You used to be able to send at least the cold packs back to Blue Apron, but they ended that program, apparently. Now their instructions are to “empty the gel into a plastic bag and dispose in the trash.” Not cool.
I’d rather just get a box of fruits and vegetables from local farmers delivered to my house once a week.
Blue Apron
- You can order 2 or 3 meals a week out of a choice of six available. I get the two a week because it works out to four dinners for me.
- Ten percent have been mediocre; fifty percent good, and forty percent lights-out meals that I would expect at a twenty to thirty dollar a plate restaurant.
- You get just what you need, so it cuts down wasted food to virtually zero. I can’t tell you how many bottles I have lying around because recipes called for a teaspoon of this or a tablespoon of that, and I had to buy a whole bottle just for that.
- The variety of meals definitely expanded because it made me try recipes that I wouldn’t have otherwise thought of trying.
- The portions make for a good dinner. People who think the portions are “way too small” might want to review their eating habits.
- You can suspend the service easily at their web site if you are going to be eating out a lot or going away for vacation or even if you just don’t want it. You have to do it by noon on the Saturday before the next Friday’s delivery, however, or you are locked in for that next week.
I’ve been using Blue Apron for a couple years. I only get it once or twice a month. I love to cook and had been in kind of a rut for a while. The Blue Apron recipes are very good, and it has inspired me to cook several new and different styles. We particularly love Korean.
There have been a handful of recipes we didn’t care for, or didn’t seem any better than I could whip up on my own with whatever chicken breasts and soy sauce I had on hand. Only one we thought was outright bad, but I dont’ recall what was wrong with it at this point.
I also gave Hello Fresh a couple tries. Very ho-hum for our tastes. We’re not tremendous foodies, but only one recipe out of about nine that I tried was anything close to outstanding. In addition, a couple of the recipes were kind of botched and, while I could figure them out, it still seemed stupid and unprofessional. In one case, my husband was surprised one was a food-delivery recipe. It was very ordinary and while certainly edible again, something I could cook without even having a recipe to follow.
That said, Blue Apron relies a bit too much on chicken breast and roasted vegetables, but fortunately I like roasted vegetables.
Funny, I’d have said they rely too much on various coleslaw-type recipes and variants of salted, peppered and sauteed chicken/beef/fish with some kind of sauce on top.
I guess maybe they get in ruts, or maybe it’s more seasonal, since roasted vegetables might heat your house up more than a cold salad type dish.
We’ve done Hello Fresh and Blue Apron. Hello Fresh for 2 weeks, blue apron for maybe 3 months. Blue Apron was way better in terms of the food taste/recipes. Both were just way too expensive though - my comparison isn’t necessarily buying it myself but say, ordering takeout from a chain like Applebees, and they don’t beat the price of that. Which is too expensive IMO when I have to cook it myself.
I’ve done CSA boxes myself and liked them a lot. These services serve a different function and aren’t directly comparable.
I’ve done Blue Apron for probably 3 years now. I love it because I love the variety of food. I’m single, and now that BA allows me to pick just 2 2 person meals per week it’s perfect. My box arrives Monday, so meal one covers Monday and Tuesday, Meal 2 Wednesday and Thursday and then I’m free to do whatever on the weekend. Price wise it’s cheaper for me as others mentioned - per unit cost might be higher but i don’t need to buy a lot of extra food that I won’t eat. As for preparation, I’ve gotten pretty good at it. BA uses a lot of the same techniques, and their website includes videos to teach knife skills. I also subscribe to their wine program which pairs wine with some of their meals. I really like this too - and I’d love to say it’s because they make a great suggestion for a good pairing (they do!) but the truth is I just like drinking the wine.
We dud Plated and Blue Apron. Blue Apron was the one we liked best. We had to stop when we cancelled a two shipments on time but two weeks later we saw the money came out of our account anyway. Then they sort of pissed me off by making it difficult to cancel the whole deal. I had to actually converse with a member of their team.
But, after our email conversation, they refunded me all of the money they took out plus the money for the meal I didn’t get to cancel in time (we were going away) and were extraordinarily nice about it. It seemed as if they really just wanted to find out why I was cancelling.
Loved the meals. Me and hubby looked forward to our boxes each week.
Another box food thing we did for a while and really enjoyed was Try The World. We’d get a curated box of gourmet snacks and foodstuffs from a different country every month. That also was a very fun box we looked forward to getting.
We’re going to have to try this - we love snacks from other places (we already buy some from online German and Belgian retailers - one of my husband’s favorites are peanut butter-flavored puffs - no idea why those don’t exist here).
We switch off between Home Chef and Blue Apron. They each have their advantages. I’m not thrilled about the amount of packaging either, though at least most of it can be recycled here. That said, I hate wasting food more and I do like receiving only enough of each ingredient to use for each recipe.
Haha. I love coleslaw, so I guess I don’t notice.
I do too, but something like 4 of the past 6 Blue Apron meals we got were basically some kind of slaw/quick-pickled salad with some kind of meat/fish/chicken that was salted, peppered and sauteed, and a sauce of some kind added. None were bad, but we were both kind of surprised by how much those two styles of dish and cooking were.
I’ve noticed that some local services for this sort of thing have sprouted up (actually I recall seeing them around a decade or so before this became trendy). For example, there’s a chef who used to run a popular bistro that offers something like this. Also, grocery stores like Kroger are doing a rotation of fresh meal kits but so far I haven’t been too impressed by the selection. I’m just saying I live in some Midwest suburb and there are plenty of options here, so I think if I were interested I would look into those over the nationwide things.
Yes, this is my one complaint about Blue Apron - they use a lot of the same techniques over and over - like adding vinegar to vegetables, and pan-frying meat.
We (two adults) did Blue Apron for about a month and a half. Tasty, straightforward recipes, so no complaints there, but it didn’t fit with our lifestyle, namely:
-we often have independently busy weeknights, so figuring out three nights a week to spend an hour cooking a meal that we both are going to sit down and eat is tricky.
-because every recipe is a “new” recipe, with unique ingredients, even simple recipes take significantly longer than similar home-spun preparations.
-we don’t really ‘meal plan’ as is, and so getting Blue Apron didn’t make much of a difference in our regular shopping (in other words, spending on BA didn’t result in a related decrease in grocery costs).
-like food from anywhere, some ingredients don’t really last a week. So even though it’s a weekly delivery, only some ingredients will stick around long enough to be cooked the night before the next delivery.
After the first week, we ended up only using 1-2 of the meals per week. I’m sure it’s a good option for some, but it wasn’t for us.
We did Blue Apron for a while, but quickly got bored with their options.
Now we are doing Home Chef and loving it. It’s very versatile and had lots of variety.
I got a freebie from a friend for Blue Apron a little ways back. I did enjoy it. I liked exploring new tastes and the recipes did give me a certain confidence. But I was not really in a good financial place to continue with the service. I mean, it’s not really that expensive if you have the discipline to eat half of what is billed as a two-person meal now and half of it later, but I kind of just gobbled the whole thing up in one shot. Also, even though my neighborhood isn’t exactly the slums, I can’t say that I am all that confident that I won’t fall prey to porch pirates. Maybe I’ll try again if I find myself in a somewhat better state of affairs.
We did Blue Apron for about six months and liked it. We finally quit because of the cost, which is somewhere between buying and cooking your own food and eating out (this is for a family of four).
I liked that it got us to try new things, or to cook things in new ways. There were very few meals we didn’t like and none that we hated. Several where we went back to the recipe again to cook on our own.
It seems to be very seasonal; so in the fall/winter there was a lot of butternut squash and winter vegetables, and in the spring we were getting sick of yellow squash and zucchini. But at least there was a variety in the cooking methods and flavorings.
We may go back to it again, but now we just do an e-meals service where, for a lot cheaper, we get the recipes each week and go buy our own ingredients.
How many of these meal services are financially profitable versus being propped up by venture capitalist investments? I know at the beginning they are burning through cash as they try to acquire customers.
I would be tempted to try out the new service that’s still burning through investment dollars rather than the one that is self-supporting. I would assume the new service would be focused more on quality and high value to gain new customers, while the established service is looking for ways to cut costs to maximize profit.
There is a good chance you can get similar meal kits at a local supermarket. I noticed both the major chains in my rural state are in the process of adding meal kits (available in some stores, not yet available in others).