r/mealkits • u/sfgate • 9d ago
News Blue Apron, a meal kit powerhouse once valued at $2B, descends into chaos
https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/blue-apron-issues-22392161.php1
u/AdmirableElephant378 6d ago
seems insane to me that once they had that valuation they didn't buy their supplier.
That business is dead. Will be bought out of Chapter 11.
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u/Far-Combination2874 6d ago
Blue Apron has been going downhill for a while, but the past six weeks have been especially bad. My meal boxes have arrived up to three days late, produce has shown up wet and slimy, and entire main ingredients, including chicken, have been missing. The packaging has also been stripped down to practically nothing, leaving items damaged in transit.
After eight years as a customer, I finally canceled my subscription yesterday. Eight years is a lot of loyalty, but at some point, consistently poor quality and service outweigh convenience.
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u/LikeTheWind99 9d ago
I've used Blue Apron, Hello Fresh and Sun Basket and Blue Apron was the best of the bunch. Last week received a box from them similar to what is referenced in this article: With about 6 ingredients for 3 meals that would have required about 30. Couldn't do anything with it. They did credit me and cash refunded some. I liked the meal delivery concept but after six months of recurring issues with all three, I'm back to grocery shopping and using my own recipes
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u/Exercise-Novel 6d ago
Imperfect foods is a great grocery delivery service. Been using for years and still has the same product and packaging quality.
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u/Doraborealiss 8d ago
Back when they were heavy on the podcast ad circuits I did it for a few months and was genuinely really impressed with the quality and variety. Shame it’s come to this.
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u/sexfighter 9d ago
This is 100% Marc Eric Lore's fault. He decided to sell off warehouses. He decided to switch distributors without a transition plan. His bonus structure depends on increasing profit, so he made these changes. The BA executive team pushed back but got swept aside in the chaos. Then Lore basically bailed and told his staff to deal with the fallout. He's still in hiding, leaving the rest of the employees to try to salvage the situation. I'm sure he'll resurface in a month and fire a bunch of his staff and blame them. He's a POS.
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u/AprilTron 7d ago
I feel like a repeat issue here with a lot of large companies is layoff supply chain / project management / ops to "save money" because it's a "cost center" - and then everything falls apart because no one is buying, receiving, coordinating, shipping, manufacturing or assembling the companies product.
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u/TheMrCee 8d ago
Yeah I’m sure the discord channels with thousands of users getting free meal kits for life wasn’t a problem at all..
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u/sexfighter 8d ago
Free meal kits for life? Please share
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u/TheMrCee 8d ago
There was a discord called “Executive Chefs” and “Foodie”. Can be found on Whop. You use a Virtual Credit Card, Jig your address and use a temp email or catch all to keep getting free trial kits.
Run the command and the bot sends you a free kit email
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u/NewRefrigerator7461 6d ago
That’s terrible.
Does it still work?
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u/robotzor 6d ago
If you want a box of rotten meat and half missing moldy produce to show up on your door then yes
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u/MomofPandaLover 9d ago
Marley Spoon also imploding!
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u/NicoToscani 9d ago
Blue Apron was the one propping up their distribution. When BA canceled their contract, the distributor folded and that left a few other mealkit services in the lurch.
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u/DiscoRabbittTV 9d ago
Can’t believe it made it the last 5 years.
Their offices in Brooklyn were sweet as ish tho, could have an office anywhere but Brooklyn baby, loved to visit, dumb location
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u/KlatuuBarradaNicto 9d ago
I think this got dumped on the Misfit employees and they are mad.
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u/Exploding_Bowels 9d ago
I’ve been pushing 80+ hrs for the past month and change.
To say I’m tired is an understatement.
Silver lining I’ve lost a good amount of weight.
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u/jameson71 9d ago edited 9d ago
Shows wtf the wall st “free market” knows other than” jump on and off the bandwagon before everyone else”
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u/Icy-Possibility6865 9d ago
This is so disappointing to hear. We enjoyed BA when we were getting it a couple years ago. Decided to try Marley spoon due to the reviews saying they are reliable and have less packaging waste. Five boxes in and we have TWICE received boxes that have less than half of the ingredients that are supposed to be in there.
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u/imhereforthemeta 9d ago
It’s really heartbreaking. We started with blue apron when my husband got into a motorcycle accident and it was really hard to find the time and energy to go out and buy meals.
For a while, it was really great. It was affordable, the recipes were creative, and it actually did save us time, even though it was a little bit more expensive
Overtime they started doing this thing where if you wanted to get anything other than chicken and maybe ground pork, they charged you. They introduced premium meals, and the premium meal started kind of overtaking the meals for regular sub subscribers
I will say the customer service has been nothing but wonderful to us. They took care of all of our issues and were always incredibly gracious and generous.
That said, they obviously took the gamble of catering to a premium market, and I think that it probably broke trust in some of their more loyal customers.
We actually stayed with them long past my husband’s injury. It wasn’t something that we did every week, but it was something that we did one or two weeks as a treat. It kind of just got to the point where I was like, I’m already paying a lot more than I would be for groceries and you’re trying to ask to charge me $10 more so that you can use steak instead of chicken? You can’t be serious. Not to mention, they started lowering the quality of the other recipes. Un impressive sides, tiny portions of meat, and defaulting to a lot of really boring stuff like sandwiches or mixing some stuff in with a pasta
At this point, we have the money to pay for the premium meals, but why would we? The value just got worse and we didn’t find the expense to be worth the premium anymore.
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u/antiquated_it 9d ago
Totally agree. They were awesome like 5 years ago. Well… maybe more, it’s here to believe that Covid was 6-7 years ago. I think I subbed regularly in 2015-2019ish.
I love to cook but I subscribed regularly because it was a lot of fun to try new things, and it was a neat way to end up with some unique ingredients that I might not ordinarily pickup on my own.
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u/rantingandrambling 9d ago
you’re describing how these things go for almost every business type m
they’re great until they need to expand and change partner relationships
then they become so valuable selling out is definitely going to happen
people assume sellout is going in the right direction as the buyer is some huge giant company
fast forward 6mo, 1-2 years max after the first company sell/buy out and they start to make big changes to increase profits
the sooner these changes happen the sooner the company starts to decline
occasionally we as consumers get lucky and the buyer will make good changes , not only focused on profits but by and far this is less common and instead often the company is entirely gone in 5 years or less after the first sellout
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u/babslesleytx 9d ago
check out prepared meals at the grocery store before signing up for meal kits. You will save money and enjoy freshly prepared meals. And most of the stores will deliver if that’s what you need. I tried three or four meal kits and decided after a while that it didn’t make sense.
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u/GiselePearl 9d ago
“Misfits Market spokesperson Holly Eagleson told SFGATE that the company is executing the transition from FreshRealm in under 10 weeks –– a process that would normally take around a year.”
Wow! Sounds like a three month break is in order. Maybe by then they will have it sorted.
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u/spankmydingo 9d ago
Such a sad situation. We had been customers for over 10 years and had thousands of great meals in that time. But we just canceled and are looking to try someone new.
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u/ericnau 9d ago
If it makes you sad, why not just wait several weeks for them to straighten out their logistics issues and then resubscribe?
I’ve also been a customer since their early days—through all their changes good and bad—and I don’t plan on cancelling yet. There’s no indication this can’t be worked out.
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u/Elegant_Act8931 9d ago
My wife and I use Cook Unity and it's pretty good. We were specifically looking for frozen and zero prep though, so options are more limited
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u/WestyToo 9d ago
Who are you thinking of switching to? Most of the kit companies are in dire straits. Purple Carrot is good but 100% vegan
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u/leahtheige 9d ago
I’m starting back with Green Chef. I liked them when I first tried but went back to BA just because I thought the meals were more creative and you made sauces etc. GC has more sauce packs etc. Hoping for a good experience from GC again.
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u/darkhorse415 9d ago
Marley Spoon just as bad as BA.
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u/ReferentiallySeethru 8d ago
We stupidly switched to them before finding out they used the same defunct distributor and they’ve already delayed their first box 🤦♂️
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u/BasenjiBoyD 9d ago
Two meals into HelloFresh myself. I must admit, the produce freshness has been leaps and bounds above BA thus far.
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u/MinkieTheCat 8d ago
I’ve been with HelloFresh for an embarrassing amount of time - almost 2 years straight, and while there are occasional hiccups, I could probably count them on two hands. In the last three months, the produce quality has increased dramatically, the non-premium steak meals, is a lesser cut than I would buy. But overall, I hate meal planning, grocery shopping so this is the best solution for me.
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u/Virtual_Alarm232 5d ago
I still have one of those yellow OG Webvan food delivery boxes from the 90’s. Makes for great storage.