Box Dinner

I have a friend – quite a good cook, by the way – who a year or so ago signed up for Blue Apron. He and his husband used it for a while. But it was pricey. And sometimes it turned out that they weren’t in the mood for what sounded like a good idea a few days earlier when they picked it off the menu. They liked not having to invest in some obscure spice that they were never going to use again. And they liked the portion control. Sort of. They didn’t like going through the PITA of cooking – however simple Blue Apron made it – and not having any leftovers.

So they subscribed for a while. And then they went back to doing what they’d always done: planning their meals, shopping, chopping, cooking and, occasionally, deciding to hell with it and ordering a pizza.

Me?I can see the appeal of Blue Apron, and the other biggie on the scene, HelloFresh. Subscribing would certainly make my cooking more varied and interesting. I probably really cook something like once or twice a week. And that includes throwing a chicken breast on my George Foreman Grill, whipping up some pasta aglio et olio (with some walnuts tossed in for good measure), or making myself an omelet (or, if I’m feeling really lazy, scrambled eggs – a decison sometimes made mid-omelet).

Most nights, I make myself a salad. Or have whatever’s left over from the night I cooked. If I’ve gone out to eat, I may well have a doggy bag in there. Sometimes I pick up a MRE at the grocery store. (Roche Bros. has a very tasty shepherd’s pie that lasts for two meals.) I’ve been known to sup on a PBJ or toasted cheese.

I can rise to the occasion and prepare an edible meal, but I’m not someone who enjoys cooking. Maybe if it all came in a box, I’d like it better. But, if I’m being honest here, probably not. Not enough to make a commitment to a subscription service, however short term that commitment would have to be.

Whether I’m the audience or not, the box dinner providers aren’t doing all that well.

Blue Apron in America and Germany’s HelloFresh, deliver boxes of pre-portioned ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes to doorsteps worldwide for a fee of around $60 a week.

Blue Apron is also serving up a belly full of woe to investors. Less than a year after it went public in June with a $1.9bn valuation, its share price has fallen by 80%. Although the shares of HelloFresh, which debuted on Frankfurt’s stock exchange in November, have risen by 24%, analysts are concerned that both services may fall prey to competition not from rival startups, but from big grocers. (Source: The Economist)

Supermarkets are a natural. Most of them already have all sorts of MREs and other take-out options. You’re already in there for something or other. They’ve got all sorts of fresh ingredients on hand. Nothing needs to get shipped to your doorstep, so you don’t have to worry about thieves making off with your meal kit or raccoons getting into it. And from a consumer perspective, you don’t need to subscribe to anything. You can go in and commit in your moment of hunger and need and just throw what strikes your fancy into your cart and proceed to checkout.

On the grocery store front, Albertsons acquired Plated, a meal-kit provider, last fall. They’ll be rolling it out to some of their stores this year. There are no Albertsons named Albertsons around here, but they do own Stop & Shop and Shaws, so we may be seeing meal kits on nearby shelves any day now. So I might give it a try. (Walmart is also getting into the act, but there’s no Walmart in my ‘hood and, even if there were, I probably wouldn’t be shopping there.)

Not having to rely on the subscription model will be a real boon to the supermarkets, given that they get around the big challenge that every subscription-based brand needs to overcome: acquiring customers and retaining them.

HelloFresh doubled its customers to 890,000 last year, as well as the number of delivered meals to 20m. But, one year after joining, 89% of its American clients had stopped using the service on a monthly basis, says Second Measure, an analytics firm.

Blue Apron also has attrition problems.

At its peak it boasted 1m subscribers. Its client list shrank by 15% in 2017.

My friend was among them.

Blue Apron has plans to get into the retail channel, but it may be too little too late.

Now that Big Grocery has figured things out, I’m guessing that all the meal-kit providers will get out of it is a) being acquired or b) thanks for the product idea.