The problem is the extremely small niche it fills. The market is people who have enough time and patience to cook their own meals, but not enough to grocery shop and look up a recipe. If you're new to cooking that's one thing, but I'd imagine many users eventually "outgrow" the service as they become more skilled and/or realize how much the convenience is costing.
We use a similar service that's closer to a CSA + recipe cards. We get a basic recipe and a bunch of raw veggies/locally produced products.
Meal planning is work. Grocery shopping is work. Cooking is work. We've decided that cooking is the work we enjoy, and the other parts are work we'd rather pay someone to do for us. We are more than capable of putting together a meal plan, we just value our time more than money and have found the right service to pay to help us in that regard.
I’m really surprised... you don’t have any online grocery shopping in US?
I have been buying groceries only online for years and I wouldn’t definitely call work to click a couple times more on the ingredients that you need for some meal.
If you are particularly lazy you can even create shopping lists for every meal that you need and add all of them with a click.
What countries have widespread online grocery shopping? I've seen it advertised a bit in the US (more and more recently), but haven't seen it gain a strong foothold yet. I've had some friends that used Amazon Fresh. I've used it once or twice, but wasn't confident it was price competitive and also didn't want to wait the day or two when I could just pick it up for dinner tonight. For me it's just an expectation and familiarity thing (I get confused about all the Amazon services and forget that most of them exist).
I've heard some people talk about why grocery delivery "won't work" in the US. There's a huge last-mile problem. For the first few years, Blue Apron was northern east-coast, then west-coast only. It took awhile to get most states covered. Another argument I've heard is that people like to pick their food. They're worried they'll get stuck with blemished/bruised food.
Online grocery delivery is fairly widespread in the US at least in the general vicinity of urban areas. I've had Peapod available for over ten years in the Northeast even though I'm far enough out of Boston that I don't get most of the delivery service things.
However, the only time I've used it was when I had a broken foot and, while I could drive to the store or pick up one or two things, doing a grocery shopping was difficult.
At least at the time, they'd invariably be out of something I needed for a recipe and/or they'd make substitutions that weren't really what I would have wanted. Quality was "OK." Normally, it's not a big deal for me to go to the store and I just didn't love the service in general.
In UK all the big chains give you the option for online delivery.
The quality is not a problem and it’s fairly easy to switch to a competitor in case it is.
Edit:
Ah Amazon fresh is simply not working as a food delivery service.
They handle the trolley like a normal amazon order, it’s not optimised for tens of items, they mess up a lot of orders and the refund workflow is simply ridiculous.
If you only ever used Amazon fresh for grocery shopping then I can understand your issues.
The problem with online groceries is lack of control over quality. Particularly fresh fruits, meats, etc - they'll grab what's on top, as far as I can tell. This is usually the fruit that's bruised, leafy vegetables that are wilted, the meat that's closest to date, etc.
Our local store's online service is actually one of the better ones I've tried in terms of finding things and getting the task done - but they fail in quality at the end.
We buy a box that specifically is sourced in our local area. Online grocery shopping solves the 'trip to the store' but doesn't solve meal planning, sourcing local ingredients, managing a shopping list, etc.
Right now, the cost of my box includes all those steps. It also occasionally includes locally sourced meat, fish, dairy, or eggs. I can find information on the farms where those items came from easily.
I value that service enough to pay a small premium for it.
Most of the online grocery delivery shops give you food from local producers, all of them must indicate the origin, at least in uk.
For some recipes you can’t have local produce, by definition.
Your box doesn’t solve the trip to the store because you still need to buy household stuff, breakfast food and all the other stuff that you use daily that is not sold by blue apron or these kind of services.
The premium doesn’t seem small to me given that is 2-3x a grocery store, at least in case of blue apron...
I don’t think that there is a huge market for people that don’t want to click a couple times more to add the ingredients for a recipe (or actually just a click if you add it once in a shopping list), that are willing to pay a premium but that still need to go to the grocery store for the normal shopping and do all the cooking.
"This solved a problem for me, and I found it valuable."
"No, you're wrong, it'd didn't solve that problem for you."
Wat? I'm able to evaluate a cost benefit scenario in the context of my own life quite adequately. The stuff we need from the store these days is staples, which we buy rarely in bulk.
I said that I don’t think that there are many people that benefit from this scenario for the reasons that I wrote.
If you benefit from it being aware of the alternatives of course you can use it.
> Meal planning is work. Grocery shopping is work.
There's definitely a time limit to this. As you get better at cooking, you get better at thinking of recipes that don't have ingredients that quickly spoil, and/or can be cooked from frozen, or can be frozen after cooking, or can be portioned out as part (let's say) half the meals you cook this week.
These habits accumulate, they don't appear all at once. Worse for a service like blue apron: cooking a lot of new recipes fosters that sort of thinking.
I think an important perspective to remember is that most styles of cooking were come up with by people who didn't have refrigeration, although they weren't as fragmented as we are (lots of single people and couples due to capitalist alienation.) When you tighten the constraint of the number of people being cooked for while loosening the constraint of how long ingredients will last and how long things you cook can be saved (without changing the taste much e.g. pickling and drying), things come out about even.
In my case it was a combination of that and quality problems. (This was Hello Fresh, not Blue Apron though). We had a lot of great meals, used the "family plan" so we'd have left overs, but there was some kind of inflection point where we started have regular issues with the meats. In a period of about 6 weeks we had 4 or 5 problems. Beef that was open and dropping it's liquid out. 3 chicken meals in a row where it gave off a foul odor of sulfur, indicating it had spoiled. We had issues with other fresh ingredients as well, though these were the only ones that ruined the meal completely.
Each time, Hello Fresh customer service was good in giving a refund and even a meal credit, but it was too much. You can't plan your meals when there get's to be a 1 in 3 chance your food is spoiled. We cancelled, but by that time we already had about 20 solid recipe cards for dishes we loved and could easily do ourselves, so we didn't bother looking for another meal service. Maybe we will if/when we get bored with our choices again, but it would probably be temporary given the premiums paid.
I'm looking towards Amazon's purchase of Wholefoods and what that might do for meal services to bring the cost down substantially, then I'd consider a regular subscription.
This is the sort of binary differentiation that has led to countless services being discounted on virtually identical criteria. AWS, for instance.
But it isn't so simple. I live in Canada and have used a couples of services and currently and semi-regular with makegoodfood (which I assume is very similar to Blue Apron). I'm a pretty decent cook and baker, have all of the cookware, and go to the grocery store relatively regularly, but still I make use of it because it isn't simply that they give me ingredients.
I like their menu. They constantly surprise me with good meals with great ingredients. Things that I would have never, in a million years, have chosen on my own. And the recipes (and thus, the meted out ingredients) have been almost perfect. This is a far cry from finding recipes online and replicating them -- this food vendor has been completely incentivized to make their creations perfect, versus recipe sites like AllRecipe where it's just user contributions, often with shockingly bad errors in some top recipes (pancakes with 3 1/2 tablespoons of baking powder to 1 1/2 cups of flour? Give me a break... 4.5 stars)
Cost wise there is no way I could go to the grocery store and buy the ingredients for less. I should say that I get the 4 meal versions (so the shipping is less a component of the price), but to get all of the often odd spices, small amounts of various things like odd ciders, vinegar, etc, it would be very pricey to replicate. Cooking interesting meals is expensive because you can't buy exactly what you need for most things. Not to mention that it wouldn't just be time consuming trying to find every oddball ingredient, it's stressful too. But every couple of weeks I get a box with very, very high quality meats, fish, perfectly portioned out spices and ingredients. It's so much nicer.
This is a bit like the "cloud server" versus "your own raw metal" discussions. In the end many underestimate the advantages of the former, and grossly underestimate the cost and inconvenience of the latter.
