I agree. It seems like these will eventually lose to just normal automated grocery delivery. You will always need other food than just the kits even if they are cost competitive in NYC, etc.
My wife now can cook a much wider variety of meals after a few months of meal kits. It also has reduced dramatically the thinking it required to plan meals in advance. If grocery stores want to compete they will have to work with their providers to create smaller packages of items to assemble and a team to design and forecast demand for different types of meals. Not impossible but definitely not easy, I see acquisitions happening in this space.
I wouldn't say they taught me to cook, I didn't learn any new techniques. But, I did get a lot of ideas from them, and it led us to eating a wider variety of food.
I'm now curious -- what do typical American university students eat? Do they cook, or are all meals provided? (Surely not at weekends?)
[1] http://laurenmclean.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/01_Sharwo...
[2] https://recipes.sainsburys.co.uk/recipes/main-courses/easy-c...
Most Americans, including students, cook standard American food such as hamburgers, hot dogs, eggs, spaghetti, roast chicken, ramen, steak etc., as well as a lot of canned soups, frozen vegetables, and boxed casserole mixes.
But these kits are for people who want to eat something novel every meal, and certainly not mundane working class food. I mean, you don't need a recipe for a hamburger.
So you'd be surprised. But, for the most part, these services justify their relatively high prices with recipes that may look a bit intimidating for many people to pull together on their own.
For us, and I think we were probably a bit better cooks than is normal, hamburgers would count as a lazy meal, assuming you mean cooking something like [1] from the fresh meat section.
Hot dogs, eggs alone, or ramen -- no; this is food for when you've arrived home alone drunk at 4:30. Or woken up hungover.
Roast chicken or steak is fine, so long as there's also some vegetables and some kind of sauce.
Average meals would be things like curries or stir-fries made with a pre-prepared sauce or spice mix, chicken/turkey fricassees, risottos, or casseroles. I think we discovered fairly quickly that £3 tetra pak wine improved most dishes, so long as one didn't drink it.
The Blue Apron recipes have fancier ingredients than we would have bought when we were 18-22, and a little more effort in the sauces. Looking at things like [2] and [3], the skill required was well within what we could make, although we'd probably use dried herbs, cheaper vegetables (canned sweetcorn, normal size tomatoes), and normal meat rather than anything special.
In fact, the "Fresh Basil Fettuccine" is almost exactly like our "use up what's left in the fridge" meal.
[1] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=29239931...
[2] https://www.blueapron.com/recipes/seared-chicken-creamy-past...
[3] https://www.blueapron.com/recipes/fresh-basil-fettuccine-pas...
Only one dorm offered cooked evening meals, and then only Monday-Friday. It was a fair bit more expensive to take this dorm.
In any case, most universities only offer dorms for the first year.
[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/ImageCropToolT4/imageTool/uploade...
Yes, of course you need other groceries beyond the meal kit itself, but that's not the point - the point is that you've paid the meal service to deal with all the boring parts of the process, which often includes the decision-making, so you can just enjoy the cooking and eating.
The wildly globe-hopping table of the home cook is a recent, and kinda silly, development. You can get plenty of variety without trying to prepare meals from every continent.
(this goes out the window if it's a major hobby, obviously, but in that case so should complaints about its difficulty/inconvenience, which are entirely self-imposed)
On first use answer some questions that provide information about dietary needs. Drag some sliders around to indicate preferences for simplicity, cost, ,quality, convenience. Some people want beans and rice because they're cheap, some people want fancier meals and care less about price. Some people are cooking for four and want meals that scale well. Some people
Each wee checkbox the meals you want to eat in accordance with your schedule for the upcoming week.
Press go and get a bunch of meals paired with a shopping list
click on the meals to revise as necessary (e.g regenerate on you don't like or mark an item on the list of required items as "I'll source this myself")
Add to cart, press go, wait for brown truck.
Something like that could be a hit with single men and college students.
That's where I see the value. People spend a lot of effort figuring out how to eat a balanced diet while optimizing for low (enough) cost or just close enough. Offloading the work of planning a balanced diet on a weekly level is something many people would pay a small premium for.
It's an interesting leverage point, since there's obviously a [possibly smaller-than-they-want] market. But the expansion into automated grocery will be a matter of luck & timing. Unless you're Amazon [in which case it's persistence]