Blue Apron stock crashed from $10 to $2. What do you think about the business model? Would you buy at 80% discount to IPO - assuming it is ripe for a takeover at this price.
I wonder how long until Bezos hires an army of cooks and craps over all these "aprons". He has all the infrastructure he needs. Then he will build an army of robot cooks and crap all over the human cooks. How hard would it be to throw a kitchen to the back of a self service store ? Fresh truck brings the stuff anyway, they only have to cook it and the swarm of drones delivers.
That'd be amazing though. A box shows at your door full of ingredients and a tiny man(or drone) to cook for you.
Stupid fad. Why pay the same price as take out to still spend an hour to make your food? Plenty of healthy take out options in metro areas. If you really want to make your food, just buy the groceries for much cheaper using Instacart etc. Would make more sense if it was half the price of take out at about $5/meal. The only real value is the convenience of providing the recipes and pre-picking the ingredients. This can easily be replicated for cheaper by grocers or Instacart/Amazon. APRN’s gonna die.
HODL
Biggest risk to the aprons of the world is local competition. We switched from plated, to hello fresh, to just add cooking which only uses local in season New England ingredients. Just add cooking is run as a side business of a local baked goods supplier. They can charge a small premium over national apron changes due to being local and customer acquisition costs will be lower.
Huge capital required to keep growing. Economies of scale for the “fresh food” industry seems very challenging when you consider shipping cost to be the most expensive element (looking at probably 15-20$/shipment). Amazon seems to be the only logical player in this space, since they have the distribution channels completely optimized. I’m staying away.
Blue Apron is like a shitty CSA
Lol blue apron. People rarely use that shit. Maybe some high flier in New York buildings. It's pricey expensive shit. People who are lazy will continue being lazy. Stop boxing shit and present it to people as if they will cook. Fuck that. Uber eats and door dash are going to eat blue aprons business. Also Amazon delivery. Blue apron is fucked.
My wife and MIL were all over blue apron / hello fresh for a long time. They kept claiming how it is cheaper than buying at the grocery store. Which is of course very wrong, but somehow in both their heads they didn't account for everything else they buy at the grocery store. I.e. lunch, breakfast items, toiletries, juice, soda, wine and snacks. So after s couple months when they started running out if their stashes and realized the flaw in their accounting they cancelled their memberships. I imagine they aren't the only ones to do this.
There’s a few issues with it 1) you need to be adventurous with your food, which a lot of people aren’t 2) expensive 3) wasteful packaging 4) only delivers a few meals a week, meaning you’re either going grocery shopping or eating takeout the rest of the times, so might as well continue with takeout/grocery habit, you’re not gaining much in terms of convenience. I would much rather sign up for a grocery delivery service that guarantees the contents of my order will not be substituted and has ripe produce. Seems like that simple concept is unreachable.
^^that Btw, Instacart delivers fresh produce and won’t replace with substitutes if you mark it that way in the app. You can also pick a specific substitute in advance.
Yeah but I don’t want to have to mark every single item. + they sort of randomly pick produce. I want ripe tomatoes for example. And 2 Unripe avocados and 1 ready to eat. You can’t specify that kind of stuff and expect that it will actually be taken care of. And if I have to go to the grocery store anyway, then why pay for the service that will half ass it?
Absolutely. The fact that so many legit companies are crashing the party tells me that the category will expand. There is something right. This product has lots of potential, think working couple in coastal cities that does not have time to prep and cook from scratch , single people who are high earners etc etc
A concern is that the first is not necessarily the survivor
Big fish will buy out small fish. Consumer behavior is impossible to alter. For the base that is used to relying on Blue Apron, there must be someone with deep pockets willing to invest.