Blue Apron Files for IPO
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- Cheaper than eating out for a "nice" meal, but much more expensive per meal than my usual grocery shopping, or even other decent, low-cost eating out options.
- Nice to have stuff show up, but still need to go to the grocery store, anyway-- didn't feel like I was saving a trip.
- Food wasn't hard to prepare, but it was much more cumbersome than most of the things I make in a hurry, like they wanted you to prove to yourself that you could cook something "fancy". It actually added stress (may not be true for many folks).
- Food was reasonably healthy, but not as healthy (or at least as suited to me) as my own groceries.
- Most importantly, the food didn't taste bad, but it didn't taste great, either. (You can always add your own sriracha, garlic, etc, but it kind of defeats the point if you have to make your own sauce.)
Seems like a great fit for folks who want to start cooking and haven't got in the routine yet, but it seems hard to imagine lots of people staying on the plan long term.
Honestly if you want to up your cooking game by spending money buy a nice recipe app like Paprika (I'm in love with this app) and plan your meals out before you go to the store. It takes me at most 20 minutes to find new or pick existing recipes and make my shopping list for the week. Then a quick trip to the store to grab it all (<30min in store as long as I go alone + 15-20min total driving). Call it just over an hour. Yes I could bill for an hour for more money than I save with groceries vs plated but grocery trips are unavoidable so really we are talking about 20min. And the end result is I make much healthier meals than Plated/Blue Apron/etc and I make what I like.
>>> In 2014, 2015, and 2016, we generated $77.8 million, $340.8 million, and $795.4 million in net revenue, respectively, representing growth of 338% from 2014 to 2015 and growth of 133% from 2015 to 2016. In the three months ended March 31, 2016 and March 31, 2017, we generated $172.1 million and $244.8 million in net revenue, respectively, representing growth of 42%. In the years ended December 31, 2014, 2015, and 2016, we incurred net losses of $(30.8) million, $(47.0) million, and $(54.9) million, respectively, and in the three months ended March 31, 2016 and March 31, 2017, we generated net income of $3.0 million and incurred net losses of $(52.2) million, respectively.
Edit: there is a page break in between, added the rest of the sentence
$(47.0) million, and $(54.9) million, respectively, and in the three months ended March 31, 2016 and March 31, 2017, we generated net income of $3.0 million and incurred net losses of $(52.2) million,
My wife and I cook. We look up a random recipe that sounds tasty, make a list of ingredients we don't already have, pick those up at the store, and follow the instructions. It's not much harder than paint-by-numbers, which is what I expect almost every Blue Apron customer to realize at some point.
I don't mean to say Blue Apron is a bad thing - it's training wheels for cooking, which is great! But when the training wheels come off, so does the subscription. At what point do they hit the saturation point and the customer base tops out?
This is based on their podcast ads I'm always hearing; I didn't research it.
This is excellent logic! However, it's possible that it only really works ideally if you consider shopping to not be a cost or do it for zero time. When shopping is both a time and complexity sink, some people choose to consider the option of spending money instead of time and effort.
If you shop for groceries once a week, and make, say, 10 meals at home for an average of $4 each, then you're paying Blue Apron $60. It takes me about an hour to go shopping, but I live near the grocery store and enjoy being able to pick things out. Others might be in a different situation and be willing to pay a hefty fee to not bother.
That's exactly the issue - I don't have ingredients sitting in my fridge. I don't conveniently live near a large supermarket. I don't own a car. I cook mostly for myself, and very occasionally a few friends. When I come home from work late, the last thing I want to think about is spending almost an hour going to the store, browsing and buying stuff, coming back.
To do that, first I also have to decide what exactly to cook, which is a big enough ordeal. I don't want to cook something fancy, because that means I have to get many ingredients that I'll half-use and never touch again until they go bad. Usually the simple stuff is OK but gets repetitive after a while, and leftover ingredients are still a problem.
Meal delivery fixes all that - healthy, fresh and tasty meals by default, no thought or effort required.
I guess if there was an app that decided on a meal schedule and pre-filled an instacart order, I'd do that, but again it's hard to optimize leftover ingredients and costs per meal.
relayfoods.com is basically that. We like them
The time and effort services like Blue Apron save in terms of not traveling to the super market, not having to think about what to cook, etc is the product.
My father was an accomplished chef, my wife is a fantastic cook, our kids from 0-6 years sucked up so much time and energy however. Blue Apron was a godsend.
Blue Apron is not cooking by numbers, it's convenience without the guilt/cost of eating out. The whole cooking your own meal part is a little faux feel good marketing.
I like it because it's a good way to cook things I might not decide to make otherwise.
Complaint #2 makes no sense to me. You add all your own salt. If they want less salt, add less salt.
So imagine I want to cook some chicken breasts. I'm going to dry them and the season them and let them sit for awhile. Then I will cook them and finish them. If I want to make a sauce from the nice remains of the pan they were cooked in I'd remove the chicken and excess oil perhaps and begin that process. And that process has many steps from adding shallots and garlic to deglazing with wine perhaps and reducing that and then adding stock and reducing and then mixing in some butter. The very last thing I'd do is season.
If I'm going to put the sauce on the plate and there is a starch there's a good chance I won't have to season those much at all as the sauce will carry that.
New cooks tend to over season. They forget that if everything you're cooking has salt on it when someone eats one thing there will be salt left on their tongue and in their mouth. This will help the next they thing eat and it won't need as much salt.
In general anything like a stew or a sauce should be seasons as late as possible even if there are many steps in creating it. Meat should be seasoned early and left to rest so excess moisture can be taken out of the surface areas of the meat to help form a better surface texture and flavor.
You might add a little salt in intermediary steps because the sodium will play a role in the cooking process. But those aren't "to taste" and usually you'd only need very little.
The waste thing is definitely legit though.
The only thing we wish it had is support for dietary restrictions--my wife has celiac's and we have to work around that sometimes.
I totally get that it's not for everyone but honestly for me it's been a pretty huge life improvement. They have one of my absolute favorite products.
I'm honestly a pretty big fanboy. Happy to chat. Also happy to hand out free weeks to anyone who wants to try it out. Just DM me your email + real name on twitter.
We have a small child so restaurants can be challenging, but to us it feels like the time and effort spent preparing and cleaning up are comparable to the whole restaurant ordeal, and only a little bit more intensive than the take-away process. It's more "work" but the shared meal preparation ritual is a time honored tradition that really does feel like it promotes bonding in a positive way.
The main advantage over shopping for ingredients is that we get reasonable variation and good portion sizes without spending any time planning or shopping. We've also learned a number of new techniques for rounding out meals and balancing flavors from the Blue Apron patterns that help when cooking "freestyle."
I would probably even pay a little more (but probably not much) for a more localized version that produced less trash and minimized how far my food traveled to my plate, but it would have to be just as convenient and "everything included" as Blue Apron is.
I don't think the idea that they're "doing a good thing" is so cut and dry.
Aren't they producing an astounding amount of waste? And aren't the working conditions uncomfortable at best?
https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/the-not-so-wholeso...
(Not to mention their food model seems to be "30% is crap we need to get rid of, and you will buy it")
Miscellaneous knick knacks for the recipes come in small recyclable paper bags which certainly are made of less material than large grocery store bags.
The only other things I can think of are very small plastic containers for fluids like soy sauce and the ice packs.
Overall I wouldn't be surprised if Blue Apron is slightly more wasteful than going to the store, but it's a small difference at best, at least as far as basic packaging goes.
Either way, needing to recycle is not unique to Blue Apron at all. You can easily go to the grocery store and come back with dozens of bags and packages and wrappings. Plenty of folks don't recycle in those circumstances either.
Disclaimer: I work for one of Blue Apron's competitors, Green Chef.
Err...so do you, yes?
I have friends who liked it for the healthy-food-on-rails aspect and because they weren't very adventurous cooks before trying it.
When I buy carrots, there's usually zero packaging; at most there's a thin plastic back for a bunch of carrots. I also don't buy a single leaf of Kale, and another single leaf of a different variety of Kale. Based on that picture, I'd say the amount of packaging is about twice as much as normal -- just in terms of food packaging, another picture shows the total waste[3], which is two or three times again as much. I think that's pretty significant.
I don't feel like I'm trying very hard, either, and -- even though virtually all of it is theoretically recyclable here by law -- I'm still appaled at how much garbage remains. We should strive to do better, not worse. It's not easy, though, since larger serving sizes tend to lead to spoiled food, which is the worst result of all.
And it's probably a drop in the bucket compared to the footprint of micro-grocery delivery compared to the most efficient alternatives.
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/ellencushing/these-are-the-trashy-c...
[2] https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2015-11/25/1...
[3] https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2015-11/25/1...
"Our connected Press itself is critical to delivering a consistent, high quality and food safe product because it provides: The first closed loop food safety system that allows us to remotely disable Produce Packs if there is, for example, a spinach recall. In these scenarios, we’re able to protect our consumers in real-time. Consistent pressing of our Produce Packs calibrated by flavor to deliver the best combination of taste and nutrition every time. Connected data so we can manage a very tight supply chain, because our product is live, raw produce, and has a limited lifespan of about 8 days."
- Juicero CEO
Doesn't mean they're worth investing in, or have prospects to match the valuation (I don't have an opinion either way on that personally, but I enjoy reading others' opinions).
That being said, I left them because I didn't consider them, "healthy food". Now compared to eating out, or fast food or anything yes, they are certainly healthy. But compared to shopping yourself, or healthy food places, they are not healthy. The sodium levels and calories and everything are all very high. This is mostly because healthy doesn't typically taste as good, and there is a larger market for people who want tasty over healthy.
They may eventually offer recipes tailored to low sodium, lower calories, and all like some competitors at which time I'd love to try them again.
To go a little off topic, what bothers me about groups like this, whole foods, and others, is the amount of needless packaging. For me, I buy all of my animal proteins at one of three butchers and most of my veg and bread at one of two farm markets (or a farm itself). At least around Vancouver, this is not difficult process to emulate.
These groups seem to justify their packaging by saying it's recyclable -- but that's just not good enough.
Whenever possible I try to get friends into the butcher / farm market system and away from those overly priced supermarkets. For me, I can make a fairly substantial dinner, braised chicken with plenty of veg in a madras curry sauce on rice with naan bread (from a local indian restaurant since its $2) for about $12 total. The main expense is the chicken, but even that comes to about $7 or so. This meal can easily feed four adults.
Getting these ingredients from a typical supermarket (not Whole Foods) would easily surpass $30.
One of the main hurdles for some friends has been purchasing less than picturesque veg. I challenge them to find the ugliest ones (without bruising, etc), which does help the conversion :)
The one I go to is called Persian Market, but there are a few other Italian ones that are almost as good. Dig around Yelp for farm markets under a single dollar sign.
As someone who was never taught cooking and am always exhausted after work, I need as little friction as possible to consider cooking.
I wouldn't see myself using it long term though mainly because of the excessive packaging.
Growing up, my mother was a horrible cook (still is), so I was in the same boat as you. There are lots of ways to get into cooking, but, if you're interested, one really easy method is to cook your way through Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution [2]. Don't worry about buying the bigger kitchen tools like a food processor or anything, just make sure you have a good knife and some basic pans. I believe there's a list in the front of the book.
[1] http://www.thekitchn.com/the-kitchns-guide-to-storing-fruits...
Do you mean like cardboard/plastic packaging? I was thinking materials would come in re-usable container. Not fancy, but even somewhat "cheapy" re-usable material.
https://www.jennettefulda.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ing...
Blue Apron also does a good job at allowing you to send back the materials so they can recycle them. I just point this out as I think they get a lot of criticism for a company that I don't think generates more trash than a lot of alternatives and they give an option to recycle.
You don't get enough cold packs and insulation for it to stay cold for a couple of days in a hot shipping distribution center / truck, though.
Go to a damn farmer's market and plan out your week, people!
* Lives in an area with a farmer's market in accessible range (i.e. they don't live in a food desert[1] like ~24 million Americans - and that's just any kinda real market)
* Spends as much or less at the market as on a service like this, factoring in all externalities such as food waste, travel time and expense, and so on
* Has the time to spend getting to the market and shopping
* Has the cash on hand (many farmers markets are cash only - anyone on SNAP, ~43M people[2], is now excluded since those benefits are usually on cards)
* Has a situation that allows "planning out their week"
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
[2]: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2516593/
> In 1961, more than 75% of London’s inner-city population lived within 1 kilometer of a supermarket, giving them easy access to a variety of foods, says principal investigator Jason Gilliland, who directs the university’s Urban Development Program. In 2005, he says, that number was less than 20%.
But all the stuff Blue Apron sends you is individually packaged (down to stuff like a single green onion in a bag)...
> And I'm sure the shipping is less polluting than having all the customers drive around too.
Grocery delivery is a thing, though.
And there's a different kind of waste that is reduced by BA. Every week my wife and I would have to throw out unused produce that didn't divide evenly into our meals, and it is pretty significant unless you're an expert at meal planning. There is zero food waste with BA...
If you're wasting food that often then perhaps adjustments are necessary.
>There is zero food waste with BA
Is there a citation for that very strong claim? Zero waste would require perfectly timed and sized resource allocation through their entire pipeline.
Superficially I can see the appeal of arguing based on the packaging you receive, but this fails to account for recycling options, and ignores aspects like the avoidance of food wastage given the precisely measured amounts. There's clearly more to this problem than 'wow that's more cardboard and plastic than I expected'.
> Ofc it's going to be anecdotal
Not really. People link to studies/research here frequently in comments.
I mean just look at this photo... A resealable plastic bag for 1 green onion?
https://support.blueapron.com/hc/en-us/articles/202510818-Ho...
This business about "just ship it back to us and we'll recycle it" is obviously suspect. If anything it sounds like a scheme they came up with so they could check some box in some policy subscription about "offering recycling opportunities at all stages in the supply chain", or something similar. Even though when you think about, it's obviously how wasteful that "recycling" route is.
A loophole, in other words.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/aug/19/recyclin...
That's shipping it from the local recycling plant, ton for ton. But the "net benefit" of shipping millions of box of crumbled aluminum and plastic wrappers back to Blue Apron (then unpacking and sorting them)? As if anyone has time for that, anyway (when most of us have time to do the dishes and put out the trash)? That's where things start to look suspect.
The gel packs are reusable,
Yeah, like all those soaps and mini-shampoo bottles we steal from hotels and intend to "use" someday, too.
But hey, it sure sounds nice enough as a little green checkbox on some "sustainability architect"'s slide presentation somewhere, I'm sure.
No -- you ship the gel packs back to Blue Apron and they reuse them. Reuse >> recycling, BTW.
I just did a back of the envelope calc for the carbon footprint of shipping your gel packs back to them (assuming shipping by truck 2,000km). It's about 300 grams of CO2.
A gallon of gasoline puts about 10kg of CO2 in the air. If you were to drive to the supermarket a mile away, just your trip in the car puts 800g of CO2 in the air (assuming 25 mpg).
That is, at the end of the day, it still sounds -- suspect.
While there is an obvious carbon footprint when shipping, don't forget that your box is on a truck with many other boxes. Inside your single returned box are 8-10 completely reusable gel packs from the last 4-5 weeks of meals. Ship back once a month.
Also keep in mind that many supermarket items travel farther than Blue Apron boxes, so if you're concerned about shipping emissions, you have to compare Blue Apron against that un-recycleable Purdue chicken package that probably traveled 3x as far.
The UK did a study about shipping recyclables to China for processing, and even that 10,000 mile journey for recycling had a better carbon footprint than landfilling and remanufacturing.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/aug/19/recyclin...
A fully packed delivery truck in a densely subscribed area would be more efficient in terms of fuel than all of those individuals driving to the store. But yes, minimal customers, in a big area, buying few meals consecutively would be worse.
problem more or less solved from their standpoint
Sure, maybe it's not actually that much extra packaging compared to 1/12th of a normal egg carton, but it certainly felt ridiculous to receive in the mail...
For a lot of people, Blue Apron et al aren't replacing a weekly shopping run, where you grab everything you need for a week. It's replacing people buying fast food, which is also very heavy on packaging.
There are use cases like this that are not the strawmen that I keep seeing on Hacker News like "it's cooking with training wheels on" and "not worth it" and blah blah blah.
1) recipes aren't repeated for at least a year. Boo! If I found something I like, I'd want to reorder it. (I'm not the kind of person who is always looking for something new).
2) 'regenerative farming practices' might be appealing to me, but the lack of specificity makes me think this is only done in a fad-ish sense.
3) $10 per person per meal...and I am doing the cooking? Sounds expensive.
4) 'less food waste' that's great but it sounds like it is at the expense of lots of packaging waste. And as you get experience, you find no need for much food waste anyway. Leftover ingredients can often be added to other dishes even if the recipe wouldn't necessarily call for it and you're not using super specialty flavors (see #6).
5) They used to refer to using 'local farms' in the ads. Local to them maybe, but not me likely. And I doubt packing the ingredients up and shipping them individually to me is more efficient than the standard food supply channels which are very efficient.
6) fancy sounding ingredients (always mentioned in the ads) don't impress me.
It's not all bad IMO though. The 'training wheels for cooks' argument is appealing to me in that it might get more folks used to cooking.
This company reminds me of Webvan during the 1st internet boom. They tried to do everything a market would do plus delivery. They soon found out it was too costly and went under.
What they need to do is partner with grocery stores so that customers can pick up the food or have it delivered without having to deal with UPS or FEDex. One big pain is all the packing. It gives the impression of waste. True or not it's not nice to see a bunch of packing stuff going in the trash.
I, for one,order and pick up a Thanksgiving meal every year from my local market. It's about $10 per head. If they can match that at my local market. I'd be happy to order it. It probably wouldn't be an everyday thing but I'd use it multiple times a week.
When I tried Blue Apron, I spent an hour cooking a meal for two. That's 30 minutes of work per serving.
When I cook with my own ingredients, I spend an hour shopping and an hour cooking, then make 8 servings and refrigerate/freeze the leftovers. That's 15 minutes of work per serving, and it's significantly cheaper.
I agree that Blue Apron makes more sense if you don't have access to a good grocery store, or if you don't want to invest time in finding recipes.
First, this helps a ton. Fresh food isn't available in a lot of areas and this makes it easier for both current residents and it reduces friction for people looking to move to these towns.
On the other hand, will a societal trend towards this lead to the creation of more food deserts? These services are not cheap, and food deserts tend to be in impoverished areas.
According to the internets, the walk score and bike score for my house is really high but most of the restaurants and grocery stores around don't have a lot of variety or organic products. If we didn't already have a good cooking culture and procurement habits, I might be tempted to use Blue Apron or a similar service.
Revenue/Profit 2014: $78 million / ($31 million) 2015: $340 million / ($47 million) 2016: $795 million / ($55 million)
Does it mean that Youtube competitors like Vimeo must be profitable private companies in order to stay in the market? Youtube's pockets are, at this point, effectively infinite, so my sense is that Youtube competitors are not directly competing with what Youtube offers, but similar niches peripheral to Youtube.
A better analogy might be Groupon (IPO'd 2011) or GrubHub (IPO'd 2014). Both of those were in similarly indefensible industries - GrubHub even in food delivery - and they both IPO'd basically because having capital gave them a competitive advantage over competitors that didn't, because it let them not-die and continue attracting customers with subsidized prices. Neither was kind to public market investors, but it was absolutely the right choice for founders & early investors who got out (or in some cases, were forced out).
I do agree that differentiating between competitors is tough though. On the surface all of these companies look about the same. They try to cater to different segments - health conscious, upscale, etc, but I'm not sure how effective this is.
For a while we ordered mostly takeout which was both expensive and unhealthy. We were able to start cooking for ourselves for a bit on our own, but eventually the weekly meal planning and shopping run got to be too much of a burden. That's where we found Blue Apron which had us eating healthy for another ~6 months. During this time we tried Plated too, but that week was guest recipes from some magazine and they were poorly timed and included practically inedible ingredients. After 6 months work situations changed and we just didn't have time for an hour of cooking 3 times a week. Since then we've been using Munchery which we're very happy with.
That's going to be a fun tidbit if they ever have an E. coli outbreak.
Which is one less layer (though possibly a heavier layer) than is typical with grocery shopping.
you have never used blue apron.
Yes, I have. (Now, admittedly, onions were a poorly chosen example, and with many other items you could get up to three layers—for meats that are shipped in the chilled section—layers of packaging. But regular onions were usually one layer, green/spring onions usually two.)