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Comment by nsnick | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone actually use Blue Apron? They seem to do promotions all the time and yet, I don't know anyone who actually uses their service.

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I used it for almost two years for a variety of reasons - primarily it forces you to be a better cook and cook a much larger range of recipes than you would select on your own. Eventually I had a stockpile of recipes from them to pull off of and we moved right across the street from a grocery store so was pretty ridiculous to keep using it. I don't regret it at all - I'm a much better cook and I can cook a much larger variety of stuff now than prior to using the service. These services don't seem like they are able to sustain people for long periods of time. If people are like me you'd use it for a while then eventually find it unnecessary. Seems like the model is short-lived propagation than long-term use but I could be an anomaly. Also used a few others in that time - Blue Apron was the most consistent.

If you're an anomaly, then my wife and I are, too: that was exactly our experience. We were already pretty decent cooks, but in a bit of a rut. We used Blue Apron as a way to push ourselves to try new ingredients and new recipes. Once we felt like we'd been exposed to most of their repertoire and settled on which sorts of dishes worked for us and which didn't, we stopped.

interesting...

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?

Other services have forced Blue Apron to advance a bit on these. It used to be you got to "pick" from 6 meals. I put "pick" in quotes here because selecting meal 1 meant you couldn't select meals 4, 5, and 6, etc. Now they've gone up to 8 meals and you can pick any of them you want. Home Chef is still a few steps ahead with 11 meals, including one breakfast option and 1 premium option (extra cost).

Sounds similar to me and my wife. If you want more variety, try a CSA if one is available in your area. Ours would provide an assortment of recipes with every box and looking new things up online is just so easy. Who knew roasted fennel was so damn delicious? (:

We used it a lot when they just started. For a while the quality was very good: chefs did a good job providing variety of choices, packaging was good. But after a year or so they started to cut the cost and shifted to low-quality selection which felt like fast food. We moved to Home Chef: it's pricier, but they provide what Blue Apron was when they started.

Funny you say that. I get Home Chef delivered at least twice a month now after converting from Blue Apron as well, and I've been doing for long enough now that it feels like I can detect the pattern to their recipes. Always a chicken breast dish with some sort of sauce/coating and vegetable side... some form of meat in lettuce wraps... pork medallions in some kind of sauce with vegetables...

Not to say I'm not a fan, but there are definitely patters I'm starting to notice with Home Chef's offerings.

It is totally shocking that it turns out there are limits as to how many food permutations they can deliver that meet all the core requirements (healthy, GF, week-long shelf life, etc..).

Kale and sweet potato for every meal!

I canceled when I couldn't tell them to stop sending me sweet potato. They sent me an email saying they'd changed some stuff based on my recommendation but when I rejoined they still sent me two sweet potatoes and a bag of kale with every box.

I haven't had any urge to join back up.

It was eggplants and lamb for me.

Home Chef: I just spent 5mns browsing their website, and couldn't find prices without giving my email address. Frustrating.

I see their packaging littering my building's garbage areas, on its way to landfills.

So much garbage.

Cities are responsible for garbage and many are aggressively trying to reduce waste. Many cities are looking strongly at business regulation as a way to do this. Fees on plastic bags is just one example of this.

Blue Apron may eventually run into conflict with cities if their packaging is excessive and not compostable.

All of their packaging (with the exception of any meat packaging) is fully recyclable or returnable for re-use. There won't be a conflict on BA's end. If anything, it'll be on the end of the consumer for not disposing and/or recycling properly.

I've always wondered - which is worse? Tossing the packaging in the trash or burning fuel to ship it back to them. My gut says local recycling would be best, but sometimes there isn't a nearby use for post consumer materials.

In that case, they do have local drop-offs too but they're usually at grocery stores so, if the point was to save yourself a trip, are you really doing that?

This is such a shame as they offer a really, really easy recycling service for their boxes. The only caveat is that you have to have the stuff from at least 2-3 deliveries before you can send it back for recycling, but it's easily separated and costs nothing.

Yes! Per recommendation from my sister in law. My wife and I cook for two and are generally quite satisfied:

- generally right-sized portions and ingredients pared down to 2 people

- excellent variety of ingredients and cuisines, including many things I had never seen before, and some things you'd have to go to an international market to try ro find

- nice rotation of seasonal recipes

- generally great flavors – they know how to coax fledgling chefs into enough seasoning! Frequently recipes come with a nice spicy kick.

- preparation is somewhat chef'ed up but not overly fussy

- recipes encourage mise en place and are generally easy to follow

- simple and functional mobile app, as well as fairly active and occasionally helpful forums

- cheaper than eating out, at least at this level of cuisine. More expensive thab a market probably but you don't have to plan and shop and worry so much about leftovers

Downsides:

- 6 day advance notice to cancel a delivery – you need to keep on top of your game!

- ingredient selection tends towards the inexpensive

- not feeling the return of packaging via mail – I miss the days of Webvan, and still have an old plastic crate of theirs poking around somewhere I think!

- prep can be deceptively involved for these recipes – for me total prep time is 2-3x what the recipe states for cooking time

I've found their prep times are only accurate if you've made the dish before. If you're reading and following as you go, it definitely takes longer. But I've kept my recipe cards, and remade a few things at the suggested timeframes.

For some of these, having a mandolin slicer can really cut down on prep time.

We did briefly, but it wasn't that great. And then we were an unwilling customer for 3 months because they kept charging our bank account and refusing to close the account.

In the last big Blue Apron thread I participated in, I found it a bit suspicious how many people were just rabid about the company, the product, and the service and how it was "simply gourmet and such better food than [insert fast casual chain]" and "how dare you compare the quality!", etc.

I'm not so paranoid to think that the whole crowd were interested/biased parties, but I can't help wonder if they've convinced themselves that the absurd cost is actually worth it. I've tried it and I don't find the quality to even as good than that of say, Modern Market or some other slightly-upscale eatery.

Blue Apron seems to inspire surprisingly passionate discussions here. Detractors tend to be very negative and even a bit hostile, and I suspect that maybe puts fans of the service on the defensive or makes them feel like they have to praise it more than it really deserves. So far this thread is very civil though.

I've tried it and enjoyed it. I found it to be a high-quality service. Negative points were (1) trash; (2) I didn't like most of the vegetarian meals, and I'm trending towards a more vegetarian diet; (3) I prefer to cook simple meals at home that generate leftovers (so that I don't have to cook every night), but BA meals tend to be complex, messy to prepare, and do not create any leftovers. These three points were easily sufficient to stop me from using it long-term.

(1) is a topic of a lot of argument. Some insist BA creates mass amounts of waste compared to normal grocery shopping. Others contend the difference is much smaller or even nonexistent when looking at "average" grocery shoppers. I'm in the middle. I think the waste is exaggerated, but still greater than what the average shopper would produce.

We used it for about 6 months (or maybe a little more) a few years ago. I got it for my wife who enjoys cooking and enjoyed the "semi-forced" variety. Several of the meals (or close variants) are now in our regular rotation at home.

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...

Weird, I canceled Blue Apron twice from their website. Maybe they removed that because it was too easy to cancel.

Regarding point (3). I don't want to pay double (for double portions) just to have leftovers. I was doing the 3x dishes (2 portions per dish) for $60. However, if you double the cost to $120 -- it makes way more sense to go the grocery store since prices drop with increased quantity. Their pricing model is messed up. If you want double portions for all three meals, it shouldn't cost twice as much -- it should be, like, 30% more of something comparable to grocery store pricing.

Do you think that referring to "absurd cost" is going to result in a good discussion?

...and it's not really that absurd, even, compared to eating out or throwing away spoiled groceries because you bought too much or didn't get around to cooking it.

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

When people are very hostile to customers and say they are wasting their money, the customers tend to get very defensive and say they are not.

They popped up on so many talk radio shows with each host himself voicing first-person experience ads (even John Batchelor), it turned me off right away.

Lifelock, Proflowers, and that beet company use the same strategy. That advertising just has a snake-oil feel to it.

Listen to any podcast and you'll hear about Casper, Audible, Harry's Razor, and Blue Apron so much you'll forget what the actual podcast was about. I don't think there are any companies advertising with podcasts beyond those four.

Don't forget Lootcrate--get cartoon junk sent to your house every week for some reason.

I wasn't referring to within the podcast; I meant during OTA broadcasting.

Yeah I was just pointing out another medium where advertising has become a monster with the help of just a small number of companies.

The way these companies advertise is largely why I'll never do business with them (same with Lootcrate).

If you have to advertise that much to get me to be a customer, then you're essentially telling me your user experience is shit, and your product/service is shit, and the only way to get customers that you haven't poisoned with a bad experience is to constantly spam.

They're literally paying for advertisements to not do business with them. Dunno how that makes sense to do.

How does that follow? Say a company provides an excellent service and 100% of their customers return and they're growing quite a bit by word of mouth, but they want to grow even faster. Why wouldn't they advertise as well?

I'm not saying BA is good (or bad), by the way. I don't even live in the US, I have no idea.

Okay, so let's say a perfect company exists, where it is 100% perfect. If such a thing existed, it would mean word of mouth would be infinitely successful and every customer would be converted into a cult member and spread the religion of that company... ergo, they would not only not need advertising, but advertising could only be viewed as a negative aspect.

This isn't the outcome you were expecting, but that's the logical outcome of logic.

As far as BA, everything I've heard is bad (not one single good story at all), but I'll never be a customer of theirs anyhow: I can cook already.

There's also _another_ mattress company. Can't remember the name, but it shows up on Crooked Media podcasts a lot. Apparently podcasts are the preferred marketing medium of the modern mattress industry :)

One of my friends uses something like it (not sure of the name, could be Blue Apron?).

When they told me that is how they make their dinners, I thought they were joking.

They were incredibly wealthy and well cared for as a child, so much so that apparently they never learned how to prepare a meal themselves.

They have never bought the ingredients, followed a recipe, and made their own meal in their entire life. So it did make sense that they would use this service when I thought about it.

The total addressable market for that consumer group (people who never learned how to cook for themselves due to an upper class lifestyle) is small. But they likely have deep pockets.

There is a thin(ish) line between convenience as a service and surrogate mummy as a service to prolong adolescence into adulthood.

I did for a few weeks but didn't really enjoy the vegeterian options. They weren't bad, but weren't good either. However when I lived in a large apartment several of my neighbors had them. I also had a vegetarian coworker who enjoyed their service, so YMMV.

There are several services that cater solely to vegetarians, which is one of the problems for Blue Apron -- too easy to replicate.

I used them for a few months, but then just got tired of the meal cycle and didn't want to waste any of the food I didn't feel like cooking. I totally agree that they really need to do more to prevent the monotony of the weekly meal box schedule. I also really wanted them to add desserts to their boxes, but they added wine instead... I don't drink wine so that did nothing for me. I also always had anxiety that I would have to contact customer service if any of the food didn't arrive in editable condition. They always backed up their product, but I don't like feeling like I have to be a part of their quality assurance team every time I open one of their boxes.

I used it for the better part of 3 years. Made me a pretty good cook. I probably wouldn't use it again now that I feel a lot more confident in the kitchen.

I probably wouldn't use it again now that I feel a lot more confident in the kitchen.

That's the big flaw I see in their product model - it's inherently self-limiting.

It's similar to coffee subscription services that give you a different bag each month. Those services helped me define what I enjoyed and now I just buy coffee directly because I know what I want.

That's good comparison, actually. But do you see any of those subscription services filing for an IPO? Or needing all that automation and cleverness (and implicitly, with all that overhead, scale) just to get their stuff out of the door?

That's the problem with Blue Apron. It's a nice idea. But it's just too darn big of an idea (and way too much engineering) for the problem it addresses.

I agree. Blue Apron's operation can be reproduced, and Amazon is probably one of the best companies to do it now that they have Whole Foods.

I don't see a coffee subscription type service going to IPO, unless it's part of a larger business. However, total spend on groceries/food will always be higher than coffee, so it's not an equal comparison exactly.

True, BA is a way to educate people until the service isn't needed. That could be a problem, but I have the feeling there are plenty of people who can't cook. The question is - can the afford these lessons?

It's way cheaper than actual cooking classes. That doesn't totally answer your question, but I've found receiving the food with well-written descriptions (they are particular in the language they use to describe how to cook things, so you get it just right). It's like, the next step down in my opinion from physically going to a class and having someone teach you a couple things.

Oh, it can be great as a niche-y, learning-to-cook service. If inherently somewhat costly.

Just not the wide-scale, low-margin partial-replacement-for-takeout-and-grocery-shopping that they appear to be need it to be for their business model to succeed.

It seemed like they always included some weird ingredient it would be hard to get locally. But we also are 30 minutes from a Whole Foods.

The real art of cooking is learning ingredient substitution.

I tried it out for 2 weeks. It was fun to just throw stuff together, and cooking things I normally wouldn't have tried. Although I don't regret those 2 weeks, I doubt I'd try it again.

I think they have a Groupon effect where they get a lot more reduced-price samplings than actual subscriptions.

It's probably built into their marketing costs. Some people will go into it thinking they'll cancel after the trial, but actually end up converting once they come to enjoy the convenience. Those are the customers who make the initial subsidies worth it, obviously. But more of what I've read in other comments here -- still anecdotal -- is people "graduate" after a certain amount time once they feel like proficient cooks. It's like Blue Apron is empowering their customers with good cooking skills a little too well.

Apparently, 1MM people use it weekly.

Are these roughly the same 1MM people who used them the prior week? I haven't looked through their filings but wonder what the repeat customer %/churn is.

I'd be skeptical of their reported churn figures because of the asymmetry in the web experience.

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.

They list an email that you need to send a message to, which auto-replies with a link to their website where you can cancel. I unfortunately don't have the link handy to share, but it's easier than needing to go through the rigamarole of you canceling upcoming shipments.

The cancellation set up they have is clearly geared towards people who won't want to bother doing that--and then forget to cancel a shipment.

It's this:

https://www.blueapron.com/cancel_subscription

Because of the principle of the matter (it should be about as easy to cancel as to sign up), I'd rather keep whacking them for a paid ad clickthrough a couple times a month, even if it puts me at some risk of forgetting for 6 straight weeks. (I haven't yet.)

That seems incredibly foolish. Paid ads cost them less than a penny per click and all it would take is for you to forget 1 time and they'd make all that money back immediately and still turn a profit. The best thing to do is just cancel. It makes their numbers go down and it involves nothing else on your end.

I would be shocked if the cost-per-click on the term "plated" or "blue apron" was under a penny.

I was under the impression that it was more than a dollar in all likelihood. (I agree; if it's a penny, then I'm pissing upwind.)

Anyone have insight into the likely CPC?

Considering the name of my hobby blog that I own the .com for with ~1k visitors per month is more than 25c on Adwords, if Blue Apron is less than a dollar I would eat my laptop.

Even if it's not, though, each delivery costs, at the very least, $60. You'd have to go through your process 60 times (at a dollar per click) to even make a dent. On top of that, considering they send free boxes to people all the time, it's not like they're losing money on that.

I found it more annoying than buying my own groceries. There are too many ingredients and far too much cutting. I want simple meals that I can prepare quickly. Many of the meals were tasty, but not worth ~1-1.5h of prep time.

If it's taking you 1.5h to prep a meal you got from Blue Apron, then you're doing something seriously wrong. Prep time is usually no more than 10 minutes and cook time is never longer than 35 minutes unless you're putting something in the oven to set it on a timer.

Prep before cooking for me is usually 20–40 mins; more if you count defrosting.

We're talking about Blue Apron meals which don't ever need to be defrosted. The prep time only involves washing and cutting things prior to cooking.

I freeze meat that I'm not eating in the next day or two, particularly fish. Prep includes reading and understanding the recipe, fetching bowls and implements, bringing out the ingredients, preparing the work surface, and often starting water to boil.

Again, if that takes you 40 minutes with a Blue Apron meal, you're doing it wrong.

>Does anyone actually use Blue Apron?

Podcast hosts.

Will be two years in Aug for me.

I liked the idea a lot, but I found a local place that does it better. http://www.localbaskit.com/

No, absolutely nobody uses Blue Apron but they decided to go public anyways as a joke. /s

Is not the point of sarcasm that no one could possibly misunderstand?

Either commit to the format and get rid of the '/s', or just speak sincerely.

No, the point of sarcasm is not to mislead people.

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