Blue Apron — my new best friend in the kitchen

Finally, I can write something about food! Earlier in the fall, I got a groupon for a Blue Apron delivery, and it only cost me about $30 for 6 meals with the groupon, a pretty good deal. I was also excited about trying it out, because Blue Apron was founded in New York and they didn’t use to deliver in bay area. And the company is probably one of the earliest and most funded ($193M) meal-kit startups in the space, so it should be good.

Signing up

A quick overview on what the website looks like. The entire signup process has about 4 steps — Welcome, Preferences, Delivery and Payment. In Preferences, you can select either the 2-person plan ($9.99/meal or $59.94 for 3 meals for 2 people) or the family plan ($8.74/meal, $69.92 for 2meals for 4 people). You will also have to indicate your dietary preference or any food that you don’t eat.

I selected a 2-person plan, and now I just have to wait for my package to be delivered.

What’s in the box

I got this refrigerated box in mail in the morning (they usually deliver on Thursdays), and I didn’t put it in the fridge until later that night. But when I took out the grocery, everything was still cold and fresh. It looked like they used some special ice bags in the box, so the whole box can stay cold for about 1–2 days (one time I didn’t put the grocery in the fridge until the end of the next day).

Here are step by step recipe cards, very well made. Every time you get a new box, they will also send you a health tip along with the recipe cards.

On the left, it’s the salmon salad dish along with the ingredients for this recipe. The packaging is certainly nice, and for small stuff, Blue Apron put them in a small bag called Knick Knacks, neat.

They did a very good job at breaking down the steps and explaining what you have to do in each step. If you look at it carefully, they even bold the ingredients that you need to use and the amount in each step, definitely a no brainer.

So we actually prepared two of the dishes at the same time, and it took us about one hour to finish both of them, not too bad. And here’s what the Salmon Salad dish looks like. Trust me, it does taste as good as it looks ;)

How about the mobile app

So out of curiosity, I also got the mobile app just to see the difference. In each recipe, they will show you some tips and techniques on how to make that dish more efficiently (if you are a cooking newbie). You can also use the alarm cock at the top right corner as a timer, as you use the recipe in the mobile app (probably better if you use a tablet) when you cook, pretty neat.

Besides that, you can save all the recipes in your mobile app even if you didn’t get the meals. This comes in handy when you don’t want to get deliveries from Blue Apron, but too lazy to look for new recipes to cook dinner.

Food for thought

The Quality

Overall, I am pretty happy with my Blue Apron experience.

The box’s quality was impressive in terms of how they used the ice bags to freeze the grocery to keep it fresh. The ingredients still felt cool when I took it out 2 days after I got the refrigerated box. The quality of the grocery was also above average. One time I didn’t have time to cook right after I got my package, so I actually just let the grocery sit in my fridge (not freezer) for more than 2 weeks. When I cooked my first meal, most of the ingredients still looked surprising decent.

The amount of ingredients provided is just as precise as the parts of Ikea furnitures. I finished almost all of them every time, and I never had to worry if I would run out. The recipes are very straightforward, which is perfect for a cooking newbie like me. And the food does taste very delicious :)

But…

Well, there’s always a but. Even though the experience was great, there’s always something that could have been better.

Skip Deliveries

Right now, if you want to skip deliveries for a week, you have to go to Menus on the website, and then click skip deliveries for that week. And what’s the cutoff? 6 days! That’s almost a week, so pretty much as soon as you get your box for this week, you will have to decide if you want it for next week. And of course, I forgot to skip once, and I ended up with 2 boxes at home.

If you think about it, most users that actually like the product probably will not want to cancel right after the first delivery, because next time when they sign up again, they will have to re-enter all the information. What a hassle. And therefore, users will have to remember to skip every week until the week they actually want a delivery. So I learned my lesson, now I have a reminder on my calendar every Thursday so that I won’t forget to skip my delivery.

Recipe Offerings

How about the recipes? Most of the things are quite interesting and not difficult to make; however, my boyfriend wasn’t extremely satisfied with the Mozzarella Pizza recipe we got. The dish required a lot of prep work (because we had to make it from scratch) and took a long time, but the pizza didn’t taste as good as other dishes, because we had very limited tools. Well, as a new yorker, I guess he knows his pizzas better than I do.

Still, I can’t help but wonder, if the purpose of Blue Apron is to help customers make simple healthy food at home, why would I want to make pizza? It took a long time and I don’t even think it’s healthy. I feel like Blue Apron will have to not only ensure the quality of the ingredients, but also spend time on coming up with the right recipes.

The number of the meals in each plan

Right now Blue Apron only has 2 different plans for Personal and Family, but the minimum number of meals will still be 6 for both plans. While I understand they have to deliver a certain number of meals to customers every week to cover the shipping and packaging costs, as a customer, I still feel like the amount is too much for me. As a student, I constantly have lots of deadlines, and don’t have the time to cook. And the reason I want to use something like Blue Apron is that I want to try cooking maybe 1 or 2 meals a week, but not to have 6 meals sitting around. So sometimes if I get too busy, my Blue Apron box will just have to sit in the fridge till next week.

In fact, Plated is addressing this problem by providing a 4 meal option to users, but users will have to pay a little bit more on shipping or add desserts to the package. This might not be the best solution, but we can see at least they are trying to be more flexible.

How about other startups

There are a lot of startups in the meal-kit space right now, such as Plated, Gobble and Hello Fresh. Plated is similar to Blue Apron, emphasizing on the health food made at home and interesting recipes, while Gobble and Hello Fresh focus on the speed for home made meals.

For pricing, Blue Apron is actually the cheapest ($9.99/meal), while other startups charge around $11–$12/meal. In terms of the cut-off for delivery, Plated and Hello Fresh allows users to skip 1 day in advance, while Gobble asks users to skip 6 days in advance, same with Blue Apron. Finally, on the variety, Plated offers desserts on top of the recipes, and Blue Apron offers wines that pair with the dishes.

However, Blue Apron has more than just these meal-kit startups as its competitors. Companies such as Munchery and Instacart also come into the picture. Munchery delivers the actual meal to the customer’s home and it only costs $11+$2.95 in delivery ($12-$15 in total on average), while Instacart delivers grocery if the customer wants to cook but not spend time on shopping. And of course, don’t forget users can always use Doordash and Postmates to get food delivered from restaurants. These companies address some of the problems that Blue Apron is trying to solve - Healthy food or Convenience.

Therefore, even though it seems like Blue Apron is only tackling one problem, personally I still feel like the company is facing competitors from various sectors.

The bottom line

A lot of people have different perspectives on meal-kit startups like Blue Apron. Some people are disappointed because they feel like Blue Apron destroy the cooking experience by deciding the recipes and doing the grocery shopping; some love it because it’s convenient and healthy. I guess, if the potential user is a chef or someone who really likes cooking, I wouldn’t recommend him/her use any of these meal-kit startups. The purpose of a meal-kit startup is to help you save time and learn how to cook. If you don’t have the right expectation, you probably will not have a good experience.

In my opinion, as a meal-kit startup, Blue Apron’s overall user experience and offerings are probably above average. However, most meal-kit startups don’t make money, not even mention that there’s a lot of competition in this space. On top of that, for a meal-kit startup to attract and retain customers, it will have to offer more other than just meal-kits. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how this sector evolve in the future, and how all these meal-kit startups disrupt to survive and thrive.

Anyways, I think I will still use Blue Apron occasionally in the future, but for now, let’s just look at these delicious food pictures while I eat my microwaved tacos tonight. Bon Appetite!