Blue Apron was name dropped quite a lot in that article... Who sponsored this study?
Look, I have ketchup already in my house. The meal kits need a way for you to check off the general staples like that. OK send me fermented garlic, but I have ketchup and vinegar don't waste the plastic sending me those.
It makes me wonder if there is just a lot better way of doing cookbooks. I know that Isa Chandra already has sections of her books for "a well-stocked pantry" that just gets you stocked up on the items that will be used and reused throughout her books (e.g., liquid smoke or tamari). Expanding off that idea and refactoring meal kits I think could really work in everyone's favor. Perhaps at a point in the subscription, you could just get larger items sent to you once that the kit provider knows will be used over and over in subsequent recipes since they're the planner.
The research reads so weak, though. For instance, they don’t count CO2 emission caused by transportation! They just bought the same ingredients at a grocery store, cooked the same meal themselves and compared the numbers! They also assume that you eat all of the meal kit.
So many assumptions, hard to replicate methods, arbitrary exclusions.
Even if this was not sponsored, pretty bad “research” anyways.
"Of course, shipping meal kits to millions of households causes emissions. But these kits are delivered alongside other mail on normal routes, and the researchers found that this last stage of distribution accounted for 11% of grocery store meal emissions but only 4% for meal kits."
If you want to accurately measure the cost of sending a package (or passenger, or data packet), for any reasonable purpose, you can't use the "just one more" test. You have to say, "what if I increased the load by a million units? Okay, the unit cost should be regarded as a millionth of that."
Here's a great application of the concept when Netflix tried to use the "just one more" model: [1]
>The green marketing gurus at Netflix go even further, arguing that the mail is going to be delivered to your house anyway, so the environmental cost of delivering one of their DVDs is effectively zero. ... Here, the Green Lantern feels Netflix may be overplaying its hand just a little: Eventually, the addition of new mail into the system adds up, requiring more trucks, greater strain on the mail-sorting system, and so on. Since we can’t identify the impact of one extra piece of mail, we’re better off averaging the cost of delivering the mail over each item.
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2008/08/is-your-netflix-queue-d...
It was discussed on HN too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414173
At any rate, your food gets shipped from same place and ends up with you. Isn't the co2 going to be basically the same if that's to a grocery store first or to a big cooking joint? Assuming the locations are roughly similar.