19 August, 2015
Behind The Blue Apron
In the culinary world, student and apprentice chefs traditionally wear a blue apron to distinguish them from the instructors in white. Hip American restaurants like French Laundry have all their chefs wear blue aprons, to symbolize a desire to keep learning everyday. When you subscribe to Blue Apron, the largest fresh ingredient and recipe delivery service in the United States, you essentially become the apprentice chef even if your apron isn’t blue (mine has the torso of The Flash on it). It’s like a cooking class in a box.
Home Schooled
I first heard of Blue Apron over a year ago on the local news when they did a segment on the popularity of subscription services like Birchbox and Lootcrate. It seemed like the perfect solution because I was cooking more and eager for new cooking ideas that were healthy and tasty.
When you first subscribe, you can enter your food preferences online, like if you are vegetarian or pescatarian or if you don’t eat a certain kind of meat. If you are vegetarian, just click “yes” under “Your Plan” settings and if you are an omnivore, you can check, or uncheck the following: Beef, Lamb, Poultry, Pork, Fish, and Shellfish.
Deliveries are made Tuesday through Saturday (your choice) across the United States depending on your zip code. I get mine on Tuesday. You get a large corrugated box that has an insulated liner with usually 2 large ice packs. The meats are on the bottom, underneath the ice packs, and then the rest of the ingredients are placed above the icepacks. Sometimes, unfortunately, the tender greens that might be required for a certain recipe get a little too close to the ice and get a bit frozen, but this is rare. I’ve come to learn that it’s best to take a quick inventory of everything as you unpack, because if they forgot something (which is extremely rare, but has happened) or some of the ingredients aren’t up to snuff, you can at least run to the market if you absolutely have to. You don’t want to find out you don’t have any eggplant, for example, as you’re starting to cook the meal. If it were to happen to you though, contact Blue Apron quickly and they will do their best to make it right. Almost everything from the box can be recycled, from the little bags and bottles, to the box, to the thin foil bubble liner and I don’t need to use extra plastic bags to store any excess ingredients because they only send what I need.
I’m pretty agile in the kitchen, at least I thought so, but it took some time before I really got my stride. Preparing everything thoroughly beforehand, or a mise en place, is essential to a successful meal. Cleaning as I go is another lesson I’m learning, because after a satisfying meal, the less cleanup, the better. Having all the ingredients in just the right portions is extremely helpful and also cost effective, because some of the ingredients might never get used if I had to buy a whole jar or box of it.
The great thing is that I learned these lessons on my own, with only as much pressure as I chose to put on myself. The recipe cards are easy to follow, but they also have a “Tablet View” for viewing the recipe on your iPad and just recently launched an iPhone app where you can actually watch video tutorials on cooking techniques and tricks of the trade. When you view your recipe through the app or on your iPad, there are links to videos you might need for that specific meal, like how to properly dice an onion, or de-stem kale.
If you ever need to skip a week or two, simply log on at least a week before the delivery and you can skip without having to cancel your subscription. I skipped a few weeks and took a break, because I felt like I was learning a lot, but slightly overwhelmed.
When I started again, I felt like I was better prepared. I began to actually look forward to making dinner. Not so much the prep and cleanup mind you, but the actual taste of the meal. The meals are really good and I’ve had meals I may never have tried otherwise. Now, I’m not saying I loved every meal equally, we all have things we like and don’t like, but for the most part the meals are well thought out, and delicious and they don’t repeat recipes for a year. The flavors are consistently balanced and complimentary, but I was surprised at how some dishes that ended up with the most flavor required the least amount of seasoning in preparation.
Flavor of the Week
Since I first started using Blue Apron, I’ve been seeing them more and more from snazzy new commercials to News Shows to Instagram where people make Glamour Shots of your meals (me included). I contacted Blue Apron a few weeks ago and soon got a call from Rani Yadav, Senior Director of Marketing.
We talked about everything from the philosophy of Blue Apron to the excitement of trying a new recipe for the first time. “We want people to cook more,” she told me with enthusiasm.
They work hard with hundreds of farmers so they can create meals that make use of the best ingredients, often hard to find, when they are the freshest. She said they work, “hyper seasonally” when creating their menus.
Blue Apron has built a “network of family farmers that champion sustainable farming practices and these direct farmer relationships allow Blue Apron to give customers access to hard-to-find seasonal produce (e.g., fairytale eggplants, fiddlehead ferns, watermelon radishes and micro-basil).”
As of June 2015, over 1.1 million pounds of specialty crops were planted and harvested by small, family-run farms for Blue Apron recipes.
Their “one-of-a-kind purchasing and fulfillment capability” allows them to “rapidly adapt their supply chain every week to the new menus created each week.” For example, Blue Apron works with Sun Noodle, a premium family-run ramen noodle maker that supplies the top Ramen restaurants in the country like Momofuku and Ivan Ramen, to create custom noodles for Blue Apron’s Ramen recipes.
Blue Apron turns out to be pretty cost effective as well. “A recent study showed that when customers purchased the ingredients in one Blue Apron delivery at grocery stores (from local grocery stores to Whole foods) in five different cities, the ingredients were 60% more expensive than a Blue Apron delivery, and fewer than 75% of the ingredients were available at any one store on average.”
Word On The Street
I asked a couple of my friends who’ve tried Blue Apron to give me their opinions.
Stephen Totter is an Artist Lecturer in Voice at Carnegie Mellon:
“I use them. The recipes are very easy to follow. They are basic cooking skills that anyone can follow and you have the recipe cards should you wish to recreate them. My only teeny tiny complaint is sometimes they give you an onion instead of the shallot that the recipe calls for, or forget to give you the bunch of cilantro. On the upside, being single, they only give you exactly what you need to make the recipe down to a tablespoon of butter or an ounce of vinegar. I end up not wasting anything due to produce going bad if I was shopping for myself. I really find it helpful that I am not buying a bunch of produce that will go bad. That makes up for the cost just in that alone. As a suggestion for them to improve I would say they should have different levels of adventure from ‘Presbyterian Ladies lunch’ to ‘hell yes I would like to try Yak bladder’. I would be somewhere in the middle.”
Mikey Wood is a Comic Book Artist/Writer and “Big Kahuna” at Space Monkey Comics:
“I’m a big fan of Blue Apron. It’s given me the opportunity to cook with ingredients I’ve never used (or, at times, never heard of) and it’s actually taught me a lot about cooking and portion control. I haven’t been able to use them much this month with the cons and everything and I miss it.”
The bottom line is, the meals are healthy (between 500 and 700 calories per serving), the average preparation time is 35 minutes (to which I would ad a few more minutes when your just starting out) and they taste great. You get the knowledge of taking cooking classes, but in your own home and you have less trips to the store or farmers market. And if you need any kitchen cookware or utensils, they have an online store where you can get everything you need from sauté pan to chefs knife.
Blue Apron Plans & Pricing
• The Blue Apron 2-person plan includes 3 meals per week at $9.99/meal
• The Blue Apron Family Plan includes either 2 or 4 meals a week, at $8.74/meal
• All plans have no commitment; customers can skip a delivery or cancel at any time with one-week’s notice
• Blue Apron ships nationwide, delivery days depend on your zip code
Super Special Bonus for my readers!!!!
I have 5 FREE Deliveries to give away! Simply message me on Facebook or Twitter and the first 5 who give me their email in a private or direct message will get a free meal!!
–A special thank you to Stephen Totter, Mikey Woods, Rani Yadav, Senior Director of Marketing, and Allie Evarts, Media Relations Associate at Blue Apron, for all their help.
2 thoughts
This is so interesting and well written. I never knew about Blue Ribbon. Glad I do now!
Thanks!!