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How often do you find yourself craving a home cooked meal, but without the time and energy to shop for and prep all those ingredients? Well now, there’s a startup that wants to take over that part of the process, so you can just focus on cooking and eating.
Blue Apron is a New York based startup, and one of several meal kit delivery services, that takes care of the shopping, sorting, washing and prepping. Customers start by going online to browse recipes and choose one they like. The company then delivers the ingredients directly to them. Co-founder and CEO Matt Salzberg explained the service to Inc:
“The idea came out of a need my co-founders and I had in our own lives. Our customers love sitting back and letting us do the grocery shopping for them. They know they’re going to get home and there’s going to be everything they need to create a fresh, delicious meal.”
But Blue Apron isn’t the only startup of this kind that has burst onto the scene in recent years. Other meal kit delivery services like Gathered Table and Plated also offer certain meal prep and delivery services. And of course there are grocery delivery services like Amazon Fresh. But these meal kit services go even further when it comes to convenience.
In an era where consumers put an increasing amount of stock in convenience, it’s not surprising that companies are jumping on this kind of idea. So far, Blue Apron has built a subscriber base that purchases more than $600,000 of meals a month. So it seems that consumers are appreciative of the idea as well.
Since an increasing number of people are both shopping and finding recipes online, this seems like the next natural step. If people can find recipes and buy ingredients without leaving their homes, then it makes sense to offer everything customers need to create a gourmet meal in one place, too.
Blue Apron and many of the other meal kit delivery services currently focus more on upscale ingredients and dishes. Many have specific delivery areas. But it’s entirely possible that both the service areas and food variety of these services will increase over time. Soon, everyone could be enjoying home cooked meals without ever having to set foot in a grocery store.
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Image: Blue Apron
There’s obviously a demand for it, which is good for the company and good for the customers (good food, convenient). I was thinking an extension to that in the future could be offering an option where the food can be cooked and delivered. There might be regular customers who purchase the kit, but might sometimes not have the energy to cook it.
Annie Pilon
I love getting food for delivery. So it would be nice to have some gourmet options, I agree.
Hopefully they have that in the pipeline. I think it would be quite popular.
Aira Bongco
I saw a twist in this type of business and that is they prepare diet packed lunches. It takes the guesswork out of cooking and preparing meals PLUS they are healthy too.
The great thing about that, Aira, is that if the diet packed lunches are delivered to a workplace, it’s likely to be an advert in itself, especially amongst colleagues that have their lunches together.
Annie Pilon
Good points!
I will show this post for my podcast co-host, Lotta Gergils Aston. We have talked about food deliveries on our podcast show, TrendPal. In Sweden you have a service called, food paper bag, with different packages of groceries.
Felice Morin
Any company that does a good job of making a service more convenient will usually have pretty good success. I think it would be pretty cool to give one of these meals a try. It can be frustrating when you get going on a recipe and realize that you’re missing an ingredient. This wouldn’t happen with this service. Thanks for sharing!