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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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