Blue apron

I think lowly of it and the people who use it.

>$10/meal
You still have to fucking cook everything, why wouldnt you just go buy the ingredients yourself for half the price

>>8562953
Because it doesn't work that way. You can't buy 3 leaves of lettuce, or a teaspoon of horseradish, or a chive. So it's not really half the price, it is, in fact, about the same.
>>8562944
I use it. It's fine. If you're some kind of autist who thinks that food is magically worse if it came in a cardboard box instead of in a grocery bag, then, I guess, don't use it. My favorite /ck/ argument against it is "OMG I can't stand if someone else handles my food", like they think that the produce they buy at Safeway just materialized out of nowhere via divine intercession.

>>8562944
I have visited or lived places in rural edges of suburbia where it was hard to buy bok choy, anchovy paste, guava, or just more than one type of mushrooms.
I suppose you and your mate might enjoy opening a box and trying out some step by step directions to learn some new recipes with someone else doing all the shopping. You're paying for a service, probably assume it's got a 30% markup. Maybe even it is analogous to paying restaurant prices for your meals, but you're doing all the work! Sometimes I do enjoy having some leftovers, not exact portions, like celery for the next idea that comes along, or a big container of cream to enjoy the rest of the week in my coffee. But, hrm, from a diet perspective, you're portioned out with these people. Hope you count calories and enjoy that control.
After you make something a couple of times, you do learn your technique and tweak your recipe...therein lies the skill that can make you a better cook. I'm sure this is more like just good for the lazy person. After a good repertoire under your belt, you can dump this service and just know you can get your inspiration from, uhh, cookbooks and do your own shopping, provided of course you live somewhere urban enough, rich enough, that you can get good grocery selections beyond Wal-Mart.

>>8562971
Or you live in an urban area but those are sold at separate stores, one per ethnicity

But hey if you want to spend your time heading to a bunch of different stores to pick up random ingredients and that makes you feel like a "hard working urban rich good cook", then sure, it's your time

>>8562944

I don't like the concept of it, but I guess my biggest gripe about it is if you're new to cooking and you're given the exact amount of everything you need to cook, it makes you less inclined to experiment with it. If I make a recipe that I found online or taste some good at a restaurant and want to try it myself, I'm going to adjust it to what I think would taste better to me.

>>8562953
> buy the same ingredients for half the price, and fresher when you picked it out yourself.

I really don't get it. Especially with the internet, you can research things you might want to eat, go buy the ingredients for half price, or often times less, and cook a possibly better recipe than theirs.

It's almost like women want to say, "well, I got the ingredients from "them" and I cooked according to their insructions, but the meal sucked so it was their fault.

>>8562995

what do your relationship issues have to do with food? please be as detailed as possible.

I kind of like the idea, but there's no doubt it's a ripoff.

I like the idea of having a recipe and all the ingredients I need right there in front of me, so I can try something I might not have ordinarily thought of, add it to my repertoire, rinse and repeat. Yeah, I can look up recipes (although most internet recipes are atrociously bad) but do I really want to go out and buy a bunch of lemongrass, galangal, and a gallon of fermented snake testicles just for one meal? And then I have to hope that I can find a store that has all these in my area.

I don't know. I like the idea, but there will never be an implementation that isn't shitty.

>>8563121
>lemongrass, galangal, and a gallon of fermented snake testicles

I'm quite certain that you won't be getting any of those from Blech Apron.

>>8562944
I guess it's good if I was just starting to live on my own, had disposable income, and didn't know how to cook.

But I can spend less and make better by just meal planning and shopping on my own, which is something I actually enjoy doing.

So...fuck Blue Apron.

>>8562944

I got a week of it and the meals are alright. Wouldn't mind it once a month or something.

My biggest gripe is that the flavor profile on 2 of the 3 dishes consisted of overpowering garlic. That's what I get for being really obsessive about following the recipe exactly.

>>8562944
>sage for advertisting
The exact same thread keeps getting made when the previous is pruned

I have a 30 dollar gift card for them, and don't know shit about cooking so I'm gonna try it

>>8562953
basically this, i know they portion there shit out but that isnt exactly hard to do on your own

>>8562944
Its good for people learning to cook for them selves just for the fact that it gives you things you probably would have never tried.

Think of it less as a food service and more as a learning tool with all the pieces you need in the box.

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>salt and pepper on every fucking step

I actually like blue apron alright but god damn they go overboard with that

Got a gift card for Christmas for one week's worth .For 55$ I could triple the recipes and make a side dish for each meal . I had the Chicken And cous cous. buffalo burgers with avacado and shrimp and korean rice cakes. The food is very pretentious and the recipes are scary basic . It's just a service for millennial mom's to brag about the fancy foreign meals they have been making .

If you can read their directions I don't understand why you can't look up a recipe online and go to the store and buy the ingredients .

>>8562944
Tried the free trial and it was not bad. But ultimately it's for people that are either too busy or too lazy to make these decisions and go to the grocery store themselves so I couldn't justify paying for it.

>>8563214
t. Hasn't used blue apron

>>8564342
t. Hamplanet

>>8562970
That doesn't address their complaint at all.
They were saying it is terrible value for money.

>>8564568
And I was saying it's only a "terrible value" if you're going to use the rest of that jar of mustard, or that jar of mayo, or the million other things that BA includes in small portions, but that guy was suggesting buying for "cheaper" at the store.

It's only cheaper if you divide the cost of the jar by 50 servings and superstitiously pretend the other 49 aren't waste (which they are)

Before I used BA I'd routinely buy stuff like that because I like cooking different things all the time. Mustard for instance. I'd use about once a year. Great. Buy some mustard, throw the rest out. Repeat for the other 51 weekend cooking projects for the year (my weeknight cooking was more boring and used stuff I'd actually eat regularly). Head down to Koreatown for random Korean thing. Head down to Chinatown for random Chinese thing. Head over to the Persian grocer for such and such a thing. Head all the way out to where the Indians live for such-and-such a thing.

Lot of exploration got done in that time. Lot of mystery jars in my fridge too. Bags of some weird root that I used once and figured I'd save (eventually I'd throw it out not remembering if it was 2 months old or 2 years old)

One funny thing about people who have an agenda is that the math gets "creative". We see this with the cult of DIY. Oh yeah it's totally cheaper to maintain your own straight razors. Just need a hanging strop, and a belgian couticule, and a diamond impregnated plate to maintain that couticule, and oh maybe a test razor to try out on, and a badger brush, and blah blah blah... what do you mean $490 isn't cheaper than buying blades that cost 25 cents? If you live to be 190 years old it will pay for itself!

Let's step back and recognize that if you want to have some variety in your diet, without wasting stuff, or being a crazy hoarder, BA makes sense.

you can try it for Freee

>>8562970
>You can't buy 3 leaves of lettuce, or a teaspoon of horseradish, or a chive
So you buy in bulk to use for future meals, you moron.

>>8564766
Sure, all six future meals over the next half century where I'm going to use fucking horseradish... are you actually serious?

>>8564735
you might have an intolerance to eggs

that's kind of how it starts

try not eating eggs for a few days and see if it clears up

>>8564745
D'ohh jeeeeezus

>>8564777
That's why when you cook for real, don't buy ingredients you'll never use except for that one thing you make once. If you don't like it enough to cook with it ever again, you should substitute it.

Plated is the same thing but better recipes.

>>8564869
> don't buy ingredients you'll never use except for that one thing you make once
Sure buddy, I'll make sure to never do that again just to please some sperg on 4chan.

>If you don't like it enough to cook with it ever again, you should substitute it.
What the fuck are you even talking about? If I don't eat something every day it means I don't like it? Do you actually ever eat stuff that didn't come out of a microwave box?

>>8564876
I guess I'm not wording it right or something, but I didn't mean you have to eat it every day. I just mean that if you literally only use something in one recipe that you don't eat very often, it's a waste to buy it unless you're going to use it all in one go. Over time, I've found ingredients that I like to use in lots of recipes and I have no problem buying them. But if a recipe calls for say, some vegetable I know I don't like enough to use much, I'll substitute one that I do, because otherwise it's a waste.

>>8562944
My brother gets discounts and says it makes a nice date night meal, but wouldn't pay full price

>>8564894
1. Vegetables are a totally different issue than condiments because they go bad in days not months. Problems arise when it took a 2 hour round trip to fucking Patel's out in Jackson Heights just to get something that comes in Indian Household size only. Hence the appeal of not riding the 7 train for one meal, and just getting what you need because it's not the zombie apocalypse
2. I don't substitute ingredients on recipes I'm trying out, because it's no longer the recipe. That's why it's a recipe. If you're just thrown together food based on gut feel and whatever happens to be around, that's fine, but it's not a recipe so don't call it that

>>8562970
>So it's not really half the price, it is, in fact, about the same.
Look at the receipts. Cheddar cheese is not $11/lb. Grocery store quality beef is not over $20/lb.

>>8566155
>Cheddar cheese is not $11/lb
Correct, it's more like $19/lb for good cheddar. Not Wisconsin crap, but actual good cheddar.
>Grocery store quality beef is not over $20/lb.
That depends on the cut. Stew meat, around $13/lb. Tenderloin, yeah, maybe $35. That's for the grass fed stuff. Obviously, you could go for the nasty shit, but BA uses Pat Lafrieda which is a step above your average grocery store garbage.

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>>8566178
>>8566155
Just to illustrate, here's the typical cost of trying to make burgers at home to "save money", I took this picture a few years ago when some DIY cultists were trying to argue that BA was a ripoff

Burger for one. Came to about $11 for the ingredients, not counting time spent going to the store

So yeah, BA is actually a pretty reasonable deal considering it saves you the trip, and you get side dishes

>>8562944

I think Blue Apron successfully capitalises on current consumption trends of those who spend the most money i.e. women.

>don't want to bother shopping for ingredients
>want it to be easy to cook
>want it to be tasty
>want it to look good for the Instagram pic she'll obviously post
>want it to sound complicated to brag on Twitter and Facebook about how she cooked it all by herself

Basic recipes with fancy names and flavourful condiments, step by step instructions for mundane tasks, delivery at your door of the exact amount of shit you need, and suggestions on serving presentation. They have it all.

But in the end, it's not about the food, it's about the feels. Entertainment of feeling like a chef, compliments received for serving it to a friend, attention resulting from social media posts.

TL;DR Women's best friend, but their wallet's nightmare.

>>8566230
They might as well spend it on that ripoff as some other nonsense their favorite womens talk show host raved about. At least they're trying to actually cook, albeit for 2-3 times the price if they spent 5 minutes driving to the nearest grocery.

>>8566200
Your retarded . The only thing you showed is how blue apron makes a profit

27$ a # for cheese , 19$ a # for prime burger . 1$ for a fucking hamburger bun ,40 cents for a red onion. If you really think these are normal prices and that this is how normal people shop you need to get your head out of the clouds .

>>8566594
The prime burger was not $19 a pound. This just goes to show you how non-BA customers don't understand value

>>8566652
>value = paying 2-3 times the worth of the product to save you the trouble of spending 5 minutes looking up recipes and 10 minutes going to the grocery store.

Hmmm, makes a lot of woman talk show host sense. What's the latest book of the month club choice? My guess is, "How to Apply Irrational Female Consumerism to Food."

>>8566743
Oh hi, "everyone who disagrees with me is female" guy. You seem to be in every thread today.

what about the other services that are like Blue Apron?

>>8566784
Which services? I know of Plated...

Meals are decent, some weeks have better meals than others.

Some plans limit what you can get with each other, ie if you take meal one you can't get meal 2.

It's a bit pricier than if you just went to the grocery store, but somewhat cheaper than if you were eating out at a mid-tier restaurant multiple times a week.

>>8564735
>Let's step back and recognize that if you want to have some variety in your diet, without wasting stuff, or being a crazy hoarder, BA makes sense.
have you ever tried not being a useless piece of shit? a packet of beef garlic and pepper with some onions can make several different things. ba is for losers who think 10 a plate to diy is reasonable

>>8567135
>a packet of beef garlic and pepper with some onions
How much do you weigh?

>>8564735
If you buy ingredients to use once, then maybe. But that's never cost effective, even when you're essentially doing the same thing with Blue Apron. If you get a new ingredient for a recipe you don't like, it's not hard to find other recipes that use the same ingredient, or find ways to incorporate it into things you usually make. Food is cheap when you're able to buy things in quantities that make it price effective. Of course sticking to small quantities is never going to be a good value.

Your razor analogy is a good example of why you're thinking about this the wrong way. And the way you framed it is a perfect example of why. Say we want to stick with straight razors for this example: I have a good straight razor I bought for $30 used. Say you also want to use a brush and shaving soap (because yes, it is more cost effective). I have a tin of soap I bought five years ago for $10 dollars I'm still working on (it's a really hard soap), and I use it with a ten dollar brush. That's a total of $50 for the straight razor stuff, and that's all I need. You don't need special equipment to sharpen the razor (regular sharpening equipment that you already have can do the job), or strop it (jeans, a leather belt, or even your arm will do that). That same 50 dollars will get you a Gillette Fusion, plus twelve blades (and no shaving cream); however long those last, you will run out, and need to keep spending $3 or so per blade, while the straight razor will require no more costs, besides soap every few years. In the long run it is cheaper. If you can't see that a higher initial cost can end up cheaper in the long run, learn to think about shopping differently. It's also possible to do something effectively without needing to spend as much money as possible on it.

If you can't see how Blue Apron's grocery prices aren't a terrible value, you need to learn how to shop.

>>8567184
>Of course sticking to small quantities is never going to be a good value.
That is really all you needed to say. Forcing yourself to re-use an ingredient with other recipes is actually not a good value. Suppose you bought a jar of some random fermented ox testicles for a recipe. You then go "oh, well I need to use up the rest of this, what other recipes from that culture exist". And it turns out you can use it up with this other recipe, but you need a bag of sun dried baby pigeons that only comes in 2 pound quantities, plus a jar of candied dodo brains.

Oh, but you can just substitute? Yes you *can* do that, you *can* do a lot of stuff. I cook for fun not to survive. I choose not to make an "authentic" recipe by swapping out splenda for the candied dodo brains and chicken breast for the baby pigeons.

>You don't need special equipment to sharpen the razor (regular sharpening equipment that you already have can do the job)

And here is where the lies begin. The average person does not have 8k+ stones lying around the house. The techniques for knife maintenance are inapplicable for SR honing. And you aren't going five years without hitting a stone with a razor. Except, oh yeah. You also expect me to believe your soap puck has lasted for five years. The reality is you used that razor about four times, you rolled the edge stropping it on your belt, you tried to restore it using your lansky kit, made the problem worse, and you've been using Harry's or Dollar Shave Club ever since while trying to get others to make the same mistakes you did.

The reality is $50 buys you an EJ head, and enough DE blades to last you the rest of your life. But of course you'll pretend a third path doesn't exist because it fits your agenda.

>If you can't see how Blue Apron's grocery prices aren't a terrible value, you need to learn how to shop.
If you measure value by how many calories you got per penny, then obviously it's going to seem that way, and we will never agree.

>>8564912
You are literally autistic.

Seems stupid to me, like every other absolutely pointless subscription service that's plaguing the market.

>>8568193
>But of course you'll pretend a third path doesn't exist because it fits your agenda.
What make you think that? I was actually going to bring up DEs, but decided not to because I thought talking about the cost effectiveness of razors too much in a cooking thread was autistic. DEs are definitely a better option for most people, I just talked about the example you chose, and I still stand by all the figures I quoted.

Again, my point is that you're thinking about shopping wrong, which you are. And you also keep presenting a ridiculously stupid argument. Remember that the vast majority of ingredients any recipe will need aren't uncommon or very expensive. Your hyperbolic arguing doesn't change that. There's a reason every other person in this thread thinks Blue Apron is a terrible value, and it's not because they're somehow blind to the virtue of having small quantities of overpriced groceries shipped to their house.

Here's an example using food prices: Blue Apron says they charge $10 per meal; you have to buy more than that, but lets go with the quantity they set for one meal. Yesterday I went grocery shopping and bought, among other things, ingredients for split pea soup. Just the stuff for the soup cost me about $10, and when I cook it today, I will be able to make enough food for five meals. And that was just part of what I bought, which still ended up less than a week's worth of Blue Apron. That's just one example, but it's not really atypical if you actually know how to shop and plan out meals. By any measure, services like Blue Apron are terrible values, and there's really no reasonable argument about why that's not the case. Even those companies basically acknowledge it, since their marketing is all based around convenience.

>>8562995
>It's almost like women want to say, "well, I got the ingredients from "them" and I cooked according to their insructions, but the meal sucked so it was their fault
>women
Most of the people that use these cooking services, at least the ones I know, are men. These are good for people who don't know the first thing about cooking and need all the ingredients handed to them, with specific directions. It's basically a lot of overpriced hand-holding. Most women I know that are learning how to cook find their recipes on Insta and Pinterest, or sites like Tasty, and have less of a hard time placing the fault on themselves when they fuck it up than men do. But I guess it depends on who you know...both yours and my observations are anecdotal, after all.

As for OP's question, I think it's good if you're learning to cook. Maybe do one of those services, Sun Basket or Blue Apron for a month or two to learn about cooking before you begin to branch out on your own. I think it's a nice way to introduce cooking to people who otherwise wouldn't want to learn, due to a lack of confidence/fear of failure if they researched and still fucked it up, or are afraid of the "intimidating" cooking class. (Being intimidated is a bitch reason to avoid taking a class but to be fair, some cooking instructors are stuck-up dicktips so there is that.)
Overall, I'm in favor of anything that gets my fellow generation of lazy millennial fucks to pick up a spatula and actually try to cook something, rather than brag on social media about ordering pizza twice in one week. I couldn't justify the expense for what you get but if you can afford it, want to learn to cook, and don't have the schedule to take a class at a local community college/agriculture center, it's a decent way to learn.

>>8569327
>split pea soup
Other than rice and beans that's about as frugal as you can get for one meal. The point of BA is that although some meals are obviously made from relatively common ingredients, many are not. In order to approximate the level of variety of ingredients I'd have to have a hoarder's kitchen, and throw out a lot of food. You keep going back to this argument that BA is supposed to be a substitute for welfare-tier eating, when it's obviously not.

>Remember that the vast majority of ingredients any recipe will need aren't uncommon or very expensive

I never said they were individually very expensive, but when you buy a pack with the intent of using 1/5 of it, you don't get to calculate the price as 1/5 what you paid. What you paid is what you paid. Just from this months' selections, here are some random ingredients that I don't intend to consume in mass quantities, but which require a small amount per recipe. This doesn't include the vegetables that you can't buy a few ounces at a time, but only in fairly large bunches.

golden mountain sauce
tamarind conentrate
"tempura mix" (presumably panko and some other ingredients that would have to be purchased separately)
hoisin sauce
white miso paste
udon noodles
dried limes
israeli couscous
verjus
vadouvan curry powder
matzo meal
pickled beets
castelvetrano olives
sweet piquante pepper
pistachios
fregola sarda pasta

Obviously, a twenty pound bag of dried green peas and a couple of ham hocks and salt is going to be a cheaper way to not die of starvation. That isn't what this is competing with though.

>and I still stand by all the figures I quoted.
>a puck of shaving soap that lasts 5 years

Yeah, no, it's just more creative accounting. You can lie to yourself but I've been soap shaving for years and you aren't fooling me at all.

>>8569446
>You can lie to yourself
It's Pre de Provence, if you want me to be specific. It's super hard, and bigger than most other pucks of shaving soap. I don't go overboard with loading my brush like most people do. I haven't used it exclusively (I have a couple of cheap shaving sticks I use for travel), but I've used it most of the time, and it's not completely gone. You don't have to believe me, but I'm not lying.

>You keep going back to this argument that BA is supposed to be a substitute for welfare-tier eating
And you keep arguing that Blue Apron needs to be compared to the most expensive ways to buy food for yourself, which is also obviously not the case. If you like the convenience of it, that's fine, but don't act like it's a good value, because it isn't. And that's not what it's designed for, it's a convenience service.

>>8569464
I'm familiar with pre de provence. It doesn't last five years. Closer to a year.
>but I don't use much
>also I use other stuff
>also uhh, I've been using Dollar Shave Club and gilette gel sometimes, actually most of the time, actually for the last four years since I rolled the edge on my $30 whipped dog razor because I didn't know what I was doing
RIght
>And you keep arguing that Blue Apron needs to be compared to the most expensive ways to buy food for yourself, which is also obviously not the case.
It "needs" to be compared with the closest alternatives, which are:
1. Eating at restaurants every night, or
2. Buying distinct ingredients for each meal, in small quantities, instead of rotating between the exact same 5 ingredients for months at a time, or "creative accounting" like calculating the cost of the portion you used, and pretending the rest magically didn't need to be purchased

>>8564912

>riding the 7
>ever