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

Matt Salzberg

Ilia Papas

Matt Wadiak

Food

Blue Apron

Meal Kits & Grocery Services

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. 

I had a subscription but all the ingredients and steps did not work with my lifestyle so I stopped. 

Also I found it more cost effective to come up with other recipes. 

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

I was never a Blue Apron customer, but my roommate was a huge fan. The food is amazing; however, you can't share it. We would always get the recipes (the best part of it), go to Target, and cook in bigger portions.

In reality, it always took much longer for me to prepare the meal than their estimated time...

I used Blue Apron for a few years when I lived in the US. Loved the recipes and the simple instructions- felt like I was great at cooking!

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

Blue Apron is one of the better subscription boxes. The food is good. Good for people that want to cook but not shop or prep. 

Lets give Blue Apron credit: the created a new class of how we eat. Before Blue Apron we had...groceries? restaurants? frozen meals? Now millions of people all around the world get measured ingredients with various levels of prep already done sent to their homes. People who would never cook have tried cooking. People have tried new dishes, techniques, and cuisines. There's a whole industry and while Blue Apron has fallen from the top spot, every one of those competitors (hello, Hello Fresh!) owes them thanks.

That said, it was a bad fit for us. We were already cooks so the meals felt expensive, the dishes fussy, and the results lackluster. And our picky kids never got into them.

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.

One of the better meal kits - they've improved their packaging since I first ordered but still not worth the price IMO

One of the first meal kits I tried. The meals are definitely higher end than other meal kits I've tried. They also are more complicated and took longer to make. Food was very good, but definitely was not something my young child was interested in. Also pricier than other kits.

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. 

Only meal kit I've tried that actually tasted great.

Very high quality ingredients and recipes, but they can take a while to make.

A couple of caveats: I tried this for a few months several years ago, and I haven't tried another meal kit delivery since then so I have a great frame of reference for comparison.
However, I really liked Blue Apron. The ingredients are fresh, and the recipes are really easy. I loved that I got to try new ingredients that I normally wouldn't try because I don't know anything about them or because I don't want to buy a whole bottle of something and risk not liking it. They give you the amount you need for the recipe, so there's not  a bunch of waste. The website is easy to navigate, and one thing I really liked is that you can go back and find the ingredient lists and recipes if you want to try cooking them on your own.
The reason I didn't keep up with it is that it seemed a bit too pricey for just one person, and at the time I was too busy to remember to go onto the website to skip weeks.

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.  

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