Your condescending comment missing the point. Not all of us live in "walkable neighborhoods of low-rise apartments with little shops on the first floor," nor necessarily want to. I live in a single family house in a residential area of Seattle. I'm pretty happy here, but I have to drive 10 minutes to one of a few nearby grocery stores. Grocery shopping is my least favorite thing to do on the planet, so if I can pay a service to do it for me and think up meals for me to cook, I'm sold.
I didn't see the comment but sounds ill-informed. I can walk to Trader Joe's but that's not the point at all. First, it's figuring out what you want to eat. Then finding a recipe. Then getting the ingredients. Then figuring out the recipe since there's so much inconsistency on recipe quality. Etc. Blue Apron is $10/portion which is pretty reasonable. The recipes are easy to follow and fairly healthy. We don't get much choice but have been very pleased so far with all the meals for 6 months or so. I've picked a few which I can now prepare by myself with good results. One of the reasons I like Blue Apron vs Din (even though Din meals are much better) is that I actually do feel like I am learning to cook from scratch.
Then finding a recipe. Then getting the ingredients
This is the bit you're doing backwards. Type the ingredients you've got into Google, along with "recipe" and see what you fancy eating.
Now having said that, I do sympathize with posters who think cooking is time-consuming and hard. At the age of about 25 I specifically set about learning to cook, and it took me probably 5 years before I got good at it, and another 5 years before I was able to conjure a meal from bits and pieces of unpromising leftover ingredients.
I'm glad it works for you, but $10/portion is crazy to me. I cook from scratch and average around $5/portion, and it adds up. (I cook in bulk a little more than Blue Apron wants you to, though, as it's mostly cooking for me.)
For something that approaches restaurant quality and might include beef, lamb, seafood or fresh pasta, it's a decent price point, imo. Hardly "crazy" I would say.
I used a referral sample for one shipment of meals for two. There was a choice of 3 out of 6 options for your shipment. There were seafood, beef, chicken, and three vegetarian options on the menu. However, you were restricted in your choice of three, and couldn't do {Beef, Chicken, Seafood}, which basically meant you would be paying $20 for a pasta dish for two, because you also couldn't pick {Beef, chicken, heartier non-meat option}. The total cost of ingredients was probably less than $15, maybe less than $10, for the pasta dish. It's hard to justify that as a value proposition in my book. Overall, the quality of the ingredients wasn't anything more special than what a local, non-budget, supermarket would carry in my market (NYC). (In fact, some of the labels on the ingredients seemed familiar from local delivery trucks in the area.) I agree with the GP: $10 a portion for a home cooked meal is expensive, <$5 is ideal. At $10 a portion, why make your own food, when you can get a gourmet healthy meal when you eat out?
When all was said and done, I felt that the best value proposition would be to just go on the Blue Apron website, look at the recipes, buy dry good ingredients in bulk, and make the recipes myself as time went on, buying the fresh ingredients as needed. As always, YMMV.
Edit: as many others have also pointed out, the packaging is "neat", and probably necessary for their workflow, but it feels ever so wasteful. You could supply a kindergarten arts and craft class with leftover materials from each shipment.
Well, if this was a one off occasion for forcing a pasta option, it possibly cost them a customer. If I picked two meats, I was forced the pasta option. I couldn't pick 2 meats + lentil option, or 2 meats + vegetable salad option. The pasta was good, but I felt a little cheated when I was forced to get it, especially at the hypothetical price of $10 per plate.
Perhaps it seemed that I suggested you could get a healthy meal + restaurant experience for under $10, but I was more thinking take-out options. Whole Foods' hot and cold (salad) buffet bar is like $9 per pound if I remember correctly. [1] Fairway, a competitor to Whole Foods in NYC, has a deli counter or buffet bar where you can get close to 1lb of veggies + grains + meat for under $10. [2] The only way Blue Apron makes sense over Fairway and Whole Foods, to me, is if you are either looking for the experience of cooking, or if you are a variety fiend and are going to tire of the flavors that the supermarkets use.
Do you really think that the ingredients that Whole Foods/Fairway uses are much different than what Blue Apron is shipping you? I have no illusions about Whole Foods being any more "organic" or "natural" than any other supermarket, but, if anything I would venture to say that they use the same, if not fresher, ingredients than what Blue Apron can get you. There's pretty much zero "mystery mix" factor associated with the cold salad bar at Whole Foods. I'm guessing you've never seen one of the Whole Foods hot buffets either, because it looks perfectly appetiizing every time I've gone there from 11am to 7pm. (Peak meal times)
Also, how do you figure that the Whole Foods "salad with meat" is more expensive? You're getting a pound of prepared food for $9: hot, cold, meat, vegetarian, salad, whatever you want. The Blue Apron portions do not contain a pound of food.
You seem pretty closed minded with respect to your meal planning. [1] Best of luck. Getting things delivered to you in 15 tiny little plastic baggies, with limited protein choices, seems pretty boring and ineffective to me, but, different strokes for different folks.
I've eaten the Whole Foods buffets dozens of times. Never for under $10/portion (even before tax). Absolutely it's tubs of slop with unknown ingredients that sit there for long periods of time under heat lamps. The article you cited said your preferred meal is going to be well over $10 unless you cut out the meat. Many people like Blue Apron specifically for the variety!! That they would never get at a buffet or cooking without help! Blue Apron meals are more than 1 lb of food.
I am quite open minded about my meal planning. I do Blue Apron, Din, Soylent, Caviar/fastbite, local delivery, Sprig, Munchery, Trader Joes pre-made and scratch, Whole Foods buffet, mall food court (we have a great one in SF), etc. My sense is that you don't really know what you're talking about.
The only way that could happen is if you are blocking 1 of the 3 meats for that week. Otherwise, you will always be able to get 3 meat dishes every week.
Figure out what you want to eat: generally, people fall into a few habitual meals, even when they're eating out all the time.
Finding a recipe: skip this. It's a waste of time. I haven't followed a recipe for anything that wasn't a cake in the last 15 years.
Getting the ingredients: you have the causality reversed. You choose the meals based on what you have, not what you will have based on what meals you want.
Figure out the recipe: see point #2, but also, recipes are extremely standardized. It's your failure to have learned the language that is the problem.
I agree with you about grocery shopping being horrible. My local store offers an online service where I can pick what I want and just swing by and pick it up on the way home for a $5 fee. That has saved tons of time, but having to always think of things to cook can be annoying. I may give Blue Apron a shot and see how it works. It's just so easy to eat a frozen pizza or get take out instead of dealing the mental work of planning a meal after working all day.
