Because when you're paying $10 for one meal you kind of hope it goes a little further.
To put this in perspective, if I go to the store and buy a 10 dollar meal, I'll be eating: porter house, slathered in butter and olive oil, asparagus fried in the juices, with a baked potato. I'll have also a side of chilean grapes and a slice of cheese cake for desert.
10 dollars is a crazy amount for a dinner. (Ok that might cost more like $15)
A porterhouse alone is typically 8 to 10 dollars, so no you're meal you listed there is more like 20. Sure Blue Apron is expensive but don't go making it sound like you can have a big nice steak, a baked potato, an expensive dessert, some butter and vegetables for near the same cost.
If you buy every single ingredient absolutely but that's not how cooking-at-home food math works.
You head to the grocery store and buy whatever beef cut is on sale so if you're buying a porterhouse it's because it's $4-6. Your pantry is already stocked with butter, flour, eggs, sugar, and potatoes. You had some almost stale graham crackers lying around which is why you decided to make cheesecake. You hit up the store buy some asparagus, cream cheese, and whatever fruit is in season rounding out to about $10-12 bucks and you've pretty much got the meal with plenty of leftovers and leftover ingredients for whatever you do next.
You can spread a good cheese out over multiple meals to lower the cost but I'm not seeing how to get even a brie without going over budget here though.
When I spend a lot on food I don’t hope there’ll be a ton of it - I hope it’s high quality. I think BlueApron aims at higher quality rather than massive portions designed to be too much.
Blue Apron misses massively on the high quality front, IMO. Every single beef cut we got from them ranged from terrible to barely mediocre and many made me think of Rodney Dangerfield's quote in Caddyshack: "This steak still has marks where the jockey was hitting it..."
Their chicken was generally very good and pork OK and I'm not a BA hater, though we did initially enjoy it and eventually stopped because the value simply wasn't remotely there for us.
To put this in perspective, if I go to the store and buy a 10 dollar meal, I'll be eating: porter house, slathered in butter and olive oil, asparagus fried in the juices, with a baked potato. I'll have also a side of chilean grapes and a slice of cheese cake for desert.
10 dollars is a crazy amount for a dinner. (Ok that might cost more like $15)