> 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.
That's not a great analogy. It was far more than assembly...with Ikea products, you don't cut the wood to size, or carve joints, or even use glue. With Blue Apron and the other in this space, you do everything except the shopping. so you will learn how to handle a knife, different cooking techniques, etc.
The real value add was in removing the need for keeping a stocked pantry and doing grocery shopping. Many recipes used ingredients that it was inconvenient or impossible to buy in small quantities, or that were hard to find at a standard megamart.
Which is why the Blue Apron crates were always so ludicrously expensive compared to a regular grocer despite their purported scale. You got the right proportion of green onion but get to pay the price of a whole bundle.
It takes out the entire creativity process of cooking, and for people who actually like cooking on a higher level also the process of selecting the right ingredients.
I don’t understand the whole shopping part, it would seem to be pretty clear to me that any place that is serviced by Blue Apron should have a service for groceries to be delivered as well, in fact it’s highly unlikely that they won’t.
I order all my groceries online in London, primarily been using Ocado but Amazon has also now has much wider offering with Amazon Fresh since they offer their own, Morrisons and Planet Ogranic goods.
Every large supermarket chain here offers a delivery service, it also doesn’t cost anything extra but there is usually a minimum (usually £50) for that.
Many of them even would unpack the bags for you if you ask them.
If you really want to go to the recipe route then Ocado and many other groceries delivery services also do that so you can select a meal and how many people and they’ll add the ingredients for you to your shopping bag.
To me this seems a much better solution and service than Blue Apron.
> It takes out the entire creativity process of cooking, and for people who actually like cooking on a higher level also the process of selecting the right ingredients.
Did you ever try one of these services? Because that's the opposite of our experience. My wife is the cook in our family, and she loved it. She learned by example...seeing the quantities, getting an understanding of how to handle ingredients, practicing different cooking techniques, different variations, different flavors, etc., etc., etc...
Not only that, but we didn't get every meal from the service...she used what she learned to really branch out and make all kinds of things she never would have attempted in the past.
We always knew we were paying a premium for the convenience and variety, but it's a trade-off a lot of busy families are willing to make. It allowed us to prepare something at home instead of getting fast food or going to a restaurant, which would have been even more expensive.
That's not a great analogy. It was far more than assembly...with Ikea products, you don't cut the wood to size, or carve joints, or even use glue. With Blue Apron and the other in this space, you do everything except the shopping. so you will learn how to handle a knife, different cooking techniques, etc.
The real value add was in removing the need for keeping a stocked pantry and doing grocery shopping. Many recipes used ingredients that it was inconvenient or impossible to buy in small quantities, or that were hard to find at a standard megamart.