Blue Apron Review

In recent years, meal kit delivery services have blossomed around the USA to provide ready-to-use, fresh and healthy ingredients to enthusiastic but strapped-for-time home chefs. Blue Apron, one of the leading meal prep companies in the country, is one such meal kit delivery service. The highly popular brand offers weekly menus created by chefs that users can follow using pre-packaged ingredients delivered straight to their doors.

While pretty famous thanks to celebrity and influencer endorsements (Chrissy Teigen comes to mind), is Blue Apron really worth it? To find out, take a look at our comprehensive Blue Apron review, where we take a deep dive into the company, their meal plans, pricing, customer reviews, and more.

About Blue Apron

Blue Apron is a meal kit delivery service imagined to provide complete meal kits -which include both recipes and pre-packaged ingredients – to customers all over the contiguous United States of America. The company was created in 2012 by Matt Salzberg, Ilia Papas and Matt Wadiak, who wanted to simplify making good choices when it comes to eating healthy.

To provide everything home cooks need for making quick and healthy homemade meals, Blue Apron partners with farmers who grow high-quality ingredients in a sustainable manner, as well as distribution systems that deliver the same ingredients plus recipe cards. Ultimately, the goal is to create a better food system.

When we say the company uses only high-quality ingredients, we mean it: Blue Apron’s produce is natural and non-GMO, and their animal products come from animals fed a natural diet, free from antibiotics and hormones. The company has even been recommended by Seafood Watch, which is a global leader in the sustainable seafood movement.

Aside from offering full meal kits, Blue Apron also offers wines that complement their meals. The company is also selling various kitchen tools, including cooking pans, knives, baking dishes, mixing bowls, aprons, and more.

Before diving into this review in more detail, let us go over some pros and cons of the Blue Apron meal kit delivery service.

Blue Apron Pricing

The Blue Apron meals’ prices range between $8.99 and $9.99 per serving whether you choose a Signature, Vegetarian, or Wellness plan, and start at $13.99 per serving for Premium recipes.

Discounts are recurrent with Blue Apron, as I have come to discover, which can help you make your own opinion of the company’s meals at a fraction of the cost over three recipes!

The Blue Apron prices excluding discounts are:

• $9.99 per serving for a Signature plan
• $8.99 per serving for a Signature for four plan
• $9.99 per serving for a Vegetarian for two plan
• $9.99 per serving for a Wellness for two plan that focuses on Weight Watchers-approved and carb-conscious meals

The Blue Apron Premium meals excluding discounts range between:

• $14.99 and $19.99 per serving for a Two-Serving menu
• $13.99 and $19.99 per serving for a Four-Serving menu

Wine plan price:

Blue Apron offers not only meal prep kits but also a wide choice of kitchenware and pantry basics, and you can even treat yourself to an attractive monthly wine plan.

The Blue Apron wine plan allows you to try out wine bundles that come with six bottles in a 500 mL format (which is ⅔ of a standard-sized wine bottle). Your likes are the star: you can select any wine you feel like tasting and mix and match your favorites for $65.99 per month (including shipping and excluding taxes).

Blue Apron goes the extra mile by offering customers exclusive wine pairing tips and proving indispensable in choosing wines sourced from a circuit that completely cuts out the middleman.

Blue Apron Meal Plan and Meal Selection Options

Blue Apron carefully crafts many of its recipes with ingredients to substitute if you have specific dietary requirements. The company’s flexibility is thoughtful and customer-friendly, as more and more people exclude complete food categories from their diet, such as pescatarians or vegetarians.

If you would like to subscribe to the Blue Apron service, you can choose between:

• Meal Plans with two or more weekly recipes for meals ready under two hours
• Premium recipes that focus on specialty protein combinations, advanced culinary techniques, and unique flavor twists to teach home cooks elaborate cuisine

Blue Apron offers various meal plans to accommodate two to four people per recipe:

• Two-Serving Signature, with a choice of 2, 3, or 4 recipes for two in each weekly delivery
• Four-Serving Signature: choose to receive 2, 3, or 4 recipes per delivery with a choice of 7 recipes per week
• Vegetarian Plan for 2, with two to three vegetarian recipes for two each week
• Meal Prep with eight meal servings to be prepared under two hours throughout the week

If you cannot find a menu that works for you entirely, you can visit the chefs’ Upcoming page in advance and check out substitution ingredients they recommend for their recipes. You can then swap or add ingredients to your Blue Apron recipe for an additional cost ranging between $0.95 to $5.95 per serving, and you are free to skip that week’s delivery if the recipe is not to your taste. Upon receiving your order, you will find the substitution step indicated on the cooking instructions card.

Blue Apron offers three weekly vegetarian options in their Signature for 2 Vegetarian Plan, with tasty recipes such as Roasted Sweet Potato Quesadillas, Peanut Lentil Curry, or Fontina and Pepper Focaccia Pizza.

If you have a severe food allergy, it is worth noting that Blue Apron packages its products in a facility that also manipulates allergens like fish, shellfish, eggs, milk, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, and soy.

Blue Apron Ingredients, Taste, and Freshness

Blue Apron provides fresh, high-quality ingredients to ensure their meals are both healthy and tasty. The company places customers’ and vendors’ wellbeing at the core of their business, partnering with family-run farms that use sustainable farming practices, such as Reeves Farm, Vermont Creamery, and Sun Noodle.

Blue Apron certifies that:

• The ingredients contain no GMOs, hormones, or sub-therapeutic antibiotics
• Most of the dairy products are made with pasteurized milk or cream, meeting FDA guidelines
• Some ingredients are USDA-certified organic
• Seafood is sourced sustainably and recommended by Seafood Watch®
• Their pasture-raised eggs are supplied by Vital Farms, meeting the Certified Humane® standards defined by Humane Farm Animal Care

Blue Apron Packaging

Blue Apron focuses on making their customers’ lives simpler and healthier by providing fresh, locally sourced produce and carefully packaging each ingredient to avoid any damage during transit.

The company delivers the pre-imagined meals in cardboard boxes, which gives a feel of authenticity. It’s good to know that plastic wrapping is brought to a minimum for noodles or meat. As an eco-friendly initiative, vegetables come stripped from any packaging.

Blue Apron advises you to unpack your ingredients as soon as you get them and store them in your fridge to ensure they remain as fresh as possible for longer.

Blue Apron Competitors

Over the last years, upon noticing a sharp decrease in the quality of our eating patterns, meal prep companies have blossomed all over the United States. While Blue Apron’s approach to a healthy, sustainable lifestyle is desirable, it can prove beneficial to consider other meal prep options.

Blue Apron’s main competitors are Sun Basket, Home Chef, Home Bistro, Hello Fresh, Green Chef, Plated, Medifast, Veestro, Bistro MD, Trifecta, Magic Kitchen, Snap Kitchen, and Peach Dish.

On average, Blue Apron’s recipes are priced reasonably for meals that care for the planet and products that are sourced sustainably, with meal prices starting at $8.99 – so roughly the same as Sun Basket and Hello Fresh.

Blue Apron Customer Reviews

For our Blue Apron review, we checked customer opinions on various websites, including Trustpilot, ConsumerAffairs, and TopConsumerReviews. The overall descriptions of the meals, plans, and pricing are very positive, leading us to believe that Blue Apron really is one of the best choices if you’re considering subscribing to a fast and easy meal kit delivery service.

For this review, we have found that Blue Apron was deemed a great company on Trustpilot, with a mark of 4.1 / 5 (at the time of writing). Many customers were excited by the quality and quantity of the fresh produce and pleased that the meals provided were healthy, easy to make, and relatively flavorful depending on the recipe.

Another feature of the Blue Apron recipes was that the instructions are straightforward and easy to follow, allowing customers to get fulfilling food at home in well under an hour. The generally positive sentiment lies in customers’ ability to try a wide selection of meal options from home.

“I recommend Blue Apron for anyone who’s interested in becoming a better cook, trying new menu items, feels like they don’t have time to menu plan or shop, or wants ideas for how to change up what they already eat. It’s also great for helping to get kids involved in cooking, in my experience”, a faithful customer highlights.

Some customers outlined orders missing occasionally, for which the Blue Apron team would credit the customers’ account straight away. Another complaint was the odd shipping delay due to the shipping company. Overall, Blue Apron is deemed very reliable in providing fresh, tasty ingredients and easy-to-follow recipe cards to customers.

Signing Up for Blue Apron

When we looked into signing up to Blue Apron for our review, we found that it was a straightforward process. Upon entering their ZIP code, customers have the option to select their First Delivery Date from a list of available options. Customers will continue to receive deliveries on the day that you initially chose unless they decide to change it in their account settings.

Blue Apron charges no membership fees, which means you will never pay more than the plan you have chosen, and you are entirely free to skip or cancel any order before the cutoff date if you don’t feel like getting a Blue Apron order that week.

Blue Apron Promotions & Discounts

To find the best deals and promotions for the Blue Apron meal kit delivery services, we have checked the company’s website (as well as other websites) in detail. We have found that first-time customers can get $60 off spread over their first three orders, which amounts to $20 off each box. All you have to do to enjoy this discount is sign up to the website with your email address and a password.

We’ve also discovered that the company offers regular 15% and 20% deals off their Blue Apron orders, making for exciting discounts whether you are a first-time customer or not.

Blue Apron also offers Meal and Wine e-Gift Cards, with a $60, $120, or $240 value. If you would like to gift a special someone a Blue Apron Meal Gift Card, you’ll be pleased to know that the recipient can use it towards any subscription meal plan among the Signature, Signature for four, or Vegetarian plans. In the case of a Wine e-Gift card, both the customer and the recipient must be over 21.

The Blue Apron gift card, in particular, seems like a very convenient way to please a close one while broadening their cooking horizons.

How to Contact Blue Apron

If you have any questions that this review hasn’t addressed, you can contact Blue Apron via:

• Email at [email protected]
• Phone: 646-891-4349 or 888-278-4349
• Facebook: Blue Apron
• Twitter: Blue Apron
• Instagram: Blue Apron
• Pinterest: Blue Apron

The Customer Experience team is available from Monday to Friday from 10 am to 9 pm (ET), and on Saturdays and Sundays from 11 am to 6 pm, excluding Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.

Editors Verdict: Blue Apron

The Blue Apron website immediately attracts the eye with beautifully curated recipes that only call for chopping and patience skills to be put together. The many meal options mean that the company caters to most people’s dietary needs, including vegetarians, pescatarians, those watching their caloric intake, etc. We also like that Blue Apron offers good-quality, fresh ingredients and cares about the environmental and sustainable aspects of food production.

By putting its customers’ health first and partnering with sustainable farmers, as well as fish, meat, and dairy producers acknowledged as environmentally friendly, Blue Apron is certainly one of the best meal kit subscription services on the market. The brand places itself as a genuinely caring company that offers tasty meal and wine plans for a fair price compared to other meal delivery services. We also appreciate the fact customers can be specific about the dishes they want: various dietary restrictions, reduced calorie content and so on, are all possible with Blue Apron.

The conclusion? If you’re a beginner cook looking for healthy, easy-to-make meals and you care about sustainability, Blue Apron is definitely worth it. However, if you have very strict dietary restrictions – for instance, you have a severe gluten allergy, or you’re on a keto diet – you’ll want to look for another meal kit delivery service.