(Images in this post are pulled from the Blue Apron recipe cards)
Many of you may be aware of the pre-portioned meal delivery service craze sweeping the nation. There are lots of options out there: Blue Apron, Home Chef, Plated, Hello Fresh…etc…But a lot of these don’t deliver to Denver. We are just too far from the major metropolitan areas. Blue Apron does though, so we decided to give it a try.
How it works
You sign up for the delivery service. There are two meal plan options, one that feeds 2 people per meal and one that feeds 4. We obviously chose the 2 person option. A box comes with 3 meals a week for $60. Now, that sounds like a lot. But considering how bad we are about meal planning and grocery shopping, we tend to eat out A LOT. The equivalent of $10 per person a meal is easily achieved even with just fast food. Since we were already spending the money, why not try something that is at least cooked at home and fresh?
Once you identify which weeks you would like to receive meals, you get to choose 3 out of 6 meals, usually 3 are vegetarian. The biggest bummer with this is that you cannot choose any 3 meals. Some choices will constrain what else you can pick. I assume this has to do with the logistics of packaging. You can skip any week you want, you just have to notate that about a week in advance or you will be charged and the next week will ship. For example, our deliveries are on Friday and we have until the Saturday before at 10am to confirm the meal choices or skip. The box arrives packed with ice and all the ingredients portioned out for each meal. Each recipe comes with an illustrated recipe card. Additionally, all the recipes they offer are available on their website.
Our experience
I’d say we’ve received at least 5 or 6 boxes so far and have had a mixed experience. I wish I had known that I was going to blog about them so that I could have taken pictures. Anyways, our experiment did not get off to a great start. I received a referral code for the first box free from a friend, so it was minimal risk. The first disappointment came when signing up. We only had one delivery day option: Fridays. We were really hoping to use this as a weekday meal thing. With the box coming on Friday evenings, that leaves 3 days for fresh food to sit if we wanted to wait until the following week. Not ideal, but oh well. In the larger metro areas, they have more delivery day options so you can choose what works best for you.
First box arrives and the second disappointment is quickly realized. One of the meals was Polenta-based and the plastic bag that the dry Polenta came in had ripped and was all over the box. Not only was it a mess, but it made one meal essentially not makable because we didn’t have the main ingredient. Obviously we could go to the store and buy replacement Polenta, but that defeats the purpose! I contacted Blue Apron customer service to let them know of the issue and they gave me a credit equivalent towards one meal of the next box. Awesome. Aside from that, the recipes we did make were very good and the directions easy to follow.
We receive box number 2 and another issue is apparent. The squash that they sent us looked awful.
Luckily, unlike last time, this was not a main ingredient so the dish was still makable, just minus a flavor. Again, I contacted Blue Apron to let them know the quality of the produce they were sending out. They gave me a $10 credit towards the next box. Customer service has been great, but it would have been nice to not have to deal with it in the first place!
This was consistently a problem in some of our early boxes. The produce was not quite fresh, very close to the end of it’s life. We threw out quite a few things because we could not make them right away. This problem has gotten less frequent though, I think due to seasonality. The typical summer produce that you receive is more delicate to begin with. Once we got into more of the fall recipes, they come with a little heartier produce that lasts a bit longer. I think this partially has to do with our location. While they do deliver to Denver, our meals are coming from California. That’s a long way for fresh food.
So that sounds like a lot of bad, but the good has really outweighed the bad. The boxes got better in quality and almost all the recipes have been amazing. It has really helped me sharpen my cooking skills and make things that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise picked. And they look surprisingly close to the professional pictures once they’re done! I’d say the only bad recipe we’ve done is the Tomato and Goat Cheese Pie. It was bland and just neither of us enjoyed it. Our favorite ones have probably been the Pan Seared Salmon & Farro Salad, Mixed Mushroom Tacos, and the Queso Arepas.
We’ve decided to take a little bit of a break from the boxes because we have been not great about keeping up with the meals and throwing some things out. I think from now on we will only order when there’s a box that looks really good instead of just getting them to get them. Luckily, they plan their menus out like 6 weeks in advance, so we can look plenty ahead to figure out when we want to order.
Bottom line: It’s worth trying. I think you’ll probably avoid most of the problems that we have had if you are closer to a major metro area.
When we receive another box, I’ll do a review of those meals with pictures of what we actually make!
the blonde planner 