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Comment by DLay | Hacker News Reader

I liked Matt Levine's opinion on Blue Apron yesterday:

>Here is my theory, though: Blue Apron is a tech company in the sense that its product is not meals, or ingredients, but simulacrum. What it delivers is the idea of creating a home-cooked meal from fresh ingredients, without the tedious shopping and chopping work that that would otherwise require. What Blue Apron delivers is not exactly convenience -- ordering takeout is a lot more convenient -- but the perception that you are doing something complicated and real and primal while you are actually, through the miracle of technology, doing something much easier. Blue Apron is a virtual-reality company.

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/view/articles/2017-08-09/yogur...

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These quotes make for a nice dramatic effect, but the reality is much simpler:

Cooking & cleaning is a much bigger time investment than shopping for ingredients. In 10 minutes in a grocery store I can buy enough food for 10-15 meals, which would take hours to cook (in aggregate). The comparison stands even when you include driving to the store (before any pedants try to be contrarian)

Blue Apron is optimizing the smaller part of the time pie required for eating, but at a higher cost than delivery (that optimizes the larger part of the pie for less money, usually)

That's why takeout is a decades-proved business model and Blue Apron is a VC-subsidized non-business.

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That being said, I do agree with it being a virtual reality company. And by that I mean a company that can't really exist in actual reality.

That analysis assumes that the service is only about time-saving.

I've never used it but I've heard people say how they like it because

- they get to learn new recipes using less-common ingredients

- have good quality meals (which take out often doesn't provide, if we are considering time saving)

- they, sometimes at least, prefer eating at home.

Well, yes, of course it assumes that, because providing value to the customer should be somewhere in the business model.

If it's not, it'll eventually become a non-business.

1. There's nothing that suggests the ingredients are less common. But if you're a Blue Apron user, feel free to list some of the ingredients you were not able to find at a grocery store.

1.5: you can learn new recipes 10 different ways already, without having to subscribe to any "X as a service".

2. Nothing that suggests an average person can cook better or faster than takeout, which suggests the takeout provides value to the customer.

3. Completely irrelevant to the points at hand.

My comment was saying that you're assuming time-saving is the only value, and was pointing out that's not true. I'm even willing to believe it might be the most important source of value by a long shot -- I wasn't arguing against your conclusion; I was pointing out an assumption made by the argument you stated.

Regarding 1. It's not that the ingredients are less common per se. It's that using BA means that people ended up using some less commonly used ingredients. They were introduced to new things that they hadn't used before and wouldn't have sought out on their own. They liked that.

Regarding 1.5 - obviously, but the thing is there is greater convenience (that some ppl prefer) with not having to select the recipes, get the ingredients, portion them out. For some people that different in convenience makes the difference between whether they do it or not. So treating this issue as if it was purely a matter of whether it was possible or not doesn't make sense.

Regarding 2, I have heard people say they have been able to make high quality meals that they wouldn't usually have made that are better than most takeaway.

3 is most definitely relevant, because it's an example of a non-speed-based kind of value it provides to some people - getting the kind of meal they would only otherwise get at a restaurant but at home. Most takeaway can't do that.

There was previously a free website called notakeout.com, which has since gone under (there's currently something else on the domain that's completely unrelated).

What they did was provide daily dinner recipes for fancy-restaurant type meals, with instructions, wine pairing, and shopping list. If you're an omnivore, you could simply print the day's page, stop at the grocery store on the way home, and cook whatever it was.

It seems to me that this represents about 80% of the value of Blue Apron at no cost (I think they had a for-pay email service, or something?).

It depends on your type of grocery store -- maybe gourmet stores carry things like freekah (a type of African grain) and odd varieties of fruit (like Meyer lemons), but I hadn't even heard of these things before joining Blue Apron. It's not a perfect service -- I agree with other posters saying the instructions could be made better, but I've found it quite educational.

> In 10 minutes in a grocery store I can buy enough food for 10-15 meals

In the universe I inhabit there's no way that's true. I spend a great deal of time in the grocery store just finding things, then looking at the choices to figure out what's the best deal / doesn't contain Yellow #5 / isn't expired already and on and on.

Oh and...add to that the time to phone the wife to find out if when she wrote "Onion" on the list did that mean Yellow Onion or White Onion or Red Onion or Sweet Wallah Wallah Onion or Scallion and how many of them...

> What it delivers is the idea of creating a home-cooked meal from fresh ingredients, without the tedious shopping and chopping work that that would otherwise require.

Clearly, he's never used Blue Apron, since they have you do the chopping work.

> What Blue Apron delivers is not exactly convenience -- ordering takeout is a lot more convenient -

Takeout requires me to leave my house; that is often less convenient than Blue Apron.

Delivery is arguably more convenient, though where I live the non-pizza choices without hefty delivery fees on top of restaurant prices are limited.

Try UberEATS or other alternatives. The delivery fee us only about $5

> Try UberEATS or other alternatives.

That's what I was referring to already.

McDonald's in the Seattle area is pushing UberEats really hard.

I just can't see paying a delivery fee for McDonald's

Leave the bars when they close at 2:00 a.m and take an Uber home; call UberEATS for McDonald's because you're too drunk to drive. I don't know if it's true or not; but, my local McDonald's does a lot of UberEATS business between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m.

Lyft has late night Taco Bell runs coming soon to Seattle. I'd guess 100% of those will fit exactly into the demo you mentioned

Not only the delivery fee, but certain food discounts/specials don't apply if you order through UberEats.

$5 is a hefty delivery fee for you? Not criticizing, just that would be surprising to me

For what my wife and I would typically order for anything that would be regular enough to be comparable to Blue Apron's 3-day a week frequency, yes.

For special “eating out, but at home” events, no.

it's a lot. most restaurants will deliver for free (if you're in their radius, and order above a minimum $ threshold) and you can optionally tip the driver a buck or two if you feel like it. $5 is a lot considering the competitors costs (basically $0).

Couldn't the same kind of argument be made about buying ingredients from the grocery store to make meals?

"What making meals from store-bought ingredients delivers is not exactly convenience -- ordering takeout is a lot more convenient -- but the perception that you are doing something complicated and real and primal while you are actually, through the miracle of technology, doing something much easier [than harvesting your vegetables, slaughtering and butchering your own animals, grinding your own flour, etc]"

Cooking from groceries is actually significantly cheaper than takeout.

But more expensive than grinding your own flour and butchering your own animals.

The miracles of technology and labor specialization! You can pay someone money in order to have them partially process your food before you cook it!

I don't butcher my own animals, but I do purchase half a cow in the fall from a local farmer here in Idaho. In the end it comes out to roughly $6 a pound for grass fed beef. Much cheaper than the grocery store since grass fed ground beef is $6 a pound. I also do that with a pig (whole, $750 total after butchering fees) and chickens (not economical, but tastes better). I also get to see the animals as they grow and are fed when I visit. More time consuming but I know exactly how the animals are treated and fed.

When I grew up in India, we didn't have "supermarkets" to process food, we would go to a market which had butchers, fishmongers etc. The butchers usually had live chickens that they would slaughter right in front of you. I believe they use the halal method where they slit the throat of the chicken and then put it in a box. The chicken knows whats happening when its fetched from the overcrowded cage, so it cries a very loud, pitiful scream.... that caused me much alarm as a little kid to hear it scream in pain :( :( :(.

Depends what you're dealing with - plenty of things like cakes are weirdly cheaper for me to buy than to buy the ingredients for.

Preservation matters - the cutting up of vegetables for meal kits is a form of processing that reduces their shelf life, and therefore increases cost and waste.

yeah it'll also kill you 10 years earlier, but not sure if you value health

Well, there is buy in bulk and sell at a cheaper price than it takes to buy a limited amount of ingredients and prepare. I mean that's economics 101. The preservatives are really just to extend shelf life but you find that a lot of places are just going preservative free as much as possible.

Actually probably not. You have to get the wheat (or grow it/harvest it) and then raise the animal/butcher it, save the excess. Will you eat everything before it spoils or otherwise goes bad?

?? I never said or implied anything about costs. That has nothing to do with the point I was making.

> Cooking from groceries is actually significantly cheaper than takeout.

So, for similar meals, is Blue Apron. At least where I live.

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