“Life is really different now,” she said. “Busy families need more control and flexibility.” Committing to a weekly meal plan, she added, is “just not how people eat food.”
To increase flexibility, Blue Apron has doubled its menu offerings to 100 and added two new kinds of kits. Assemble & Bake is aimed at families and can be prepared in 10 minutes, while Dish is a single-serve meal that comes ready to put into the oven. Those who still prefer the subscription option will enjoy rewards such as Blue Apron+, which offers perks like free delivery and Auto Ship and Save, which lets customers dial their delivery frequency anywhere from weekly to just one week a month.
The other reason Blue Apron is changing its business model is more systemic: the company has needed a major overhaul for years.
Wonder Group bought Blue Apron in 2023 for $103 million, a shadow of the $1.9 billion valuation Wall Street gave it after its 2017 IPO. But operational complexities, high marketing costs, and increased competition caused the brand to slip from those heights almost immediately. By the end of 2017, Blue Apron’s net losses tallied to $210 million, while its customer count shrank by 15%.
In fact, high customer attrition rates assail the whole meal-kit industry, a love-’em-and-leave-’em world in which customers pivot among introductory offers instead of staying loyal to one service. Research conducted by the Wall Street Journal in 2023 showed that a staggering 90% of customers for the five leading meal-kit brands abandoned their memberships within a year of signing up.
A hill to climb
As part of the brand relaunch, Blue Apron has also reworked its website, toning down the blues in favor of ochre and flax “to make the food the star of the show,” Enand said. Food photography has also changed to “look like a plate on a countertop in your home—it should feel identifiable with your life.”
Yet even if all the new tweaks resonate with customers, category leader Hello Fresh still commands some 75% of the market—leaving open the question of whether these efforts, calculated as they are, will deliver the needed results.
Digital transformation authority Craig Miller, author of Bricks and Clicks: How We Drove Sonic into the Digital Age, believes the revenue model shift will help Blue Apron reclaim some market share, “but would most likely be a short-term win and difficult to sustain.”
“The tradeoffs and drawbacks for a no-commitment model may more than offset the benefits,” Miller continued. “An increase in operational complexity in their supply chain will continue to put a strain on their customer service levels and overall profitability.”
