Their recipes an instructions are nice. But their problem is after I did a trial run, I have the recipes and I'll just go get the ingredients at my local grocery. I can get recipes online for free or from the good cookbooks I already own. Any money I saved by getting just the amounts of ingredients you need is lost to them being an expensive middleman. Sure you might waste less but it's more money to me.
Their recipes are all right. I felt there was too much reliance on olive oil and salt & pepper. On top of that, it was simply too expensive for what it was.
Feel similarly. We enjoyed it for a few months and have added some of the recipes (or variants thereof) to our regular rotation.
IMO, the beef was generally terrible, but most everything else was high (enough) quality.
My biggest complaint is no web UI discoverable way to cancel your account. You have to call someone (or google the hidden cancellation page).
So, for many months now, I've been googling "blue apron" or "plated" and clicking on the paid search ad every week to cancel my upcoming deliveries. ;)
I'm not sure what the target market is. The half lazy? Too lazy to pick up a few ingredients, or go out to eat, but not lazy enough to actually cook it.
Based on the comments here and elsewhere, there is a legitimate target market--which might be more charitably described as people who want to cook at home but don't have the time/inclination to do the other tasks required to cook.
But I actually agree that the use case for these services is pretty narrow. I know they don't really work for me. If I could get quality grocery delivery where I live I might get meal kits as part of that but as a standalone offering the tradeoffs just aren't right. Every time I think about signing up for a delivery in a couple weeks I look at the recipes and go "Eh, maybe I'll just buy the ingredients for that next time I go shopping."
I can't get the same quality of ingredients locally (some are not available) without a tremendous amount of time spent traveling around town.
As far as going out to eat, many of the meals rival anything I could pay to have served to me at a restaurant (as well as the time spent traveling).
I'm not sure how valuable your time is, but mine is better spent having somebody deliver me the exact ingredients I need to create a delicious meal with minimal effort on my part (aside from cooking, which I enjoy).
Maybe you enjoy waiting in lines and traveling? I do not.
I use BA. I average about one order every 4-6 weeks. I'm also an avid cook, so at first it seemed like cheating/lame. However the workflow I've developed is to watch for weeks where 2 of the 3 options are something out of the ordinary that I'd never normally to think to make for myself, particularly when they use an out of the way ingredient.
Particularly for the latter purpose, I appreciate that they give me exactly what I need, because I probably don't want to use it again any time soon.
One order every 4-6 weeks, isn't exactly their target audience. Sounds like you just like to try something new once in a while, and Blue Apron happened to have it.
That's a fantastic question, one I'm sure investors are considering. At this time it seems the answer might be leaning towards "not enough" but I think it will be interesting to see what follows and what their trajectory is from here.
For another piece of context, the latest numbers I found for online grocery shopping in the US overall was about $7 billion annually--though forecast by many to increase fairly rapidly.
