Blue Apron to Sell Meal Kits in Stores to Buttress Sagging Deliveries
wsj.com
wsj.com
We used Blue Apron on and off for 2 months and just got tired of it. We loved the food but sometimes we just wanted to have our native cuisine. But some nights, you want to try something new impulsively, which is where having them available in grocery stores would've been great.
Blue Apron also had seemingly slimy tactics (even if they weren't, they felt that way). Like for example, you had to cancel a week in advance for a delivery, but you could opt in for a delivery 2-3 days before the new week started. Also you couldn't just say "stop until I say start," but rather you had to login every 2 weeks to keep clicking "Skip delivery." All these things leave a bad taste in your mouth (pun fully, and proudly intended)
I've had similar experiences with Blue Apron and a couple of other similar businesses. They seem to rely on people forgetting and not caring enough to do chargebacks. It's turned me away from them for good.
When blue apron first started, you couldn't even cancel it through the web interface -- You had to send an email to request cancellation.
edit:
Blue Apron still uses these slimy tactics. I created a screenshot [0] of the Blue Apron cancellation page [1] (in case they change it.) Look at how difficult they make cancellation! The question is literally, "How do I cancel my account?" and the answer should be a simple button to cancel. Instead, the first paragraph tells you not to cancel, just delay, and then the third and fourth paragraphs are just additional needless text.
Then, when you email them to cancel, they don't actually cancel your account -- they send you a link to the cancellation page. Why do they require you to email them to get the link? Why don't they just put it on the FAQ page? The answer is that they're using slimy tactics to increase friction and demotivate you from cancelling.
[1] https://support.blueapron.com/hc/en-us/articles/203146687-Ho...
There wasn't a click to cancel. We had to e-mail. They never replied to the e-mail. We escalated the tone of the e-mail, and eventually somebody canceled us and replied.
Honestly, I'm really impressed at the ability of their logistics team to get a ripe avocado to my house. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but in my experience when we buy avocados at the store they are not ripe, and are eventually ripe for about a day, then are overripe.
Here's what would be great:
1. Amazon buys Blue Apron. I get a Prime discount.
2. I get a notification sometime during the day with the meal of the day.
3. I remember we're both working, and I tap to purchase.
4. BA/AMZN Shipping and Logistics drops a meal at my house.
5. I cook dinner.
Wow, I thought this "negative-option delivery" business practice went out of favor with Columbia House.
It can also be a great break when your go-to recipes feel too repetitive.
But often one of the three recipes ends up being a dud, and if you forget to skip a week and get a bunch of stuff you don't feel like cooking it's an expensive and annoying obligation to prepare meals you didn't really want or make an ersatz recipe out of the ingredients they sent.
There is absolutely zero chance I would go to a store to buy a Blue Apron box. Without the convenience of home delivery, it really loses its appeal.
But I think it depends on the cost of these in-store kits. It does remove the huge convenience advantage, but I still like the idea of meal prep kits. The problem with in-store is that this space is so easy to compete in, and now you're asking to go up against every other company that can find space on a store shelf, which is easier than maintaining a delivery network.
Blue Apron's food isn't especially high quality and the recipes aren't especially amazing. They're great, but not great enough that I wouldn't switch to a competitor if the price or quality was better.
One thing it does well is providing only as much of said ingredient as you need. I recently tried to get into Chinese cooking, and before I made my first two or three dishes I had to run out and buy Hoisin sauce, chili garlic sauce, oyster sauce, Chinese rice wine, and minced ginger. That's quite a bit of an initial investment before I even decide whether I like the food or not. So if I can pay a little extra upfront just to get whatever amount of those sauces I need while I'm still in the trial phase, that would be nice.
As someone else said, local grocery stores could probably do very well just by providing their own meal kits. Wegmans does this on occasion, although their stuff is usually assembled to the point where you simply bake it.
I find it infinitely more resourceful to have a well-stocked kitchen with ingredients that last a good while than to go out and buy a single serving of anything. I would never consider buying a specific spice or sauce "an investment" in a single type of dish given both the small cost and the viability of those items in other types of cooking. Hoisin is great when making hamburgers or chilis, for example.
And while that doesn't sound like much, again, when we're talking about buying a completely new set of sauces to make one dish, it's $3-4 multiplied by the 5 new sauces and condiments to be closer to $15-$20.
And yes, if I use those ingredients regularly, then they quickly pay for themselves, as the Hoisin sauce lasts like 20 meals and the price per serving becomes fifteen cents a meal. But at the outset, if I decide I want to try Orange Chicken and it costs $20 + the cost of meat just to get the ingredient set, it's alot cheaper just to pay $11 and order some from a Chinese restaurant, no? If I like it, great, I can make it again. But if not, I've spent more money than I needed to and am left with five bottles of sauces I'll never use again.
Case in point: I've got a recipe next week that calls for "dark soy sauce". I have no clue WTF that is or if it is sufficiently different in taste or texture that I can't just substitute my regular soy sauce in for the recipe.
Hello Fresh boxes are great but their subscription and forced delivery model just doesn't work with our schedule. We sporadically shift between cooking and eating out. They're not having a "send me a box now" option forced our hand in cancelling.
So instant food delivery but you still have to cook it? That would be a very narrow market.
After using them I was a lot less bullish on the future of these subscription sites. Whole Foods could launch a home grown line, delivered through Prime, and I’d use them day 1.
I mostly use instacart, but my parents have gotten me food delivery services as gifts and it is pretty nice. The thing I find frustrating about it however are the portions.
I'm probably outside of the norm, but I don't mind eating the same thing all the time. I would love to cook a bunch all at once and eat it all week. With the portions offered, I can usually eat 2 of the meals as a single meal.
For me, Blue Apron lowers the time commitment of cooking at home below that of “go out for a quick dinner”. At the end of a day at a desk, I enjoy doing completely brainless work with my hands for a half hour or so, but the cognitive load of figuring out what to cook is more than I care to do on a regular basis.
Also, depending on where you are, urban grocery shopping is often a terrible experience.
Families have been cooking dinners for a long time. Nothing new here.
For me, given the choice of "$30 + the time to plan meals and go shopping" vs "$60", I'll take the latter.
If I had a choice between "$80 + the time to plan meals and go shopping" vs "$160", that time is worth a lot more money.
In addition, set all of this in a New York apartment, where the ability to maintain a well-stocked pantry is limited.
Both myself and my partner have struggled with depression for a number of years. Cooking (and eating freshly cooked food) is one of the few things I can rely to lift my mood.
Having to work out what I want to cook on the way home, figuring out whether I have ingredients, go to a shop to obtain them if not are things I can reliably _not_ do. If I hit this point we end up eating ready meals or takeaway.
I'd be the first to admit it's an expensive service, but honestly the extra capacity I gain from using it is absolutely worthwhile.
Space is expensive, so stores often have pretty narrow aisles in order to cram in as much as they can. You're almost always blocking people the second you stop moving for any reason.
Trader Joe's is so popular that it's not uncommon for there to be a line just to get into the store. The checkout line moves quickly, but because it's so large you'll still probably spend 20-30 minutes waiting in line to check out.
Anyway just shining a bit of light on why people might hate grocery shopping. I still think grocery delivery services make way more sense than something like Blue Apron, though.
We get tired of cooking the same homemade Indian food and the same dozen dishes. We only know how to cook about two dozen dishes total. If we want to try something different, the only option is restaurants, which can be pricey when you eat out often, and also often not terribly healthy.
Blue Apron and similar products allow us to try new dishes without having to think about what to try. They allow us to try different cuisines without having to research ingredients and buy the wrong amount.
Yes meal kits are more expensive than cooking at home. But for us, they gave us often the same amount of food "newness" as a restaurant, without spending as much. That was worth it.
I wonder what this means about ride sharing. I actually believe it’s a game changer and it’s sustainable to profitability but stories like this make me wonder.
We do meal kits (Local Crate) and they're great, but always need a little augmenting (extra veg. mostly). So I'm already at the store a few times a week. The meal kits just simplify the process enormously. Marry the two and you've got a killer product.
Some individual stores have been doing it independently of corporate since at least 2016: https://www.facebook.com/events/968415496617260/
Yes, if you could do all three, sure, people would like to get that. But I don't see how there is profit in it. It seems like the target market is people who don't have time and energy to cook and don't have money to spare either. It's like they are secretly trying to solve the problem of the harried, overworked, underpaid 99 percent. And that's not really a business model. It's more like something that needs to be addressed by charities or government policy.
Some of the others I like have the food for each meal all come in a single bag, so I don't have to keep track of it in my fridge. My wife usually handles these and she switches them up frequently, so I can't remember all of them, but my favorite is Terra's Kitchen, because it has the least waste, and short, accurate prep times. All the items are numbered to match the meal they're for.