Blue Apron, Struggling to Woo Investors, Lowers Price Range for IPO

They are a middleman that could be easily bypassed by bigger players, and investors are calling them out on that. Also, customer retention and cost of customer acquisition remains a big issue.<p>No reason why Amazon couldn&#x27;t just tack on nice recipes to their food delivery service and the acquisition of Whole Foods makes that direction even more likely. Blue Apron is in a dangerous and precarious spot and that&#x27;s being reflected in the lowering of valuations.<p>We&#x27;re going to see more &quot;disrupters being disrupted&quot; as value chain consolidation continues to evolve.

They create tremendous waste.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grist.org&#x2F;food&#x2F;dear-blue-apron-youre-just-making-it-worse" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grist.org&#x2F;food&#x2F;dear-blue-apron-youre-just-making-it-...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.buzzfeed.com&#x2F;ellencushing&#x2F;these-are-the-trashy-consequences-of-blue-apron-delivery" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.buzzfeed.com&#x2F;ellencushing&#x2F;these-are-the-trashy-c...</a><p>Promoting reusing or recycling all their packaging obfuscates that there is so much of it.

My partner and I have tried several of the meal delivery services (Plated, Home Chef, Hello Fresh) for over a year now. We have not bothered to try Blue Apron, despite the aggressive marketing and less-than-enthusiastic recommendations.<p>We live in an area where it is inconvenient to find the variety and quality of meats and vegetables available.<p>It is very obvious to me, that operationally, there are significant differences in the material handling and logistics from each provider.<p>We now mostly rely on Home Chef. It&#x27;s variety of ingredients and recipes rivals that of Plated, but its packaging is more thoughtful, like Hello Fresh. In my experience, Home Chef has the most accurate order packaging, as well (missing or wrong items).<p>I would put my money on Home Chef.

Big discussion of Blue Apron&#x27;s valuation, business model, competitive moat, etc. here yesterday, for those who missed it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14646679" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14646679</a>

I think there&#x27;s definitely a market for the service but ultimately it needs to fit the everyday household better.<p>They should have a Blue Apron section in all supermarkets. In the market, we mostly have a choice of cooking from scratch or fully cooked. Having TV dinners everyday does not work for most and starting from scratch is always painful. A middle ground section would do wonders.<p>Additionally, the fact that they can get squeezed from suppliers, delivery services and supermarkets makes it a hard for it to stay independent as a company. I bet it will eventually get acquired.

Bad news for podcasts

There was a really good article in Medium about this.[0] Basically the Blue Apron model is too easy to duplicate. As more competition enters the space, the higher the costs for recruiting new customers, to the point where it&#x27;s no longer profitable.<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@byrnehobart&#x2F;the-slow-motion-trainwreck-facing-the-meal-kit-industry-345f14df45ad" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@byrnehobart&#x2F;the-slow-motion-trainwreck-f...</a>

It kind of makes sense. With the condition of economy I don&#x27;t think there will be growing market for fancy meal-kits. For ~9 dollars a kit they put $54M losses last year. This means price need to rise significantly if they need to make money. At say $15 I wonder how many current customer will still see value in kit.<p>Also in my mails I increasingly see ads&#x2F;coupons from local grocery stores for quick to prepare meal boxes. May be they are catching up on this trend.

I&#x27;m surprised no one has made a meal delivery service catered specifically to Instant Pot owners&#x2F;enthusiasts. Just imagine, all you need is an Instant Pot and whatever ingredients&#x2F;recipes they send you and you can cook homemade meals. Go ahead someone, take this idea! :D

I really don&#x27;t see how Blue Apron is superior to, let&#x27;s imagine for a moment, Amazon next-day delivering Whole Foods to your house with a couple of recipes included.<p>What am I missing here?<p>I personally think a much better model is high quality <i>cooked</i> or pre-cooked food delivered to your home. Deliver cooked restaurant quality food rapidly, like the ultimate take-out. Or just pop something in the oven for 20 min, etc. Cooking is time consuming and often annoying, the major pain point (for me and most people I know anyway) is not going to a grocery store once a week or finding recipes which are abundant online, it&#x27;s the actual act of cooking for 30-60 minutes, for every dinner (or lunch), before 5 or 10 minutes of eating.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m the wrong target demographic, who knows.

I&#x27;m not convinced the market for people who like cooking but can&#x27;t be troubled to choose their own ingredients is really that big.

Their recipes an instructions are nice. But their problem is after I did a trial run, I have the recipes and I&#x27;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&#x27;s more money to me.

I&#x27;d always hoped this concept took off, an IPO auction instead of a fixed price offering:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wrhambrecht.com&#x2F;openipo&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wrhambrecht.com&#x2F;openipo&#x2F;</a><p>I first learned about it during the Google IPO, but after that, I never saw any companies doing an auction IPO that I was interested in investing in.

I have never seen what value Blue Apron provides,<p>Their meals are overpriced for what you get from what I have seen, I fail to see their value over simply buying the stuff local and and finding a recipe online for free.<p>for their $60 per week to get 6 small portion meals I can buy over 2x that number of meals shopping at my local store, + snacks and other household items

I think the future will be industrial sized kitchens that cover a large neighborhood, with individual meals delivered by drone to your home or apartment within a few minutes. I could imagine apartments with no or minimal kitchens built to rely on that. Throw in some high quality reusable containers and you have much higher efficiency and sustainability than any current meal delivery service.

I ended up cancelling and vowing to never go back to their service after they didn&#x27;t credit one of my &quot;come back&quot; coupons correctly. Not that it was the biggest deal, but they deliberately were doing something other than what they advertised and were completely unapologetic about it. That small act lost me as a potential customer to their competitors.

Everyone here is like &quot;can&#x27;t believe anyone would use this because XYZ&quot; but not one reason has made sense.<p>I have been using blue apron for more than 2 years.<p>I&#x27;d say It&#x27;s the highest quality meal at its price point.<p>It makes it so I don&#x27;t have to think about picking a recipe and selecting ingredients on Instacart or whatever.

I&#x27;ve done Chefs Plate and Good Food here in Toronto, and while they are great, for people like me living in the city, the delivery is not the most convenient aspect.<p>My local Supermarket chain, could just put up a rack with meal kits, and destroy most of their market.

I think it&#x27;s so sad that people can&#x27;t cook on their own and need a kit to be able to make anything for themselves. I don&#x27;t know I feel like one can throw anything in a pan with some olive oil and salt and it&#x27;s always delicious...

Do they have to have an IPO? Has the board been promising employees and investors that one is coming?

For those hitting the WSJ paywall: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;t.co&#x2F;6jFYZkEC6V" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;t.co&#x2F;6jFYZkEC6V</a><p>It&#x27;ll give you a Twitter referral which should bypass it.

if blue apron IPOs it&#x27;ll be sunk within 5 years. their product is useless[<i>]. people who want to pay a premium on food and still cook it? sounds like the downsides of a restaurant, food delivery and grocery, all in one.<p>a really good food delivery service with options to click a receipe and all have the quantity(ies) of all of the necessary foods added into your cart will kill this whole microshopping silliness.<p>most who seriously want to cook probably want to choose their own ingredients.<p>[</i>] actually, people who want ridiculously complex meals, but for some strange reason want to cook it instead of buying it already made might like this.