Founded in 2012, Blue Apron is a leading meal delivery service that ships millions of meals each month to avid subscribers residing throughout the United States. It is the most affordable and accessible meal delivery service, providing you with the ingredients and recipes to churn out gorgeous, nutritional, tasty whole food meals from scratch in the comfort of your own kitchen.
Real Simple magazine calls Blue Apron the “best for beginners,” citing Blue Apron’s “streamlined, unfussy instructions.” Blue Apron has quite a few benefits, bells and whistles to its credit, enhancing its attractiveness to foodies, home chefs and aspring epicures just like you.
What’s Cooking? Blue Apron Cuisine
Blue Apron changes its menu weekly. On the website, you can click on a dropdown menu to peek ahead and see what’s on the menu for the weeks to come. Be warned: the photos are extremely drool-inducing. The company partners with a network of more than 100 farmers to bring you a wide variety of fresh, in-season ingredients harvested at the peak of ripeness.
The company’s overall vision of eco-responsibility entails providing you the cleanest food possible that has few to no negative impacts on the environment/ecosystem. For example, all seafood is Seafood Watch-recommended and sustainable. Meat contains no sub-therapeutic antibiotics or added hormones. All plant items are non-GMO.
At press time, Blue Apron’s weekly menu includes
- Spicy Korean Rice Cakes
- Caramelized Onion Grilled Cheese Sandwiches
- Creamy Lumaca Rigata Pasta
- Crisp Catfish and Spicy Vegetable Curry
- Persian-Style Chicken and Crispy Rice
- Seared Steaks and Salsa Verde
Each entrée comes with multiple side dishes, such as:
- Fingerling Potatoes, Asparagus, and Radishes
- Summer Squash, Currants, Lemon Yogurt
- Asparagus & Goat Cheese
- Summer Squash & Celery Salsa
With each weekly menu Blue Apron also furnishes recipes, instructions, technique tips and suggested equipment to complete each recipe for each featured weekly entrée and related side dishes. It’s a brilliant advertisement for the service, enticing you to order.
Blue Apron: Pricing, Signing Up, Cancelling
Blue Apron offers meal plans with three to four meals weekly that feed one to two people or four to six people. Pricing breaks down to about $9 to $10 per serving. You can choose between plans for vegetarians or carnivores.
Signing up is easy:
- Submit an active email address
- Create a password
- Enter a valid ZIP code
Select your meal plan, enter your shipping and payment information, designate your weekly delivery date, and then declare any dietary restrictions. Delivery is free. You can skip orders up to five weeks in advance or cancel by shooting a short email to customer service.
What People Say About Blue Apron
PC Mag gave Blue Apron a five-star rating, and The Kitchn also raved about the service. BoxedMealz also did a comprehensive Blue Apron review and gave the service a thumbs-up. All three praised Blue Apron for its reliable delivery, speedy customer service, user-friendly recipes and scrumptious results. Both criticized Blue Apron’s use of excessive packaging for very small amounts of ingredients. Nevertheless, Blue Apron appears to be ideal for “novice chefs and time-challenged foodies,” or anyone desiring straightforward, mouthwatering, fresh, wholesome meals from scratch in a jiffy.