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Comment by goldcd | Hacker News Reader

Always seemed a strange business model. Appealing to people who "want to cook", but doing so by turning yourself into a production-line assembler. Like saying your want to learn carpentry, by buying some Ikea flat-pack.

What confused me (and makes me think I've overlooked something) is why nothing more interesting has come along from the supermarkets. In the UK at least, they're all online and deliver - but they all seem to stick to "buy your ingredients and we'll deliver them". I'd quite enjoy one that let you browse recipes and would stick all the ingredients in your basket - but then added some intelligence. e.g. You add the "roast chicken weekend meal" to your cart, and it asks "are you going to eat all that chicken?" For £5 extra would you like to add some bacon, creme-fraiche, tarragon, frozen-pastry & peas to enable you to make a lovely pie on Monday? Or asks "what's in your fridge" - here are some recipes and prices for things to use it up? Could even add some intelligence - I don't like mushrooms, so when recommending a chicken pie and providing a recipe, switches something else into my basket & recipe (leeks are lovely). Or would further adjust the recipe - you said you needed to feed 8 at the weekend, so I picked the larger lump of meat, and have adjusted the cooking time in the recipe. Or "Do you own a pressure cooker, a freezer and have 2 hours free this weekend to batch cook some chilli" Or... basically Blue Apron and the rest seem to be trying to solve a real problem, completely the wrong way.

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I think the biggest problem for me as a single person is the way most stuff sold in supermarkets is designed for family meals. Which is fair, families probably represent a significant portion of their customer base.

But it becomes problematic for me because I either have to eat the same meal 4 days in a row (or freeze it) or only use half of the ingredients and shove the rest in the cupboard, or throw it away because its perishable

I wouldn't mind a service that works out a set of meals you can make for the week that makes the best use of ingredients (minimises waste) and brings some variety.

I suspect the economics don't work out on it though

In Texas, H-E-B sells exactly what you are describing. They have four types of meal kits: eat, heat, cook, and prep.

https://www.heb.com/static-page/meal-simple

I buy at least 3-4 of them a week because they're perfect for a single person who wants to eat in and maybe not prep as much but still wants a wide variety of meals to eat.

Yep. The chipotle chicken breast with potato and broccoli is my favorite.

Some perishables like fruits and vegetables are terrible to buy. Cilantro comes in a massive bunch from which I take three sprigs, and its rotten in a couple days. Bananas are unedible until day 2, then I have maybe a 3-day window to eat all the bananas before they are flabby, brown, and mushy. Even if I throw a handful of arugula in every single one of my meals, its massive tub is barely half empty by the time it starts rotting in my fridge a week after purchase.

Even if I plot and plan to use all my cilantro in 3 days, all my arugula in 1 week, power through 3 bananas a day during my bunch's window of opportunity, I can still end up going out for dinner which throws everything out of schedule. Or maybe I forgot to pull out the chicken out of the freezer and into the marinade this morning, so there is now no point in cooking if I need to wait 2+ hours after I get home for my bird to thaw and flavor.

Cilantro/Basil/Parsley/Green onions: place the stems in a glass of water,cover with a plastic bag and keep in the refrigerator. It will last more than one week.

Mushrooms: place in a brown bag in the refrigerator. They will last more than a week. They slowly dry up and can be rehydrated like dried mushrooms.

Bananas: when they are about to ripen place in the refrigerator. The skin will turn brown and look miserable but the inside will be just fine. You'll gain two or three days more time to eat them.

Arugula,spinach and other salad greens: Put the leftovers in your lunch bag and snack at work.

Can confirm! Also, - bread is awesome in the fridge, lasts weeks. - put ice cubes in a plastic bag to stop sublimination - drown basil in olive oil, squeeze out the air, cover in olive oil, then refrigerate - lasts months - peppers: soak and refrigerate in vinegar

I struggle with cheese - olive oil can work but it's awkward.

I HATE bread once it's been refridgerated/frozen... completely destroys the structure and texture of the bread. Only don't mind if you're going to do toast, french toast or some other bread pudding or stuffing application. It's unfit for sandwich use after.

For hard cheese: parchment paper and a ziplock bag.

Any tips for Avacados? I tried the brown bag but getting them to the right texture that isn't too hard or spoiled is maddening.

Leave them out and as they begin to get soft & ripe place them in the fridge. It'll slow it down, like bananas, and keep them ripe a little longer. When i was using avocados as snacks this was the only way I could keep them for multiple days.

As someone who often cooks for myself, bananas are a pretty terrible example because you can literally buy one banana if you want. Perhaps I've been violating a taboo all my life, but I have never had a problem breaking up a bunch of bananas in the store.

Fresh herbs I agree. It's one reason I tend to grow them. [ADDED: There are also a lot of frozen and freeze dried options these days that I often take advantage of.]

There are lots of meats you can pull out of the freezer and put in some water for 30 minutes or so.

I'm actually sympathetic to your basic point but it's just not something I find to be a huge problem.

> I have never had a problem breaking up a bunch of bananas in the store.

Ah, so you're one of those people. Don't you realize you're condemning those poor banana bunches to an ignominous death in the dumpster? Nobody's going to buy a bunch with an uneven number on bananas. :(

Being serious though, I don't think you're violating any major taboo. I see people do the same thing all the time. You're actually performing a public service for all those people who want fewer bananas but are afraid to split the bunches themselves.

TIL this was a thing :-) But then I've never been very good about rules.

I'll also usually cook two or three dishes that share all those ingredients. So for example, if i buy pre-made pesto sauce, i'll make pasta with pesto sauce, and chicken breast with Pesto sauce. If i buy a lot of Mexican ingredients (beans, cilantro, ground meat et all) i'll make a Chilli and taco bowls.

With bananas I make a banana milkshake when they are too soft to be eaten. With cilantro bunch, I keep some for garnishing rest I make chutney. Simple recipe of cilantro, garlic, green chilies, slices of fresh/frozen raw mango or even raw mango powder and salt etc goes in blender and out comes the chutney.

I (not quite sub-consciously) ensure I always leave some bananas to get to that 'black, but not crushed' state - solely to make milkshakes from. I give myself a pass on the calories, as I'm "being green and eating my 5-a-day"

It's ok, I am the one who is quite happy to pick up the odds and ends and make a loose bunch

When I buy bananas, I tend to grab a couple of the ripest ones in the pile, plus a few of the greenest ones.

Pro-tip for Bananas: When they start to have black spots on the skin, throw them in the freezer. Use them in a smoothie, it will give your smoothie a really nice creamy texture, almost like an ice-cream and it's all natural!

Yeah, soft bananas are also great for banana muffins.

For banana bread and muffins, you actually want bananas that are basically past ripe enough to eat. The sugar content is significantly higher.

Frozen bananas can also be used for banana bread pancakes (which are not only tasty, but don't require eggs--that's what the bananas are for). Recipe here (I use regular flour, not the whole wheat they call for): https://www.howsweeteats.com/2011/06/whole-wheat-brown-sugar...

I have a love/hate relationship with Avacados. When you time it properly it's amazing, too early/too late and you're screwed.

Dry or freeze your herbs?

Older simpler technology makes for some good habits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_dehydrator

For cilantro, get a mason jar with a little water in it. After the cilantro is in, cover the leaves with a plastic bag. The cilantro will be good for about a month.

Put your cilantro in a ziplock bag, roll it up to exclude the air before zipping up and keep it in the fridge. Will keep for quite a lot longer.

Peel and freeze your bananas before they go bad. Use the frozen bananas for smoothies, or thaw them for cooking(eg banana bread).

mushy bananas become banana nut bread... you cannot fail this.

I've found that by shopping at higher end grocery stores, or at least focusing on the organic/craft-oriented departments, the quantities tend to be smaller and much better suited to my childless, bachelor existence.

There was also a learning curve to preparing food for just myself to consume. The priorities are different from the family household I grew up in, so much of what I had learned didn't apply very well unmodified, to my adult life.

Families make the costly perishable ingredients go further by utilizing carbohydrates like pastas and breads as fillers.

I now make many of the same dishes I grew up eating, but without the pasta or bread, which I've entirely stopped purchasing to the very clear benefit of my health/weight.

When you dispense with the fillers, it's a lot easier to consume the perishable ingredients in one or two meals.

It definitely seemed strange at first to eat things like lentil or chicken soup or a meat ragu with pork ribs sans pasta or bread. But once acclimated, the recipes have changed a bit to be less liquidy while more meaty/beany with more veggies where applicable, and are very tasty and nutritious. It's basically decadence, and healthier than eating all the carbs.

>Families make the costly perishable ingredients go further by utilizing carbohydrates like pastas and breads as fillers.

As do many restaurants. I've (not very originally) joked that Tapas is Spanish for expensive and appetizers generally often seem pricey for the size of the portion. There are various reasons for this including the fact that there's a certain overhead to an individual order.

But it's also the case that typical main dishes tend to have a fair bit of "filler" that tapas/appetizers do not. At good restaurants, the rice or potatoes (or vegetables) may be nicely and even somewhat exotically prepared but the raw ingredients cost very little compared to the protein.

Seriously, try the tapas (or table) in Spain. The original is always better than the imitation. Besides being the price of a typical US sit-down burger or grilled chicken dish, it's much higher quality and healthier! Also for readers who aren't aware, tapas is usually a shared meal and best when everyone going agrees to get different tapas dishes or arrangements. Of course the jamón ibérico de bellota will be higher priced than a typical steak, but well worth it IMO. "Filler" in Spain tends to be olives, cheese, and bread.

Funnily enough I have JUST launched a little side project that is attempting to do exactly what you are describing. (Or will do).

There's a few more features I need to add before I'd consider it MVP level and but it's getting close.

http://cookmatic.co

Basically you can paste in recipe URLs (so far only supports seriouseats and bonappetit) it parses the ingredient list and generates a shopping list combining everything you need to make all the recipes).

Future features include adjusting the portion size to scale up and down and combining recipes in a manner that minimizes ingredient waste when shopping

Have you taken a look at Paprika? It imports from almost any site, adjusts portions, and generates a combined grocery list. The only thing is doesn't do is the last thing: combine recipes in a way to minimize ingredient waste.

I am getting Access Denied errors when adding to queue or pressing the plus button on the ingredients list.

A couple of years ago I became an empty nester and decided to get rid of my cars. I switched to delivery: CFA box, meat box, and regular grocery delivery.

My meals are a bit repetitive (I often make, as you note, the same meal for four days) but that makes my life easier. But what has amazed me is it really doesn't take long to make the kind of meals I like to eat -- often 30 minutes an almost always less than 60. I can't be bothered making fancy sauces and the like, so I eat healthier than I probably ever have in my life. It's really a great deal to feed myself for four days for only a few bucks and for not much more time per meal than it would have taken to heat up a premade package.

Even my gf and her kids like my cooking which astonishes me.

I live in Palo Alto so can use the BBQ year round -- BBQ and Instant pot account for a lot of my cooking.

> the way most stuff sold in supermarkets is designed for family meals

Dude. Leftovers. I used to make a couple of family-sized meals on the weekend to have for lunch and dinner throughout the week. I’d also dine out 2-3 times a week to mix it up a bit.

Dude. Read the whole comment before replying:

But it becomes problematic for me because I either have to eat the same meal 4 days in a row...

"Lunch and dinner throughout the week" is not what parent is looking for.

Right. That's why

> I’d also dine out 2-3 times a week to mix it up a bit.

You can buy stuff in much smaller portions in most Japanese grocery stores, which I think is much better. There are also some grocery stores that have the option to buy unpacked produce, like Wholefoods.

Cue Steve Martin hot dog bun rant.

"In [Father of The Bride, George Banks [Steve Martin] heads to a local market in order to cool off after having had a bit of a meltdown over his daughter’s impending wedding. While there, he has an even bigger meltdown over the fact that while hot dogs are sold in packages of eight, hot dog buns are sold in packages of twelve. So, he decides to take a stand by ripping open packages to remove the four offending buns. When a befuddled clerk tries to stop him, George says that the hot dog and hot dog bun corporations “are not ripping off this nitwit anymore, because I am not paying for one more thing I don’t need. George Banks is saying ‘no’!” LOL He winds up getting arrested and is sent to jail, where his wife Nina (aka Diane Keaton) has to bail him out."

http://www.iamnotastalker.com/2011/06/28/the-father-of-the-b...

It isn't just singles. I have a family of four and do basically all the cooking. I struggle to make use of the entirety of many perishables I buy simply because they're packaged in such huge volumes. Leafy/bushy things like herbs comes to mind, as well as some prepackaged vegetables (grape/cherry tomatoes) and fruits.

> Appealing to people who "want to cook", but doing so by turning yourself into a production-line assembler. Like saying your want to learn carpentry, by buying some Ikea flat-pack.

That's not a great analogy. It was far more than assembly...with Ikea products, you don't cut the wood to size, or carve joints, or even use glue. With Blue Apron and the other in this space, you do everything except the shopping. so you will learn how to handle a knife, different cooking techniques, etc.

The real value add was in removing the need for keeping a stocked pantry and doing grocery shopping. Many recipes used ingredients that it was inconvenient or impossible to buy in small quantities, or that were hard to find at a standard megamart.

Which is why the Blue Apron crates were always so ludicrously expensive compared to a regular grocer despite their purported scale. You got the right proportion of green onion but get to pay the price of a whole bundle.

It takes out the entire creativity process of cooking, and for people who actually like cooking on a higher level also the process of selecting the right ingredients.

I don’t understand the whole shopping part, it would seem to be pretty clear to me that any place that is serviced by Blue Apron should have a service for groceries to be delivered as well, in fact it’s highly unlikely that they won’t.

I order all my groceries online in London, primarily been using Ocado but Amazon has also now has much wider offering with Amazon Fresh since they offer their own, Morrisons and Planet Ogranic goods.

Every large supermarket chain here offers a delivery service, it also doesn’t cost anything extra but there is usually a minimum (usually £50) for that.

Many of them even would unpack the bags for you if you ask them.

If you really want to go to the recipe route then Ocado and many other groceries delivery services also do that so you can select a meal and how many people and they’ll add the ingredients for you to your shopping bag.

To me this seems a much better solution and service than Blue Apron.

> It takes out the entire creativity process of cooking, and for people who actually like cooking on a higher level also the process of selecting the right ingredients.

Did you ever try one of these services? Because that's the opposite of our experience. My wife is the cook in our family, and she loved it. She learned by example...seeing the quantities, getting an understanding of how to handle ingredients, practicing different cooking techniques, different variations, different flavors, etc., etc., etc...

Not only that, but we didn't get every meal from the service...she used what she learned to really branch out and make all kinds of things she never would have attempted in the past.

We always knew we were paying a premium for the convenience and variety, but it's a trade-off a lot of busy families are willing to make. It allowed us to prepare something at home instead of getting fast food or going to a restaurant, which would have been even more expensive.

Still too much work!

How about you give me a list of meals, I pick 50 or 100 of them, and then you give me a shopping list for the month including where to get it at the best price, taking advantage of bulk purchasing and overlapping ingredients. Then email/text/notify me every day with the recipe for dinner that night. I'll keep the left overs and use them for lunches.

This should minimize time for planning and cost of meals, two things Blue Apron largely fails to do.

It'd also be nice if I could get a further notification asking me how long it took me to prepare, so the service can get an idea for how long it takes me to cook and help me plan dinners accordingly - maybe giving me faster alternative alongside the normal dinner plan.

Aside from the optimizing-where-to-buy part, this sounds like what https://mealime.com is attempting to do. I've only used it for one meal so far so but if you select multiple meals it creates a combined shopping list.

I came across platejoy (platejoy.com) a couple months ago while looking for a meal plan that would work around my food allergies and it check most of the boxes of what you are asking for.

The planning is week by week, and it doesn't have a best price thing, but it does pretty much everything else (recepies in app, you can tell it ahead of time you prefer to eat leftovers for lunch, each recipe has a prepare & cook time and asks for feed back). Also, it can send all the ingredient to Instacart in a single click, if that's your thing.

It's really changed the way I eat. I went from eating out for lunch and dinner almost every day, to cooking at home pretty much every night.

I once had a cookbook named 'once a month cooking' https://www.amazon.com/Once-Month-Cooking-Revised-Delicious/...

Everything was laid out for you, what to buy, the order to prep and cook, and in one weekend you'd have everything ready for a month's worth of meals

As a single father who sucks at everything kitchen.. i need dis.

No you don't. As a single parent you don't have time, and kids don't appreciate and in fact often don't like elaborate or gourmet food.

Learn to make half-a-dozen simple dishes from memory. Pasta with meat sauce. Simple dishes with chicken, pork, fish, or beef, and vegetables. Stuff you can throw together with basic staple ingredients, minimal prep work, and minimal utensils. This makes shopping easier and minimizes time to prepare meals.

Avoid kitchen gadgets. They are just an extra thing to clean and you'll rarely use them. Have a few good knives, a couple of cutting/prep boards, and a basic set of pots and pans and utensils and stick to recipies that work with that.

> Avoid kitchen gadgets.

May I nominate one exception: a pressure cooker. This includes plug-in electric like the Breville Fast Slow Cooker. If you are able to chop carrots, you can make endless variety of stews, casseroles, soups and curries with straightforward recipes, minimal complexity, short cook times and not too much cleaning up afterwards. And they're the sort of dishes that make great leftovers.

If the blue apron team doesn't read threads like these and actually build things people want, they're finished.

They spent so much on advertising and promotions without improving their product offering.

Still too much work!

Just come to my apartment and feed me like a baby bird.

For $30 dollars/day, you _can_ find someone to spend 3x15 minutes vomiting into your mouth.

Check out my new VAAS startup (YC19).

Does it have machine learning and is it on block-chain?

Best of all I only advertise through podcast ads and Medium posts about what I learned by blowing $50k on podcast ads.

I really enjoyed Blue Apron. For a very long time I wanted to learn to cook, but didn't know where to start, and cookbooks where always intimidating because they usually assumed you already knew how to cook.

Blue Apron doesn't assume any of that.

I also liked the idea of "cooking good food", but for me it was a case of not knowing what good food was. With Blue Apron sending me tasty meals to make, I was able to learn by example about what worked and what I liked.

I thought it was great. I eventually cancelled though, once I was just cooking on my own entirely.

I think you've highlighted a problem with the business model. I had a similar experience. I really learned a lot about cooking from my first couple of years with Blue Apron, but now I'm at the point where I don't really need it any more. So as a "training wheels" for home cooks, it's great, but they have a built-in retention problem. Also, the recipes have gotten a lot simpler (and frankly not as appealing) over time. It's probably partly cost-cutting and partly people complaining about recipes taking too long to prepare.

Tbf, I have done one of those boxes(Hello Fresh) for nearly 2 years and I has absolutely definitely taught me how to cook, purely through repeated experience. It goes beyond being able to follow a recipe - after cooking nearly 500 meals I have enough experience to make delicious meals without looking at timers or measuring everything down to a gram.

Plus, each meal works out much cheaper than eating out. So for me personally this was money extremely well spent. I also live in the UK.

> Plus, each meal works out much cheaper than eating out. So for me personally this was money extremely well spent. I also live in the UK.

I just got 2 free boxes from Missfresh (seems local to where I live) and Goodfood. I tried my first yesterday and god I wish it was worth it to keep doing because they shown me that I actually can cook something amazingly good. However I didn't expected to keep buying theses boxes because they are so incredibly expensive, 10$ CAD per portion is starting to be pretty close to a restaurant (a cheap one but still a restaurant).

Have you really did the math to confirm this? Is the UK that much more expensive in terms of food? HelloFresh in the UK does seems cheaper at £ 4.20 / meal but still I just can't believe feeding 1 person would cost 430$ CAD per month where you live.

In UK £4.20/meal gets you pretty much nothing when eating out. Maybe if there is a deal on you can have a frozen burger and soda from Wetherspoons, but even Subway or McD is more expensive.

But that of course is eating out. I can cook a dinner for two for less than £8, no problem - but it's not as far as you'd think. Like, super simple meals:

1) chicken breasts(£3) + pack of mushrooms(£1) + parsley(£0.80) + cream(£1) = £5.80

2) pork/beef mince(£3) + chopped tomatoes(£0.50) + celery(£1) + carrots(£1) = £5.50

3) beef mince(£3) + chopped tomatoes(£0.50) + black beans(£1) + feta(£1.50) = £6

And that doesn't include the cost of pasta/rice, spices....but those are easy to buy in bulk so I assume cost per meal is <£0.50 on those.

Now that we're off Hello Fresh we budget £200/month for food(but that includes lunches), and that's doing all our food shopping at Lidl, which is stupidly cheap compared to any of the larger supermarkets.

So yes, cooking by myself is cheaper(I don't think that's a surprise to anyone), but I still consider hello fresh to be money well spent just for learning how to cook well.

In general, the prices in the US are similar to a chain restaurant that maybe isn't quite fast food but in the ballpark. Getting the direct restaurant equivalent of most of the meals would typically cost quite a bit more.

These services aren't about value. You can get mostly lower quality restaurant meals for about the same money. And you can cook much more cheaply at home if you want to.

You make a good point that Blue Apron only teaches you how to assemble ingredients, but not to shop for them. They are two separate skills. But most people who don't know how to cook are bad at both, and Blue Apron gets rid of one of the highest friction parts and lets people dive right into the actual cooking part of, well, cooking.

Getting people unafraid of assembling ingredients and heating food and cleaning after is a good first step. If you didn't grow up cooking and shopping and cleaning, there's a lot to mentally unpack before you make a meal. If you have no basis for how to plan anything ("Would you like to add extra meat for $5") extra options quickly get confusing.

>"are you going to eat all that chicken?" For £5 extra would you like to add some bacon, creme-fraiche, tarragon, frozen-pastry & peas to enable you to make a lovely pie on Monday? Or asks "what's in your fridge" - here are some recipes and prices for things to use it up?

The fact that Blue Apron doesn't really do that is why I cancelled my subscription. I hated the way they would send all these tiny single-use things. Too much plastic and too much food waste.

Rather than sending me kits, I would prefer if they would essentially do my shopping for me. Planning meals and ensuring I have the right ingredients on hand is annoying and I would love some help with it. But I don't need all the ingredients in one box.

Kroger is starting to do these meal kits. They are within 5 feet of the door and serve two, and all cook in 20 minutes.

I just don't get the point, though. I can move past the box and into the Kroger, using the box as a shopping list, and buy the exact same ingredients for half the price, only now I must spend 5 minutes dicing a tomato instead of slicing open a plastic bag containing diced tomato.

The best way to get quicker in the kitchen is to cook with common ingredients, and prep things in tandem. Keeping your cooking within a certain cultural palate is a good way to limit the amount of different fresh ingredients you need to maintain, and simplify your cooking.

You can find fresh (not frozen), raw, already prepared meals that can be thrown in the oven, a pot, or on a grill at Kroger, Publix, Fresh Market, Costco and others. Those are great for when you're in a hurry and you don't want to waste time with the ceremony of putting together a meal kit. Meal kits are a weird compromise between a prepared meal and just following a recipe yourself.

I work in this space, so I may have some insight. The short answer is sort of tautological or whatever the term is: Nobody is doing the recipe thing because nobody does the recipe thing.

Think about it this way: Amazon has how many billions of dollars? And they haven't done the recipe thing yet... why? The answer is probably simpler than you think: that's not how consumers choose what to buy [in sufficient quantities to make unit economics positive].

Your reasoning as to why Blue Apron's model is weird is spot on: it's weird because that's not how consumers actually shop and cook. If they did, it wouldn't be weird and Blue Apron would be doing much better.

You have just described a value-add B2B SaaS; offers integration into existing retailer's online shopping portals.

If this doesn't exist, give it six months and it will. If you want to try and swing something like this and need an extra set of hands, my email is in my profile.

There's literally dozens of people who have tried to do this recently and failed, and dozens more still trying to do it.

How do you make money? How do you acquire customers cheaper than it costs to provide the service?

You don't go after the consumer. Consumers don't care enough and, as you said, the marketplace is glutted.

Instead, sell to grocery store chains that have existing infrastructure. In fact, you don't even build an app. Instead you offer an API that they can call when they want to implement this sort of functionality.

Optionally, you offer to do the integration (though this seems like it could make for an awful headache). Make sure the docs are good and the customer service is better.

The point is to give the grocery chains a value add that their competition doesn't have: a way to plan meals effectively and order all the ingredients.

There are some very relevant comments elsewhere in this thread that call out waste, which is a problem I'm not sure how to solve.

There's a lot of innovation opportunity, some of which you already noted. Some chains are already doing it, but most aren't. The most basic service that most aren't doing is curbside pickup. That's the biggest missed opportunity. I'd never go anywhere else. Most grocery stores that I've seen doing that offer it for free. Add in a delivery option for a charge and you take a massive chunk out of Amazon Fresh's market, and I'd put more faith in a local supermarket than the online model of Walmart.

Agreed on the meal plan delivery services. I tried one of them and it was horrible. They have cheap, small portions of ingredients, and even left out ingredients when I used them. Probably out of stock, and didn't want to refund my sale and have even more oddball ingredients leftover. They were unapologetic.

Worse yet, they're rather tasteless if you actually know how to cook. My wife is beyond most chefs because she grew up in a Latin country. A Latin person who grew up in the kitchen with mom and grandma is pretty much the best place to get food in the world.

You could write an algorithm for everything, someone from a culinary culture will never be duplicated or surpassed in our lifetimes. You'd need a hell of a finely-tuned general purpose robot to taste test your food and adjust a recipe to your tastes as a human can.

There are a number of apps and web sites that do what you ask. My favorite one (from the old iPhone days, now discontinued) would let you input the ingredients you have on hand, and it would suggest what you can make with them.

They seem to come and go. I think the problem for a supermarket to adopt something like this is that you can use it to make a list using one market's superior app, then do your actual shopping at another market.

> you can use it to make a list using one market's superior app, then do your actual shopping at another market

This critique makes no sense to me. Should amazon not recommend items online because you might purchase them from alibaba or walmart instead?

Whichever markets choose to make such a system would surely do so with the assumption that they are the best choice, and they will recommend their items. I doubt many consumers would go through the friction of comparison-shopping a whole list to find other things that are suitable substitutes.

Your comment to me seems akin to the silly statement "shoe stores should not display their wares in the window because consumers then might go buy them at other shoe shops for cheaper"

Have you never seen Tesco Real Food? https://realfood.tesco.com/recipes/vegan-shepherds-pie.html - hit the "shop ingredients" button and it'll offer to add the relevant ingredients to your online shopping basket.

> Appealing to people who "want to cook", but doing so by turning yourself into a production-line assembler.

That's because you ignore the true reason why it's interesting. I got 800 games on Steam but when goes time to play, god it's awful. Never had this issue before having that many games. Recipes suffer from the choice overload.

Personally I also love it to try new ingredients. When it's part of a full meal, some ingredients "scare" me less.

> Like saying your want to learn carpentry, by buying some Ikea flat-pack.

No holes were predrilled in the yu choy I got in my recipes yesterday. It would be closer to get a few boards that you have to cut/trim/drill yourself, which as far as I know, seems to be a great way to learn.

> I'd quite enjoy one that let you browse recipes and would stick all the ingredients in your basket - but then added some intelligence.

It's weird but I don't trust my supermarket to offer me great recipes. I trust them to offer me food, but not great recipes. Even more so considering their goals is to sell food, not sell recipes.

> Or asks "what's in your fridge"

I agree but this always come down to the laziness out of me. Lazy me can easily click on an image that seems like a great meal, but way less on a adding every single things I may have in my fridge.

> Blue Apron and the rest seem to be trying to solve a real problem, completely the wrong way.

I personally think you just don't really understands whats the real problem.

> For £5 extra would you like to add some bacon, creme-fraiche, tarragon, frozen-pastry & peas

Is food really cheap in the UK? This would be impossible in the US, the tarragon alone could cost half that.

You only need a sprig or two of tarragon, though. The grocery store won't sell you it in that form, but for a company making a few thousand meals it's perfectly doable. A rasher or two of bacon, a quarter cup of creme-fraiche, a sprig of tarragon, and a single pie-sized circle of pastry should easily be doable for £5.

Bacon about £1.50, creme fraiche £1.00, fresh tarragon £0.70, ready pastry about £1.30, frozen peas around £1.00.

So about £5.50 with out discounting for the fact you're over buying

http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/

Most of the local grocery stores in Portland have bulk spices where you could get enough of whatever you needed for a dish for well under a dollar.

Many grocery stores all over the US have that. Not for fresh spices though, maybe the poster was thinking of fresh tarragon, which is typically sold for around $2.50 for far more tarragon than you need for a single portion of anything.

Every super market in NZ sells the kind of kit that Blue Apron et al delivers. So basically Blue Apron does just delivery.

That said I've never bought the kit there - they seem to be the same for weeks.

it wasn't strange to me that they packing ingredients to prepare at home, what was strange is trying to get by on an idea easily replicated by businesses local and with a more direct connection to the same customer.

there was nothing blue apron or similar really was able to do to set themselves apart from what a grocery chain could do, less even.

A friend of mine is actually trying to implement the intelligence you described. We’re also based in the U.K.

I've seen meal kits in stores here in the Boston area, Wegman's I think.

I've also seen them at a local organic-y place near Davis Square.

In addition, whether or not they're "meal kits," you see more and more "one bowl meals" and the like (that you can add meat to if you're so inclined) in the produce section of grocery stores.

Mariano's in Chicagoland also sell meal kits now, as do the Amazon Go stores, one of which is conveniently next to a major train station.

All of that boils down to 'looking up a recipe, buying ingredients, and cooking them' :) i.e. the hassle we want to avoid.

I do agree however, that grocery stores will own this category.

Reasons it's not happening yet:

1) Grocery store chains tend to not be very innovative

2) The 'behaviour' of such things is still maybe niche. Most people will take the 'pre cooked'. It's like books: few people actually read.

3) My bet is that small, local providers like Blue Apron end up proving such things. Some of them will grow, but mostly we'll see a lot of players and a lot of brands, just like everything else in food.

Blue Apron is a rational premise, just not quite sticky enough for the price.

We need an Uber for cooking.

Where we can connect some nearby retired folks to make dishes for others, without all the fuss and excessive additives (sugar, salt, butter) of commercial restaurants. Plus, allowing the cutlery and dishes to be reused (no plastics or disposables).

Probably with an emphasis on delivering multiple servings of food in one go, and with lead times in the days. Uber Eats with its single serves and lead times in the minutes is too wasteful.

Easier said than done, and a lot of friction in establishing a relationship like that.

Are there no catering services in your country where you can get a pot of food delivered, instead of individual portions?

That and the people who cook at home either:

1. Love to cook.

2. Are quite price sensitive.

The first group were never going to use blue apron. They have the skills and the interest to do it all themselves. The latter group is tricky to hold onto: margins must be relatively thin, and there’s a high probability that these users will learn how to assemble their own recipes to cut out even the razor thin margins that blue apron was making.

The result is a rotating user base, and extremely advertising costs to acquire new customers. This is probably why they’re on podcasts all the damn time.

There are several people I know who have used BlueApron for 2+ years. They are all married, no kids. They enjoy cooking, but they just as much enjoy going out to eat. They have steady, good paying jobs, so they are not price sensitive.

To them, BlueApron is an entertainment expense. It gives them variety in their diet, and makes for a good time when preparing it. Often they'll have friends over and add in some sides or something to make it a dinner date with people they'd otherwise just go out to eat with.

During the week I'm mostly cooking for myself when I'm not traveling and the 2-person orientation is sort of the nail in BA's coffin for me. And, on weekends, when I'm often cooking for others I rather enjoy planning a menu and making a meal from scratch.

If I were regularly cooking during the week with someone else, assuming we weren't regularly coming home too late, I could definitely see using these services off and on just for the sake of some variety.

Your categories match my experience living in Silicon Valley, but outside of that bubble is not accurate at all. In the real world most people I know cook at home by default. Ordering take out or eating out is the exception, even if they're not foodies (or poor).

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