I did really enjoy learning to cook new things.” Another former subscriber who cancelled after a few months said, “What it taught me was that I needed to spend an hour or so a week meal planning and looking for fun recipes, and I needed to set aside an hour to shop. Discussions in the r/BlueApron Reddit forum seem to support that theory: “I think of it more as a cooking lesson, and save the recipe cards,” one user wrote. Every ingredient is packaged separately, resulting in absurdities like a single scallion arriving in its own plastic bag.”īut the real problem with meal kit companies’ business models, Cohen argued, is that the kits serve as “training wheels” of sorts for newbie cooks once subscribers grow more confident in their abilities to saute and figure out which ingredients complement one another, they inevitably cancel. As Dirt Candy chef Amanda Cohen pointed out in a 2017 New York Times op-ed, “ generate enormous amounts of paper and plastic waste. Many ultimately found the mail-order services too expensive, and while meal kits may prevent food waste, the excessive amount of packaging (not to mention the energy used to ship ingredients nationwide) led customers to shake their heads. Blue Apron, arguably the biggest name in the space, was founded in 2012 and valued at a hefty $2 billion just three years later.īut as the meal kit space became more and more crowded, the novelty wore off, and for many consumers, so did the sheen. Meal kits also seemed like a dream come true for food tech-hungry investors, who sank millions of dollars into companies like Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, Sun Basket, Plated, and Chef’d celebrity names like Ayesha Curry, Martha Stewart, and Mark Bittman also jumped in head first. Rather than poring over recipes to figure out what to make for dinner, then schlepping to the grocery store for ingredients (and inevitably having leftover produce spoil in the fridge), subscribers could instead have perfectly portioned ingredients delivered right to their doors on a weekly basis, complete with easy-to-follow recipe cards. For infamously time-pressed millennials, mail-order meal kits initially seemed like a dream come true.

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