How Blue Apron Became a Massive $2 Billion Disaster (observer.com) 158
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Observer: If you like to cook but not to shop or plan your own meals, and if you weren't too hungry, and if you didn't like cooking for too many friends, then Blue Apron -- the startup delivering precisely measured, prepackaged amounts of just enough salmon, green beans, butter and lemon for one meal, no leftovers -- was for you. Exactly who it was that was both upwardly mobile to pay for this service while also having a barren kitchen, nobody really knew -- but by the divine math of Silicon Valley gamblers, your existence made this an idea worth several billion dollars and potent enough to "disrupt" the grocery business. People actually believed this. Or they did until Jeff Bezos and Amazon went shopping and bought out Whole Foods. Or until HelloFresh launched. Or until Blue Apron spent millions on packaging and shipping, as well as marketing, literally gifting away boxes of neatly assorted ingredients to millennials who never ordered another box. All this conspired to, one-by-one, wreck Blue Apron's IPO, crater stock prices to all-time list lows, kick founders out of company leadership and now, at last, the seemingly undeniable, ultimate doom of the company.
After losing another $23.7 million in the last three months of 2019, Blue Apron is laying off 240 workers and shutting down the shop at its Arlington, Texas warehouse location. Blue Apron will keep, for now, its California and New York assembly-and-distribution shops, while leaders ponder peddling what's left at a paltry $50 million price tag. Meanwhile, customers continue to desert Blue Apron, down to 351,000 in the last quarter of 2019, from 557,000 the year before. Selling off Blue Apron that low would mean a loss in the neighborhood of $143 million for Blue Apron's capital investors, including Fidelity and Goldman Sachs. That hurts, but as usual, retail investors took the worst hit. Stock-market playing rubes, who bought in when Blue Apron went public at $11 a share, have lost more than 80% on their investment -- and that represents a recovery. Shares were trading for $3.60 at the close on Wednesday, up from 2018 when Blue Apron was worth less than a dollar. There's no other analysis than this: Blue Apron was one of the biggest-ever Silicon Valley catastrophes, a mix of hubris, unrealistic expectations, a misunderstanding of how people exist in the world -- and, Amazon.
After losing another $23.7 million in the last three months of 2019, Blue Apron is laying off 240 workers and shutting down the shop at its Arlington, Texas warehouse location. Blue Apron will keep, for now, its California and New York assembly-and-distribution shops, while leaders ponder peddling what's left at a paltry $50 million price tag. Meanwhile, customers continue to desert Blue Apron, down to 351,000 in the last quarter of 2019, from 557,000 the year before. Selling off Blue Apron that low would mean a loss in the neighborhood of $143 million for Blue Apron's capital investors, including Fidelity and Goldman Sachs. That hurts, but as usual, retail investors took the worst hit. Stock-market playing rubes, who bought in when Blue Apron went public at $11 a share, have lost more than 80% on their investment -- and that represents a recovery. Shares were trading for $3.60 at the close on Wednesday, up from 2018 when Blue Apron was worth less than a dollar. There's no other analysis than this: Blue Apron was one of the biggest-ever Silicon Valley catastrophes, a mix of hubris, unrealistic expectations, a misunderstanding of how people exist in the world -- and, Amazon.
Well at least we still have Soylent (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well at least we still have Soylent (Score:5, Informative)
I actually split a case of Soylent with a co-worker out of curiosity's sake. It's not very filling and tastes kind of like pancake batter. Ketolent on the other hand tasted much better and closer to chocolate milk.
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I actually split a case of Soylent with a co-worker out of curiosity's sake. It's not very filling and tastes kind of like pancake batter. Ketolent on the other hand tasted much better and closer to chocolate milk.
I was considering experimenting with it for overnight hiking, an alternative to dehydrated meals. Of course some home based experimentation and acclimation beforehand would be prudent.
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Oh god at room temperature that stuff would be awful.
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Oh god at room temperature that stuff would be awful.
Thanks for the warning. :-)
Have fun with your auto-immune diseases. (Score:2, Troll)
You should look up "protein denaturation".
You're basically assuming the same thing as assuming a chicken could come out of a boiled egg.
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Stuff like soylent has been around for decades, longer for the fitness nut, like since the 90’s specifically for geek cul
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It [soylent] was going to succeed because it harnessed an existing culture.
No, its a fad. Eventually that geek culture will become aware of the reality that drinking Soylent to avoid having to leave your desk to eat and loose valuable coding time is actually counterproductive to productivity. You need mental breaks and rest to maintain productivity.
Assuming of course we do not go down the Soylent Green path.
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So have a banana every once in a while.
But the radiation? :-)
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Potassium is a mineral. One of the best sources is actually potatoes. Bananas don't have much.
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So, I can continue eating that "family" sized bag of potato chips each night. Gotcha.
Hey, that will make sure that you get your sodium too. :-)
A little confused summary (Score:5, Interesting)
So does the summary start off by implying the whole concept was a stupid idea "Exactly who it was that was both upwardly mobile to pay for this service while also having a barren kitchen, nobody really knew"
Followed by the fact that started to feel some financial pain because Amazon/Whole Foods and Hello Fresh did the exact same thing? Implying there is a market for all of this?
I personal love Hello Fresh (don't have Blue Apron where I'm at), because I suck at buying ingredients for a receipie and half the chaotic stuff I buy off the shelf just ends up rotting. I also don't want to eat out every night.
At any rate, in my opinion, it was and still is a good business idea.
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Re: A little confused summary (Score:5, Informative)
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Stop loss is not a solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Ouch that is pretty bad, however this is kind of the reason why investors back multiple horses.
No this is why smart investors insists on seeing the founder's research of the reachable market segment, their pain/want, the hundreds of potential customer interviews documenting the unsolved pain or unmet need, ... Then the smart investors do their own research into all these things, confirming the founder's preliminary research. Its only after all this research that you even get to the point where 1 in 10 ventures succeed.
Also a lot of investors have Stop loss orders which automatically execute at a given price to avoid taking a 98% hit on a single investment.
Nope for two reasons. One, stop losses only work in very liquid markets, basically there needs to be a ton of buyers of the stock out there when you want to bail out. Two, the pre-IPO investors may bot be able to sell during a given timeframe.
Like the rise of bitcoin most early adopters exited at levels well below the peak, ...
Only those selling their stock as part of the IPO. Bitcoin is an extremely poor analogy since it is completely unregulated, unlock publicly traded stocks, IPOs, etc.
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Then the smart investors do their own research into all these things, confirming the founder's preliminary research
Do you seriously believe that?
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Then the smart investors do their own research into all these things, confirming the founder's preliminary research
Do you seriously believe that?
Yes. Because that is what VCs have told me they do. That the numbers founders provide is more to evaluate how well the founders did their homework and how realistic they are. That the VCs own research will be considered more reliable. I've also spoken with the staff that does such research once a venture gets past early screening and is seriously considered.
These VCs use doing one's own research as one of the things that separates the "smart money" from the "dumb money".
An edible halftrack (Score:2)
It seems like it really hits the sweet spot by combining the cost of a takeaway with the convenience of cooking for yourself.
Shocked, shocked I am that it's going tits-up.
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Amazon/Whole foods is nothing like blue apron. I actually used blue apron for several months and the ingredients were excellent btw. Not worth it in the long run.
Prime Now, the Whole Foods thing is simply grocery delivery. Itâ(TM)s pretty good. Given that I canâ(TM)t currently drive' itâ(TM)s quite helpful' amd way less expensive than getting an Uber to go get the things that I do buy from Whole Foods (mainly produce and meat' since I can get stuff there that Publix does not sell)
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We did Blue Apron for roughly a year. I loved the recipes, but for us it wasn’t worth the cost - nowadays it’s easy to find the ingredients from most international cuisines, and I don’t mind grocery shopping. Plus all the packaging seemed wasteful.
If they offered a recipe-only tier, we’d still be customers - I do think their recipes are a cut above. But they don’t, so we now subscribe to eMeals.
Following reciped misses the point anyway. (Score:3)
Granny also didn't follow recipes.
If you already can cook, you don't need one. You know what ingredients are out there, and whar techniques and tools you can use. You sit there for one minute, and imagine what flavors and textures and looks you would like todayy including how they should be balaced. Then you go buy and make that.
I just have all the spices and flavorful components at home, and sniff them if I can't imagine them, until I have the right composed picture in my head.
Half the secret of all good c
Re:Following reciped misses the point anyway. (Score:5, Insightful)
Granny also didn't follow recipes.
Granny worked in the kitchen of a restaurant and could indeed cook many things without following recipes.
Granny also owned multiple cookbooks and wasn't remotely embarrassed about looking up a recipe.
I mean, maybe you can successfully create a vindaloo, a balti, a karahi gosht, a methi, a jalfrezi and also a thai green curry correctly off the top of your head, while also accurately recreating the rich flavours of a Moroccan lamb tagine, a beef bourguignon, proper Scottish haggis, a proper Texas vegetarian chilli, the 48 varieties of bread available in my local shops or even something as simple as Worcestershire Sauce.
Maybe. But I'm guessing you can't, without finding a recipe or two.
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proper Texas vegetarian chilli
lol wut? I just googled that and no results came back.
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I cook for my family. I've made dish X maybe 10 or 20 times, for any given X. I'm getting pretty good at knowing how to throw together what we have in the fridge into a delicious meal (I mean, it's only been a decade of twice-weekly practice, so maybe I'm on the slow side).
But when I want to create some classic dish, I always look up the recipe. Why? To avoid disappointing results because I've forgotten that it takes three eggs and not one, or two tablespoons and not teaspoons of crushed mint, or olive
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I went to Culenary school in Belgium. Lesson one was that receipies where guidelines, not manuals.
My wife always amazes me with how she seems to know just how far she can bend a recipe and still have it turn out great. Me, on the other hand... unless I've made a dish a dozen times, I'm reading the text religiously and following the ingredients list verbatim.
As with many skills, while I do think most people can become competent at it - some people are just born with more innate ability than others.
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If you really have difficulty learning that, pick a popular dish, since there are dozens of different recipes of them, and use a different one each time you cook it. After a while you will reach enlightenment and will be able to use recipes as guidelines.
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I liked Blue Apron, especially their fish recipes. However, I found that their instructions were confusing. I think they should have presented the instructions in the form of a timeline so you could see what to start when and what is finishing. It would have made it a lot easier to prep the stuff.
I think there are plenty of people for whom Blue Apron would work. My wife and I are the only two people in our house, and neither of us likes to shop for groceries or even to cook much, so Blue Apron is good t
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and I don’t mind grocery shopping. Plus all the packaging seemed wasteful.
This is precisely why I'd always thought Blue Apron would fail in the long run. Once young people learned what we old timers learned in the dim mists of time, how to cook, they'd also learn to stock up on groceries and cook from scratch - following recipes - without the need for some company to measure and prepack all the ingredients. That it lasted this long is a miracle.
As to HelloFresh, I rarely see anyone even stopping at the gondola in my local Ralphs (aka Kroger) supermarket, much less purchase a mea
Re:A little confused summary (Score:5, Insightful)
So does the summary start off by implying the whole concept was a stupid idea "Exactly who it was that was both upwardly mobile to pay for this service while also having a barren kitchen, nobody really knew"
Followed by the fact that started to feel some financial pain because Amazon/Whole Foods and Hello Fresh did the exact same thing? Implying there is a market for all of this?
I personal love Hello Fresh (don't have Blue Apron where I'm at)
Exactly - it's a good idea, and my wife and I use Hello Fresh too for 3 meals/week - cheaper and healthier than going out or getting takeout and we can customize the meals the way we like them.
They've reduced some of the packaging waste and I'd like them to do more, but overall, box meals are better for the environment than buying ingredients at the grocery store since box meals (in general) have much less food waste. And I've found that to be true -- it's hard to buy the exact quantities needed to prevent spoilage before you can eat it all, but the box meals are pre-measured so there's little waste.
https://www.npr.org/sections/t... [npr.org]
I think Blue Apron's problem is that while it's a good idea, it's also pretty easy to copy so there's a lot of competition both from other box-meal companies, and from grocery stores and other delivery companies like Amazon.
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Uneaten food usually biodegrades, plastic based packaging not so much...
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Re:A little confused summary (Score:4, Informative)
I live alone and getting diverse meals without spoilage is a chore.
But blue Apron was about double the cost overall.
Re:A little confused summary (Score:5, Informative)
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Oh, to have mod points.
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Having actually subscribed for a time, it was nice to be able to just have one or two meals that were ready to go - no thinking in advance, shopping lists, etc. There was reasonable variety weekly, so I'm not "stuck" rotating through the same 10 meals my family likes. I just needed a pan or two, olive oil, and salt and pepper (oh yea gods the salt & pepper to taste). So yes - I was paying a premium for being lazy. Doesn't mean the whole thing is intrinsically a bad idea, but it certainly points agai
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I can see use-cases, particularly if you live alone and work a lot, and don't know how to preserve ingredients and/or have a vacuum-sealer and freezer. If you're not buying meat in 'family packs' it tends to be rather expensive per pound. But not everyone can deal with four or five lbs or chicken breasts before they spoil, or have good results freezing them. Not everyone's good at planning meals for a week, and most people freaking hate shopping anyway, particularly if they have limited time for it.
Same
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The meat comes already frozen and sealed into single use packs which is great for me.
I still need to buy my veggies, but I can in and out the produce section pretty quick without getting distracted.
My biggest issue is that I now eat way more meat than I would naturally, since it's my main source of protein for most meals.
The price is probably almost as much as meal kit boxes, but since it's all frozen I don't ne
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I can see why it works well in Sweden - where average income is higher and their value system in relevant areas is arguably a bit different culturally - but there are already better options in all three categories (eating healthier, saving time and saving money)
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But it was the cost, and all the packaging we had to dispose of, and the kitchen clean-up that got us to cancel.
Now we're getting Thistle delivery and while we really like most of it, food sometimes goes to waste for various reasons. But there is a lot less time spent prep and cleaning, we only need to use one skillet to warm up the food, and the food is really fresh and always delicious. But I wo
A "good business idea" (Score:2)
So does the summary start off by implying the whole concept was a stupid idea "Exactly who it was that was both upwardly mobile to pay for this service while also having a barren kitchen, nobody really knew" ... At any rate, in my opinion, it was and still is a good business idea.
Why is that? Good business ideas aren't based on "that's cool" or "I'd like that". Good business ideas as based on a ton of research. Of making sure a "large enough" identifiable and reachable market segment exists, one with a clearly unsolved pain or want. Researching these things properly takes hundred of interviews after you've identified the segment with the pain/want. Unless you've done this minimal homework you don't know you have even a *potential* good business idea. You merely have an untested hypo
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Wouldn't it be more sensible to learn how not to suck at buying ingredients? It's not really difficult.
The key is not to execute the recipes like a robot, but to understand why they are like that because many of them are rooted in some basic stuff - like the mirepoix stock base for example - that are akin to standard libraries. Once you understand that basic stuff, you will be able to cook the recipes as they would fit you best, not as they are written down and your bying stops being chaotic.
I've been where
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The lack of aptitude is - and not just for foods - easily compensated by training. Altering recipes on the fly is just a matter of practice, no innate understanding is required.
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Eeeeh, Innate understanding is necessary so you can visualize what the results will be; that innate understanding is the result of practice (and some degree of natural talent, but much more practice.) So -- yes, but also no. :)
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Cult of the IPO (Score:5, Insightful)
A public offering used to be something a firm would do after getting itself well-established and earning a solid profit for 10, 15, 30 years. Or when it used a stock incentive plan and became so successful the SEC told it it no longer met the definition of a private company (e.g. Microsoft). The idea that a firm should be targeting an "IPO" 1-3 years after being founded (not even after first profitable year, or even first sale to a customer) is pernicious and corrosive. Not to mention ridiculous. And it is doing serious damage to our economy.
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Somebody who's extremely rich got that way making maximum use of their money. That habit dies hard. Also, there's a kind of high score thing going on. Maybe your friends are hundred millionaires and you've only got tens of millions.
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The old rich don't mess with this sort of BS at all. They keep expenses low relative to their wealth, and barely need any returns (above inflation) to live the way they want. They stay away from investment fads because their goal is wealth preservation.
But America is full of people who became wealthy in their lifetimes, and are income-obsessed. The upper middle class, not the upper class. That's a whole different outlook. When you make a billion because you got lucky (and weren't a complete screw-up),
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The old rich tend to have constant income from investments; they just call those investments 'estates' or 'real estate' or whatever.
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I know that in practice they are trying to get-even-richer quick.
However I like to imagine people investing in spite of it not being a safe bet because they actually want what they are investing in to happen. I could respect a wealthy person pumping money into something they believed in, especially if they know it isn't even a very likely profitable thing to do. Therefore I'd like to tone down ridicule of people for being 'dumb' with their money when they make obviously risky investments so long as they c
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Huge success in business is largely based on luck – new research [phys.org]
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It's not necessarily always that the rich want to believe they are special. Sometimes it's that they want to believe they are *not* special and that people who can't find any success are the special ones. If I have amassed a lot of wealth in a way I think anyone could do, tell other people how I did it, and many are too lazy to follow any of my directions then their plight is purely their fault, not mine. If the poor are poor because they're just lazy, then there is no reason for any sort of social welfa
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No, they are merely exploiting moronity. (Score:3)
This would not be a thing, if there weren't rich morons with more money than brains.
And naturally I think it's a good thing, if they lose that money as quickly as possible.
The only thing I'm opposed to, is the money going to morons that are just as bad. Making it possible for the money to go in a circle, from losing moron, ex-leech to losing moron ex-leech, and being caught in there. Like two kids buying candy off of each other, by passing a dollar back and forth. (Which is essentially, how all of the econo
Re:Cult of the IPO (Score:4)
You got that wrong. It's not ridiculous, it is profitable. And it's not doing any damage, it is raising value and generating revenue.
Oh...
You mean the real economy? Like the actual business world, where things are produced and services offered?
Sorry, nobody gives a toss anymore. It's the financial economy that matters, why would anyone sane ever do something as crazy as deal with an actual customer or product?
The local grocery store chain (Score:3)
has been selling single serving heat and eat dinners for years now. There are so many of these stores that unless you are stuck at home (I guess they do deliver now) you can't go anywhere without driving by one of their stores.
I still have some doubts about getting perishable food delivered to me (I live way outside of the city) in a manner which won't give me a lesser experience in food quality.
I also am quite picky about the veggies and meat I buy. So I guess I'm not a potential Blue Apron client.
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In fairness, there are few enough of you living way outside the city you are an minor market segment and don't really effect valuation. Esp. if you factor in the required income to buy from Blue Apron.
My kid went through 7 or 8 of these services (Score:2)
Where's the 2 billion (Score:2)
loss? Surely wasn't the bankers that sold the shares, surely wasn't the managers who received salaries. Must have been retail 'investors' that bought the story that they were sold and failed to pay attention to what value each share actually earned or was secured by.
The brokers made their money from order flow, the managers made their money and still have shares worth something..
Who's yet realized the 2 billion loss [or was the loss made upon purchase]?
The Blue Apron, The (Score:5, Informative)
What killed Blue Apron for me was: 1) I rarely received a complete box, or 2) at least one thing was rotten. No matter what, I always had to go to the store to replace that missing or rotten item. I complained. They never cared. I stopped sending them money. They never tried to get me back. I love to cook and don't mind shopping, so it has been no big loss.
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My roommate tried Blue Apron out: these guys had horrible quality control. The way the delivery box was packed and insulated was significantly different every single time. The one common thing seemed to be that the food packets that needed to be kept cold (and sealed) were inevitably on the bottom of the box with the heavier items stacked on top, so the food packets on the bottom often ruptured. We had more than one occasion where the box was soggy because the ice blocks ripped through the plastic bags then
Reverse Stock Split Makes These Numbers Even Worse (Score:5, Informative)
This is actually much worse than it appears based on the numbers. The $3.60 share price is after a reverse stock split [bloomberg.com] converting 15 shares to 1 share. So, that $11 a share IPO price is really worth 24 cents today, not $3.60, when you factor in the reverse split.
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why are there terms like "reverse split" or "negative growth"? It is like calling vomiting "reverse eating".
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Because the financial sector would truly love to sell everyone a shit sandwich and they're just smart enough to know that they have to change the name to get people to buy it.
Grocery logistics is idiocracy right now. (Score:5, Insightful)
The current hotness is to, as efficiently as possible, ship to a store a pallet of food. It's a logistical wonder behind the scenes.
Then they pay someone as little as possible to put it on the shelf at all hours of the day. [Not to mention all of the brand reps that set up and do their own stocking like the Cola companies].
So I can pay someone else as little as possible to pick it back up off the shelf. Put it on a car and drop it off at my house.
All while also paying for lights, parking, rent, real estate taxes to be close to your customers.
Blue Apron was the exact opposite end of the spectrum. Trying to do concierge food service on a national scale.
If you want to set up a food shipping/delivery company: Go to a food desert (There are a lot to pick from in the US [streetsblog.org]) Offer to drop off fresh food like the milkman or USPS. Put your warehouse where it's cheap and efficient to your existing logistics. Hell some places are so desperate for food that's not from Dollar General they'd come pick up an order on Saturdays.
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not the kind of customers of a typical food delivery service
Because food delivery services are doing it as expensively as possible. Getting food delivered directly to the house should cost less, not more, because of efficiency gains.
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with avid home gardeners.
It's disingenuous to assume that that is being filled by people with the free time to garden. Food deserts are more closely related to poverty and the presence of dollar stores [cbsnews.com].
One small town opened their own grocery store [washingtonpost.com] and struggles with all the problems I pointed out above. The 'last mile' of food distribution is ungodly inefficient because of the manual labor that goes into maintaining the status quo of food shopping.
I never got the point of this. (Score:3)
And I think most people didn't.
I get a pre-made meal with pre-picked ingredients and everything ... but I still have to cook it myself??
Why?
If I cook, it's because I want to make something myself! And if I don't want to cook, I don't want to cook!
This has no target group.
It's like as if somebody who calls himself an artist would want to precisely reproduce a sheet of notes on an instrument, with both made by somebody else. Sorry, that's called a synthesizer. I don't want to be a robot.
Or like somebody completely un-musical trying to do that because he likes to listen to music. It won't be fun, nor will it be good. Nobody wants that.
I think it only exist for posers. People that want to pretend they are great chefs, while not really doing anything. A popular trend nowadays. Like slacktivists, or "we care" corporate PR. Or most of what surrounds hipsters. To which Blue Ribbon, err, Apron apparently appealed.
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I don't use this service, but if you live on your own, it can be hard to buy just what you need. Some things come packaged in large enough amounts that you need to intentionally plan to use them up, or they spoil. For instance, I don't have breakfast and eat out when I work, so this works out to 1 home cooked meal for one person on working days. Buying meat can be a problem.
It's especially a problem with rarely used ingredients being sold in large amounts. For instance some places only sell lemons packaged
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I recognise the issue, but mostly avoid it by just cooking enough food for several people.
E.g. right now I have 9 portions of home made Hungarian goulash in the freezer. Take one out the day before I want to eat it, leave it in the fridge overnight, warm it up the next day, add bread and I have a filling tasty healthy meal.
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I get a pre-made meal with pre-picked ingredients and everything ... but I still have to cook it myself??
Why? If I cook, it's because I want to make something myself! And if I don't want to cook, I don't want to cook! This has no target group.
Most people cook because going out or ordering takeaway each day would be too expensive. They learn a few meals and end up making those out of habit and laziness. They totally could look up a recipe online, head down to the grocery store to buy products they don't normally cook and make a meal they don't normally make but in the moment it's easy to go with mac and cheese. And they say to themselves they should learn more about cooking, get a bit out of their comfort zone but in practice they're procrastinat
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I -like- to cook. I looked at our options and we chose HelloFresh (not the cheapest, but they seemed to have a lot of options that I liked). Being able to skip the shopping, and have clearly laid out ingredients and a recipe where I could just 'go' saved me a lot of time. It made it possi
There are viable alternatives (Score:3)
Part of the problem (for Blue Apron) is that it is easy for competitors to enter the market and they have.
We use a local (to Vancouver BC) version called FreshPrep and have also tried HelloFresh. But are reasonable and about the same price (just under $20US for a two-person meal.) We like FreshPrep because it is local and we can do two meals a week instead of three. Which works for us.
So far have not had any issues (about six months). The kits are well packed, nothing missing. Reasonably easy to follow instructions.
Good riddance, people grow up (Score:3)
Anyone who needs a prepackaged box of raw ingredients to cook a salmon steak, asparagus, and potatoes is suffering from incredible laziness. How hard can it be? I didn't need to watch a youtube video (although there are thousands) or read a book to do this, but you certainly can if you need info. Right now I am cooking fairly complex dishes like Moroccan tagines, Thai curries, or Indian Byrianis and they turn out alright just using online recipes.
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fairly complex dishes like Moroccan tagines
umm. Complex? Sure, long list of spices to add, but basically it's "cook the meat, cook the veg, stick in the tagine and leave for an hour or two".
Unless you're trying something like a Moroccan hot salad, which was a truly marvellous surprise one place sprung on me. 14 miles to the next nearest house in any direction, nearer 25 if you wanted a restaurant, and this place just said, "Dinner is at 7pm." I turned up, a woman started passing tagines through a window, they put one in front of me, told me it was m
Sigh (Score:3)
"If only we'd had millions of customers, we would have reached the point where we could have made it profitable."
"If only a competitor hadn't opened up in the market, we would have been profitable".
"If only people paid for our service rather than lived off freebies from us, we would have been profitable".
There's a certain amount of growth-building etc. to do in a business, and a certain amount of monopolisation of a niche, and a certain amount of marketing. But if you entirely rely on that to be profitable, you're not a business. You're a plaything.
Amazon's food market in the UK pretty much flopped - they tied in with one of the cheaper supermarkets, so they don't really dominate at all. I imagine the big ones told them where to go. And they haven't yet "just bought out" some of the oldest and biggest supermarkets that operate (possibly in the world).
But still you can't make money by doing a very, very basic step that still leaves 99 steps for the customer to do, then charging them product + costs + delivery, when they can get product anywhere, and the other costs are actually prohibitive on that kind of scale, and then expecting to be profitable.
I bought from one of these places, about 15 years ago, long before they were so reliant on the subscription model. I think it was leapingsalmon. They sent me a kit of food, with all kinds of pre-made stuff, and all I had to do was cook it... I didn't even need to prepare it, it was just a posh, fresh, ready-meal in effect. I used it once for a special occasion where we wouldn't have been able to go out, but never again since.
But if you're haemorrhaging money with every customer, then more customers isn't going to fix the problem unless you can scale. And can you really scale if all you do is buy lots of fish, package a single fish, and then have to deliver that fish individually? I don't think you can.
Even the major supermarkets are taking a large hit on home delivery in order to maintain their place in the market. There's no way it "only" costs them £2.95 to select, package, and transport 100+ individual items of my shopping to me. That doesn't even cover their staff wages for the time involved (which is one of the reasons I use it... I hate spending hours in shops to buy food, and only do a big shop once a month).
New Yorkers (Score:5, Insightful)
"Exactly who it was that was both upwardly mobile to pay for this service while also having a barren kitchen, nobody really knew "
New Yorkers. People living on Manhattan are the only people with money to pay for frequent delivery of expensive fresh food and have nothing in their kitchen. Some of San Francisco is like this too.
NY and SF are also where the investors into this business live - it's where bankers and venture capitalists live. So of course they looked in the mirror and thought "I'd buy that!" and because they're so much smarter than everyone else that meant their personal opinion is always correct and this was a good investment.
I see a niche market for this (Score:2)
If those infamous Google Glass prototypes had been sold to surgeons needing information while in a procedure, it would have been a hero product. In the same way, I can see the Blue Apron concept selling to people learning to cook, or for experienced cooks wanting to try a new recipe without ending up with a lot of leftover expensive ingredients.
Good (Score:2)
idea good, but too much "disruption culture" (Score:2, Interesting)
I actually like the idea and have considered signing up with one of the various services several times.
In the end, I've always decided against it, mostly because a) my life isn't steady and I can't say which days this week I'll be home in the evening to cook and b) I have an unusual taste and there would be meals that I don't fancy or even don't eat at all. (all the services I checked were basically subscription services that send you theirs selection x times a week).
But I still like the idea of having pre-
Re: (Score:2)
What exactly are you cooking that uses such uncommon ingredients that you wouldn't be able to use them for a different dish?
Re: (Score:2)
Wrong question.
I don't cook every day, and I don't want to cook "by what's in the kitchen", but by what I feel like cooking and eating that day.
So I might buy a bunch of mushrooms, use half for a dish, and not make another dish with mushrooms for a week or two, by which time they've rotted.
I would buy half the amount, but often I can't because there's that package size and that's it.
Dotcom Bust 2.0 (Score:2)
Services like this are a stupid waste of fuel and packaging. Instead of "on the internet," the new buzzword is "free delivery." While I am unfortunately chained to Amazon (and its employee practices), I can't understand why meal prep kits are a thing. Unless someone is home bound, there is literally no benefit to not buying your groceries at your local supermarket or grocery store. Not only are the foods not going to be fresher than the grocer, but they end up costing more. Personally, I love leftovers, and
too big too fast (Score:2)
isn't this just a problem of bussinesses wanted to be too big too fast?
start small(er) and at least you'll get an idea if your idea is viable and if it isn't, you don't lose millions.
if it does, steadily grow and expand.
all the big companies around these days grew like that, which one was ever successful starting out superbig?
It's a mystery... (Score:4, Insightful)
...how investors can be so stupid. The massive success of high-tech businesses like Google is entirely due to holy grail of "massive multiplication": you can support massively more customers with very little addition to your infrastructure, because the entire business is online. This cannot apply to any business where you are directly selling physical product or labor, because your costs must inevitably rise in proportion to your customers.
Amazon appears to be an exception to this rule, only they aren't really. They may have started by selling books, but they ultimately build a sales platform for other businesses to use, not to mention AWS, etc..
Uber is another apparent exception, only they also aren't. As long as drivers are not employees, Uber is not selling labor, they're just selling access to their platform. If the courts ever force Uber to treat their drivers as employees, it's game over, because then they will be selling labor hours directly.
A business like the one in TFA, selling grocieries, isn't even pretending. It's just a grocery service. There is no reason why anyone should have confused it with a tech business, or thought it would scale, or given it any sort of stratospheric evaluation.
Re: (Score:2)
Was just for rich lazy people (Score:3)
I've tested pretty much every ingredient-delivery service out there, including a bunch I'm sure you've never heard of.
Out of all of them, I had the best success and satisfaction with Blue Apron. Issues of missing ingredients or poor ingredient quality (veggies going bad) were too common with the others, even if I sometimes liked the meals better on paper.
At the end of the day, though, none were a good fit for me. I have a food co-op along my commute, so detouring to pick up ingredients isn't an inconvenience. I don't mind shopping, and actually kind of enjoy it. I feel confident about my ability to select high-quality ingredients and the veggies at my co-op are always top-notch, fresh and never going bad, and many are from local farmers. And my co-op does this cool thing where each week they have some sort of recipe they've picked out or come up with, and then in a pile in the center as you enter they have all the ingredients for that dish gathered together and all are on-sale, along with paper slips with the recipe for you to grab. I really enjoy doing those and it's a great deal, besides being awfully convenient.
Blue Apron, or any of the other services, was just not right for me. The insane price premium for the service was just not worth it to me. I could only see it being targeted at rich families for whom grocery shopping is not possible either due to time or availability of enough or quality ingredients. I don't fault anyone who would like to cook their own food rather than eat out or eat junk/fast food, regardless of their means or monetary decision-making skills, so I'm sad to see Blue Apron go.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
If the show fails will they hoist Patrick Stewart on his own Picard?
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, it's against the God who can't be bothered to get his ass off his throne for 5 seconds to say "Howdy!" to the world, and erase all doubt of his existence. No, we get stupid excuses for him being a no-show. Just as well, because anybody who read more than a few chapters of the Bible will see just how much of a psychotic, blood thirsty monster he really is. This isn't something I would want to be forced to spend an eternity with.
Of course, the X-ians chant that he is the 'right' God, like every other re
Re: How Picard Became a Frelling Disaster (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Trivia: The author of the book "From Here to Eternity", James Jones, was an actual US Army infantryman stationed at Schofield Barracks during the Pearl Harbor attack. The book, unlike the movie, contains an
Re: (Score:2)
Can anyone come up with a less efficient and less sustainable or more wasteful method...
Easy. Say I want a baked potato with all the toppings. I could drive my car 10 miles to a grocery store, buy a 5 pound sack of potatoes, a half-pint of sour cream, a pound of butter, a pound of bacon, an 8oz bag of shredded cheese, and a bundle of chives an inch thick, and drive them back to my house. Then I could cook one potato and one slice of bacon, top the potato with a tablespoon each of butter and sour cream, chop like 3 chives and sprinkle them on top along with the crumbled up bacon and a pinch