
Blue Apron lays off more workers - crunchlibrarian
https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-apron-lays-off-more-workers-1542148447
======
untog
Can't help but feel like Blue Apron and its competitors are the next
generation of Groupon and _its_ competitors. Burnt through VC funding
competing with each other only to find out the actual market for their product
isn't that great.

But thanks for all the free trials, VC investors! I've had a few above average
dinners out of it.

~~~
DoubleGlazing
I think a bigger problem which these services don't get is that if you live in
a reasonably sized city then you will have a huge range of takeaway/delivery
food options.

The amount of people who want to cook and prepare a nice meal is probably a
lot less than the amount of people who just want to buy, eat and enjoy a nice
meal.

I live in Dublin, not exactly the biggest of cities, but I can't think of a
single type of food that I can't order through one of the various home
delivery apps available to me. No need to cook food or be constrained by a
predetermined set of menus.

It's hard to make the case for a meal in a box service when you can order just
about any food imaginable from your phone and it will be delivered within 30
minutes.

~~~
michaelt
The case for a meal-in-a-box service is "It's home cooking, but easier for
only a modest increase in cost"

The case for home cooking over delivery food most people know already :)

~~~
cardamomo
And what is the case for home cooking over delivery food, in your opinion? (I
may agree with you, but I don't think everyone is on the same page here.)

~~~
c0nducktr
It being far less expensive, seems to be the standout reason. Normal people
can't afford $700/month for food delivery services.

~~~
Agathos
It's a little less expensive, but I wouldn't call it "far" less expensive
unless you're prepared to stick to the lowest-cost ingredients like rice and
beans.

~~~
michaelt
In my area, cooking for myself, my weekly supermarket food bill is about £30
(~$40) and that lets me eat pretty well. For comparison, a medium-sized
delivery pizza is £17 (~$22).

So I'd be looking at about 4x the cost if I ate a delivery pizza every day.

How do the figures compare in your area? Is delivery food radically cheaper?

~~~
Agathos
I'm in Chicago, so $22 is almost the cost of a medium deep dish pizza, and I
can stretch that to almost a week of dinners if it's just me.

A couple of footnotes: 1\. Pizza is absurdly cheap, even for takeout food. I
don't really understand how that works. 2\. I prefer takeout over paying for
delivery, which saves a lot. My favorite pizza places are in walking distance.

------
usaphp
I've used 4-5 services similar to Blue Apron, the issue with them for me is
that we got tired by being limited to 3-4 recipes per week to choose from, and
most of those is just different variation of pasta.

Also I don't want to pay ~$9 for their pasta dish and also cook and wash
dishes after it. Even if someone who is making minimum wage - they will waste
~30 minutes cooking + ~15 minutes washing dishes and cleaning the kitchen
after, so it's about $15 on top of the $9 portion, and you still have to go to
grocery because their food is mostly for dinner and for 2-4 times a week
because they have limited number of recipes.

On top of that I want to be able to spontaneously decide what I want to eat
today, and not being forced to choose my food 2 weeks before. Maybe that works
for someone, but whenever we try it just gets really boring and annoying after
3-4 weeks of usage.

~~~
jrochkind1
I think Blue Apron is really the king of these services, on the 2-person-meals
option there are now usually 8 options to choose from (they increased from 6 a
couple months ago), only 2 max of which are pasta.

Most weeks there's a steak option, a fish option, or both, and there's always
a couple non-pasta chicken options. I think the steak options are becoming
somewhat rarer, there used to be one every single week.

A while ago they stopped charging different prices for different options. (So
of course, I usually try to get the ones that look like the most expensive
ingredients). I think that, along with increasing the number of options every
week, was probably in response to customer feedback on pain points... but both
those things also cut into their profitability. My sense is that they've been
reducing the cost of the ingredients accordingly, trying to catch up.

I don't mind the time to cook and clean myself, the whole point for me is I
_want_ to be cooking... it's just SO convenient not to have to do menu
planning and shopping. And most of the meals cook quicker than what I'd cook
myself (you can follow them like a zombie barely realizing what you're doing,
for better or worse, ha). I'm willing to pay for that... to a point. If the
ingredients and recipes are good. And they are correctly charging the right
price for me -- in that any higher, and I'd cancel, they've got me at my max
ha.

Even $15/meal is probably less than I'd pay at any restaurant/carry out that
wasn't terribly unhealthy, including gratuity and tax.

~~~
ryanmercer
>Even $15/meal is probably less than I'd pay at any restaurant/carry out that
wasn't terribly unhealthy, including gratuity and tax.

15$ a meal is pure insanity for 400-600 kcals, I eat 6-8lbs of chicken a week
and my weekly grocery bill is right around 50$.

I live in Indiana, the average household income is $45,943, even just one
person earning that you're taking home 35,482$ a year which is about 97$ a day
which makes just 1 of these meals a day 10.2% of your net income.

Most of the country is not tech workers drawing high 5 and low 6-figure
incomes.

~~~
jrochkind1
Right, but the person I was replying to was comparing it to prepared food.

I think more Americans may eat prepared food more often than you think (and
Blue Apron or similar services are usually 2-3 meals a week, which is far from
every meal).

But I agree it looks like the price they would need to charge to be profitable
is not a price there is a sufficient market for.

------
jrochkind1
I'm a Blue Apron customer, I like it pretty okay.

But I've thought for a while that:

A) I wouldn't pay any more than I am now for it (in fact, I keep looking
around for cheaper alternatives, but there aren't any, probably because...)

B) I suspect they can't make a profit at what they charge.

(especially cause as time goes on, I skip more and more weeks, further cutting
into their per-acquired-customer revenue. Either I'm just getting tired of it,
or my suspicions that each month the ingredients get cheaper and cheaper are
correct, perhaps in response to B above).

I don't expect them (or their competitors) to stay around.

~~~
PenguinCoder
Spot on with my thoughts and experience recently as well. I do like the pre
prepped aspect, but I can't justify the costs and quantity of food/portions
any longer.

~~~
jrochkind1
Yeah the portions have gotten smaller too, you think?? I thought so too.

------
drcode
To me, the real appeal to me of meal services are "long tail" nutritional
preferences- For instance, if you eat a strict ketogenic diet, you can get
meal kits for that as well.

It's difficult to make your own ketogenic meals solely via your own grocery
shopping and recipe research... but I can now eat pretty tasty meals with
minimal effort in 2018 via meal services.

~~~
wutbrodo
That's interesting to hear; I'm not in ketosis, but have a pretty non-standard
diet from an American perspective[1], and part of what's kept me doing
grocery/cooking from scratch and away from meal kits and other similar
solutions is that they seem pretty poorly tailored to my bare minimum of a
healthy diet. A friend gave me a $30 referral discount to HelloFresh and I
tried out one shipment and gave up on it, for pretty much precisely this
reason. I guess I should take a deeper look at their options for special types
of diets, or maybe even

> It's difficult to make your own ketogenic meals solely via your own grocery
> shopping and recipe research

I'm surprised to hear this even more. Have you tried Googling "keto recipes
[other search terms]" and meal-planning around it? If you've already tried
this, I don't intend this to be patronizing; I'm actually relatively new to
cooking most of what I eat, which means things like meal planning are actually
pretty new to me. I've just found it to be a really effective way to organize
frequent cooking, and once you build up a bit of a repertoire of recipes, it
doesn't really take any extra time beyond putting the ingredients and
Instacart order together.

[1] Which it turns out means simply "getting enough protein and fiber to not
be super unhealthy"....

~~~
brianbreslin
I've used sunbasket because it has paleo options. Happy to share a referral
code.

------
throwaway427
Literally eating a Blue Apron as I read this.

This is too bad, I just started doing Blue Apron and I really like it. I'm
actually a good cook but I get stuck in a rut with respect to cooking the same
things over and over again so it's been nice to have some enforced variety,
especially when it comes to sides or bowl/hashes.

The quality is good, the prices seems fair. Just seems like a fraught model.

~~~
edoceo
Just get a random recipe subscription?

~~~
throwaway427
It's not an issue of ideas, it's an issue of wastage and cost. And cost might
even be a wash but at least now I don't have to watch a whole bottle of
gochujang or horseradish or bag of farro go to waste because I wanted to try
this one recipe I saw on NYT cooking and you can't get those things in
perfectly sized amounts.

~~~
unexpected
I feel the exact same way - maybe that's the pain point a business needs to be
solving - making much smaller bottles of one-off ingredients!

~~~
TeMPOraL
So you think we need to trade the occasional waste of some ingredient you
didn't use (and didn't bother to give to a friend/neighbour) for wasting
ungodly amounts of plastic on small packaging?

(I know this is happening and will continue to happen - and this is how market
choices contribute to the climate change and destruction of environment we
live in.)

~~~
throwaway427
Modern landfills really aren't all that bad, the real cost being the space
they take up, which happens to not be a problem in the US.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Last time I checked, modern landfills were methane emitters, which is bad.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
About 60M metric tonnes annual worldwide. Energy production and livestock
produce 600M. So landfills are about 10% of the problem

~~~
TeMPOraL
Thanks for the number!

Still, my concern isn't _just_ the landfill. When talking about unnecessary
packaging, it's also the energy cost of extracting oil and turning it into
that plastic packaging. Not all trash is created equal.

~~~
throwaway427
Phrased that way... what isn't concerning? Maybe enjoy Blue Apron for a year
and skip an iPhone upgrade?

------
towndrunk
Maybe I'm just not their target but I want to pick my own veggies and meat. I
don't want to leave it up to a minimum wager tossing whatever in my box as it
heads down the line.

~~~
ceejayoz
You're getting downvoted, but this was an issue for me as well. I'll go
through half a dozen ribeyes before picking the one I like the looks of. Same
for produce - I'll pick certain onions, good looking broccoli, the non-slimy
mushrooms. This is at a high-end grocery store (Wegmans), too.

~~~
jrochkind1
When I first started using Blue Apron a year plus ago, I found the meat to be
generally pretty high quality, as good or better as what I could get at the
standard grocery store picking it out myself (rather than a "premium" one like
whole foods or whatever), and better than Trader Joe's'. (around me, the
standard grocery store has pretty crappy meat).

My sense is that meat quality has been going down, but I dunno, maybe it's
exactly the same meat and the novelty has just worn off.

My sense is also that Blue Apron has historically had higher quality
ingredients than some competitors, but I can't say that for sure, and am not
sure it continues to be true.

~~~
14
Don't doubt your senses. I am certain, in the sense of my own taste
experience, that 7-11 started off using higher quality meat then switched. In
Canada 7-11 had a big change a couple years back and started selling fried
chicken as well as pizza some of which had chicken. Initially I was really
impressed with meat quality. It was tender white meat and fresh and seemed of
comparable product to what you would expect from kfc back in the day. Then one
day it stopped. Just never got as good. It was like they fed us their best for
half a year then once in moved to a lower cheaper meat.

~~~
ransom1538
Like a dinner party. Excellent wines first, 8 more bottles deep, start pouring
the 10$ bottle.

------
drdeadringer
The number of podcasts I listen to has mushroomed the past several years.
Shortly ago, it seemed like half of them were brimming with Blue Apron
sponsorship ads bordering on "Two Starbucks on every corner". Thankfully
that's stopped, and now I know why. Perhaps their ad push didn't work as
intended and/or expected.

[Of course, the new ad blitz is for someone else.]

Personally, I'm currently just not one of their target markets although on
paper I probably should be. If/when I move further away than 1 block from a
grocery store [I lucked out, a lot], and/or want to eat more complicated prep-
time food, and/or have less time or ability to shop for ingredients [and
somehow a simple grocery-delivery service just won't cut it] for some ever-
increasingly complicated prep-time food, I'll might see the light.

~~~
rtpg
If i didn’t listen to podcasts I’d have no idea the electric toothbrush market
is so big

The target market for this stuff feels so slim. Either you’re in this “too
time constrained to shop, not too time constrained to make food at home”
sliver, or in the “don’t want to menu plan” market. In the latter, you pay for
this menu planning value add with, what, 30% surplus on the ingredients? Only
to be replaceable by a recipe app, basically

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
>If i didn’t listen to podcasts I’d have no idea the electric toothbrush
market is so big

Made me laugh. I agree. I have yet to figure out what’s wrong with the
Sonicare, seems great.

Luckily I listen to podcasts (mostly electronics) that don’t do inline
advertisements. When I hear them in other shows I can usually tell they are
coming with the awkward segue that seems to be common MO.

~~~
krrrh
Quip toothbrush seems like it was born out of a pitch based on flashing the
Dollar Shave Club exit numbers in front of a wide-eyed VC. Honestly hard to
understand how they can compete with cheap knockoff sonicare heads from
Amazon, but they’ll spend a lot of money finding out.

------
tyingq
IPO in June 2017 at ~$10 per share. Closed today at $1.22 ...ouch.

~~~
maxxxxx
I think this means Mission Accomplished for the investors. Suck out all the
value from the company and then dump it on retail investors by going public.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
People keep not understanding or appreciating this point. This is precisely
what Uber is in the middle of doing right now too, and to some extent probably
what Spotify did, and the future value of those two is by no means clear or
stable.

As long as they can can prop up the valuation for a short time, they can
capitalize shortly after an IPO and externalize the losses on unwitting
millions of people who came to own some unicorn stock because they were auto-
enrolled in the 2055 retirement mix of some bottom scraping asset manager that
charges high fees on a portfolio with loose definitions of what it can invest
in.

~~~
dcow
Where I grew up “pump and dump” was a _dirty_ term.

------
neonate
[http://outline.com/https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-
apron-l...](http://outline.com/https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-apron-lays-
off-more-workers-1542148447)

------
empath75
I like their recipes but it’s just a grotesquely wasteful way to ship food
around. Ultimately this business belongs in grocery stores. I’d happily drive
down to Wegmans once a week to pick up 3-4 locally packaged blue apron style
meals.

~~~
ghaff
In the scheme of things, most likely including going to restaurants, I have
trouble working up too much outrage about the packaging and shipping.

That said, I agree with your broader point. I'm not sure why more stores (some
do) don't have more kits. Planning for the next week in a way that includes
picking 3 meals that will involve at least a modest amount of effort doesn't
work for me--and I like to cook generally.

I get that they appeal to people who like to cook but want some structure (and
home delivery) around it. But it seems a pretty niche market. I got Blue Apron
once. It was "OK." And, while I've thought about it, I've never ordered from
any of these services again.

~~~
nemothekid
I used Blue Apron for a couple month. I’m hardly a “save the earth” type - but
one of the reasons I’ve been skipping the service is the huge amount of
cardboard and plastic ships with each box. I must have 8 full extra heads of
garlic lying around. The “ice packs” are a pain in the neck to get rid of and
it doesn’t feel right to dump that stuff in the trash.

However I will admit I got tired of the selection. Usually there will only be
one meal that I’m actually looking forward to eating and the other 2 are
unappetizing enough for me to just eat out.

~~~
ghaff
I reuse a lot of the plastic bags. But I imagine I'd run out of use for ice
packs after a while. Given the amount of cardboard I have to take to recycling
from Amazon and elsewhere, I'm not sure a bit more makes much of a difference.

But the menus mostly don't excite me that much. And if I'm going to spend that
much effort I have tons of cookbooks and online recipes. Your experience
sounds like the one week I tried it. There was a pretty good recipe. An OK
recipe. And then some obnoxiously complex hamburger recipe that wasn't even
all that great.

------
sjroot
I am actively job interviewing and I have talked to a lot of startups. One of
things I always ask my interviewer is whether or not the company is
profitable.

If you get to be that large of a company (100 workers => 4% of staff => ~2500
employees) and you are not making a profit, there is something wrong. Bringing
all of those people onboard seems like a waste of investor money.

That said, I am a fan of Blue Apron and I do hope that their figure out a way
to operate in a profitable manner soon.

Edit: as replies point out, profitability isn’t a great indicator for the
success of a company. While it is fair game to ask, there are other better
indicators (churn and burn, existing customer base, etc) that give a better
picture. My point was that I think a company at this size should be profitable
or working aggressively to make that possible. I think Blue Apron is laying
these people off to accomplish that.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Don't think that's necessarily a really good metric in this day and age, as
there are "good" kinds of unprofitability and "bad" kinds of unprofitability.
Amazon was unprofitable for most of its existence until relatively recently.
Most successful startups are unprofitable, and these days with the "winner
take all" mentality of most VCs a company would be _penalized_ for being
profitable too early.

I think a much better metric, especially for early stage companies, is their
growth rate, their customer acquisition cost, and very importantly, their
customer churn rate. Blue Apron's churn rate coupled with their high CAC has
always been a giant flashing red flag.

~~~
p1necone
I think "good" unprofitable basically boils down to "only unprofitable because
what would otherwise be profit is being immediately reinvested into growth
(marketing, new employees, better third party software/hardware etc)".

~~~
mattnewton
And the bad unprofitably is usually a variation on selling dollars for .95 to
try and capture a market (to charge 1.05) or build up infrastructure/scale
that will eventually let you produce them for .94 cents

That has to both pan out and pan out before they run out of money.

~~~
glhaynes
Not my area but I get the impression Amazon has done a lot of both of what the
above two posts call "good" unprofitability and "bad" unprofitability.

------
g105b
I never understood business models like this in the first place.

Those who like to cook don't have a problem buying ingredients themselves.

Those who don't like cooking don't mind spending the same amount as a Blue
Apron subscription to order takeaway.

The target audience consists of people who would theoretically like to cook,
but don't know how to read a recipe book and/or don't want to go shopping or
use online grocery shopping.

~~~
Merad
I think this is an often understated point when discussing meal services. In
my experience with Blue Apron and Hello Fresh there were some good and
interesting meal choices (often ethnic dishes that I hadn't tried before), but
probably 50% of the menu boiled down to simple dishes like "some variation of
spaghetti with salad" or "chicken breast with a simple sauce and basic
veggies." People who already know how to cook are going to realize how much
they're overpaying for these simple dishes, and people who learn to cook
thanks to the service will come to realize it unless they avoid the grocery
store entirely.

Ultimately the complex/exotic dishes just aren't offered enough to offset
paying $10/ small portion for the more simple dishes.

------
beerlord
I think there is a legitimate role for Government or Not-For-Profit here:

Rather than providing money handouts to the worst off citizens, why not just
cut out the middleman and offer basic prefab housing and cheap nutritious
meals instead?

Instead of shipping individual groceries to middle-class hipsters, why not
just cut out the middleman and cook the food instead?

Such a restaurant scheme already operates in India (called 'subsidised
canteens'), and is used by all classes there since its cheap and reliable. The
meals aren't free - they cost a few cents.

I'd happily eat almost every meal at such a restaurant which offered no-frills
service, a simple (and probably vegetarian) menu, and very low cost. The menu
could be coordinated with seasonally and locally available ingredients, and
would probably offer a single choice of food, changed daily.

It would be like a soup-kitchen - but the need to pay a buck, and the presence
of the middle classes, would make it acceptable for everyone.

I think if organised well enough, it could actually be more efficient that
having everyone cooking at home - better logistics for the use of ingredients,
less food waste, less water wasted in cleaning dishes, etc. Not too mention
the better division of labour by having dedicated cooks doing the work with
professional-grade equipment, rather than everyone spending ages to do it at
home (and for a lot of poor people, they lack the equipment or skills to cook
proper meals).

~~~
TylerE
> Rather than providing money handouts to the worst off citizens, why not just
> cut out the middleman and offer basic prefab housing and cheap nutritious
> meals instead?

They did this. Ever hear of government cheese?

Turns out, the g'ovt isn't a very good grocer. Thus food stamps, and later
EBT.

------
noer
(non-delivery) Food is a really tough space to compete in. Acquisition costs
are relatively high and usually require you to give some amount of product
away. Because you're trying to get people to switch from a known quantity
(whatever someone buys to prepare themselves) or to make more time for cooking
(over prepared food or food delivery), you need to make sure that first
experience is excellent and hope that you're going to get a very good number
of people to actually pay for the service when it isn't free.

From my experience (work for an investor in and did
product/acquisition/marketing for a food startup), there are very few people
who will say no to a free meal, but converting those people is hard and there
are a ton of variables that are hard to control for. The biggest thing that is
tough to plan for is each person's taste. For example, if you pick a free meal
and you don't like it will you really buy another one?

------
misiogames
call me old fashion, but dinner (which is the only meal I have at home) is
more than just the process to put energy into the body, it's a family ritual
that provides additional value via the cohesion and collaboration required by
the family members to make it happen, and this ritual starts when, after work
the family members got to go out of their way home to personally select the
best products they can find, which they will bring home, this part is
annoying, but is part of the whole thing. And for the days when we don't want
to cook, or want something different, meal delivery is super effective. These
offering are in a middle ground with just a little value as a novelty.

------
lechiffre10
Typical problem of "path to least resistance" which is also the reason Amazon
succeeded so well by recommending products ( Netflix does the same with show
recommendations) We are by nature prone to take the path that requires the
least effort so Cooking vs Ordering food ( which arguably has been made a LOT
easier with the likes of Postmates,foodora, Uber eats etc...) means that
people will have a tendency to order food instead of cook. Especially when you
consider the amount of competition among these food delivery companies and the
discounts/promotions they throw at users to retain their business.

------
awicklander
We signed up for Blue Apron and Sun Basket. Time after time, the actual food
provided by blue apron was inferior. Often close to rotten. This isn’t a
complicated story( Blue Apron delivers food with instructions but the food
isn’t very good.

~~~
pfranz
I wonder if that's a regional thing? I haven't used Blue Apron in 6 months,
but often the ingredients would last probably twice as long as most
ingredients from the local grocer. It also tended to show up around 10-11am
and be fine by the time I got home between 8-9pm in the box.

------
checker659
Ashwin Ramdas's satirical video on Blue Apron is worth watching:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDMfDwDUxKE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDMfDwDUxKE)

------
tjpnz
What would prevent a supermarket chain from implementing their own weekly
boxes and offer them in store or for delivery using their own established
logistics? With the access they have to vendors they would be able to offer
more range, fresher ingredients and better prices while still being able to
make a profit. I don't live in the US but I've seen what they've been doing on
YouTube with sponsorships and limited time offers - they must be taking a huge
hit.

~~~
krrrh
Nothing. Here’s a photo I took of a kit in a German grocer just outside an
U-bahn station, about 4 years ago:

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/ktemanrhxruxi3r/2014-12-23%2014.34...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/ktemanrhxruxi3r/2014-12-23%2014.34.08.JPG?dl=0)

I took the picture for a friend who was looking into a meal kit play at the
time. Seeing it executed so well I couldn’t imagine how a subscription service
could compete. They had about 4-6 meal displays like this amongst the regular
groceries.

~~~
stevenhuang
That's amazingly well executed indeed, and the first one I've seen a picture
of at that. I wish the local grocers here in Ontario (Loblaws) would do
something similar.

------
lolsal
I have tried Blue Apron and switched over to Green Box and I really like both
of them.

I am a really decent cook, but I mostly cook for 2 people so the value of
these services to me is the convenience of just-what-you-need serving-size
bits of rarer oddities like a small hunk of a special cheese, 3 shoots of
green onions, a small bunch of fresh rosemary, exactly the right amount of
this sauce or that seasoning, etc. Often unless my partner and I are doubling-
down on a specific ingredient for a week or more, a lot of random things end
up spoiling before we can use them up.

I think in the end since we're paying more for the ingredients, and generating
more waste/recycling, it ends up being a wash on total consumption.

------
JohnJamesRambo
Everyone I know that tried these (including myself) starts getting them piling
up uncooked and rotting and cancels. A month or two of product testing would
have told them this model can't succeed. After that, it was just how long can
we fool the VCs?

------
readhn
I suspected blue apron would fail.

i did try it - and i had two major annoyances:

1\. Wasteful Packaging - seemed like a waste of materials / cooler / all the
plastic containers. (imagine 10,000s of these shipped everywhere and ending up
in dumpsters)

2\. I still have to cook! Im paying these guys more than i have to for basic
ingredients and i STILL HAVE TO WASTE TIME and COOK! Where is the convenience?

Most of the people in our circles tried it for fun and recipes, 1-2-3 months
then bam most quit.

This business model is a total failure. Local grocery stores did start
carrying meal kits. But what i REALLY MISS is the guacamole kit from TJ! I
wonder why TJ REALLY stopped carrying it...

That said thanks VCs for "free" food!

------
anonytrary
Maybe -- just maybe, the market for services like Blue Apron and Eatwith just
doesn't exist. They are both romantic ideas, and it's very possible that they
that would have taken off in the 1940s (provided we had the same technology),
but it's clear that they have been outpaced by the busy world of today.

------
cardamomo
Given this downward trend with the rising trend of "luxury" apartments
including more and more amenities, I wonder if the next new thing will be
building-exclusive, fully-managed micro-farms with produce delivery directly
to your fridge.

------
gricardo99
I just saw a new meal kit display at my local supermarket, which to me makes
the most sense and was always going to be a huge looming threat, if not
guaranteed killer, to the meal kit startups.

------
ArrayList
Good, it's a pretty useless service. Has anyone considered, um, looking up
recipes and um, going to the store, buying the stuff, and cooking?

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perseusprime11
Stitchfix will be here in the same boat in a few years.

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nradov
I considered using Blue Apron a while back but their portions are just too
small. Maybe that's not a problem for most of their customers but I exercise a
lot and need at least 3100kcal (with a high fraction of protein) most days to
avoid losing weight. I might consider it again if they offered a larger
option.

