Blue Apron falls 9% on fourth day as a public company

I can imagine the headlines. “AVOCADO TOAST FAD MAY BE LINKED TO DEVIL WORSHIP”

It's not 20 years ago, and “online for home delivery” is increasingly where people already shop. And, it's easy to displace a business that requires a trip out with one that requires a trip out, but one you were likely taking already. Harder to do that with something that doesn't require a trip out at all.

> No one can use Blue Apron without a regular grocer in their routine already.

Yes, you can. Cooking oil, salt, and black pepper—the only ingredients BA doesn't usually supply—don't require a traditional grocery or even one of the limited-area perishable delivery services to acquire. If BA is your only home cooking, you literally never need to enter a traditional grocery store, or order from a similar full-grown online delivery service. Google Express or Amazon in one of the areas where they don't have grocery delivery will work fine.

It also took little more than a good website to compete with Amazon in the early days, but B&N/Borders/etc. never figured out a way to do it well.

What I want to do is order stuff with as little friction as possible, and have the right items delivered in a way that's convenient.

The chain delivery service we tried involved a few things:

1. A poor site experience. It had 'pantry' functionality, but it was anything but good. Putting together a large order took nearly as much time as doing it in person.

2. Delivery was scheduled during windows, windows that were often either missed, or perhaps worse, beat by many hours. They were often many hours outside the window. We eventually stopped including anything fresh in the order and would pick those up ourselves on days when we were hosting guests. That defeats much of the point.

It was like ordering groceries from the cable company.

3. We were able to select whether we'd want substitutions if something was unavailable. In virtually every order, we would either receive items (we didn't want) when we specified no substitutions, or didn't get substitutions when we wanted them. Often the substituted items were poorly chosen as stand-ins for what was unavailable.

4. It required a young male delivery guy to enter the home to deliver the items to the kitchen. It was a different person nearly every time. This is unacceptable for a number of reasons. Whenever substitution issues happened they seemed so disconnected from the process that it meant it never got better, and recourse took more time than it was worth.

Why a company with billions at its disposal and half a million employees can't get that right is somehow both a mystery, yet also a foregone conclusion.

While I seriously doubt Blue Apron poses much of a threat to the entrenched companies, I think someone else (perhaps Amazon) probably does.

Aside: I've never heard a single good thing about OnTrac.

as we got busier our 1-2 weekly home cooked meals dropped to once per every two weeks, and my partner loves cooking and she's very good at it, never thought she was the audience for a meal kit.

she ended up getting a job at Plated. Now we cook 2-3 times a week and end up spending more time together as a result.

the cost is not trivial (and of course we have access to employee discount) but it's certainly less expensive than almost any take out meal in NYC.

i don't know what the long term situation is like but i could see it always doing well at least in a city like new york

Either via home delivery (so, not people who would use a curbside drop off), posdibly, in some areas, through Amazon Prime Fresh, or in smaller, more frequent trips walking or with a bike, or they don't regularly, and they just eat out and work with non-perishables at home.

Edit:we also ended up eating out at about an average of 2.5 nights a week every year which is much higher than when I lived in a rural area with a car

This is in a medium-sized (~1 million people) European city; I gather your milage may vary in an American city, though I assume the ones where people tend to not have cars are mostly fairly dense.

You're assuming that everyone who doesn't have a car is poor, which isn't necessarily true.

Quite solid in price/friendliness/quality.

Is this Texas? Because it sounds like the most wonderful place known as HEB.

I also think that "playing startup" is so obvious that many people could have come up with it. That being said, it's also quite possible that I saw it somewhere and absorbed it without fully remembering the source and now have a false memory of coming up with it myself.

I will add though that it's pretty fascinating as someone who is so disinterested in (and at times has a disdain for) startup people and startup culture, to be accused along the lines of, "how dare you feign not knowing who Startup Person X is!"

I wonder if I'm counted as an active customer in those figures. We haven't gotten a delivery from them in about 10 months, but since they don't offer an online cancelation accessible from the web UI (presumably to juice their retention numbers), I click on a paid ad of theirs every few weeks to cancel my upcoming shipments. They manage to make signing up online easy, but can't get the (simpler) cancelation process to work online? Color me skeptical.

I'd say we were glad on balance that we tried it.

Cons:

Incredibly expensive for what you get. (Obviously; they're paying a large amount for shipping and a large amount for marketing.)

Ingredients were generally acceptable quality, the chicken was quite good but the beef was pretty uniformly terrible. (I often thought back to Rodney Dangerfield's quote in Caddyshack: "this steak still has marks from where the jockey was hitting it!")

After a few months, the variety/novelty factor wears off and then it just becomes an incredibly expensive way to get a small amount of groceries delivered.

I don't want to seem like I'm grinding an axe, but it also annoyed me greatly that there's no web UX accessible way to cancel your account online. (You have to call and talk to a human.) Solution: google for the hidden cancellation page or just remember every few weeks to google "blue apron" or "plated" and click on a paid ad to bring you to the site and cancel the deliveries for the next six weeks. :) That makes their churn numbers look lower, but their SEM expenses higher...

You can, and many people do, eat much more cheaply, but many people don't for various reasons.

what do you think the next step would be for you and PP to continue?

more tech challenging meals? shorter prep times? regular delivery? more exotic meals? more raw ingredients than prepped? healthier meals?