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Comment by MartinCron | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. It's obvious that Blue Apron produces more trash than buying the ingredients the traditional way, but do you think it produces more trash than, say, ordering take-out?

I'm not a customer, but I've been thinking of trying it. Honest question.

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Because when a restaurant buys vinegar, it comes in a gallon jug, if not a five gallon bucket. Hell, it might come in a 55 gallon drum. But then Blue Apron puts it in single 1 oz bottles and ships them all over the country, wasting a huge amount of packaging to supply commodity ingredients.

I get the basic concept, but I was thinking of all of the waste in the-take out packaging.

That said, the idea of getting a single ounce bottle of something any reasonable kitchen should already have (like vinegar) does feel pretty gross.

Take out dinner in itself is not a thrash concept. Something like Blue Apron is. A thrash concept producing thrash. You don't have to cook with takeout. You have to cook with Blue Apron, spend extra money on groceries and produce extra thrash when the entirety of it is avoidable. And if you are nearly a good cook and follow the instructions on a prepackaged thing, you surely can go and shop groceries and cook better meals. So this kinda solution is not for the lazy (take-out crowd) and neither for the home chefs.

Trash. Thrash is something else.

Take-out trash it pretty bad, but I'd imagine that packaging every ingredient individually is even worse. More surface area to cover, if nothing else.

1 quart of white vinegar = 80 cents for a supermarket brand. If you want organic Sprouts white vinegar it's $1.80. If you need something like rice wine vinegar, ~$2 for 12oz. Anyway, the point is that they must be making a huge mark up even if they charge 50 cents for 1 oz bottles of vinegar.

Don't people poach eggs? You need vinegar for that. Boil a pot of water, two capfuls of vinegar, crack 2 eggs into something like a 3/4 cup measure, turn heat off wait for water to stop aggressively boiling, lower the measuring cup of eggs so it partly submerges, tip it to empty the contents (you don't want to drop the eggs in from altitude), lid on the pot, set a timer for 5 or 6 minutes. Play around with the time. It'll take less time if you have a stove with residual heat: glass or coils. It'll take more time if you have gas or induction.

If you do it a bunch of times, you can figure out when they're done the way you like them just be jiggling the pot and seeing how the eggs move under water.

The fresher the egg the more it will hold together. If it flattens out on the bottom, oh well some eggs do that even with vinegar. You'll get over it.

Next start making homemade bread for your eggs. And now you'll be willing to pay $6 for really good eggs from chickens that eat insects. OK I'm carried away now...

I'm trying out Blue Apron right now. As far as packaging:

    * 1 big box
    * 1 "bubblewrap" cooler bag
    * 2 huge ice packs
    * Misc. plastic bags for produce
    * 3 small paper bags for "extras"

The box and the refrigeration setup are definitely wasteful (even ignoring the environmental cost of shipping it), but the packaging on the produce is pretty minimal.

How about instead of ordering takeout or blue apron, you go to the store and buy groceries? It literally takes less than 2 hours a week from planning meals to getting home.

Plus 4-7 hours of cooking and cleaning. Suddenly you just spent an entire work day on dinner.

You do that with blue apron as well....? I dunno, cooking is an inherently relaxing experience for me and many others. I don't think Blue Apron is a better solution if you're making the "counting hours" argument, as for much less money I could do marginally more work and spend marginally more time. That's a win in my opinion.

I haven't used Blue Apron, but they do all the prep, which is often the biggest time suck in cooking something complex. Anyhow, if you find that part relaxing, I think that just means you're not Blue Apron's target customer. That's fine, but insufficient for making claims about whether or not Blue Apron is a good solution in general.

It's really not marginally more work. I think it'd take me at least three hours a week to plan out meals like Blue Apron does and acquire all the ingredients myself. That's a ~42% increase in time spent if you wager 7 hours normally spent on cooking and cleaning.

But I also just flat-out don't like going to the grocery store, mainly because the one near me is so busy. It's great if I go at 11PM on a weeknight, but I'm usually too sleepy to do that. It's complete chaos on a Saturday or Sunday (and go too late on a Sunday and the produce section will be emptied out too).

I would recommend trying PeachDish. https://www.peachdish.com/ We are the best quality meal kit company. We were voted best quality by Forbes and the New York Observer. I would be honored to be upvoted by the HN community. Thank you. I started it in my garage 4 years ago- the first year I was not sure about the food, and then met my business partner judith, who used to be president of slow food in the south east, and her husband is an organic farmer.

Thank you,

Hadi Founder, PeachDish - also use coupon code HADI

I'll throw in the excellent 5 ingredients 10 minutes http://5ingredients10minutes.com/ from Jules Clancy, most of the recipes can be found for free on her blog at thestonesoup.com 10 minutes required a bit of training, but it's almost always easily cheaper, faster and better than random food for order.

There's really no need to spend 4-7 hours a week prepping food if all you want is a decent and healthy dinner - though spending time preparing something fancy for friends and family is a rewarding activity in it's own right, but that's an entirely different matter.

I do go to the store (and the farmers market) and buy groceries, and cook, all the time. I've recently been curious about Blue Apron as a relatively low-effort way to expand what I cook and how I cook it.

My wife and I have been using Plated and HelloFresh for over a year now. While the services are not cheap, I have found that it's a much better and cheaper option over the course of a week. The food tastes better than the things I would attempt to cook, but more importantly, I end up saving money on meals because I don't end up wasting ingredients or throwing away leftovers.

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