Many of my friends have tried Blue Apron, and not many still use them. As a strictly amateur chef myself, find the business model pretty strange. At some point the customers are going to realize they can get all of these ingredients from the supermarket. And not long after that, they're going to realize that they already have most of these ingredients sitting in their fridge.
My wife and I cook. We look up a random recipe that sounds tasty, make a list of ingredients we don't already have, pick those up at the store, and follow the instructions. It's not much harder than paint-by-numbers, which is what I expect almost every Blue Apron customer to realize at some point.
I don't mean to say Blue Apron is a bad thing - it's training wheels for cooking, which is great! But when the training wheels come off, so does the subscription. At what point do they hit the saturation point and the customer base tops out?
My wife and I cook. We look up a random recipe that sounds tasty, make a list of ingredients we don't already have, pick those up at the store, and follow the instructions. It's not much harder than paint-by-numbers, which is what I expect almost every Blue Apron customer to realize at some point.
I don't mean to say Blue Apron is a bad thing - it's training wheels for cooking, which is great! But when the training wheels come off, so does the subscription. At what point do they hit the saturation point and the customer base tops out?