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Comment by jerkstate | Hacker News Reader

I live in the Bay Area and Blue Apron is on thin ice with us right now. Their quality control got really bad right around the time of their IPO. Now nearly every week we have missing ingredients and/or leaking containers. We had no problems for 2 years and now it's pretty much constant! They are always pretty responsive with a credit commensurate to what the damage to the meal is, but this is basically the worst possible time for them to be screwing up like this.

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I had a positive experience with a Blue Apron, but had similar quality issue with Purple Carrot. Most of the produce would arrive in a partially rotten state and sometimes ingredients were missing or the bottle of some liquid hadn't been fully closed and leaked over everything. I switched to Sun Basket and so far, so good.

Ever been to Red Lobster? :-)

It's like they all use the same name generator for their companies that goes [Color related qualifier] [Food related noun].

Some of the rejected candidates before they settled on Blue Apron: "Orange Orange", "Sky Aubergine", "Yellow Spatula", "The-color-of-a-lawnchair-that's-been-out-in-the-rain-too-long Cucumber".

Same here. Our package came 2 days late. The meat and perishables... perished. At least they gave us a voucher. But whatever they did to cut costs/speed up delivery/prepare for IPO was executed very poorly.

I've noticed the same in the NYC area: the last few weeks I've had ingredients crushed which has never happened before.

They've also been spamming me with discounts to the wine club only to tell me that they can't legally deliver in NY when I tried to sign up. Don't they know where I live?

I hope they can recover because I do truly like the product and I think they're the best right now (a margin better than Hello Fresh, leagues better than Plated)

I live in New York City, and we are entirely satisfied and impressed nightly with Sun Basket. It doesn't have nearly the reach or brand awareness as some of the bigger players, but it's everything I've ever wanted in one of these services. Worth checking out.

Thanks, just signed up to try it out.

They addressed this in the conference call. In essence they want to make sure that order fulfillment is staying at high enough quality levels. And they've struggled lately operationally which has caused issues with that. I'd expect they turn it around soon.

Or perhaps the best time, they have IPO'd, the original investors got their money back plus extra, the founders made a tidy sum and if it all falls to pieces it is the institutional investors who will take the hit. Now they are a public company they will be looking at their bottom line so the easiest/fastest way to improve that is to cut costs.

The Silicon Valley Way?

I should probably watch that show.

I almost worked for them. Turned them down, but got far enough in the process to learn that their dev teams were mostly made up of juniors, and they were keen on bringing in more senior people to up the quality. That was about 9 months ago, my guess is that the process hasn't been going smoothly.

I dunno about that. In my experience, their website is actually one of the better parts of the experience. It's really easy to skip weeks, change menus, set up a recycling pickup, etc. It works on mobile too and I've never really had any issues with the tech side of it. The only issues we've ever had are with the manual and/or delivery aspects of the service. Other than that, I really like it. It's pricey, but I'd rather put the money into meals that I enjoy where I feel like I'm also learning something and eating something I "made" and Blue Apron fits that bill for me.

fair point

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