Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by ams6110 » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 9:25 PM UTC

_thejrk wrote: post #172

padobson wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still too much work! How about you give me a list of meals, I pick 50 or 100 of them, and then you give me a shopping list for the month including where to get it at the best price, taking advantage of bulk purchasing and overlapping ingredients. Then email/text/notify me every day with the recipe for dinner that night. I'll keep the left overs and use them for lunches. This should minimize time for planning and cost…

As a single father who sucks at everything kitchen.. i need dis.

No you don't. As a single parent you don't have time, and kids don't appreciate and in fact often don't like elaborate or gourmet food.

Learn to make half-a-dozen simple dishes from memory. Pasta with meat sauce. Simple dishes with chicken, pork, fish, or beef, and vegetables. Stuff you can throw together with basic staple ingredients, minimal prep work, and minimal utensils. This makes shopping easier and minimizes time to prepare meals.

Avoid kitchen gadgets. They are just an extra thing to clean and you'll rarely use them. Have a few good knives, a couple of cutting/prep boards, and a basic set of pots and pans and utensils and stick to recipies that work with that.

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

#222

Post by asdff » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 9:25 PM UTC

djhworld wrote: post #174

goldcd wrote: post #140

Always seemed a strange business model. Appealing to people who "want to cook", but doing so by turning yourself into a production-line assembler. Like saying your want to learn carpentry, by buying some Ikea flat-pack. What confused me (and makes me think I've overlooked something) is why nothing more interesting has come along from the supermarkets. In the UK at least, they're all online and deliver - but they all…

I think the biggest problem for me as a single person is the way most stuff sold in supermarkets is designed for family meals. Which is fair, families probably represent a significant portion of their customer base. But it becomes problematic for me because I either have to eat the same meal 4 days in a row (or freeze it) or only use half of the ingredients and shove the rest in the cupboard, or throw it away because…

Some perishables like fruits and vegetables are terrible to buy. Cilantro comes in a massive bunch from which I take three sprigs, and its rotten in a couple days. Bananas are unedible until day 2, then I have maybe a 3-day window to eat all the bananas before they are flabby, brown, and mushy. Even if I throw a handful of arugula in every single one of my meals, its massive tub is barely half empty by the time it starts rotting in my fridge a week after purchase.

Even if I plot and plan to use all my cilantro in 3 days, all my arugula in 1 week, power through 3 bananas a day during my bunch's window of opportunity, I can still end up going out for dinner which throws everything out of schedule. Or maybe I forgot to pull out the chicken out of the freezer and into the marinade this morning, so there is now no point in cooking if I need to wait 2+ hours after I get home for my bird to thaw and flavor.

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

#223

Post by goddamnyouryan » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 9:28 PM UTC

djhworld wrote: post #174

goldcd wrote: post #140

Always seemed a strange business model. Appealing to people who "want to cook", but doing so by turning yourself into a production-line assembler. Like saying your want to learn carpentry, by buying some Ikea flat-pack. What confused me (and makes me think I've overlooked something) is why nothing more interesting has come along from the supermarkets. In the UK at least, they're all online and deliver - but they all…

I think the biggest problem for me as a single person is the way most stuff sold in supermarkets is designed for family meals. Which is fair, families probably represent a significant portion of their customer base. But it becomes problematic for me because I either have to eat the same meal 4 days in a row (or freeze it) or only use half of the ingredients and shove the rest in the cupboard, or throw it away because…

Funnily enough I have JUST launched a little side project that is attempting to do exactly what you are describing. (Or will do).

There's a few more features I need to add before I'd consider it MVP level and but it's getting close.

http://cookmatic.co

Basically you can paste in recipe URLs (so far only supports seriouseats and bonappetit) it parses the ingredient list and generates a shopping list combining everything you need to make all the recipes).

Future features include adjusting the portion size to scale up and down and combining recipes in a manner that minimizes ingredient waste when shopping

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

#224

Post by uxp100 » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 9:28 PM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #206

aerovistae wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For £5 extra would you like to add some bacon, creme-fraiche, tarragon, frozen-pastry & peas Is food really cheap in the UK? This would be impossible in the US, the tarragon alone could cost half that.

Most of the local grocery stores in Portland have bulk spices where you could get enough of whatever you needed for a dish for well under a dollar.

Many grocery stores all over the US have that. Not for fresh spices though, maybe the poster was thinking of fresh tarragon, which is typically sold for around $2.50 for far more tarragon than you need for a single portion of anything.

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

#225

Post by behringer » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 9:30 PM UTC

jonathanjaeger wrote: post #154

behringer wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's really weird to me is that you can go to the store and get food that's basically ready to serve after you warm it up. You could eat steaks, fish sticks, brats, chicken, pork, chicken nuggets, fries, a huge variety of vegetables ready to be steamed from the frozen section. You could eat that every day and pay a quarter of what it costs for this stuff to be hand picked for you. You don't even need to season any…

I buy the family size of Blue Apron for myself (12 meals at $8.99 per serving). There is no food in NYC of any considerable size/quality/taste that is a quarter of that price for that amount of calories. Ramen noodles and tuna maybe..

You don't have grocery stores in NYC?

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

#226

Post by ghaff » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 9:32 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #222

djhworld wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest problem for me as a single person is the way most stuff sold in supermarkets is designed for family meals. Which is fair, families probably represent a significant portion of their customer base. But it becomes problematic for me because I either have to eat the same meal 4 days in a row (or freeze it) or only use half of the ingredients and shove the rest in the cupboard, or throw it away because…

Some perishables like fruits and vegetables are terrible to buy. Cilantro comes in a massive bunch from which I take three sprigs, and its rotten in a couple days. Bananas are unedible until day 2, then I have maybe a 3-day window to eat all the bananas before they are flabby, brown, and mushy. Even if I throw a handful of arugula in every single one of my meals, its massive tub is barely half empty by the time it st…

As someone who often cooks for myself, bananas are a pretty terrible example because you can literally buy one banana if you want. Perhaps I've been violating a taboo all my life, but I have never had a problem breaking up a bunch of bananas in the store.

Fresh herbs I agree. It's one reason I tend to grow them. [ADDED: There are also a lot of frozen and freeze dried options these days that I often take advantage of.]

There are lots of meats you can pull out of the freezer and put in some water for 30 minutes or so.

I'm actually sympathetic to your basic point but it's just not something I find to be a huge problem.

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

#227

Post by MoBattah » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 9:33 PM UTC

brianpgordon wrote: post #216

webninja wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investopedia and most finance textbooks define any security trading as less than a dollar as a penny stock. Here is why: If a stock listed on the NASDAQ fails to meet a closing bid price of $1 for at least 30 consecutive days, it is delisted. If a stock listed NYSE trades for under $1 for 29 consecutive days, the company must, within 10 days, submit a plan to the NYSE to move the stock into the $1 territory within a…

I thought the cutoff for penny stock was actually higher, like a few dollars.

Can be anything less than $5.

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

#228

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 9:33 PM UTC

lostphilosopher wrote: post #217

Blue Apron customer here, family of two, three meals a week for the past two years. I like BA a lot, but I don't see anything about BA that is unique to them. There's probably 5 other options in my area. I stick with BA largely due to momentum. For those curious: Pros: - No food waste. Grocery shopping inevitably resulted in large amounts of food getting tossed due to expiration (or even space concerns). - "Forced" v…

> I don't buy the argument that BA packaging is bad. It's almost all recyclable.

Reduce, reuse, recycle. In that order.

People vastly overstate the value of recycling, especially for glass and plastic. Steel and aluminum are about all that's 'good' to recycle.

For plastic and glass, it's only marginally less bad than going to a landfill. The cost to collect, sort, melt, and produce an inferior product is just too much.

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

#229

Post by asdff » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 9:41 PM UTC

jerkstate wrote: post #52

mawburn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

$10 per serving is egregious. Take a blue apron recipe with you to a grocery store, and I bet you can buy all the ingredients for $2.5 a meal.

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

#230

Post by ghaff » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 9:42 PM UTC

newnewpdro wrote: post #204

djhworld wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest problem for me as a single person is the way most stuff sold in supermarkets is designed for family meals. Which is fair, families probably represent a significant portion of their customer base. But it becomes problematic for me because I either have to eat the same meal 4 days in a row (or freeze it) or only use half of the ingredients and shove the rest in the cupboard, or throw it away because…

I've found that by shopping at higher end grocery stores, or at least focusing on the organic/craft-oriented departments, the quantities tend to be smaller and much better suited to my childless, bachelor existence. There was also a learning curve to preparing food for just myself to consume. The priorities are different from the family household I grew up in, so much of what I had learned didn't apply very well unmo…

>Families make the costly perishable ingredients go further by utilizing carbohydrates like pastas and breads as fillers.

As do many restaurants. I've (not very originally) joked that Tapas is Spanish for expensive and appetizers generally often seem pricey for the size of the portion. There are various reasons for this including the fact that there's a certain overhead to an individual order.

But it's also the case that typical main dishes tend to have a fair bit of "filler" that tapas/appetizers do not. At good restaurants, the rice or potatoes (or vegetables) may be nicely and even somewhat exotically prepared but the raw ingredients cost very little compared to the protein.