Blue Apron Shares Hit New Low, as Anyone Can Do “Meal Kits,” Even Walmart

I really liked Blue Apron but there was so much trash left over! I really wish they would do better pre-planning with ingredients, like send a stick of butter and a jug of vinegar instead of a pat and a tiny bottle. There were so many bottles from week to week of the same stuff - vinegar, soy sauce, mirin, etc.. We ended up just using a lot of the techniques we learned from Blue Apron to prepare vegetables from CSA boxes.<p>It&#x27;s a great idea for young people who would like to learn how to cook (or learn some new techniques&#x2F;staples). I might get a few months subscription for a relative who just moved out on their own as a gift, for example.

Without reading the article, this is exactly why I gave up on my last side-project.<p>The subscription box business is great for consumers, but nearly indefensible against competitors.<p>Dollar shave club was hugely successful because it was a first-mover. Now Gillette and others are offering direct subscription services.<p>There simply is no moat if you don&#x27;t own the base materials in the package and can control for manufacturing costs.

I&#x27;ve been using HelloFresh for a couple months. I don&#x27;t think there is a business model here. Too much expense in shipping materials, and then a pain for the customer to dispose&#x2F;recycle said materials. Vegetable quality is hit or miss. And the price is high. The convenience factor just barely, barely makes it worth while.<p>Having said that, the recipes are really great (I&#x27;m not a cook, but can follow a recipe). Wish they would just bundle their recipes into a book and sell that (strangely, I&#x27;ve not been able to find a &#x27;complete meal&#x27; recipe book with a set of steps for each part of the meal sequenced together)

Completely indefensible from competitors with zero chance of a monopoly. Peter Thiel is tutting disapprovingly down in his antarctic survival mansion...

Agreed this isn&#x27;t much of a defensible business: if anything it feels like a stepping stone to the next phase: 100% on demand meal kits.<p>1. I upload my meal plan for the next week or two, or select from pre-designed options.<p>2. The grocer [1] picks and packages the ingredients into kits, one per meal.<p>3. I pick them up and&#x2F;or they are shipped to me. (or a bit of both if it&#x27;s Amazon or Walmart)<p>Actually, that&#x27;s just a stepping stone to a fully automated kitchen, but that&#x27;s a separate thread for another day...<p>[1] I&#x27;m using this term loosely.

Wow, it&#x27;s only been 18 years since Blue Mountain Arts being sold to Excite@Home for $780M.<p>If you recall, Blue Mountain Arts made 3&#x2F;4 of a billion dollars in 1999 for it&#x27;s &quot;ecard&quot; business, a business that literally anyone with a webserver can replicate in an afternoon.<p>It&#x27;s too bad too, because Excite was my favorite &quot;webportal&#x2F;homepage&quot; back then. And the dotcom bubble burst killed it.

I feel like there&#x27;s still a lot of potential for this type of a business to pivot&#x2F;grow as they try to improve the unit economics in multiple ways.<p>It sounds like (based on the thread) a lot of people picked up Blue Apron as a starting point to cooking. So why not create an interesting skillset based&#x2F;gamification of cooking product where you learn new skills all the time. I&#x27;m sure everyone can dice&#x2F;cut&#x2F;bake&#x2F;fry&#x2F;sautee etc in a few meals but there are probably other advanced techniques which you could subscribe to, to learn new&#x2F;interesting techniques&#x2F;recipes.<p>Also, you could have a community based thing where different people compete for skillset or you order blue apron for a party and cook together etc (larger quantities -- less wastage, better economics).

I used to subscribe to Green Chef, but stopped mostly due to the time it takes to make the meals. Usually it took twice as long as it said on the recipes.<p>We now subscribe to Freshly. Meals are pre-made and in 3 minutes they are heated up. Perfect!

Blue Apron needs to sell itself to a large supermarket chain. They can use the markets as a base of operation. Their business model is impossible to maintain. Marketing and delivery costs are killing them. I suspect a year from now we won&#x27;t see them as an independent concern. They might even go out of business. Walmart will win this fight, no question.

Market cap is now under 500M. Is there any point at which they become a value play, or are the unit economics too awful?<p>Edit: Typo dutifully noted and corrected!