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

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

#101

Post by GrinningFool »

tigershark wrote: post #58
Pfhreak wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#102

Post by Pfhreak »

tigershark wrote: post #58
Pfhreak wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#103

Post by duderific »

ghaff wrote: post #28
jonathanjaeger wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They recently added meals that take 20-30min rather than 30-55min and it has made a world of difference, not to mention they expanded the menu. I also find some of the meals tastier because they're simpler rather than using too many ingredients. I still get the occasional bland one, but they have improved. As a company I wouldn't invest in them. The amount they spend on advertising (e.g. really pricey podcast adverti…

I only used them once and one of the meals was the most complicated hamburger recipe I'd ever made and I didn't think it was really all that good. I half suspect there are motivations behind making the recipes for these services complex and a little exotic. If they had four ingredient recipes that took 10 minutes of prep, I daresay a lot of people would think "I'm paying 2x to 3x what I would pay in the grocery store…

We've been using Gobble and we really like it. Usually the 4-year-old can't/won't eat it, but at least my wife and I don't have to worry about what to make for dinner 3 times a week. The food is really tasty, simple to make, one pan and takes around 30 minutes (not the 15 minutes that they advertise, but still ok.)

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

#104

Post by notyourday »

joshstrange wrote: post #54

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 Ub…

They are there to separate fools from fool's money. Eventually they run out of fools that have money, which is why all of them if they do go public will become penny stocks.

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

#105

Post by endorphone »

spyspy wrote: post #13
chad_strategic wrote: post #6

After 10 years of marriage, my wife thought it would be helpful for me to start cooking, as she was getting stressed out with our 2 years old. We used Blue Apron as the starting point. I can't tell you how much time we save in planning meals and trips to the store. My wife doesn't have nag me about what I what I want for the week's dinner. The quality of the food and the time saved is well worth the price. I know the…

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.

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.

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

#106

Post by ghaff »

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.

> I can have someone else prepare my meal that will taste just as good or better

Maybe. For one thing, it depends on where you live. I guarantee you that I can cook better than pretty much anyplace within a 15 minute drive of my house. Secondly--and this is perhaps at least partly a reflection of how much I eat out when traveling on business--but, when I'm home, I mostly don't want to go out to a restaurant.

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

#107

Post by Tiktaalik »

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…

Yup this is already happening. Save-on-Foods in British Columbia has this and they also have their own food delivery service, so they're successfully replicating both Blue Apron and Instacart.

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

#108

Post by javagram »

wastedhours wrote: post #85
rayiner wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Am exploring that market at the minute, the model would be order on your morning commute, pick up freshly prepped ready meals from your transport hub on the way home. Interested in talking to anyone who's looking for something in that space.

Not sure if you saw this recently but there might be some relevant lessons to drawn on from Chowdy? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18312602

Your business model description sounds a bit similar.

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

#109

Post by jarvl »

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…

How would you define "rich enough"? My SO and I collectively make $80k per year and we can afford 4 meals a week. Granted, it's a little more expensive than planning our own meals. But it saves shopping and planning time, so the overall time commitment is at most an hour per day (the time it takes to cook the meal).

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

#110

Post by ngngngng »

diminoten wrote: post #82
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…

This is like saying, "Why take your car to the mechanic? I do my own repair work and it's way cheaper!" Blue Apron is for people who don't know what to buy at the grocery store. Grocery stores could definitely attack this by doing what you're suggesting, but part of this is the very concept that I can't walk into a grocery store, buy some chicken, and turn it into something tasty.

I think it's more like saying, why pay for a mechanic to be shipped to your house, when it's only a short drive to the mechanic.
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