These companies are going to get absolutely destroyed when the big supermarkets come on tap.
Several are working on identical services where you pick up, curbside, the ingredients and instructions in a bag, and pay significantly less for doing so.
Why have your ingredients mailed to you when a supermarket on your way home will offer the same thing for 50% cheaper?
While I don't disagree, people said the same thing about Amazon.
The supermarkets have changed very little about the way they've done business in the last half-century, and as such I have a difficult time imagining them doing a good job executing on something like this.
I've also tested the majority of the meal and food delivery services out there, and my experience meshes well with the above: the local supermarket chain in some ways provides a better offering than anyone (as they should–you're absolutely right about that), but for a few years now they've persisted in making sure the actual execution is the worst I've experienced of any service. I can't see that changing until they completely overhaul their hiring practices and put sufficient processes in place to ensure good execution.
(For the record, Blue Apron strikes me as a pretty mediocre product at a pretty uninteresting price, executed in a pretty bad manner.)
> The supermarkets have changed very little about the way they've done business in the last half-century, and as such I have a difficult time imagining them doing a good job executing on something like this.
I don't get what you mean by "ensure good execution" because it takes so little for grocers to successfully move into a market like Blue Apron's.
20 years ago, grocers destroyed the "fast casual roasted chicken" restaurants (Boston Market, Kenny Rogers Roasters) by simply buying chicken roaster machines and adding hot prepared food to the deli counter... and charging about a third the price. I'd hazard a guess that Safeway's chicken isn't as yummy[1] as Kenny Rogers' Roasters but that didn't stop anything.
So what about their execution is required here beyond "cheap and available where you already shop"? No one can use Blue Apron without a regular grocer in their routine already. Grocers successfully tapping into this higher margin product line seems inevitable, even if done with lower quality (is that what you mean?)
> I don't get what you mean by "ensure good execution" because it takes so little for grocers to successfully move into a market like Blue Apron's.
It also took little more than a good website to compete with Amazon in the early days, but B&N/Borders/etc. never figured out a way to do it well.
What I want to do is order stuff with as little friction as possible, and have the right items delivered in a way that's convenient.
The chain delivery service we tried involved a few things:
1. A poor site experience. It had 'pantry' functionality, but it was anything but good. Putting together a large order took nearly as much time as doing it in person.
2. Delivery was scheduled during windows, windows that were often either missed, or perhaps worse, beat by many hours. They were often many hours outside the window. We eventually stopped including anything fresh in the order and would pick those up ourselves on days when we were hosting guests. That defeats much of the point.
It was like ordering groceries from the cable company.
3. We were able to select whether we'd want substitutions if something was unavailable. In virtually every order, we would either receive items (we didn't want) when we specified no substitutions, or didn't get substitutions when we wanted them. Often the substituted items were poorly chosen as stand-ins for what was unavailable.
4. It required a young male delivery guy to enter the home to deliver the items to the kitchen. It was a different person nearly every time. This is unacceptable for a number of reasons. Whenever substitution issues happened they seemed so disconnected from the process that it meant it never got better, and recourse took more time than it was worth.
Why a company with billions at its disposal and half a million employees can't get that right is somehow both a mystery, yet also a foregone conclusion.
While I seriously doubt Blue Apron poses much of a threat to the entrenched companies, I think someone else (perhaps Amazon) probably does.
Clearly the experience you had was terrible, but done well I find online grocery deliver far better. In the UK its been a thing for a long time and the stores have shaken out the issues.
Delivery slots are almost always adhered to, and if they're not the driver will call and tell you what's happening. Substitutions are pretty rare in my experience, and when they do happen you can refuse them at the door and the delivery driver will just remove it from your bill, I've also had more expensive items subbed in with no change to the amount I was charged. Drivers will generally ask if you want help, but will wait outside when asked.
Finally the web experience after a few orders is so much better than in store, and that's even with some awful UX in places. They track what you buy frequently and then show them as the first result in searches - I can do a full shop in twenty minutes or so now the site has been properly trained (they also feed loyalty card data in, so if you're already a frequent shopper with a chain its probably trained already).
Just to say that this is exactly experience too. I am amazed that US grocery stores don't offer it as standard especially as Asda are owned by Wal-Mart.
> It also took little more than a good website to compete with Amazon in the early days, but B&N/Borders/etc. never figured out a way to do it well.
Borders didn't try in the early days; when they got around to online retail, they outsourced it to Amazon. Much too late they tried their own...
B&N actually had a good website (it was always better than Amazon's for ordering books, IMO), they just weren't committed to competing with their own stores on price because the website was an "and, also..." not a bet-the-compaby deal.
Ah ok. So the execution you're speaking of is on the delivery aspect. That makes sense now. In terms of execution, I was thinking you meant purely of the food itself and leveraging the existing dominant consumer behavior (going to the grocery store)
Borders Toys r us, maybe Target? Outsourced their sites to Amazon for years. All to disastrous results. Can't count Borders vs Amazon.
Barnes & Noble gave a decent try, to this day maybe (haven't been on for a few years). They even got domains like books.com 20 years ago. But they would do the annoying thing many retailers did - consider the website secondary to their brick & mortar. Price things differently online, not accept an online price in-store and vice versa. B&N years later even did a decent job with the Nook. It still didn't get them anywhere.
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Which service did you use? I only know of Peapod in the US for big grocery chains. The prices were high. Though when they had items for sale, the cost would be equal to their in store cost or slightly lower. I never had an issue telling them to drop my stuff at my doorstep after the first time when I didn't want them to come inside. Each time I placed a big box or two at my doorstep for them to place my order into. I used Peapod maybe 15 times, on and off, between 2007-2010. That's ages ago for web times.
The big window range was annoying though later on they let you spend a bit extra to make it smaller. Rarely did they miss the time window I set. This all took place in central Jersey.
It felt figured out enough to me a decade ago. Maybe I'm an exception.
I'm going to wager that they were trying to hint at both the inexperience of youth, and a different person each time so you can't build up a relationship with them. The kind of relationship where they remember the last 3 orders they've delivered to them have been wrong, and they then check the order themselves before they leave the warehouse/store.
The poster specifically said male. That had to be intentional (my wager). am6110 was right imo with pointing out the gender, but their comment was clearly not written well at all.
I ageee with everything else about building a relationship regardless of age or gender of the delivery person.
To be fair to ams6110, the op went out of his way to specify the gender of the delivery person.
I had the same problem with these services and having yet to have a single person deliver to me twice over 4 years, but that's regardless of whether they are a man,woman, or any other gender
I'd say the charitable interpretation is that the poster believes that 'male' is salient because males are generally more clueless in regards to grocery shopping.
From experience I'd agree that this is a correct observation, but perhaps a risky one to make considering recent discussions (among other things).
Again though, the charitable interpretation is that the poster did not really think about this statement too much, did not intend to cause offense, and might be quite open to the viewpoint that men are actually great at grocery shopping and assuming otherwise - however harmless it may seem to some people - is to be avoided.
I can't speak for anything else but I've become convinced that I should assume the charitable interpretation. If even writing this is considered an example of 'privilege' or sweeping real issues under the table, I truly and honestly want this to be pointed out and I'll seriously consider it in the progression of my personal views on these matters.
This is a bit of a sidenote, by the way, and not a direct response to your comment. I've just been thinking a bunch about all this lately, and your comment seemed a good a place as any to express myself :).
> So what about their execution is required here beyond "cheap and available where you already shop"?
It's not 20 years ago, and “online for home delivery” is increasingly where people already shop. And, it's easy to displace a business that requires a trip out with one that requires a trip out, but one you were likely taking already. Harder to do that with something that doesn't require a trip out at all.
> No one can use Blue Apron without a regular grocer in their routine already.
Yes, you can. Cooking oil, salt, and black pepper—the only ingredients BA doesn't usually supply—don't require a traditional grocery or even one of the limited-area perishable delivery services to acquire. If BA is your only home cooking, you literally never need to enter a traditional grocery store, or order from a similar full-grown online delivery service. Google Express or Amazon in one of the areas where they don't have grocery delivery will work fine.
What sounds dystopian about it? Honestly, I think the amount of takeout that would be involved is more revolting to me than Blue Apron. My ex and I subscribed to Blue Apron for several months (I think 3 meals a week, but maybe it was only 2). In all that time, there was only one meal that we didn't particularly care for, and I think we might have screwed up preparing it. We found the recipes to be top notch and the ingredients to be very good (although the amount of garlic they ended up sending us got excessive after a while).
It was a great experience for us. I would recommend it.
Always these comments :p. Obviously we both know the poster was just making a point that you could possibly do Blue Apron only for home meals.
I don't care for food. I know most people do. Most people care about variety and possibly some sort of cooking sometimes. I do cook chicken in bulk, but that's a pretty quick process. Otherwise I'm perfectly satisfied having the same 2 meals whenever I am at home for those meal times. One of them includes Soylent, the other includes 1-2 glasses of milk.
I can still go out and enjoy social lunch or dinner with business acquaintances or friends.
I responded to someone saying Blue Apron for home meals seems dystopian. How is my comment not relevant or adding on to the conversation? Blue Apron for your home meals does not seem dystopian to me. I'm replying to that notion.
That answers both of your quite condescending questions.
It just sounds sad, honestly. Cooking is not hard, and it can be downright easy with just a small amount of ingredients and whimsy. There are hundreds of dishes you can make in a single pot! There are fantastic recipes with three ingredients.
>> While I don't disagree, people said the same thing about Amazon.
just to play devil's avocado, Amazon's advantage was not having the overhead of stores, now they just purchased whole foods. Seems as if they are moving towards being a supermarket
Sorry, I was referring to how it was obvious to so many that Barnes & Noble and Borders would crush this fledgling website founded by the kook who set out in a van to compete with them.
> Sorry, I was referring to how it was obvious to so many that Barnes & Noble and Borders would crush this fledgling website founded by the kook who set out in a van to compete with them.
I remember Amazon's launch quite well, and I don't remember any of that sentiment. The first time I used Amazon I remember thinking "Wow, books are the perfect thing to sell online." I feel like it's become part of a standard origin mythology to play up the founder as "some kook with a crazy dream" that everyone else thought was insane. I think that's rarely the case, and is instead played up in an effort of founder worship.
Out of curiosity, I went to have a look at AMZN's stock price at the date the article was published, to see how the stock price during the heady heights of the dotcom bubble compared to today.
Interestingly, if you view the entire stock history price chart, the dotcom bubble is barely a blip.
IMO, the right way to look at long-term performance of an investment is on a semi-log chart. (Day or week charts, I prefer linear; anything 3 month or longer, I prefer semi-log.)
Semi-log (where constant percentage changes are constant-sized), it's more than a blip. Linear (where constant dollar changes are constant-sized) charting hides past market moves if the overall bias has been up and exaggerates past market moves if the overall bias has been down. This can lead investors to improperly discount the pain/gain cycle that happened over that time period.
Now that I also actually take a look, while his theory has not panned out the way he thought, it is true that Amazon would have been a poor investment for most of the decade following 2000.
I agree with hn_throwaway_. Amazon having no chance in people's eyes and being discarded by everyone seems to be an exaggeration.
I wasn't even in middle school/junior high when I and some other classmates started using Amazon. We loved using it for getting books. There was no weirdness about it. In fact, in my memories, using Amazon was completely normal and seemed like a good idea. This would be in 2000 and 2001.
Obvious to a young person like you. Clearly Amazon understood their market. But it was not obvious to entrenched businesses and all investors. Even Warren Buffet admits he made a mistake about Google.
Warren Buffett said those things very recently. He has always been against most tech and web companies because he doesn't understand the space. Buffett was already entering his 70s once the dot com bubble burst and you could look at companies in a better sense. I can see a good example being used. I don't think Buffett is one though.
A store in my area (Fred Meyer) that sells about everything, recently started pushing this service where you shop online and then pull into this special parking space where someone brings you your stuff and loads it into your trunk. I thought it was a great idea, so at about 3 I loaded everything I needed for dinner into my online shopping cart and went to check out. Turns out the earliest they could have it ready for me was the next day. I wasn't even expecting to have to pick a time frame at all. I figured I would just see some message about it being ready in 30 minutes, or some other short time frame.
You'd be amazed at how good entrenched companies are at completely failing to understand what their competitive advantage even is, let alone using it.
Hannafords has a service like this too though I haven't looked into it. Seems sort of a limited use case for me. But at a minimum needs to be, if not ready in an hour, at least order at lunch and swing by on the way home.
"The supermarkets have changed very little about the way they've done business in the last half-century"
UK supermarkets seem to have made huge changes, online shopping and delivery is really common, self scanning (which I always use), loyalty points used across multiple vendors (e.g. getting points for paying utility bills), "metro" urban stores etc.
Edit: I'm not doubting that there are some - just wondering how it differentiates itself from other players in this market, particularly when Amazon isn't a brand I associate with product quality.
> While I don't disagree, people said the same thing about Amazon.
The difference to me is that Amazon competed aggressively on price and selection. You could get books or items which you just couldn't get in a local Borders. You could also get the same item significantly cheaper than a Borders or Barnes and Noble.
Blue Aprons value lies in the recipe and the convenience of having all the ingredients picked out for you, but charges a significant premium. I would like this as a way to try new recipes or expand my range (e.g. I don't stock ingredients/spices etc at home for Chinese food), but not as my go-to option for daily meals.
It may not be as easy for someone like whole-foods or Safeway to generate recipes, efficiently package/put-together ingredients etc, but I also feel the value addition is much less than someone like Amazon's was: More items and much cheaper.
I'll add to what others have said that, for anyone vaguely interested in quality and variety of food, a grocery store of 50 years ago would be this ocean of poor quality produce, canned food, Wonder bread, etc. A lot of that is the transformation of US food supply chains but grocery stores are part of that.
Do you have any recommendations on similar services? We tried Blue Apron and found that their only shipping options were FedEx Home (consistently arrives after 10PM) and OnTrac (consistently isn't delivered at all).
One of the differences is that Supermarkets don't have the freedom of operation that Blue Apron does. Years of tight margins and increasingly complex stocking and merchandising restrictions in exchange for incentives has created something of a quagmire there. You're locally owned small market, sure. But don't look at Safeway or Krogers to be able to jump onto this trend either quickly or cost effectively.
Those constraints would seem to be the only reason another startup, curbside, continues to exist :-)
Publix, a regional chain that OWNS the South East and was recently ranked by Consumer Reports as the most loved grocery store in the US, is already doing this. They don't advertise it very well, but they started offering it a few weeks ago.
EDIT: including some extra deets about their size (since that was your primary argument against it happening) -> $34B in Revenue (2016), Operating Income $2.94B (2016), Assets of $17.46B, and 200,000+ employees.
... and privately owned. Which helps a lot in this case. That said, if they are successful at duplicating the Blue Apron model effectively then I expect that would be sufficient "proof" for the shareholder driven grocery chains.
Kroger is currently running trials of meal kits in select Cincinnati-area stores (their home turf). They cost $14 for the same amount of food as a $20 Blue Apron 2-serving recipe, and most of the ingredients are pre-chopped. The recipes are less "exotic" than BA though.
More details can be found here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanpearson/2017/05/17/krogers...
At least one big supermarket already has. Costco has a great selection of prepared, near-prepared (stick in oven), and frozen foods that are tastier and cheaper than Blue Apron. If meal kits become a huge market, I expect Costco will enter.
We have this already in the Netherlands. Albert Heijn is the biggest supermarket here, they have raw ingredients grouped in boxes for different recipes like soups, lasagnas, etc. I know I pay more than if I bought the ingredients one by one, but hey, sometimes you do it. They also do home deliveries, have express checkouts, and now they will experiment with something like Amazon Go.
> Why have your ingredients mailed to you when a supermarket on your way home will offer the same thing for 50% cheaper?
Because, based on supermarket prices for similarly sized packages, it won't be 50% of the cost, and because the additional time for a supermarket stop takes up enough time to basically make it a wash, considering the money value of time, for people in the target market even if it was 50%.
I started using one of these services a couple of months ago and the biggest thing for me is simply having one less thing to have to think about. Both myself and my partner have struggled with depression, and one of the few things which reliably makes a difference for me is cooking. The issue is that when you feel like the world is crumbling around you and you struggle to make it out of bed, let alone out of the house, I'm simply unable to plan through what supplies I need, obtain them and cook.
Obviously I'm incredibly privileged in the sense that I am in a comfortable financial position and can afford to use these services.
Edit: I should probably also add that neither myself or my partner can drive, so getting groceries is a bus ride / hoping that the small shops in walking distance have what you need (reasonable for salt/pepper/cooking oil/pasta/rice, not so much for anything more 'exotic').
I think there is a lot of consumer psychology at play here. What you said will work very well in a country such as Singapore where people predominantly stop at a mall/supermarket after work. Beyond 7 PM all the roast chicken from the supermarket shelves are gone.
In the US, I don't see this as a practice. I mean you just drive home from work or these days use ride sharing. In either case stopping by is a hassle. Am assuming a supermarket can mimic BA's recipe and packaging.
What bothers me about BA is not the supermarkets but the management's unacceptable ways of hiding actual customer acquisition costs.
> Beyond 7 PM all the roast chicken from the supermarket shelves are gone. In the US, I don't see this as a practice
Think it depends where you live. My nearby grocery store makes/serves fresh pizza, take out dinners (different each night), the usual rotisserie chickens (that are all gone by 7), in store made sushi (to order if you're there at the right time), has an asian and american hot bar, and provides a drive through grocery pick up service.
I did BA some in the past, but now I have a bunch of recipes and just order the ingredients online and pick them up at a drive through on the way home. It's cheaper, and almost as convenient. The store will also deliver, but I'm okay saving the fee since it's so easy to pick up.
> Think it depends where you live. My nearby grocery store makes/serves fresh pizza, take out dinners (different each night), the usual rotisserie chickens (that are all gone by 7), in store made sushi (to order if you're there at the right time), has an asian and american hot bar, and provides a drive through grocery pick up service.
Is this Texas? Because it sounds like the most wonderful place known as HEB.
Part of the Blue Apron sell is you get to cook with 'fancy' ingredients that most grocers might not carry.
Whole Foods 365, for example, is an attempt to move the industry in the opposite direction by carrying far less than a standard market. You can certainly make delicious meals from the 365 inventory but can't necessarily fulfill a given recipe with the inventory at 365 or even a standard grocer. This is a common problem when 'cooking to the recipe'.
(though I'd agree this probably isn't enough on it's own to save blue apron)
Blockbuster and Netflix did not sell perishable goods.
Now I could buy the argument that the supermarket chains just won't be able to attract the appropriate talent to deliver an experience rivaling that of Blue Apron (or Amazon, if they decided to get into this market tomorrow via Whole Foods).
I walk to the store and buy groceries and then walk home. No cab, delivery service, or drone needed. Sometimes I shop at a store closer to the office and bring what I buy home on the bus [which is typically how I get to/from work].
> I walk to the store and buy groceries and then walk home.
Right, exactly. Some of these replies are incredible! Absolutely if you live somewhere more remote you'll need a car, but for people in urban areas...?
I've lived in several quite different cities over the last decade and haven't owned a car the entire time and have managed to buy groceries just fine. No Amazon Fresh or eating out regularly required...
Discussing outliers isn't that interesting, to be honest. There are exceedingly few cities in the US where not owning a car is practical for the vast majority of people.
Sure, you can live pretty much anywhere without a car - but you are now in the extreme minority trying to make that work and likely are making significant lifestyle changes/sacrifices to do so. I grew up without a car in my household in a very midwest giant-suburb style metro area, and it was truly a different lifestyle. I would not go back to that.
However, living in Chicago without a car is an amazing liberating experience, not the hinderance it was elsewhere.
While there are few cities like that in the US, a fairly large part of the US population lives in them. New York City alone has a population of about 9 million.
There's a grocery store across the street from me, connected by an underground mall. I don't even need to go outside to get to groceries, much less get in a car
it's difficult; you need to carry them or take a cab, and it's especially hard to buy for multiple meals and in the quantities to realize significant savings that outweigh the meal kit convenience.
as we got busier our 1-2 weekly home cooked meals dropped to once per every two weeks, and my partner loves cooking and she's very good at it, never thought she was the audience for a meal kit.
she ended up getting a job at Plated. Now we cook 2-3 times a week and end up spending more time together as a result.
the cost is not trivial (and of course we have access to employee discount) but it's certainly less expensive than almost any take out meal in NYC.
i don't know what the long term situation is like but i could see it always doing well at least in a city like new york
On the other hand, I walk across the street to my grocery store, or I stop by on the way home after work to the same branded store that's near my work. Why pay $12-$15/meal when I can pay far less from my grocery store?
Also I don't really understand why nobody is addressing that a grocery store can just buy a van and deliver to you within the hour if necessary, but easily at least same day. What do I do with Blue Apron if I need something now?
Oh and don't forget that it's a simple market to get into, and will absolutely have razor-thin margins if they want to stay in business.
I'm in a city and currently don't own a car. We end up buying groceries through delivery services like instacart or peapod. If the service fails to deliver, which happens more frequently than we want, we kinda just deal with not having the food we wanted. Sometimes that means esti g a substandard meal, sometimes it means eating some frozen food we had and turning the other ingredients into a different meal the next day. It's extremely incovienent but it's better than walking to s supermarket or all the problems that come with car ownership in a city
Edit:we also ended up eating out at about an average of 2.5 nights a week every year which is much higher than when I lived in a rural area with a car
They probably use delivery services for groceries or don't cook. The point of blue apron was it was an easy way for people intimidated by cooking to start doing it.
That's a very narrow view of how people get around. Is it based on a rural experience? I've never been outside of walking distance of a small shop for food shopping.
That's one point of Blue Apron. For me, the point is that I can spend 100% of my cooking time cooking, instead of planning or shopping. As a result, I cook a lot more, and I like that.
We accept significant inconvenience. Make the 45 minute bus journey or uphill bike ride there a couple times a week and overstuff a backpack. Pick up small items at the overpriced, upscale mini-marts between work and the downtown bus/train terminals, if we remember to. Rent a Zipcar or take an Uber each way to the nearest proper supermarket that's open at the conclusion of our bus rides home, and kick ourselves for the expense.
If you haven’t tried them I’d suggest getting a set of panniers for grocery hauls (I’ve got the ortlieb backroller plus). We do most of our grocery shopping by bike and having panniers makes transporting larger quantities much easier.
One of the four supermarkets I walk past on the way to work every day. Or occasionally from a larger fifth one which requires a small detour.
This is in a medium-sized (~1 million people) European city; I gather your milage may vary in an American city, though I assume the ones where people tend to not have cars are mostly fairly dense.
> How do these folks get groceries from the store now?
Either via home delivery (so, not people who would use a curbside drop off), posdibly, in some areas, through Amazon Prime Fresh, or in smaller, more frequent trips walking or with a bike, or they don't regularly, and they just eat out and work with non-perishables at home.
I don't have a car, I live in Silicon Valley working for a tech company, and I'm more than willing to pay for weekly meal ingredient boxes (which I do).
You're assuming that everyone who doesn't have a car is poor, which isn't necessarily true.
> Several are working on identical services where you pick up, curbside, the ingredients and instructions in a bag, and pay significantly less for doing so.
Is there anything here that would get in the way of supermarkets usual model? All I can think of is that a package of ingredients would have to have a sell by date of the item that goes out of date the quickest and they would require staff for preparation (e.g. adding only one clove of garlic, packaging up a tablespoon of soy sauce).
Publix started offering this service a few weeks ago. I haven't tried it yet (probably never will, for the same reasons I'd never try Blue Apron), BUT they put it in plastic containers with a label for each of the individual items and the instructions. The contents appear to be in individual wrapped vacuum sealed bags. Not sure much beyond that.
Maybe it's just Houston, but many of the ingredients are available in every supermarket. You can get higher quality recipes sent to your home whether you live in a Whole Foods neighborhood or a beer-and-weenies neighborhood. I would probably drive across town to find what I needed, but many people won't.
> These companies are going to get absolutely destroyed when the big supermarkets come on tap.
While I agree they're in trouble, i really don't think it'll be supermarkets that hurt them. Supermarkets are about as likely to rise up as Blackberry is about to destroy Apple.
An iPhone is a fundamentally different device from a old-generation BlackBerry.
As far as I can tell, these services sell you the same head of lettuce as the grocery, at a large markup. Just because you think that Safeway, QFC, and Costco won't figure out this business doesn't mean that some other grocery chain won't.
Grocery stores have a fundamental advantage in this game - they have a location where people who don't want to pay for delivery can pick up. They can absolutely compete on price, without sacrificing any quality. On the other hand, it doesn't matter how much a BlackBerry costs - it was not an iPhone.
The difference between companies like Blue Apron and Amazon is that one is created with a "I think I want to do a startup, any startup that's in vogue nowadays. I know people who can take me to IPO" mindset and the other "there is a clear business opportunity in bringing efficiencies in the retail books business. The time is right since all the underlying infrastructure (PCs, wide internet access, Credit cards, USPS/UPS, etc.) needed for such an opportunity to succeed are present; all it needs is a strong execution path and leadership to have a go at it" mindset.
Edit: possibly not my own thought, for whatever that means. I just don't want to accidentally suggest to others that I steal thoughts. See child comments.
oh really? you sure it's you and not Paul Graham that calls it that? like don't you realize you're literally on a site started by the guy that coined that phrase: everyone here is already familiar with it and the correct attribution.
I'm not here to convince you of anything, but I will say with all genuine honesty I don't know who Paul Graham is. I'm here because I got tired of reddit and my friends said there's more tech news here.
I also think that "playing startup" is so obvious that many people could have come up with it. That being said, it's also quite possible that I saw it somewhere and absorbed it without fully remembering the source and now have a false memory of coming up with it myself.
I will add though that it's pretty fascinating as someone who is so disinterested in (and at times has a disdain for) startup people and startup culture, to be accused along the lines of, "how dare you feign not knowing who Startup Person X is!"
Surfing Hacker News without knowing who Paul Graham is, is like shopping at Amazon without knowing who Jeff Bezos is. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it but it seems a bit odd to some of us. That doesn't make it okay to be rude to you.
Paul's one of the founders of YCombinator who hosts this site.
That being said, I don't really know Paul as a Startup Person, only as an essayist and author. To that end, I'm happy to commend his book "On Lisp" to anyone's attention, though, as it's one of my very few desert-island technical books!
I used it for almost two years for a variety of reasons - primarily it forces you to be a better cook and cook a much larger range of recipes than you would select on your own.
Eventually I had a stockpile of recipes from them to pull off of and we moved right across the street from a grocery store so was pretty ridiculous to keep using it.
I don't regret it at all - I'm a much better cook and I can cook a much larger variety of stuff now than prior to using the service. These services don't seem like they are able to sustain people for long periods of time. If people are like me you'd use it for a while then eventually find it unnecessary. Seems like the model is short-lived propagation than long-term use but I could be an anomaly.
Also used a few others in that time - Blue Apron was the most consistent.
If you're an anomaly, then my wife and I are, too: that was exactly our experience. We were already pretty decent cooks, but in a bit of a rut. We used Blue Apron as a way to push ourselves to try new ingredients and new recipes. Once we felt like we'd been exposed to most of their repertoire and settled on which sorts of dishes worked for us and which didn't, we stopped.
Sounds similar to me and my wife. If you want more variety, try a CSA if one is available in your area. Ours would provide an assortment of recipes with every box and looking new things up online is just so easy. Who knew roasted fennel was so damn delicious? (:
Other services have forced Blue Apron to advance a bit on these. It used to be you got to "pick" from 6 meals. I put "pick" in quotes here because selecting meal 1 meant you couldn't select meals 4, 5, and 6, etc. Now they've gone up to 8 meals and you can pick any of them you want. Home Chef is still a few steps ahead with 11 meals, including one breakfast option and 1 premium option (extra cost).
We used it a lot when they just started. For a while the quality was very good: chefs did a good job providing variety of choices, packaging was good. But after a year or so they started to cut the cost and shifted to low-quality selection which felt like fast food. We moved to Home Chef: it's pricier, but they provide what Blue Apron was when they started.
I canceled when I couldn't tell them to stop sending me sweet potato. They sent me an email saying they'd changed some stuff based on my recommendation but when I rejoined they still sent me two sweet potatoes and a bag of kale with every box.
Funny you say that. I get Home Chef delivered at least twice a month now after converting from Blue Apron as well, and I've been doing for long enough now that it feels like I can detect the pattern to their recipes. Always a chicken breast dish with some sort of sauce/coating and vegetable side... some form of meat in lettuce wraps... pork medallions in some kind of sauce with vegetables...
Not to say I'm not a fan, but there are definitely patters I'm starting to notice with Home Chef's offerings.
It is totally shocking that it turns out there are limits as to how many food permutations they can deliver that meet all the core requirements (healthy, GF, week-long shelf life, etc..).
Cities are responsible for garbage and many are aggressively trying to reduce waste. Many cities are looking strongly at business regulation as a way to do this. Fees on plastic bags is just one example of this.
Blue Apron may eventually run into conflict with cities if their packaging is excessive and not compostable.
All of their packaging (with the exception of any meat packaging) is fully recyclable or returnable for re-use. There won't be a conflict on BA's end. If anything, it'll be on the end of the consumer for not disposing and/or recycling properly.
I've always wondered - which is worse? Tossing the packaging in the trash or burning fuel to ship it back to them. My gut says local recycling would be best, but sometimes there isn't a nearby use for post consumer materials.
In that case, they do have local drop-offs too but they're usually at grocery stores so, if the point was to save yourself a trip, are you really doing that?
This is such a shame as they offer a really, really easy recycling service for their boxes. The only caveat is that you have to have the stuff from at least 2-3 deliveries before you can send it back for recycling, but it's easily separated and costs nothing.
Yes! Per recommendation from my sister in law. My wife and I cook for two and are generally quite satisfied:
- generally right-sized portions and ingredients pared down to 2 people
- excellent variety of ingredients and cuisines, including many things I had never seen before, and some things you'd have to go to an international market to try ro find
- nice rotation of seasonal recipes
- generally great flavors – they know how to coax fledgling chefs into enough seasoning! Frequently recipes come with a nice spicy kick.
- preparation is somewhat chef'ed up but not overly fussy
- recipes encourage mise en place and are generally easy to follow
- simple and functional mobile app, as well as fairly active and occasionally helpful forums
- cheaper than eating out, at least at this level of cuisine. More expensive thab a market probably but you don't have to plan and shop and worry so much about leftovers
Downsides:
- 6 day advance notice to cancel a delivery – you need to keep on top of your game!
- ingredient selection tends towards the inexpensive
- not feeling the return of packaging via mail – I miss the days of Webvan, and still have an old plastic crate of theirs poking around somewhere I think!
- prep can be deceptively involved for these recipes – for me total prep time is 2-3x what the recipe states for cooking time
I've found their prep times are only accurate if you've made the dish before. If you're reading and following as you go, it definitely takes longer. But I've kept my recipe cards, and remade a few things at the suggested timeframes.
We did briefly, but it wasn't that great. And then we were an unwilling customer for 3 months because they kept charging our bank account and refusing to close the account.
In the last big Blue Apron thread I participated in, I found it a bit suspicious how many people were just rabid about the company, the product, and the service and how it was "simply gourmet and such better food than [insert fast casual chain]" and "how dare you compare the quality!", etc.
I'm not so paranoid to think that the whole crowd were interested/biased parties, but I can't help wonder if they've convinced themselves that the absurd cost is actually worth it. I've tried it and I don't find the quality to even as good than that of say, Modern Market or some other slightly-upscale eatery.
Blue Apron seems to inspire surprisingly passionate discussions here. Detractors tend to be very negative and even a bit hostile, and I suspect that maybe puts fans of the service on the defensive or makes them feel like they have to praise it more than it really deserves. So far this thread is very civil though.
I've tried it and enjoyed it. I found it to be a high-quality service. Negative points were (1) trash; (2) I didn't like most of the vegetarian meals, and I'm trending towards a more vegetarian diet; (3) I prefer to cook simple meals at home that generate leftovers (so that I don't have to cook every night), but BA meals tend to be complex, messy to prepare, and do not create any leftovers. These three points were easily sufficient to stop me from using it long-term.
(1) is a topic of a lot of argument. Some insist BA creates mass amounts of waste compared to normal grocery shopping. Others contend the difference is much smaller or even nonexistent when looking at "average" grocery shoppers. I'm in the middle. I think the waste is exaggerated, but still greater than what the average shopper would produce.
We used it for about 6 months (or maybe a little more) a few years ago. I got it for my wife who enjoys cooking and enjoyed the "semi-forced" variety. Several of the meals (or close variants) are now in our regular rotation at home.
I'd say we were glad on balance that we tried it.
Cons:
Incredibly expensive for what you get. (Obviously; they're paying a large amount for shipping and a large amount for marketing.)
Ingredients were generally acceptable quality, the chicken was quite good but the beef was pretty uniformly terrible. (I often thought back to Rodney Dangerfield's quote in Caddyshack: "this steak still has marks from where the jockey was hitting it!")
After a few months, the variety/novelty factor wears off and then it just becomes an incredibly expensive way to get a small amount of groceries delivered.
I don't want to seem like I'm grinding an axe, but it also annoyed me greatly that there's no web UX accessible way to cancel your account online. (You have to call and talk to a human.) Solution: google for the hidden cancellation page or just remember every few weeks to google "blue apron" or "plated" and click on a paid ad to bring you to the site and cancel the deliveries for the next six weeks. :) That makes their churn numbers look lower, but their SEM expenses higher...
Regarding point (3). I don't want to pay double (for double portions) just to have leftovers. I was doing the 3x dishes (2 portions per dish) for $60. However, if you double the cost to $120 -- it makes way more sense to go the grocery store since prices drop with increased quantity. Their pricing model is messed up. If you want double portions for all three meals, it shouldn't cost twice as much -- it should be, like, 30% more of something comparable to grocery store pricing.
...and it's not really that absurd, even, compared to eating out or throwing away spoiled groceries because you bought too much or didn't get around to cooking it.
You can, and many people do, eat much more cheaply, but many people don't for various reasons.
They popped up on so many talk radio shows with each host himself voicing first-person experience ads (even John Batchelor), it turned me off right away.
Lifelock, Proflowers, and that beet company use the same strategy. That advertising just has a snake-oil feel to it.
Listen to any podcast and you'll hear about Casper, Audible, Harry's Razor, and Blue Apron so much you'll forget what the actual podcast was about. I don't think there are any companies advertising with podcasts beyond those four.
The way these companies advertise is largely why I'll never do business with them (same with Lootcrate).
If you have to advertise that much to get me to be a customer, then you're essentially telling me your user experience is shit, and your product/service is shit, and the only way to get customers that you haven't poisoned with a bad experience is to constantly spam.
They're literally paying for advertisements to not do business with them. Dunno how that makes sense to do.
If you have to advertise that much to get me to be a customer, then you're essentially telling me your user experience is shit, and your product/service is shit, and the only way to get customers that you haven't poisoned with a bad experience is to constantly spam.
How does that follow? Say a company provides an excellent service and 100% of their customers return and they're growing quite a bit by word of mouth, but they want to grow even faster. Why wouldn't they advertise as well?
I'm not saying BA is good (or bad), by the way. I don't even live in the US, I have no idea.
Okay, so let's say a perfect company exists, where it is 100% perfect. If such a thing existed, it would mean word of mouth would be infinitely successful and every customer would be converted into a cult member and spread the religion of that company... ergo, they would not only not need advertising, but advertising could only be viewed as a negative aspect.
This isn't the outcome you were expecting, but that's the logical outcome of logic.
As far as BA, everything I've heard is bad (not one single good story at all), but I'll never be a customer of theirs anyhow: I can cook already.
There's also _another_ mattress company. Can't remember the name, but it shows up on Crooked Media podcasts a lot. Apparently podcasts are the preferred marketing medium of the modern mattress industry :)
One of my friends uses something like it (not sure of the name, could be Blue Apron?).
When they told me that is how they make their dinners, I thought they were joking.
They were incredibly wealthy and well cared for as a child, so much so that apparently they never learned how to prepare a meal themselves.
They have never bought the ingredients, followed a recipe, and made their own meal in their entire life. So it did make sense that they would use this service when I thought about it.
The total addressable market for that consumer group (people who never learned how to cook for themselves due to an upper class lifestyle) is small. But they likely have deep pockets.
I did for a few weeks but didn't really enjoy the vegeterian options. They weren't bad, but weren't good either. However when I lived in a large apartment several of my neighbors had them. I also had a vegetarian coworker who enjoyed their service, so YMMV.
I used them for a few months, but then just got tired of the meal cycle and didn't want to waste any of the food I didn't feel like cooking. I totally agree that they really need to do more to prevent the monotony of the weekly meal box schedule. I also really wanted them to add desserts to their boxes, but they added wine instead... I don't drink wine so that did nothing for me. I also always had anxiety that I would have to contact customer service if any of the food didn't arrive in editable condition. They always backed up their product, but I don't like feeling like I have to be a part of their quality assurance team every time I open one of their boxes.
I used it for the better part of 3 years. Made me a pretty good cook. I probably wouldn't use it again now that I feel a lot more confident in the kitchen.
It's similar to coffee subscription services that give you a different bag each month. Those services helped me define what I enjoyed and now I just buy coffee directly because I know what I want.
That's good comparison, actually. But do you see any of those subscription services filing for an IPO? Or needing all that automation and cleverness (and implicitly, with all that overhead, scale) just to get their stuff out of the door?
That's the problem with Blue Apron. It's a nice idea. But it's just too darn big of an idea (and way too much engineering) for the problem it addresses.
I agree. Blue Apron's operation can be reproduced, and Amazon is probably one of the best companies to do it now that they have Whole Foods.
I don't see a coffee subscription type service going to IPO, unless it's part of a larger business. However, total spend on groceries/food will always be higher than coffee, so it's not an equal comparison exactly.
True, BA is a way to educate people until the service isn't needed. That could be a problem, but I have the feeling there are plenty of people who can't cook. The question is - can the afford these lessons?
It's way cheaper than actual cooking classes. That doesn't totally answer your question, but I've found receiving the food with well-written descriptions (they are particular in the language they use to describe how to cook things, so you get it just right). It's like, the next step down in my opinion from physically going to a class and having someone teach you a couple things.
Oh, it can be great as a niche-y, learning-to-cook service. If inherently somewhat costly.
Just not the wide-scale, low-margin partial-replacement-for-takeout-and-grocery-shopping that they appear to be need it to be for their business model to succeed.
I tried it out for 2 weeks. It was fun to just throw stuff together, and cooking things I normally wouldn't have tried. Although I don't regret those 2 weeks, I doubt I'd try it again.
It's probably built into their marketing costs. Some people will go into it thinking they'll cancel after the trial, but actually end up converting once they come to enjoy the convenience. Those are the customers who make the initial subsidies worth it, obviously. But more of what I've read in other comments here -- still anecdotal -- is people "graduate" after a certain amount time once they feel like proficient cooks. It's like Blue Apron is empowering their customers with good cooking skills a little too well.
Are these roughly the same 1MM people who used them the prior week? I haven't looked through their filings but wonder what the repeat customer %/churn is.
I'd be skeptical of their reported churn figures because of the asymmetry in the web experience.
I wonder if I'm counted as an active customer in those figures. We haven't gotten a delivery from them in about 10 months, but since they don't offer an online cancelation accessible from the web UI (presumably to juice their retention numbers), I click on a paid ad of theirs every few weeks to cancel my upcoming shipments. They manage to make signing up online easy, but can't get the (simpler) cancelation process to work online? Color me skeptical.
They list an email that you need to send a message to, which auto-replies with a link to their website where you can cancel. I unfortunately don't have the link handy to share, but it's easier than needing to go through the rigamarole of you canceling upcoming shipments.
The cancellation set up they have is clearly geared towards people who won't want to bother doing that--and then forget to cancel a shipment.
Because of the principle of the matter (it should be about as easy to cancel as to sign up), I'd rather keep whacking them for a paid ad clickthrough a couple times a month, even if it puts me at some risk of forgetting for 6 straight weeks. (I haven't yet.)
That seems incredibly foolish. Paid ads cost them less than a penny per click and all it would take is for you to forget 1 time and they'd make all that money back immediately and still turn a profit. The best thing to do is just cancel. It makes their numbers go down and it involves nothing else on your end.
Considering the name of my hobby blog that I own the .com for with ~1k visitors per month is more than 25c on Adwords, if Blue Apron is less than a dollar I would eat my laptop.
Even if it's not, though, each delivery costs, at the very least, $60. You'd have to go through your process 60 times (at a dollar per click) to even make a dent. On top of that, considering they send free boxes to people all the time, it's not like they're losing money on that.
I found it more annoying than buying my own groceries. There are too many ingredients and far too much cutting. I want simple meals that I can prepare quickly. Many of the meals were tasty, but not worth ~1-1.5h of prep time.
If it's taking you 1.5h to prep a meal you got from Blue Apron, then you're doing something seriously wrong. Prep time is usually no more than 10 minutes and cook time is never longer than 35 minutes unless you're putting something in the oven to set it on a timer.
I freeze meat that I'm not eating in the next day or two, particularly fish. Prep includes reading and understanding the recipe, fetching bowls and implements, bringing out the ingredients, preparing the work surface, and often starting water to boil.
I find it interesting that none of the discussion here has been around CSAs. Are these less of a thing, even in other cities? In the D.C. area there are tons of them. They provide really great variety and I suspect many also include recipie ideas with each box (the one my wife and I used did). Most will deliver to nearby farmers markets and in our case they had enough customers in our apartment building to deliver there directly. We learned so much about different types and combinations of ingredients in that time. It was a lot of fun and made for some delicious meals.
> I find it interesting that none of the discussion here has been around CSAs. Are these less of a thing, even in other cities? In the D.C. area there are tons of them.
They are definitely a thing; Farm Fresh To You, specifically, seems to be big in Northern California; they aren't really, though, directly competing with meal kits. (I see them more as complementary.)
It could be that there's no discussion of CSAs because nobody here knows what they are. I certainly don't. Can you explain? Searching, I get Client-Server Architecture, Community Supported Agriculture, Compliance Safety & Accountability, and more. I assume it's the second one? What does it involve?
Adding to undersuit's response, here's a wapo article about the CSA scene in the D.C. area (in 2015): http://wapo.st/1AlQgSF
Basically you pay a set amount directly to the farm ahead of the harvest season and get weekly boxes of a variety of different veggies (and some bigger ones will also do meats and cheeses). Typical they cost around $30-40/week in this area, but can also be considerably more than that. Usually pick up at a local farmers' market is necessary. We lucked out with delivery to our door so some added value in that case for people in larger cities.
Community Supported Agriculture, the community buys directly from farmers. A big organizer I know of is Bountiful Baskets, they cover a number of US states(though I bet there are a number of arguments that they aren't a CSA).
Several are working on identical services where you pick up, curbside, the ingredients and instructions in a bag, and pay significantly less for doing so.
Why have your ingredients mailed to you when a supermarket on your way home will offer the same thing for 50% cheaper?