Blue Apron Review

Blue Apron Review

View Plan

5.1

Pros

Highly convenient food option
Reasonable meal kit delivery service
Offers you a good variety of vegetarian and omnivorous meals
Celebrity chef designed recipes
Wide variety of diabetes-friendly, ww-friendly meals and other special dietary meal plans
Use only seafood and meat that is hormone-free and sourced from trustworthy suppliers

Cons

Comparatively a little more expensive than grocery shopping
Not all products are organic
Not recommended for people with food allergies and intolerance to certain food items
Little customization options available.
Small orders are more expensive
Doesn’t offer meals for keto, vegan, gluten-free or paleo diets
Frequently use carbs and sugars

Blue Apron Review

There is nothing that beats homemade meals cooked based on the recipes put together by culinary experts. And what makes this a better experience is the fact that you don’t need to go grocery shopping to purchase the ingredients. With Blue Apron, you have the recipes and the ingredients delivered to you at your doorstep. So all you need to do is just choose the time and start cooking your favourite recipes without worrying about anything else.

There is a reason why we say that Blue Apron is an ideal choice for new learners! Well, Blue Apron offers you additional video tutorials that teach you the art of cooking. The tutorials are really good and includes almost everything that a regular recipe card doesn’t. So, if you are in search of a meal kit service that also teaches you cooking, make sure to choose Blue Apron above all others.

https://tower.top10mealdeliveryplans.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Blue-Apron-review-img.jpg

Almost everything about Blue Apron stands out above the other meal kit services. Right from its wide variety of flavors, good cooking instructions, availability and convenience of ingredients and most importantly the competitive cost of the services, everything about Blue Apron is perfect. We also loved the fact that they sell cooking equipment, oils, spices, pantry items and also wine that makes it easier for you to get all your requirements from one place. Sounds perfect right? Well, apart from these interesting features, there are a few places where we thought Blue Apron needs to up its game. For instance, it lacks in offering specific diet meals to customers who have special requirements. Also, there is a very little list of vegetarian recipes but not many options for vegans, keto or paleo diet followers.

Blue Apron offers you a fresh menu every week which you can browse on their website. You can either choose the meals online or simply stick to the default recipes that they choose for you. They offer you a total of 12 recipes per week out of which just 3 are vegetarian. One look at the recipe and you will see a number of tags along with the recipe that includes the time taken, vegetarian, carb conscious, plant forward, diabetes friendly, etc.

Cost-wise Blue Apron is a very affordable meal kit service. It costs you somewhere between $7.49 and $9.99 for every serve. More the number of servings you order in a shipment, lesser the total price. They also offer you Premium items that comparatively cost more than the regular items.

When it comes to packaging, Blue Apron makes sure that you receive your meal kit in the perfect condition. They take every precaution needed to make sure that the food stays fresh and free of contamination. And in order to ensure this, they pack the ingredients in an insulated cardboard box with every ingredient packed in plastic and aluminium with freezer packs to maintain the freshness inside. And in order to reduce plastic waste, Blue Apron packs only the small ingredients in plastic and all other ingredients together. Moreover, every packaging item used by Blue apron is recyclable and all the details you need to recycle the packaging waste can be found in their official website.

The recipes were not only easy to cook, thanks to the step-by-step instructions! Also, the cooked meals tasted really delicious and were filling. They also offer excellent customer services that offer you every help and aid you need right from its purchase to cooking your meal. For instance, one of the meal kits we ordered had unfortunately broken-down during the shipping and after we complained to the company, and they were really quick to offer us a refund for it. Overall, we really appreciate their meal kits, the taste, the services and their overall creativity.

Unique Features

Meal kit delivery services has multiplied in the past several years. With the increasing competition and demand by customers, you will find a huge variety of meal kit companies, each offering you unique recipes and services. Blue Apron is one of the topmost meal delivery companies in the market which is known for its simplistic approach towards cooking. It is not only educative but also quite interesting especially if you are a learner.

Accessibility

Easy to access and sign-up, Blue Apron takes the initiative to actually know your preferences, your likes and dislikes, whether you are a hearty vegetarian or a meat lover. The meal kit service quizzes you when you create your account thus offering you recipes that suit your taste buds. Once you sign-in you can quickly check your first 5 deliveries to see what Blue Apron has decided for you. Also, you can easily check the various meal cancellation and skipping options if you are going out of town. Checking out the website is extremely simple and informative. In fact, every recipe you check, you will also see a list of all the kitchen tools that you will need for cooking the meal. What again attracts our attention here is the fact that Blue Apron also sells a good collection of kitchen tools such as aprons, cutting boards, knives and peelers, wine, etc.

Convenient

One of the most famous meal delivery kit services in the market, Blue Apron has taken into consideration of every small and important aspect of cooking. For instance, their recipe cards are straight to the point and provide additional information about everything. Right from cutting the vegetables, sautee, dressing and more, Blue apron gives you instructions about everything that will help you make a restaurant style perfect meal. Also, as they offer you every single ingredient to cook your recipe perfectly, you save a lot of your precious time which is otherwise spent in shopping the groceries.

Wide Variety

Blue Apron offers you an exotic range of 12 weekly recipes to choose from. The website is updated every week, changing the menu to keep you interested and eager for their new recipes. Currently, out of the 12 recipes offered by Blue Apron, 3 of them are vegetarian. You will find protein rich meals and even recipes that are rich in vegetables, proteins and starch. For instance, their broccoli, salmon rice and the zucchini, chicken orzo, and much more. Although, if you are looking forward to special diets such as paleo or vegan meals, you might be at a loss here.

Non-GMO ingredients

This is one of the most interesting features offered by Blue Apron. The meal delivery kit offers you only non-GMO cooking ingredients, organic meat (hormone free) and sea food that is sourced from known resources. Thus offering you only guaranteed healthy ingredients, and hence guaranteed healthy meals.

Delicious and healthy meals

The main motto of Blue apron is to make delicious meals accessible to everyone, even those who do not know how to cook. Although they give you all the ingredients in measured amounts, but they still make you dice the veggies, sautee them and cook the meals, right from scratch. And almost every recipe we tried, they were all delicious, tasty and healthy, particularly because at the end, it was home-cooked with the guidance and tips offered by Blue Apron experts. The best thing being, that it really helps us learn some additional tips and enhance our cooking skills and confidence to cook gourmet restaurant style meals.

Affordable

Amongst all the meal kit delivery services available in the market, Blue Apron is best known for offering high quality meals at the most reasonable rates. Compared to all their competitors in the market, Blue Apron offers you top quality meals at a reasonable cost that ranges between just $7.49 and $9.99 for every serve which is very affordable, especially when you compare the rates of other top meal delivery services. For instance, Purple Carrot costs between $5.99 and $11.99 per serve (shipping rate included) while Sun Basket costs you $10.99 and $12.99 per serve (additional $7.99 shipping fee). Even Green Chef and Hello Fresh cost you between $9.99 and $12.99 per serve.

Packaging

Blue Apron easily captured the market not only with its excellent recipes and cooking instructions but also with its additional offers, including a good packaging. The meal kits are packed to perfection inside a huge cardboard box, wrapped in plastic and aluminum with a couple of freezer packs to keep the ingredients safe and fresh until you open them and stock them inside your refrigerator. And in order to reduce the packaging waste, they wrap only the small ingredients in plastic, while all other ingredients are packed together. Also, the freezer packs used in the packaging are environment friendly and can be easily thrown away in a drain unlike the ice gel packs that need to be thrown in the trash can instead.

Easy Cancellation

As easy as the sign-up procedure, Blue Apron’s meal kit cancellation procedure is also easy and hardly takes a minute to complete. In fact, you can also reactivate your account whenever you wish to re-use their services without any hassle.

Blue Apron vs Market Competitors

Comparative study is the best way to understand how 2 companies differ in the same services. And in order to help you choose the best meal kit services, we offer you a proper comparison between Blue Apron and its market competitors such as Every Plate, Purple Carrot and others.

Blue Apron and Home Chef

The reason why I am comparing Home Chef with Blue Apron is because they both have similar recipes. Home Chef offers you as many as 14 recipes a week while Blue apron offers you just about 6 to 8 recipes per week. Also, meals and recipes offered by Home chef are simple and easy, while the recipes offered by blue Apron include a wide variety of global ingredients that add their own special taste to the recipes. The taste of recipes offered by Home Chef appeal to the whole crowd and very accommodating for your entire family. Comparatively, the cost of the dishes is similar in both and you also have the choice to upgrade or customize your dish. Overall, Home Chef is definitely a good option to choose.

Blue Apron and EveryPlate

EveryPlate offers you one of the most inexpensive meal kits in the market. The recipes are good but they contain ingredients that are reasonable in cost. So, they contain more of macroni and mushrooms instead of expensive choices such as quinoa or dragon fruit. Also, EveryPlate offers you 9 new weekly recipes while Blue Apron offers you 12 new weekly recipes. Everyplate offers you just 1 weekly vegetarian recipe while Blue Apron offers you 3 new vegetarian recipes. EveryPlate offers you high quality ingredients (not organic) while Blue Apron offers you organic, fresh, nutritious, and hormone-free sea-food options. Cost-wise, EveryPlate costs you $4.99 per serving while Blue Apron costs you somewhere between $7.49 and $9.99 per serving.

Blue Apron and Hello Fresh

Both Blue Apron as well as Hello Fresh offer meal delivery services at the cheapest rates $7.50 per serving for a family of four. However, when you are ordering 2 servings, Hello Fresh offers you their meals a little cheaper than Blue Apron. Recipes and meals offered by both Blue Apron and Hello Fresh are perfectly great.

Hello Fresh bags the title for being the best meal delivery service by offering you a plethora of meal options such as Vegetarian, low calorie, meat and Veg, family friendly, pescatarian, gluten-free and paleo diets, something that Blue Apron doesn’t. Also, if you are prone to food allergy, Blue Apron is definitely not a good choice for you. Hence, if you have special diet needs, then choosing Hello Fresh will be the smart choice.

Blue apron offers a very interesting variety of meals. Although it may not offer you as many as 30 recipes a week like Freshly, but you certainly get a refreshing list of 12 weekly recipes to choose from. The recipes are delicious and designed to give you a perfect restaurant like meal in the comfort of your home. If you are a pasta or sandwich lover, you can always find them in the menu and add it to your weekly meal box. A few of the recipes are a perfect combination of everything, proteins, starch and vegetables, such as their delicious zucchini and chicken orzo or the simplistic, broccoli and salmon rice. You will even find meal bowls such as barley mushroom bowls with kale, fried eggs and a sprinkle of parmesan cheese or the roasted sweet potato with kale and garlic yoghurt are all delicious meal bowls. The variety is good but it doesn’t offer you specific meals such as the keto meals, paleo meals or the vegan meals.

The premium items caught my attention and they surely looked delicious and tempting enough to be added to the meal box. For instance, the delicious New York seared strip steaks with chimichurri roasted zucchini and quinoa salad are priced just $19.99 per serve. Similarly, the chicken katsu dish along with vegetable, noodles and shrimp is priced at $17.99 per serve. Yes, these premium meals are priced higher than the regular meals, but if you can’t go to your favourite restaurants during the pandemic, you can definitely order these premium recipes and devour them at home.

Also, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, there were certain recipes that were tagged ‘Discontinued’ mostly due to the resulting restrictions.

The menu shows you images of the cooked dishes along with some of other additional information such as the time needed to cook the dish and other tags such as Vegetarian, diabetes friendly, carb-conscious, 500 calories meals and Mediterranean. They do not have any tags for allergens such as soy, nuts or dairy items. You can see allergens only if you check the complete recipe. Also, the complete recipe is not available until just about a week or more before the shipping of the meal box. What caught our attention is the fact that Blue Apron itself doesn’t recommend their meals for people who have severe allergy to certain food items. The company clearly states that all their ingredients are packed in facilities which also package items such as eggs, fish, milk, peanuts, tree nuts, soy, wheat and shellfish. Thus, if you are allergic to certain foods, it is not recommended that you choose Blue Apron owing to the health risks.

We ordered Honey-ginger pork chops, Chrissy Teigen’s special Garlic and soy glazed shrimp and sweet potato with spicy cucumber bao.

The meals came with their instruction cards that were really easy to follow. Each step is accompanied with their pictures to give you a better understanding about how to proceed in the recipe. These pictures greatly help you to learn how to chop your vegetables or how much to sautee them. If you are a novice in the kitchen, the Blue Apron’s app can prove to be a big help to you. The instruction videos show you how and when to add salt, season or cook the meals. The app is almost similar to that of Hello Fresh, but is comparatively much more informational.

Most of the meals were easy to cook, delicious to taste and looked perfect like the picture presented in the recipe card. If we ended up making mistakes, then it was only due to us not following the instruction guide perfectly such as overcooking the fried egg. The only problem we faced was that the cooking time ran much longer than what was mentioned in the instruction card. The soy-glazed shrimp turned out to be really tasty and so did the ginger pork chops.

Blue Apron - Customer Testimonials

Kiara Jones – Blue Apron

Washington

Enjoying Blue Apron meals for 2 years!

I and my partner love cooking and experimenting with new recipes. And it was entirely due to our love for cooking that we started with Blue Apron and their interesting choice of weekly recipes. The meals turn out to be delicious and flavorful. Personally, we would rate them full 5 stars for their services and recipes. We started with 3 meals a week for 2 people. The cooking took us hardly about 45 minutes, especially because we knew every step in the process (thanks to the instructions card which also include images for every step). The final dish not only looks perfect but also tastes equally good. No wonder we wait eagerly for their new recipes each week. Well, Thank You Blue Apron for your services and recipes!

Matteo Crane – Blue Apron

California

I owe my cooking skills entirely to Blue Apron!

If I have learned cooking, it is all and all due to the tutorials and cooking instructions provided by Blue Apron. I started my cooking journey with Blue Apron with just 2 servings a week. Being a picky eater, it was really difficult for me to choose a recipe that included all my likes. Luckily with Blue Apron, I ended up liking all their recipes and loved their taste. Until now, I have ordered as many as 40 meals from them and have never been disheartened with their kits and recipes. The best part is almost every ingredient is packed and made available in the box except for oil, salt and pepper. Their mobile app is very handy and I access my Blue Apron with ease, whenever and wherever I want. I also appreciate their customer services which extremely excellent. Once I didn’t receive a few ingredients in the meal kit and when I complained it to their customer service, the company was quick to reply back and didn’t charge me at all for the meal.

Blue Apron Cost

Except for the premium meals, almost every other recipe at Blue Apron costs you somewhere around $7.49 and $9.99 per serve. More the servings you order, lower the price for these meals. After you sign-up for Blue Apron, you need to choose the number of servings per meal, whether your meals must include 2 or 4 servings. Also, if you are looking for an only vegetarian meal, you will receive only 2 servings of the meals.

Once you have checked the recipes and made your choice, you then need to choose the number of meals you wish to order per week. Almost all 2-serving plans (also including the vegetarian meals) allow you to choose just 2 to3 recipes in a week. No matter how many recipes you order in a week, these 2-serving plans cost $9.99 per serve. Also, if you choose their smallest meal plan, then you need to pay an additional $7.99 shipping charge.

The 4-serving meal plans allow you to choose anything between 2, 3 or 4 recipes in a week. So, if you are ordering the plan with the highest number of recipes in a week, Blue Apron costs you its lowest, $7.49 per serve that is, $119.84 weekly (free shipping). This is a really reasonable cost compared to all other meal delivery services. If you are ordering olive oil, seasonings, salts or wine, each of these items will be charged individually. Blue Apron also offers you special monthly wine subscription plan, where you can order 6 wine bottles of 500 ml at the cost of $65.99 monthly. All these orders do not include shipping charges but not tax.

Blue Apron