When all was said and done, I felt that the best value proposition would be to just go on the Blue Apron website, look at the recipes, buy dry good ingredients in bulk, and make the recipes myself as time went on, buying the fresh ingredients as needed. As always, YMMV.
Edit: as many others have also pointed out, the packaging is "neat", and probably necessary for their workflow, but it feels ever so wasteful. You could supply a kindergarten arts and craft class with leftover materials from each shipment.
Where can you get a "gourmet healthy" email when eating out for $10? That would barely cover a Shake Burger + fries.
Perhaps it seemed that I suggested you could get a healthy meal + restaurant experience for under $10, but I was more thinking take-out options. Whole Foods' hot and cold (salad) buffet bar is like $9 per pound if I remember correctly. [1] Fairway, a competitor to Whole Foods in NYC, has a deli counter or buffet bar where you can get close to 1lb of veggies + grains + meat for under $10. [2] The only way Blue Apron makes sense over Fairway and Whole Foods, to me, is if you are either looking for the experience of cooking, or if you are a variety fiend and are going to tire of the flavors that the supermarkets use.
[1] https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/department/article/daily-me...
[2] https://www.fairwaymarket.com/content/uploads/06_05_15_REDHO... Scroll to the bottom: those build your own meal options are listed as sale prices, but they are representative for regular non-sale options too.
Bonus how-to maximize value at the salad bar: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/08/03/whole-foods-salad-b...
Wait, the Whole Foods salad with meat is more expensive. And the Fairway meals are as expensive or more for what looks like slop.
Also, how do you figure that the Whole Foods "salad with meat" is more expensive? You're getting a pound of prepared food for $9: hot, cold, meat, vegetarian, salad, whatever you want. The Blue Apron portions do not contain a pound of food.
https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&q=whole+foods+b...
https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&q=fairway+deli
You seem pretty closed minded with respect to your meal planning. [1] Best of luck. Getting things delivered to you in 15 tiny little plastic baggies, with limited protein choices, seems pretty boring and ineffective to me, but, different strokes for different folks.
I am quite open minded about my meal planning. I do Blue Apron, Din, Soylent, Caviar/fastbite, local delivery, Sprig, Munchery, Trader Joes pre-made and scratch, Whole Foods buffet, mall food court (we have a great one in SF), etc. My sense is that you don't really know what you're talking about.
"people fall into a few habitual meals"
"choose the meals based on what you have"
Goes without saying that you're pretty much dead wrong.
Finding a recipe: skip this. It's a waste of time. I haven't followed a recipe for anything that wasn't a cake in the last 15 years.
Getting the ingredients: you have the causality reversed. You choose the meals based on what you have, not what you will have based on what meals you want.
Figure out the recipe: see point #2, but also, recipes are extremely standardized. It's your failure to have learned the language that is the problem.
This is the bit you're doing backwards. Type the ingredients you've got into Google, along with "recipe" and see what you fancy eating.
Now having said that, I do sympathize with posters who think cooking is time-consuming and hard. At the age of about 25 I specifically set about learning to cook, and it took me probably 5 years before I got good at it, and another 5 years before I was able to conjure a meal from bits and pieces of unpromising leftover ingredients.