Blue Apron offers ingredient and recipe meal kits that they deliver to your door.

Matt Salzberg

Ilia Papas

Matt Wadiak

Blue Apron

Meal Kits & Grocery Services

Food

The food was pretty good, but I didn't feel like I was saving a ton of time using their meal kits. I couldn't justify the cost and the packaging for something that I only felt so-so about. 

What's wrong with Blue Apron? I'm surprised by the low rating. The meals are delicious and they do exactly as advertised. 

I love Blue Apron as they make cooking week night meals easy.  The food is good and the produce is always fresh.  

Sometimes the recipes are much more labor intensive than they let on.

What could be easier than recipes and pre-portioned ingredients? Not grocery shopping has helped me cut down on a lot of extra purchases I would make just walking down the aisles.

Menu is simplistic and ingredients necessarily streamlined/unremarkable, leading to eventually end of a honeymoon phase. Subscription isn't friendly to manage and seems designed to have people accidentally order more boxes.

I've tried Blue Apron off and on for many years. Unfortunately to make its business model work in recent years, the product has used pretty basic/cheap ingredients that produce unremarkable, simple dishes. But they are pretty healthy and can be good for a novice cook looking to wean themselves off delivery food.

I love Blue Apron. It's one of the OG's of the meal kit services and I've been using it for years. I have the app on my phone and I customize my boxes to make sure I get recipes for meals I know I'll like. My preferred diet is 90% vegetarian and 10% pescatarian and I love how Blue Apron always offers at least 3 to 4 vegetarian meal options every week. It's easy to cancel an order when I know I'm going to be out of town. I always keep the nice, glossy recipe cards and have re-made several of the dishes in the past. Blue Apron also offers a very nice wine delivery service, which is also customizable. I often look forward to my Blue Apron boxes. 

Always feels like a lot of packaging. The recipes aren't anything groundbreaking and tend to use a lot of the same ingredients over and over again. It's also pretty terrible experience to skip boxes or cancel your subscription. 

It's a fun way to cook at home but still mix up the recipes you make. 

It's been a couple years since I have tried Blue Apron, but here is what I remember. TONS of packaging for tiny little ingredients. You're going to use a ton of pots and pans to cook a dish. If you are splitting between two people, you'll probably be hungry after. The only pro was it did introduce a few new styles to cook beets, but seriously who even likes beets anyways?! 

This used to be the only game in town for meal kits, but now that there is a lot more competition my appreciation for Blue Apron has waned.

Simply put, the recipes were often tasty, the packaging was completely overwhelming, and most of the meals involved more work than I expected. Initially there were not a lot of vegetarian options, although I think they have gotten better about that in the years since I used this service.  

About Blue Apron