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Comment by nubbins | Hacker News Reader

I found that Blue Apron did pretty much all I could have expected on their end- better recipes and ingredients that I usually got in my neighborhood and new techniques I hadn’t tried. I quit because of the fundamental problem that a subscription food service requires an unknown time commitment (recipes were quite involved)3x a week as well as worry about missing the delivery and having food spoil.

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This was the same issue for me. Maybe I’m just inefficient at cooking but I discovered quite quickly that cooking complex meals at home multiple times per week is actually not something I wanted to do. I found myself spending what felt like an inordinate amount of time on dinner between prep, actual cooking, eating, and extensive cleanup.

I don’t know if this is really Blue Apron’s fault. It’s more that I thought I wanted their service, then discovered I really didn’t.

On the logistics side, there were also numerous times when the delivery time was just not convenient for me. Again, I don’t think BA really did anything wrong here per se, but it was frustrating needing to plan around expecting a big box of fresh food to show up sometime on a particular day. This was further complicated by living in an apartment complex where deliveries sometimes go to the door... but also sometimes to the leasing office, which closes before I even get home.

This is my main issue with these types of services. Some weeks I want to make something new/complex 4 times and some weeks I barely want to at all.

Here in Denmark we have a nice services where you can cancel your order or reorder every week, but I never know how much time I have at the beginning of the week.

For what it's worth you can cancel/skip specific deliveries with Blue Apron. That helps some on the logistics side if you know in advance you're going to be busy the day of delivery. But it doesn't completely address the issue, especially since you have to skip a certain amount of time in advance.

> Maybe I’m just inefficient at cooking but I discovered quite quickly that cooking complex meals at home multiple times per week is actually not something I wanted to do. I found myself spending what felt like an inordinate amount of time on dinner between prep, actual cooking, eating, and extensive cleanup.

The way to be efficient is to cook in bulk so you have leftovers. I typically cook in bulk every Sunday, freeze six portions, and remove a portion from each the six prior weeks from the freezer.

This is what I prefer to do, but it's exactly the opposite of how Blue Apron works, which is why I found myself frustrated. BA portions are designed for a single meal (for one or two people [edit: two or four]), so there are no leftovers.

> BA portions are designed for a single meal (for one or two people)

Actually, BA portions are designed for a single meal for two or four people, (two people for the regular plan, four for the family plan.)

Thanks for the correction. It's been a while since I used it. We used the two-person plan and I wrongly remembered the other option as being for one person as opposed to four.

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