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Comment by mathattack | Hacker News Reader

Market cap is now under 500M. Is there any point at which they become a value play, or are the unit economics too awful?

Edit: Typo dutifully noted and corrected!

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For them to be a 'value play' wouldn't they need to have purchased a bunch of real assets, like farms etc?

Blue Apron stopped making sense for me when Uber Eats started delivering to my house. It's just too expensive.

For $9.00 per meal, and a family of 4, I can just get delivery from most of my favorite restaurants. (More Choice, Same Price, Tastes Better, Much Easier)

I guess Blue Apron is healthier than what I typically order, but I could choose to order healthy if I wanted to... which I usually don't.

I would have a hard time even getting McDonald's delivered to me for $9 a meal.

I love Blue Apron. $10/meal for the quality of their food is fantastic. I also really enjoying cooking it with my girlfriend. But, I don't order it every week, just probably once or twice a month.

I think the OP meant that $9 per serving. So $36 (now $40) for a family of four.

I know that's what he meant. The price of a meal and delivery + tip would easily be $9 from McDonalds. Sure, kids meals are a bit cheaper, but it would still be hard.

It seems like the target market for meal kits would be people who want to learn to cook? (Without working too hard at it.) Delivery will get you tasty food but you don't learn anything.

Who knows? You have to figure on one end, there's people like me who have a well-equipped kitchen and some knife skills and have no interest in or need for meal kits, and at the other end are people with no interest/time for cooking at all, and mainly want to go with take-out/delivery options. Given the premium prices, it's presumably not an option for, say low-income folks with more limited cooking facilities. So who's left?

I think it's for people who are too lazy for grocery shopping but not lazy enough to just order takeout. That's a tiny sliver on the laziness scale IMHO.

Not quite. The meals I prepare from Blue Apron are significantly healthier than most takeout options - we control the sodium entirely and the majority of the ingredients are fresh vegetables and proteins. Plus the variety week to week is staggering - I've been getting weekly Blue Apron for more than a year and never had a repeated recipe. I've learned about all sorts of new foods I had never even heard of before. I am absolutely too lazy to meal plan and go grocery shopping, but ordering takeout isn't even a comparison point for me.

I've done 90 boxes from HelloFresh and I went from barely knowing how to cook to being very proficient and confident that I can cook nearly anything. I also have no problems picking ingredients and things that work well together. I've stopped the subscription some time ago, but in my opinion it was worth the money for the skills alone.

Problem there is that once people learn to cook, they have no need for the service anymore. To survive you'd need to have a healthy pipeline of new customers with manageable acquisitions costs relative to the lifetime value of the customer.

And even if Blue Apron could clear all of those hurdles profitably, as the article contends, they have no moat. They are not vertically integrated so there's but only so much efficiency they can glean out of the supply chain and there are much bigger fish out there that can bludgeon them to death with scale.

Unfortunately for Blue Apron that's not going to make them money. Once you learn the basic skills you won't need them anymore. They'll have a hard time growing if this is their model. gambiting's reply illustrates this perfectly

Or positive cash flow which is unduly discounted. I don’t see if they would still have a business if the new customer growth stopped.

I'm shocked how cheap food is in US then. In UK HelloFresh works out at a little bit less than £5/person/meal, and you just can't beat that. No one will deliver for that cheap, and any item from the menu will be more than this. I guess you could go eat at a chain restaurant like wetherspoons, but then for £5 you get a frozen burger and a pint of pepsi. Even a McDonald meal will hardly fit in that price, order anything better than a bigmac and you're looking at £6.29.

Hey, Switzerland is worse! McDonalds will easily set you back 12 CHF last time I checked a few years ago, it could be worse now. Grocery shopping was kind of nerve racking, even at discount Migros.

According to "the Big Mac Index" Switzerland is actually ranked number one when it comes to average salaries (purchasing power) vs. price of a Big Mac (consumer prices), see: https://www.statista.com/statistics/274326/big-mac-index-glo...

Regarding groceries: You should go shopping to Aldi-Suise and Lidl-Suisse. They have the same veggies and fruits and they cost half of what you have to pay at Migros!

(Content marketing: If you want to learn more about how to save money in Switzerland, check my blogpost: "Eight reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in tech" https://goo.gl/O3rul7)

It is difficult to find those in the city without a car. In Lausanne, you might have to go out to Renens, for examples.

Ironically, I was able to save a lot of money working in Switzerland (more than half my post-doc salary) because everything was just too expensive to buy :). No regrets!

GP might have an extremely low bar for "restaurant meal." $9 isn't quite enough for an okay lunch sandwich in the coastal/metropolitan US. Some sort of entree is more likely at about $18.

It all depends on the metro area. That seems a little high for Chicago.

a lunch sandwich meal can be had in chicago for ~10-12

I think they did buy Niman Ranch.

It’s easy to create the app. It’s hard to deliver fresh ingredients on such short notice on time... A number of these startups have shut down after they burned through their investors’ money.

It depends if you think Walmart can really put together something people will pay for. If not, might as well buy Blue Apron now while everyone is afraid of the future. Cash in after the competition gets weeded out.

Imagine once Amazon-Whole Foods makes a play.

> Market cap is now under 500K

I think you mean $500M.

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=fin&q=NYSE:+APRN

Soon under $500K.

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