
Meal Kits Have a Smaller Carbon Footprint Than Grocery Shopping, Study Says - taude
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/04/22/716010599/meal-kits-have-smaller-carbon-footprint-than-grocery-shopping-study-says
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sct202
There are a lot of assumptions with the rate of emissions in regards to
transportation to the store and food waste as result of overbuying that make
this study hard to believe.

Meal kits don't fully replace all your food for a week, so it is unlikely to
eliminate a whole trip to the store so those emission savings that they are
counting towards the meal kits are suspect. And then the waste statistics will
vary heavily on the person and household characteristics. I've known people
who procrastinate on making the meal kits and throw the whole thing out or let
their roommates pick over whatever hasn't rotten. In addition, since some
things with Blue Apron come pre-cut or picked, I wonder how the researchers
measured waste at Blue Apron's kit production facilities, where some parts of
the vegetables/meat aren't used in any recipe or waste from over-ordered
produce.

Edit: More details are here [https://news.umich.edu/those-home-delivered-meal-
kits-are-gr...](https://news.umich.edu/those-home-delivered-meal-kits-are-
greener-than-you-thought-new-study-concludes/)

~~~
thatoneuser
It stands to reason that bulk preparation of these meals would lead to
dramatic reduce in waste compared to individuals. It would be an obvious
metric to monitor.

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corodra
You know what this feels like? Remember that guy who was some economics
professor in NYC that laid the claim that public libraries are terrible for
the economy or some other nonsense and that it's best to just let Amazon sell
people books instead. Plus, he roughly said something along the lines of
"It'll be good for their stock price too".

Remember that jackass? Feels like he's at it again.

And the math and logic used in this drives me insane. It's like the same logic
"Oh, it's cheaper to buy half an ounce of taco seasoning instead of a pound.
The half ounce pack is only a dollar. A pound is 5 dollars." Makes me want to
rip my hair out and scream.

~~~
nwah1
The company that produces the meal kits can buy all the ingredients in bulk.

They can portion all the ingredients perfectly so that there's no waste.

They don't need to staff, light, heat, cool, and stock any stores.

And you don't need to go to the store and back, which means less emissions.

The argument is perfectly sensible, when we're comparing to normal cooking in
American households. Maybe compared to a Mexican cookout for your whole
extended family and neighborhood, it isn't as good, but that's not the most
relevant comparison in a typical US context.

~~~
corodra
They can buy in bulk... unlike grocery stores?

Portioning food for you at a premium because you can’t adult?

Goto the store and back? Like, pick up a head of garlic, go home, then pick up
carrots, go home, etc? Most folks in America do a one day shop to pick up
groceries for the week.

Because individually wrapped foods is so less wasteful than buying even
minimal bulk.

What I love about this, it’s people who never grew up poor who try to tell
people how to live cheaper and frugal. It’s amazingly stupid. I grew up white
trash poor. You know how you keep costs down? Buy in bulk and cut out the
middle men as much as possible. Meal kit companies are another middle man with
plenty of overhead both financially and environmentally.

These kits typically cost $10 and I still have to cook? Most of these are of
the $3 to $4 range if you buy it all yourself sensibly at the store.

~~~
perl4ever
"You know how you keep costs down? Buy in bulk and cut out the middle men as
much as possible."

I have been noticing frequently that unit prices for larger packages of things
are often as high or higher than smaller ones. I suspect that due to the
increasing quality of data analytics, stores have realized that they can
systematically take advantage of the majority of people who don't scrutinize
everything and make assumptions.

It's interesting that you don't mention looking for things on sale. That is
something I have rarely done in the past, but I'm starting to feel like maybe
it's necessary to avoid being screwed.

Shopping for a week or more is only logical if you can't stop at a store on
your way home from work, and you live a long way from it. I live less than a
mile from work, and slightly over a mile from the nearest supermarket.

~~~
corodra
I got more on a soap box there because I lost my cool a bit. But yea, sales
and clearances were our vital methods of staying within budget. Hell, there
was one week I survived on a 96 cent clearance bag of assorted bread from
Walmart.

But one of the other things that’s getting lost is the human element. It seems
like if it’s not on the internet, it doesn’t exist or is unattainable. I
developed relationships with farmers and some businesses to get the
undesirable pickings or overflow at a lower price. Nothing wrong with them or
even spoiled. Think of, ever seen a really ugly ass strawberry? Most packagers
don’t accept them because of stupid public perception. Or they just sneak one
or two in. You can get those really damn cheap from a grower. Or slightly over
ripe for even cheaper or free. Then you learn how to make your own preserves
out of them. Some farmers markets have end of weekend sell offs too. Super
cheap on all the leftovers that haven’t sold. I’m pretty sure you can do the
same with a supermarket if you get to know the right people. But I never tried
a big box market.

But also, bagel shops and Panera, make friends with the night crew. You can
get some of the days unsold baked goods for free or for 5 bucks. But people
just refuse to know others and that’s being considered “okay”.

It’s not. I’m introverted too. It’s not okay to hide from society and run away
from relationships.

I’m in tech now. Tech is great and all... but it’s so damn silly to imagine
that an internet company can save poor people somehow with their service. Same
with the logic of bitcoin saving those without access to “fiat currency”. If
ya don’t have access to a dollar, ya don’t really have access to the internet,
let alone a computer.

I live 1.4 miles from the grocery store I visit. It’s still smart to only shop
once a week. It’s the death by a million papercuts in finance. If you go too
often, your likelihood of buying things you don’t truly need goes up. That’s
bad for your budget. Plus think, your mob/demob time at a grocery store is
always about 5 min. Finding a parking spot, walk into the store, ring up, cash
out, walk to the car, load groceries, leave parking lot. That doesn’t include
actual shopping or travel to the store. It’s only 20min once a week for me to
get groceries, roughly. You can spend way more than that, in time per week, if
you go to the store to pick up as you need. Just in time inventory works fine
for stores. But not really for people. It’s scary where your time sinks are
when you track your time.

~~~
perl4ever
My attitude has been, if I'm concerned about my cash flow/finances, and I
can't find a way to earn more, then I need to look at what I'm spending on
housing and transportation which outweigh everything else. When something
worries me, I try to ask myself, is this what is really worrying me, or am I
substituting something that seems more easily controlled for the real problem?

It's a cliche that if you could eliminate your daily Starbucks you would save
enough to become a millionaire some day. But if I continue to get retail
coffee _whenever I want_ , I won't get it anywhere near every day. So the
savings aren't that great. Same for real butter, or visually attractive
produce, or imported organic pasta. Something that is a small fraction of my
income _and_ which I do a small fraction of the time is just not the place to
look for savings. My rule of thumb is that while it is true that small things
can add up, small things multiplied by small things don't add up
significantly.

------
craftyguy
Blue Apron was name dropped quite a lot in that article... Who sponsored this
study?

~~~
ctulek
I couldn’t find anywhere including the article. NPR has a disclaimer though
that one of their sponsors is Blue Apron.

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.

~~~
bryanlarsen
From the article:

"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."

~~~
jjeaff
By that logic, only that one letter at the very end of the delivery route is
responsible for any of the co2 emissions from package delivery. Everything
else is just along for the ride, since they were going by anyway.

~~~
SilasX
Bingo! This is one of my pet peeves!

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...](https://slate.com/technology/2008/08/is-your-netflix-queue-
destroying-the-environment.html)

It was discussed on HN too:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414173](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414173)

~~~
thatoneuser
Isn't there just some average value floating around out there to estimate the
cost of an ounce-mile of mail?

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.

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astazangasta
The assumption that meal kits cause less food waste is dubious. This is
exactly why we stopped getting Blue Apron - we found that we only ate 1 out of
3 kits we got, and our fridge would pile up with unused raw ingredients we
would hope to be able to use before they spoiled. In the end we decided the
combination of trash and food waste was too much and went back to groceries
full time.

------
bfrydl
> But store meals required purchasing food in larger quantities than necessary
> (think a 12-pack of hamburger buns for a two-person meal).

This is the key, and one of the reasons I love Blue Apron. The meals come in
such exactly portioned amounts that the only thing left when I'm done eating
is the packaging. There is zero food waste, ever. (Incidentally, this makes an
effective weight-loss diet if your problem is overeating like me.)

That being said, I wonder if Blue Apron would still come out ahead of home
cooking if you did not attempt to make the same meals but instead more typical
home cooked meals. Blue Apron recipes on average are more varied and have more
ingredients than what a person would normally cook, so I wonder if the extra
food waste is more a consequence of trying to reproduce them.

~~~
craftyguy
Freezers are a thing.

~~~
jbob2000
There's an energy cost to keep food frozen for weeks or months at a time. It's
common for houses to have multiple fridges and freezes, you wouldn't need to
do this if food was delivered when you wanted to eat.

~~~
jjeaff
Having more stuff in your freezer actually costs less. Due to the higher
thermal mass that takes longer to warm up when the freezer is off. So if more
food delivery means less stuff in the freezer, it's going to take more energy.

And let's be honest, no one is going to ditch their freezer entirely for
something like blue apron.

~~~
jbob2000
My brother just moved into an apartment and wants to get a chest freezer so he
can store more frozen food. But there's really nowhere to put it, so he has to
go out grocery shopping more often then not.

People who already have freezers won't ditch them, why get rid of something
that works. This will be a generational change - younger generations will
never get secondary freezers because they'll be big consumers of meal kits.

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illegalsmile
Ultimately changing consumer behavior and the way we shop is the way to reduce
the carbon footprint and waste, not delivery food services. Even being aware
that everything has an environmental cost can make a difference in how one
purchases food.

Eat less meat. Make delis, bakeries, butchers, etc... more available in the
grocery store so instead of buying six chicken breasts you can buy two. Same
for hamburger buns, go to the bakery and buy individual buns. Make grocery
stores donate their food or compost it rather than throw it out. Save and more
importantly eat leftovers! While obviously not for everyone, shop for a few
days not a week or two. More grocery stores need to provide a local Blue Apron
alternative so I can go in and pick up a few boxes with whatever else I need.

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esotericn
There's a whole class of article like this one that rub me the wrong way for
reasons I can't quite explain.

It's basically taking a theoretical "average person" who just happens to be
very wasteful and extrapolating in the headline, heavily implying something
which isn't actually the case.

I don't waste food unless you include things like chopping the end off an
onion because it could theoretically have been used in a soup. Actual waste,
the sort of 'throwing away a burger' the article describes, just doesn't
happen to me.

Beyond that, logically a person who cares about their carbon footprint does
not waste (significant amounts of) food.

X is bigger than Y if you stretch X.

~~~
c22
I used to be good at not wasting food until I had kids. A toddler will ask for
a burger, confirm they want a burger, and then not eat any of it. Or they'll
just eat the cheese. You can save it in a tupperware in the fridge and they
might take a bite from it in the next few days but eventually you will have to
throw it out. If you try to eat the burger the child will cry.

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ricardobeat
Still no good if you’re trading carbon emissions for a lot more plastic in the
environment. You cannot offset / undo plastics.

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gonyea
Meal kits waste an incredible amount of plastic. Using it felt immoral.

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thatoneuser
I think people are being way too dismissive of this. There is a ton of waste
that goes on getting you your groceries. Walmart is notorious for fucking
small farmers by rejecting huge quantities of pre agreed on produce. Once in
the store some % gets tossed out before it even gets to the inside shelves.
Then you have the amount the consumer wastes.

I'm not necessarily saying this is a good take because that seems like a fuck
ton of plastic they use, but I could see it being overall relatively a more
efficient way.

~~~
taude
I'd assume that the store throwing out some of the waste before hitting
shelves would likely be done by the meal prep companies too. But agree on the
consumer waste

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dzhiurgis
What if you buy meal kit in a supermarket (common here in NZ)?

I feel it's the delivery that's worst part of these. Grabbing one while you
shop or on a way back from work seems genius.

Ultimately these companies don't really have a moat. Most supermarkets deliver
to your home or carry their own set of kits...

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m0llusk
It used to be that much of what was bought at a grocery would come in basic
paper or plastic wrapping. Now much of my work is with residential maintenance
and these meal kits are a huge problem at every level.

They are huge boxes that get delivered by big trucks, but there is not enough
delivery parking or storage.

Then they generate a bunch of waste which is supposed to be mostly recyclable
but ends up going out as one big mess of garbage with the boxes not broken
down and all of the items unsorted and mixed together with wet garbage.

The situation reminds me of the flushable wipes crisis that snuck up on
everyone despite plenty of early warnings.

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codinger
Who funded the study?

