Blue Apron - My Thoughts

Unless you are living in another country (that's for my brother, Kel), you have most likely heard of Blue Apron.  Blue Apron is a meal delivery service.  Yep, you read that right - you can have meals delivered to your home weekly.  Recently, a friend had some free "trials" to give away and I was able to get one so I thought I'd share the good, bad and ugly :-)

 When you set up your account, you can choose your delivery date (I picked Wednesday).  The box arrives and it is all pretty and fun looking!

 Inside the box are two beautiful recipe cards (well, 2 in my case because I only got 2 meals for 4 people with the free trial).

 The food is enclosed in this insulated bag inside the box with dry ice in the bottom.

 All the ingredients are packaged and labeled for easy use.

Each paper bag is labeled for the meal that it goes with and the meat is well packaged also.

 This is meal one - BBQ Chicken Sandwiches with cole slaw and roasted potatoes.

 The beautiful recipe card.

 This is what was inside the bag.  They supply everything you need except olive oil and salt and pepper.  All of the ingredients are premeasured which makes it even easier to cook dinner.

This was the final dinner.  All in all, it was pretty good. 

Now, here are my opinions:
1) Over all, Blue Apron does a great job with packaging, directions and overall ease of use of their product.  The fact that you get all of the ingredients premeasured is a bonus.
2) They use a high quality of ingredients but not necessarily the best cuts.  For example, for the BBQ chicken meal, it was boneless, skinless chicken thighs, not breasts.  I personally find the boneless thighs kind of slimy (I like bone-in thighs but they are "dryer". 
3) The price point is a killer.  The two meals that we received "retail" at about $72.00.  So that is two meals for a family of four.  Blue Apron says you feed each person for about $8.99 a piece.  Well, honestly, I can feed my whole family 3 times a day for $8.99 a piece, not just one meal.  It is not designed for a family who lives on a super tight budget.
4) So would I ever use it again?  I might at some point just for fun - maybe with a coupon :-)

Now, here's my little disclaimer.  If Darryl and I were "DINKS" (Double Income, No Kids) I would totally take advantage of a program like this.  In order meals for 2, you can get 4 meals for about $60.00.  That would mean 4 meals totally ready to cook when I walk in the door and no shopping.  (We'd eat out the other three HA!) I'd also use this if I was single.  Why?  Ordering 4 meals for 2 people means that I would either have 8 dinners or 4 dinners plus lunch the next day.  Talk about making life easy! 

Overall it was a good experience, it just doesn't fit into our budget or life right now. 

You might notice I only talked about one meal.  Well, the second meal sent to us was Salmon and Kale.  Neither item is a food that either Darryl or I like so I didn't end up cooking it.