Blue Apron
Blue Apron's Thai chicken burger.
Blue Apron ships around 8 million meal kits each month to customers around the US. Inside its boxes, there are pre-packaged ingredients for meals, so that people can prepare dinner without going to the grocery store or finding recipes.
In an interview with Business Insider, Blue Apron's co-founder and COO Matt Wadiak said his favorite recipe is the Thai chicken burger with heirloom tomatoes and potato wedges.
"To get a delicious tomato with a chicken burger that has lemongrass, ginger, and garlic infused in it with a bunch of cilantro is a truly magical meal," he says.
Wadiak, who's also a chef, developed the recipe for the burger, one week after he and co-founders Matt Salzberg and Ilia Papas launched the company in 2012. Wadiak wrote the first 350 recipes for Blue Apron, and tested all of them in his apartment.
"We were pretty scrappy back in the day," he says.
Wadiak adds that it's hard to say which recipe is the most popular with customers, because Blue Apron's offerings change every week. He has noticed that whenever a recipe features a unique, yet approachable ingredient, like marinated pink lemon or Chinese long beans, they are highly popular. Once a customer signs up, they can filter by any dietary restrictions and pick which recipes they want for the upcoming week.
Blue Apron's prices range, depending on the number of meals per week ($60 for three dinners for two people, $70 for two dinners for four people, or $140 for four dinners for four people). The cost per meal is still a bit more expensive that buying the ingredients at a grocery store, but then again, the service supplies the exact amount you need for each recipe. If you're cooking for just one or two people, that means you don't have to worry about buying entire bushels or bags of ingredients.
Blue Apron doesn't specify all of the farms, ranches, and fisheries it sources from, but it highlights a select number on its site. On March 22, the company announced it bought NH Ranch, a small collective of farms in California and New Zealand. Blue Apron will work with NH Ranch's founder, Bill Niman, a rancher known pioneering humanely raised livestock in the US. Going forward, the meal kit company will source all of its beef, chicken, and turkey from farms in its network.