WASHINGTON — For professionals who would rather not brave the crowds at a restaurant or supermarket, a home-delivery service like Blue Apron has definite appeal.
Blue Apron subscribers get high-quality, perfectly measured ingredients brought to their door, along with instructions for putting them together.
One fan is Fortune magazine’s Leigh Gallagher. Recently, however, she and her husband have “noticed some changes,” she wrote on Fortune.com this week: Meals, she wrote, seem “to have gotten easier and less sophisticated.” And then there are all the potatoes, which seem to be more prominent lately in recipes.
Gallagher’s observation comes as the company’s stock price struggles. Last month’s IPO has been rattled by Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods Market.
Is Blue Apron trying to cut the price of what they’re sending out? An official said no, but Fortune’s Matt Heimer told WTOP’s Dimitri Sotis that it’s a question worth asking.
“In a very competitive business, issues of quality and customer satisfaction can really make or break you in a way that they wouldn’t if you were in a monopoly business like cable television or something like that,” Heimer said.
“Blue Apron really can’t afford to be perceived as skimping — especially right now, when they’re at a crucial turning point in their business.”
An Amazon-Whole Foods marriage looms large, Heimer said. Even if Blue Apron adds more distribution centers, he said, it probably won’t make much of a difference, because the local Whole Foods is more likely to be closer.
“If it’s only a difference between shipping something from 10 miles away and shipping something from 10 blocks away, a lot of those sort of core affluent urban consumers who probably love both Whole Foods and Blue Apron are going to choose to get the more local option,” he said.
It’s an example both of a disruptive business being disrupted itself — and of how quickly business models can change.
“Blue Apron was a disrupter in its own right,” Heimer said. “That made life trickier for a lot of supermarkets and restaurants.”
“And now, lo and behold, they’ve got a big 800-pound gorilla in the form of Amazon teaming up with maybe a 400-pound gorilla in Whole Foods to make their life a little more complicated.”
