactly what you are describing. They have four types of meal kits: eat, heat, cook, and prep.

https://www.heb.com/static-page/meal-simple

I buy at least 3-4 of them a week because they're perfect for a single person who wants to eat in and maybe not prep as much but still wants a wide variety of meals to eat.

newnewpdro• 8 years ago

I've found that by shopping at higher end grocery stores, or at least focusing on the organic/craft-oriented departments, the quantities tend to be smaller and much better suited to my childless, bachelor existence.

There was also a learning curve to preparing food for just myself to consume. The priorities are different from the family household I grew up in, so much of what I had learned didn't apply very well unmodified, to my adult life.

Families make the costly perishable ingredients go further by utilizing carbohydrates like pastas and breads as fillers.

I now make many of the same dishes I grew up eating, but without the pasta or bread, which I've entirely stopped purchasing to the very clear benefit of my health/weight.

When you dispense with the fillers, it's a lot easier to consume the perishable ingredients in one or two meals.

It definitely seemed strange at first to eat things like lentil or chicken soup or a meat ragu with pork ribs sans pasta or bread. But once acclimated, the recipes have changed a bit to be less liquidy while more meaty/beany with more veggies where applicable, and are very tasty and nutritious. It's basically decadence, and healthier than eating all the carbs.

asdff3• 8 years ago

Some perishables like fruits and vegetables are terrible to buy. Cilantro comes in a massive bunch from which I take three sprigs, and its rotten in a couple days. Bananas are unedible until day 2, then I have maybe a 3-day window to eat all the bananas before they are flabby, brown, and mushy. Even if I throw a handful of arugula in every single one of my meals, its massive tub is barely half empty by the time it starts rotting in my fridge a week after purchase.

Even if I plot and plan to use all my cilantro in 3 days, all my arugula in 1 week, power through 3 bananas a day during my bunch's window of opportunity, I can still end up going out for dinner which throws everything out of schedule. Or maybe I forgot to pull out the chicken out of the freezer and into the marinade this morning, so there is now no point in cooking if I need to wait 2+ hours after I get home for my bird to thaw and flavor.

goddamnyouryan• 8 years ago

Funnily enough I have JUST launched a little side project that is attempting to do exactly what you are describing. (Or will do).

There's a few more features I need to add before I'd consider it MVP level and but it's getting close.

http://cookmatic.co

Basically you can paste in recipe URLs (so far only supports seriouseats and bonappetit) it parses the ingredient list and generates a shopping list combining everything you need to make all the recipes).

Future features include adjusting the portion size to scale up and down and combining recipes in a manner that minimizes ingredient waste when shopping

CodeWriter232• 8 years ago

the way most stuff sold in supermarkets is designed for family meals

Dude. Leftovers. I used to make a couple of family-sized meals on the weekend to have for lunch and dinner throughout the week. I’d also dine out 2-3 times a week to mix it up a bit.

sidlls• 8 years ago

It isn't just singles. I have a family of four and do basically all the cooking. I struggle to make use of the entirety of many perishables I buy simply because they're packaged in such huge volumes. Leafy/bushy things like herbs comes to mind, as well as some prepackaged vegetables (grape/cherry tomatoes) and fruits.

gumby• 8 years ago

A couple of years ago I became an empty nester and decided to get rid of my cars. I switched to delivery: CFA box, meat box, and regular grocery delivery.

My meals are a bit repetitive (I often make, as you note, the same meal for four days) but that makes my life easier. But what has amazed me is it really doesn't take long to make the kind of meals I like to eat -- often 30 minutes an almost always less than 60. I can't be bothered making fancy sauces and the like, so I eat healthier than I probably ever have in my life. It's really a great deal to feed myself for four days for only a few bucks and for not much more time per meal than it would have taken to heat up a premade package.

Even my gf and her kids like my cooking which astonishes me.

I live in Palo Alto so can use the BBQ year round -- BBQ and Instant pot account for a lot of my cooking.

spelunker• 8 years ago

I really enjoyed Blue Apron. For a very long time I wanted to learn to cook, but didn't know where to start, and cookbooks where always intimidating because they usually assumed you already knew how to cook.

Blue Apron doesn't assume any of that.

I also liked the idea of "cooking good food", but for me it was a case of not knowing what good food was. With Blue Apron sending me tasty meals to make, I was able to learn by example about what worked and what I liked.

I thought it was great. I eventually cancelled though, once I was just cooking on my own entirely.

o_nate• 8 years ago

I think you've highlighted a problem with the business model. I had a similar experience. I really learned a lot about cooking from my first couple of years with Blue Apron, but now I'm at the point where I don't really need it any more. So as a "training wheels" for home cooks, it's great, but they have a built-in retention problem. Also, the recipes have gotten a lot simpler (and frankly not as appealing) over time. It's probably partly cost-cutting and partly people complaining about recipes taking too long to prepare.

vertex-four• 8 years ago

Have you never seen Tesco Real Food? https://realfood.tesco.com/recipes/vegan-shepherds-pie.html - hit the "shop ingredients" button and it'll offer to add the relevant ingredients to your online shopping basket.

aerovistae• 8 years ago

For £5 extra would you like to add some bacon, creme-fraiche, tarragon, frozen-pastry & peas

Is food really cheap in the UK? This would be impossible in the US, the tarragon alone could cost half that.

paulcole4• 8 years ago

Most of the local grocery stores in Portland have bulk spices where you could get enough of whatever you needed for a dish for well under a dollar.

ceejayoz• 8 years ago

You only need a sprig or two of tarragon, though. The grocery store won't sell you it in that form, but for a company making a few thousand meals it's perfectly doable. A rasher or two of bacon, a quarter cup of creme-fraiche, a sprig of tarragon, and a single pie-sized circle of pastry should easily be doable for £5.

thisone2• 8 years ago

Bacon about £1.50, creme fraiche £1.00, fresh tarragon £0.70, ready pastry about £1.30, frozen peas around £1.00.

So about £5.50 with out discounting for the fact you're over buying

http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/

asdff3• 8 years ago

Kroger is starting to do these meal kits. They are within 5 feet of the door and serve two, and all cook in 20 minutes.

I just don't get the point, though. I can move past the box and into the Kroger, using the box as a shopping list, and buy the exact same ingredients for half the price, only now I must spend 5 minutes dicing a tomato instead of slicing open a plastic bag containing diced tomato.

The best way to get quicker in the kitchen is to cook with common ingredients, and prep things in tandem. Keeping your cooking within a certain cultural palate is a good way to limit the amount of different fresh ingredients you need to maintain, and simplify your cooking.

moojd• 8 years ago

You can find fresh (not frozen), raw, already prepared meals that can be thrown in the oven, a pot, or on a grill at Kroger, Publix, Fresh Market, Costco and others. Those are great for when you're in a hurry and you don't want to waste time with the ceremony of putting together a meal kit. Meal kits are a weird compromise between a prepared meal and just following a recipe yourself.

Jemaclus• 8 years ago

I work in this space, so I may have some insight. The short answer is sort of tautological or whatever the term is: Nobody is doing the recipe thing because nobody does the recipe thing.

Think about it this way: Amazon has how many billions of dollars? And they haven't done the recipe thing yet... why? The answer is probably simpler than you think: that's not how consumers choose what to buy [in sufficient quantities to make unit economics positive].

Your reasoning as to why Blue Apron's model is weird is spot on: it's weird because that's not how consumers actually shop and cook. If they did, it wouldn't be weird and Blue Apron would be doing much better.

gambiting2• 8 years ago

Tbf, I have done one of those boxes(Hello Fresh) for nearly 2 years and I has absolutely definitely taught me how to cook, purely through repeated experience. It goes beyond being able to follow a recipe - after cooking nearly 500 meals I have enough experience to make delicious meals without looking at timers or measuring everything down to a gram.

Plus, each meal works out much cheaper than eating out. So for me personally this was money extremely well spent. I also live in the UK.

dwild2• 8 years ago

Plus, each meal works out much cheaper than eating out. So for me personally this was money extremely well spent. I also live in the UK.

I just got 2 free boxes from Missfresh (seems local to where I live) and Goodfood. I tried my first yesterday and god I wish it was worth it to keep doing because they shown me that I actually can cook something amazingly good. However I didn't expected to keep buying theses boxes because they are so incredibly expensive, 10$ CAD per portion is starting to be pretty close to a restaurant (a cheap one but still a restaurant).

Have you really did the math to confirm this? Is the UK that much more expensive in terms of food? HelloFresh in the UK does seems cheaper at £ 4.20 / meal but still I just can't believe feeding 1 person would cost 430$ CAD per month where you live.

dwild2• 8 years ago

Appealing to people who "want to cook", but doing so by turning yourself into a production-line assembler.

That's because you ignore the true reason why it's interesting. I got 800 games on Steam but when goes time to play, god it's awful. Never had this issue before having that many games. Recipes suffer from the choice overload.

Personally I also love it to try new ingredients. When it's part of a full meal, some ingredients "scare" me less.

Like saying your want to learn carpentry, by buying some Ikea flat-pack.

No holes were predrilled in the yu choy I got in my recipes yesterday. It would be closer to get a few boards that you have to cut/trim/drill yourself, which as far as I know, seems to be a great way to learn.

I'd quite enjoy one that let you browse recipes and would stick all the ingredients in your basket - but then added some intelligence.

It's weird but I don't trust my supermarket to offer me great recipes. I trust them to offer me food, but not great recipes. Even more so considering their goals is to sell food, not sell recipes.

Or asks "what's in your fridge"

I agree but this always come down to the laziness out of me. Lazy me can easily click on an image that seems like a great meal, but way less on a adding every single things I may have in my fridge.

Blue Apron and the rest seem to be trying to solve a real problem, completely the wrong way.

I personally think you just don't really understands whats the real problem.

Shivetya2• 8 years ago

it wasn't strange to me that they packing ingredients to prepare at home, what was strange is trying to get by on an idea easily replicated by businesses local and with a more direct connection to the same customer.

there was nothing blue apron or similar really was able to do to set themselves apart from what a grocery chain could do, less even.

tixocloud• 8 years ago

A friend of mine is actually trying to implement the intelligence you described. We’re also based in the U.K.

g0510512• 8 years ago

Appealing to people who "want to cook", but doing so by turning yourself into a production-line assembler. Like saying your want to learn carpentry, by buying some Ikea flat-pack.

That's not a great analogy. It was far more than assembly...with Ikea products, you don't cut the wood to size, or carve joints, or even use glue. With Blue Apron and the other in this space, you do everything except the shopping. so you will learn how to handle a knife, different cooking techniques, etc.

The real value add was in removing the need for keeping a stocked pantry and doing grocery shopping. Many recipes used ingredients that it was inconvenient or impossible to buy in small quantities, or that were hard to find at a standard megamart.

zanny• 8 years ago

Which is why the Blue Apron crates were always so ludicrously expensive compared to a regular grocer despite their purported scale. You got the right proportion of green onion but get to pay the price of a whole bundle.

dogma1138• 8 years ago

It takes out the entire creativity process of cooking, and for people who actually like cooking on a higher level also the process of selecting the right ingredients.

I don’t understand the whole shopping part, it would seem to be pretty clear to me that any place that is serviced by Blue Apron should have a service for groceries to be delivered as well, in fact it’s highly unlikely that they won’t.

I order all my groceries online in London, primarily been using Ocado but Amazon has also now has much wider offering with Amazon Fresh since they offer their own, Morrisons and Planet Ogranic goods.

Every large supermarket chain here offers a delivery service, it also doesn’t cost anything extra but there is usually a minimum (usually £50) for that.

Many of them even would unpack the bags for you if you ask them.

If you really want to go to the recipe route then Ocado and many other groceries delivery services also do that so you can select a meal and how many people and they’ll add the ingredients for you to your shopping bag.

To me this seems a much better solution and service than Blue Apron.

BuckRogers• 8 years ago

There's a lot of innovation opportunity, some of which you already noted. Some chains are already doing it, but most aren't. The most basic service that most aren't doing is curbside pickup. That's the biggest missed opportunity. I'd never go anywhere else. Most grocery stores that I've seen doing that offer it for free. Add in a delivery option for a charge and you take a massive chunk out of Amazon Fresh's market, and I'd put more faith in a local supermarket than the online model of Walmart.

Agreed on the meal plan delivery services. I tried one of them and it was horrible. They have cheap, small portions of ingredients, and even left out ingredients when I used them. Probably out of stock, and didn't want to refund my sale and have even more oddball ingredients leftover. They were unapologetic.

Worse yet, they're rather tasteless if you actually know how to cook. My wife is beyond most chefs because she grew up in a Latin country. A Latin person who grew up in the kitchen with mom and grandma is pretty much the best place to get food in the world.

You could write an algorithm for everything, someone from a culinary culture will never be duplicated or surpassed in our lifetimes. You'd need a hell of a finely-tuned general purpose robot to taste test your food and adjust a recipe to your tastes as a human can.

dzhiurgis• 8 years ago

Every super market in NZ sells the kind of kit that Blue Apron et al delivers. So basically Blue Apron does just delivery.

That said I've never bought the kit there - they seem to be the same for weeks.

sonnyblarney• 8 years ago

All of that boils down to 'looking up a recipe, buying ingredients, and cooking them' :) i.e. the hassle we want to avoid.

I do agree however, that grocery stores will own this category.

Reasons it's not happening yet:

1) Grocery store chains tend to not be very innovative

2) The 'behaviour' of such things is still maybe niche. Most people will take the 'pre cooked'. It's like books: few people actually read.

3) My bet is that small, local providers like Blue Apron end up proving such things. Some of them will grow, but mostly we'll see a lot of players and a lot of brands, just like everything else in food.

Blue Apron is a rational premise, just not quite sticky enough for the price.

beerlord• 8 years ago

We need an Uber for cooking.

Where we can connect some nearby retired folks to make dishes for others, without all the fuss and excessive additives (sugar, salt, butter) of commercial restaurants. Plus, allowing the cutlery and dishes to be reused (no plastics or disposables).

Probably with an emphasis on delivering multiple servings of food in one go, and with lead times in the days. Uber Eats with its single serves and lead times in the minutes is too wasteful.

Easier said than done, and a lot of friction in establishing a relationship like that.

poloniculmov• 8 years ago

Are there no catering services in your country where you can get a pot of food delivered, instead of individual portions?

syntaxing• 8 years ago

I thought about doing some subscription cooking service before but I recently joined the New York Times free 6 month trial and I didn't know/expect how useful their recipe section is. Takes most of the anxiety of choosing what to cook. For those who know how to cook, I highly recommend trying it out and following their weekly/daily suggestions. With this and the grocery delivery services, it doesn't make financial sense to join subscription food services. Though admittedly, I was taught how to cook at a young age so it's easier for me to follow the recipes.

ghaff22• 8 years ago

The NYT has long had a great food section. I also have a couple generations of their cookbooks. I understand how some people appreciate the greater structure of BA and its ilk but, as I wrote elsewhere, it's a pretty narrow use case.

ghaff22• 8 years ago

Somewhat OT but do any of these services let you opt into deliveries rather than opt out? As someone who might consider trying out a few meals now and then on a week when I'm not traveling/busy, the menus look appealing, etc. I'd be potentially interested. But I don't want to have to be constantly opting out and/or canceling my subscription (which I'm sure would get messed up sooner or later). It really is a dark pattern that makes me even less likely to use any of these services than I otherwise would.

marrone12• 8 years ago

I haven't used Blue Apron in a couple years but it used to be an opt-out dark pattern which was supremely frustrating.

asavadatti• 8 years ago

Same with Sun Basket the last time I used them. I would order more if I knew I had the ability to start/stop/cancel my subscription online

scott00• 8 years ago

Meez Meals works on an opt-in basis. Their food's pretty good I think. Only available in the midwest at the moment.

thieving_magpie• 8 years ago

I stopped using blue apron because I can't stand having a subscription to everything. I travel with some frequency and it's just a hassle to have to plan that ahead. All I want to do is order a box for next week without thinking about when I can cancel again for the following week.

capevace• 8 years ago

I once worked for their biggest competitor - HelloFresh - as a door-to-door salesperson and I have to say... the way we were told to pitch to potential customers was terrible. We were told to sign up the customer and then then opt-out of delivery for a period of 5 weeks so the customer forgets that they’re still subscribed. The salespeople - mostly ~20 year olds - were also heavily exploited and the wages and commissions not paid. I’m lucky I got out quick because otherwise they pressure you to stay because most of your colleagues become your friends and they then peer pressure you...

I’ll assume it’s quite similar to BlueApron... but I don’t know for sure...

anoncoward111• 8 years ago

A sales job will always be one of the easiest ways to get hired in the US, and also one of the easiest ways to go unpaid and mistreated for a long time.

It's rare than anyone buys from an outbound sales person anymore, especially when it's not very complex or important.

I'm thoroughly surprised that food service companies would go door to door to beg for revenue. That is far more desperate than spam emailing,

Spooky23• 8 years ago

Honestly, it's just a lame business model.

It's sort of like when you see the college kid who doesn't know how to do laundry. It's amusing, but even the most inept and lazy individual doesn't need alot of time to learn how to fold pants. In the food space, if you have the money to have pre-packaged groceries fedexed to your home to save time... why wouldn't you just get takeout?

My wife did a personal chef business with a friend when she got out of school. They would cook meals for dentists and doctors and deliver it. The most insane customers even had clean silverware and plates delivered, and one asked paid a 5x markup for them to go to Williams Sonoma and buy a fully outfitted fancy Thanksgiving dinner, with place settings and all. (ie. "Make it look like the catalog, please")

Blue Apron appeals to some middle ground of harried people, but the customer isn't rich enough to pay a wacky markup for burgers and isn't getting enough done to save a ton of time!

albeebe1• 8 years ago

While I enjoyed the trial, the food was great, and the freezer packs they ship with the food have found a new life keeping things in my cooler nice and cold, i can't say that i'm surprised at all. Cancelling the service required jumping through numerous hoops, ultimately requiring me to call them to cancel.

pwaivers• 8 years ago

Hello Fresh is down ~48% since its IPO in July. In that same period, Blue Apron is down ~70%. Blue Apron is doing even worse than the competitors.

yalogin• 8 years ago

How well is papa Murphy’s doing? I found it really odd that I get the ingredients home and then cook again. Now Blue Apron is just making a generic company out of the papa Murphy model. I don’t find it attractive. When I saw that they are going public it just felt like a way to cash out of their short term popularity.

rcdmd• 8 years ago

APRN's Q3 filings are ominous-- although margins are decent at 33%, they've never been profitable and their customer base decreased 25% Sept. 2017 to Sept. 2018.

lostphilosopher• 8 years ago

Blue Apron customer here, family of two, three meals a week for the past two years.

I like BA a lot, but I don't see anything about BA that is unique to them. There's probably 5 other options in my area. I stick with BA largely due to momentum.

For those curious:

Pros:

- No food waste. Grocery shopping inevitably resulted in large amounts of food getting tossed due to expiration (or even space concerns).

- "Forced" variety. I have had a _ton_ of meals and ingredients I would have never gotten if I wasn't doing BA. Things I've never heard of and wouldn't know to ask for. Now that I know of them, I bring them into some of my non-BA cooking too. Part of this is just just breaking habits. Before BA there were about 10 meals I was making a lot - I liked them I know how, etc., this meant I was only eating the ingredients in these meals which was probably not "complete nutrition."

- Learning a few "tricks." While the actual BA meals are cook by numbers, the specific steps often contain general purpose info. Random example: Before BA I never cooked with garlic, just never thought of it, but most BA meals use it. Now I use more garlic when I cook non-BA meals.

- Portion control. If I cook from a supermarket (and buy in super market portions) I inevitably make more than a meal, and inevitably _eat_ more than a meal. BA means I make and eat the suggested amount.

- No grocery shopping. I'm not a big fan of shopping and my wife hates grocery shopping, not having to do it is a plus.

- Less eating out. BA isn't cheap, but it's cheaper than most restaurants I'd go to. Having already paid for BA meals encourages eating them at home.

- Fast. The food isn't easier to prepare and certainly doesn't cook faster, but having exactly the right ingredients all together means I don't have to spend time assembling (or googling alternatives when I realize I forgot something).

- Fun. I look cooking, and I like BA cooking. Probably not for everyone, but there you have it.

Cons:

- Not cheap.

- Bummer when you don't like the meal. (Rare, but it happens.) Worse when you _know you're not going to like it_ but it was you're only option. Example: The texture of kale bugs me and sometimes you can't get a meal without it.

- Doesn't scale for guests.

Note: I don't buy the argument that BA packaging is bad. It's almost all recyclable. But I live in an area that makes recycling pretty easy so that might not be generalizable.

Obi_Juan_Kenobi• 8 years ago

I don't buy the argument that BA packaging is bad. It's almost all recyclable.

Reduce, reuse, recycle. In that order.

People vastly overstate the value of recycling, especially for glass and plastic. Steel and aluminum are about all that's 'good' to recycle.

For plastic and glass, it's only marginally less bad than going to a landfill. The cost to collect, sort, melt, and produce an inferior product is just too much.

Karunamon2• 8 years ago

Food waste has to be factored in. I can't help but wonder what the math for net energy consumption breaks down as when you're forced to buy x+y quantity of food when you only want or need x, vs packing material.

twblalock• 8 years ago

Blue Apron is a perfect example of a company that has no moat. Anyone could compete with them -- other delivery startups, Amazon, grocery stores, etc.

There is also no obstacle to Blue Apron customers jumping ship to a competitor. That contributes to making a moat impossible, but it also means Blue Apron and services like it are probably going to be commoditized and forced into a race to the bottom on prices, so I wouldn't expect their future profit margins to be very good.

The only way Blue Apron can differentiate itself is by offering better recipes and better customer service than its competitors. But their competitors can easily become equally good at those things.

Overall it's not a good investment because even if the business manages to survive, it won't be able to make very much money for its shareholders. I guess you could buy the shares cheap and hope Blue Apron will be acquired.

adrianmonk• 8 years ago

I considered trying one of these but I realized I'm not going to get all my at-home meals (or any drinks, snacks, paper towels, etc.) from them. Which means I'm still making a weekly trip to the grocery store. So where's the convenience?

magoon• 8 years ago

Loved it but quality problems continued to rise. Quality consistency is core to customer retention.

Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

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