It’s been almost five years since we started using Blue Apron as our primary meal plan. Here are my thoughts on a Blue Apron review, the pros and cons, and why we keep subscribing. Disclosure: This post is sponsored by Blue Apron, but I have been a paying subscriber for years.
Putting a meal together night after night can often feel never ending. There are studies that show how often planning weekly meals can lead to stressed out families. Meal delivery services like Blue Apron take a load of the stress off your plate (ha!) by delivering the recipes and ingredients to your doorstep. The convenience doesn’t end there: you’ll save time not having to go grocery shopping, get the benefits of cooking at home, and have less food waste because you’ll use every ingredient in its entirety.
Blue Apron has remained my favorite meal delivery service for years. I first tried it over 10 years ago in 2014. A lot has changed since then! While it started more as a chef-inspired fancier meal experience (perfect for a date night in), these days Blue Apron is the ideal flexible meal service for all types of people.
Having used Blue Apron for so many years, here is my latest Blue Apron review post including the pros and cons and how we use it to save us lots of time! If you’re already ready to try it, get the latest promo here!
Blue Apron Review
What is Blue Apron?
Founded in 2012 in New York City, Blue Apron is a subscription-based meal kit service that delivers recipes and ingredients right to your door to cook at home. Their aim is to make healthy eating and home-cooked meals easy and fun. They strive to offer the highest quality ingredients and partner with farmers and sustainability experts to ensure we’re getting REAL food.
How does Blue Apron work?
The process of ordering through Blue Apron is very easy and stress-free. First and foremost, make sure you subscribe using my promo link! (You’ll save $80 across the first 5 weeks of a new subscription right now.) Also know that any selection you make, you can change! Want to move from 2 to 4 person, switch your recipe types, or change how many recipes you get each week? It’s all super easy to do online or in their app. You can also easily skip a week if you are traveling or otherwise not able to cook that week.
1. Choose your preferred type of meal
Choose between Meal Kit Recipes and the Prepared & Ready line (Note you can now mix and match these!!).
2. Select your recipe preferences
If you want to set-and-forget your recipes and have Blue Apron choose them for you, you start by selecting a style of recipe to focus on (Chef Favorites, Family Friendly, Fast and Easy, Vegetarian, etc.) But note you can always choose your own recipes! If you forget, they will choose for you. The 15-minute meals are also consistently on our order because they save so much time with pre-cooked ingredients like pasta or meat. Blue Apron offers over 100 weekly options.
3. Select your plan
Choose between 2 and 4 servings and if you want 2, 3, 4 or 5 recipes per week. We always do the four serving and cook once, eat twice! We also do two recipes per week for a total of 4 nights of Blue Apron meals.
Once you put in all that info, the recipes and ingredients are shipped right to your door. The recipe cards are very well written and easy to follow. They’re worth hanging onto if you ever wanted to recreate a certain meal later on.
4. Choose recipes and add ons
Once you’re logged in and subscribed, you can choose your recipes for each week as well as any add-ons you like for a small added cost. They offer breakfast and lunch meals, soups, desserts, and extra proteins.
What are the Pros and Cons of Blue Apron?
Pros
Convenience
Blue Apron meal kits have saved us a million hours of time. Our meal plan is predictable and consistent. Gathering recipes on the web before the grocery store run used to always be the hardest part of meal planning for me, and recipe inconsistency can make cooking a gamble. Blue Apron recipes are always so well written, and in five years I haven’t had one “not work.”
Easy Grocery Trips
Since Blue Apron takes care of dinner, our grocery trips are just for breakfast and lunch staples. This saves us so much time since we know where all the basics are in our grocery store and can be in and out much more efficiently. No more searching for oddball ingredients. For our final night of cooking, we’ll plan one kid-friendly meal like homemade pizza or spaghetti.
Cook Once, Eat Twice
I love having a plan and being able to look ahead and know what’s on the menu for each day. I divide into two chunks: prep and cook. I spend 20 minutes during the day to prep the vegetables and sauces and study the recipe, and the other 10-20 minutes at dinnertime to execute the dish. Another way we maximize Blue Apron is to order the four-serving option and have it two nights in a row. It’s the ultimate time-saver because not only do we save on cooking time, but there are fewer dishes to clean on those nights, too.
I strategically plan our schedule around the longer “cook days” versus the days we know we’ll be having the leftovers. On a leftovers night, we might have a late gym class, one of us out on the town, or kid soccer practice.
Variety
My honest opinion: Blue Apron recipes are top notch! There is always an extra layer of flavor/sauce/topping that I wouldn’t have thought to add if I were just throwing ingredients together. They are constantly adding new recipes to their collection, so we never get bored (but we do repeat our favorites sometimes!).
Portion Size
The portion sizes from Blue Apron are perfect for us. Often we will be able to get a 5th meal out of the 4 serving kit if Mazen likes what we’re cooking (Maybe Birch will enjoy adult food when he’s 40 🙂 ). When we have tried other meal kit companies, I did not find the portions to be so plentiful. Often there was a vegetable or carb missing. Blue Apron’s recipes are very well balanced with veggies, carbs, and protein in every recipe.
Cons
Price
The average Blue Apron cost is $9.99 a recipe. You are paying a bit more for the convenience and no, it’s not as cheap as meal planning from bulk. But what you fork over (ha!) in dollars, you gain in hours of time. What is your time worth? For us, the service is well worth the cost. And it’s definitely cheaper than takeout and healthier than fast food.
Packaging
This con is going to be unavoidable with any food subscription service. Since the ingredients come in the mail on an ice pack, there is packaging to recycle. Plus the little containers the ingredients come in. However, Blue Apron has really tried to plan this with sustainability in mind, and when packaging can be minimized and recyclable, it is. I re-use the boxes all the time for a Goodwill run or friend needing to move.
Local-ish
Living in Virginia, we are surrounded by local farms, vineyards, breweries, etc. And we always try to shop and eat local whenever we can to support our fellow Virginians. So ordering from Blue Apron obviously won’t allow you to shop locally. However, Blue Apron does work with small farmers and food suppliers, like Vermont Creamery, Sun Noodle, Reeves Farms, and Rumi Spice. So you can know you are still supporting small business.
Is Blue Apron worth it?
A resounding YES. We’ve been using Blue Apron for years now and wouldn’t continue to be paying subscribers if it wasn’t! It has really simplified our household routines, and the new 15 minute meal option has been a game changer for making dinner even faster than if we were planning it all from scratch.
We still enjoy cooking other creative meals on our 5/6th nights, and we definitely order less takeout then we did before Blue Apron began. If there’s a Blue Apron meal in the fridge, we aren’t allow to go out, so we’ve easily saved money on takeout over time.
Check out some more of my Blue Apron blog posts and Reels!
Still not convinced? Check out this post, where Blue Apron goes head-to-head with other meal kit service companies like Hello Fresh and Green Chef.