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Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

markets.businessinsider.com

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Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#51

Post by samstave »

heavyset_go wrote: post #44
samstave wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blue aprons should seek to have some subsidies from states or insurance where they can provide healthy meals to SnAP users, or elderly, or offer it to apartment complexes where they know how many units just want "blue apron sunday dinner" or something

The average SNAP benefit is $126 a month. According to Blue Apron, their price per serving is $10 plus shipping. At their lowest tier, Blue Apron costs $50 a week for 4 servings. Neither Blue Apron nor SNAP recipients could survive off of one another.

I meant to have a portion of that in some sort of subsidized manner...

Not a replacement. I also think snap is bullshit. For example, you cant buy toiletries with it and you cant buy things which are cooked.

The best cooked deal of anything is a $5 rotisserie chicken at costco.

And snap users can never get those.

But it would be interesting if blue apron were to cater to larger groups, such as retirment homes, or elderly communities...

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#52

Post by jerkstate »

mawburn wrote: post #47
ghaff wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's definitely a use case for these services. It's just a fairly narrow one. - Willing and able to cook for, ideally, more than one person - Able to plan a week ahead for the most part - OK with paying a non-trivial premium to have a lot of menu planning and shopping be handled by someone else I tried Blue Apron and thought it was "OK" but I could never really make these meal kit services work out for me. t obvio…

> OK with paying a non-trivial premium to have a lot of menu planning and shopping be handled by someone else This is the one I've never been able to get past. For what these services cost, I can have someone else prepare my meal that will taste just as good or better. Why would I not do that? I get if you're trying to learn to cook or something like that, but that only sounds like a temporary problem.

$10 per serving is essentially fast food prices in the bay area - you can't really get a healthy meal with meat and vegetables.

My family used Blue Apron for a while when we first had kids, and it was great for our lifestyle. We did move on to a service that optimizes grocery shopping so we can buy ingredients for a week's worth of meals in one shopping trip.

Edit: for those who asked, I am using thefresh20 now. It's pretty low-tech (just a weekly pdf). Besides being straightforward to shop for, it tells you how to prep stuff ahead of time. For example, bake 8 potatoes the first day and use half in a recipe today, half in a few days. Cook some pork chops today and save some for fried rice in a few days. Cook a pot of quinoa today and use it throughout the week.

There are a number of other services out there that allow you to customize things like servings/calories per meal and diet types but I am dubious about how well they could possibly optimize shopping and prep to use up a whole quanta of an ingredient over multiple recipes in the course of a week to be near the manually curated efficiency of fresh 20. If anyone has experience with those please let me know!

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#53

Post by ngngngng »

I feel like grocery stores could easily compete with blue apron for much lower costs. Just ration the food they already have in stock in little packages. Charge a little more than you would otherwise for the employees time picking recipes and combining them into the packages. I would happily use this service at local grocery stores. But compared to grocery stores and cooking from scratch blue apron is too expensive for me.

edit: Blue apron is currently $7.50 - $9.99 per serving. I cook delicious food for myself regularly for less than $4 per serving if I make enough to have leftovers for a day or two. It really seems to me that grocery stores could eat blue apron alive with their lowered costs to provide this same service.

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#54

Post by joshstrange »

Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, Plated, and all the other food prep deliver services are a hack. A disgusting, wasteful hack.

Calling someone using Blue Apron a cook is like calling someone doing a "paint by numbers" a painter. I'm not trying to be a cooking snob but I get really sick of people praising BA/Plated/etc as some amazing concept or a huge time saver. It's neither, it's for people who want food delivery (as in UberEats, Grubhub, etc) with extra steps.

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#55

Post by wgerard »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #46
checkdigit15 wrote: post #2

"Securities traded on a national stock exchange, regardless of price, are exempt from regulatory designation as a penny stock"[1] Blue Apron is on the NYSE [1]"SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION 17 CFR Part 240" https://www.sec.gov/rules/final/34-51983.pdf

They will do a reverse split, perhaps 10:1 to get the stock back up in price.

Doing a reverse split just to meet the share price requirements is generally viewed as a sign the company is spiraling out of control (i.e. investors will continue selling to cut their losses).

I don't have the numbers offhand, but I would wager a large sum that companies in trouble doing reverse splits just to meet listing requirements almost always continue tumbling downwards. For a recent example, see Helios and Matheson (MoviePass).

Companies that have successfully navigated reverse splits while publicly-listed (it's very common with pre-IPO companies for sure) are generally much larger and more well-known than Blue Apron (e.g. AIG), or in inherently risky businesses (e.g. Biotech companies).

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#56

Post by losvedir »

rayiner wrote: post #45
ghaff wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's definitely a use case for these services. It's just a fairly narrow one. - Willing and able to cook for, ideally, more than one person - Able to plan a week ahead for the most part - OK with paying a non-trivial premium to have a lot of menu planning and shopping be handled by someone else I tried Blue Apron and thought it was "OK" but I could never really make these meal kit services work out for me. t obvio…

It's targeting a narrow intersection of people who are rich enough to pay $10 per serving for a meal, have the time to cook every night, and are okay with the lack of customizability in ingredients.[1] We considered it but it made no sense for us. It would save us a little money versus eating out all the time, but it doesn't solve the time problem (my wife and I both get home around 7:30 or 8:00 and need to get the f…

> I would rather see a high-end TV dinner service.

This is interesting. If I understand your point, I think Kettlebell Kitchen[0] qualifies. I have friends that use that and love it.

But I'm sure there must be others out there. Does anyone else use a service like this? I've been thinking about using something like it for myself.

[0] https://www.kettlebellkitchen.com/

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#57

Post by simias »

gammateam wrote: post #36
wgerard wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investors aren't stupid and realize a company doing a reverse split just to maintain the minimum share price is doomed. See also: $HMNY.

then thats what the article should be about, not an arbitrary share price metric

It's a symbolic milestone, that's it. If a company's stock keeps plunging eventually you have to decide that it's time to talk about it, having it cross the $1 threshold seems like a decent time.

It gives an excuse to make an article and recap the events that lead to this situation. As someone who didn't follow this story closely it's useful to have this bit of context.

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#58

Post by tigershark »

Pfhreak wrote: post #21
spyspy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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.

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#59

Post by joshstrange »

ngngngng wrote: post #53

I feel like grocery stores could easily compete with blue apron for much lower costs. Just ration the food they already have in stock in little packages. Charge a little more than you would otherwise for the employees time picking recipes and combining them into the packages. I would happily use this service at local grocery stores. But compared to grocery stores and cooking from scratch blue apron is too expensive f…

Some already do this [0] and it's 10000x better than Blue Apron/Plated/Hello Fresh. Also they don't have the same perverse incentives that BA/P/HF have. Kroger might make a profit off their meal kits but they aren't 100% reliant on that revenue, in fact I'd bet they don't really care that much if you but the meal kit or all the parts of the meal kit because you are still buying it in their stores.

[0] https://www.kroger.com/b/preppared

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#60

Post by zwieback »

ngngngng wrote: post #53

I feel like grocery stores could easily compete with blue apron for much lower costs. Just ration the food they already have in stock in little packages. Charge a little more than you would otherwise for the employees time picking recipes and combining them into the packages. I would happily use this service at local grocery stores. But compared to grocery stores and cooking from scratch blue apron is too expensive f…

Agree and it's already happening. At the higher-end stores where I live there are a whole bunch of meal-kit options when you enter the store.
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