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The team at Epicurious has tested 20 different meal delivery services and found that, while most of them make getting dinner on the table easy, serving as a less expensive alternative to takeout, your mileage may vary in terms of the quality of that food. But Blue Apron, one of the original names in meal kits, has a reputation for offering more interesting recipes and better ingredients. We wondered, though, after the company’s 12 years in the business, how accurate that reputation really is. So I tried Blue Apron’s meal kits and ready-made meals for two weeks to feed my family of four. Here’s my honest review.
Blue Apron recipes
Blue Apron offers three different types of meals: Standard meal kits that you prep and cook yourself, Ready to Cook meals that involve little prep and a single provided aluminum baking pan, and Prepared & Ready meals that, while not frozen, resemble the sorts of single serving options you’d find in the freezer section at the grocery store. Each week there are just over a dozen recipes to choose from, and subscription plans allow mixing and matching of the standard kits and Ready to Cook meals (Prepared & Ready meals are available as add-ons or as a wholly separate subscription). Dishes do return to the lineup, but for the four weeks you can plan ahead, you won’t see many, if any, repeats.
Compared to other meal kit delivery services like HelloFresh and Green Chef, Blue Apron offers more variation on the standard templates of its meals. Sometimes the proteins come with two sides instead of one, and you’ll see lettuce wraps, quiche, and noodle soups featured, with different iterations each week. Family-friendly pastas and pizzas, as well as curries, burgers, tacos, sandwiches, salads, bowls, and meat loaves incorporated flavors and ingredients from a wide range of cuisines, making them more interesting than many other meal kits on the market.
What I liked:
Blue Apron’s recipes bring together complex flavors and, more than any other meal kit I’ve tested, produce novel and pleasantly unexpected dishes. Blue Apron also offers more recipes served family-style that can easily feed a family of four. The oven-baked gnocchi with creamy feta, spinach, and roasted red pepper and Romesco tomato sauce was a particularly big hit in my household.
Some weekly menus offer a few sheet-pan dinner options, essentially giving you the Ready to Cook option using your own pan.
Though they are precooked, the Prepared & Ready meals have brighter, more pronounced flavors than they might if they were frozen.
What I didn’t like:
There’s a notable difference between the menus available for two people and the menus available for four, and a lot of the options I would have been excited to try—like Kung Pao tofu, one-pan prosciutto gnocchi, and Dijon chicken with a side dish that combined fluffy rice with vinegar-marinated apple, were only accessible on a two-serving plan—not great for me and my family of four. Also note that, while you can filter your recipe choices somewhat—selecting low carb or vegetarian—Blue Apron won’t necessarily be the best choice if you have very specific dietary preferences or restrictions, just because it will keep you from taking advantage of the wide array of weekly meals on offer.
Some of the Ready to Cook meals, which require little more than putting all the ingredients into the baking tray and giving it a stir, could have used a side dish to make them feel more complete. With the Gnocchi and Feta Bake (yes, like the viral pasta recipe), I would have loved to have a salad on the side. This is particularly noticeable when comparing these oven-ready meals to the recipes you prep yourself, which tend toward more balanced plates (the Everything Bagel–Crusted Pizza, for example, came with a side salad, and most pan-cooked protein entrées have potatoes or rice along with a veggie like green beans, zucchini, or broccoli).
Blue Apron ingredients
Blue Apron uses some deeper cuts when it comes to spices and produce that makes their meals eat more like something you might find in a cool new cookbook. Of the all meal kits I’ve tried, Blue Apron offers the broadest, most playful and creative range of ingredients and flavors.
What I liked:
I received quality ingredients in good condition and appreciated additions I wouldn’t have gotten while grocery shopping, like sweety drop peppers—teardrop-shaped peppers with a fruity, smoky flavor—and balsamic marinated onions, which both added a punch to Blue Apron’s salads.
Blue Apron meals also rarely required any pantry ingredients other than salt and pepper and olive oil. (However, unlike other kit services I tried, Blue Aprons recipe cards did not indicate anywhere which of those things to have on hand, so, if you don’t have a bottle of olive oil around all the time, read the full card and plan accordingly.)
While most of what I cooked from Blue Apron involved fresh ingredients, one of the Ready-to-Cook meals, a chicken and chickpea curry, happened to include canned tomato sauce and canned beans. That meant I had more flexibility in my meal planning and could hold this recipe a little longer (I froze the chicken in the meantime).
What I didn’t like:
Blue Apron doesn’t offer many opportunities to swap out ingredients. If you wanted your shrimp lo mein with chicken instead, you’ll probably find yourself out of luck. When they do offer swaps, it is sometimes just for a higher-grade version of the same ingredient (regular ground beef for USDA Prime) and will involve an upcharge.
Cooking difficulty and logistics
Blue Apron meals take longer to make than lots of other meal kit recipes and require a bit more cooking skill. Suggested times for the standard recipes that require more prep work typically run between 30 and 55 minutes, and I found they often took 10 to 15 minutes longer than that. It’s not always active time—in the case of a pizza recipe the dough needed extra time to relax—but you should factor it all in if you’re planning to eat dinner right at 6 p.m.
What I liked:
Blue Apron challenged me in a good way and brought in ingredients I might not have otherwise purchased. And I think getting new ingredients in these kits improved my comfort with them, and taught me some cooking methods for future home-cooked meals. Because I was cooking for four, I also appreciated that Blue Apron’s recipe step-by-step instructions actually listed the ingredients and steps for the four-serving version of the meal in a clear and easy-to-read way. Other meal kits will simply add parentheticals like “1 cup (2 cups for four),” which can be easy to miss if you’re cooking in a hurry.
Because some recipes are a bit more involved, I also liked having the quicker Ready to Cook meal options in the mix, so some nights I could be more hands-off. Prepared & Ready meals were, as advertised, very easy to heat up (two minutes in the microwave). No complaints.
What I didn’t like:
If you’re getting into meal kits because of their reputation for being fast and easy, know that Blue Apron meals can be time-consuming. I had some cases of close-call timing (meat about to overcook while I was still stirring a sauce) or overlapping steps that take some focus to execute.
Some of the ingredient upgrades caused issues with the recipe. For example, I received a meatball recipe and swapped for a higher grade of meat. But I didn’t just get different meat; I received an extra six ounces of it (24 ounces instead of 18). The recipe just instructed me to add all the meat to a bowl, which made bigger meatballs that I had to make sure to cook for a longer time.
The Ready-to-Cook meals come with a recyclable aluminum pan and the instructions typically ask you to combine the ingredients in that shallow (about two inches deep) tray. Stirring everything in this confined, low-walled vessel caused more problems (and mess) than it solved, as it was hard to mix everything evenly without spilling over the sides. Throwing everything together in a large bowl and dumping it into the pan would have been easier and only added one more dish to clean.
Blue Apron cost
The smallest Blue Apron subscription possible is two meals per week for two people, which comes in at $12.49 per portion. Shipping is an added $10.99 per box, so you’re looking at about $61 total. If you bump that up to five meals per week, the cost goes down to $9.49 per portion plus shipping. For four people, you’re looking at a per-portion cost of $9.99 for two meals per week ($91 per box) that drops down to $7.99 for five meals per week. (Both plans offer graduated pricing depending if you choose two, three, four, or five meals.)
Blue Apron’s Prepared & Ready Meals come in single servings only and cost between $9.99 and $10.99 per portion depending on whether you choose the four-, six-, eight-, or 10-meal option. These can also be included as add-ons to your meal kit subscription.
What I liked:
The portion sizes are more than enough; nothing feels scant. So the price felt justified.
What I didn’t like:
Many of the more interesting and multidimensional meal options cost extra. During my testing, I saw plus-ups that added anywhere from $2.99 to $6.99 per serving. I think once you start paying $15 to $20 per plate, you’ll need to ask yourself if it’s truly cheaper or more convenient than dining out.
Packaging
Blue Apron ships in cardboard boxes that contain a foil-lined bubble wrap bag inside. The bag contains that week’s kit bags, proteins, and some loose or packaged veggies. Packaging on the Ready to Cook meals is similar to the meal kits, however, the included pans come packaged separately
What I liked:
Some meal kits, notably HelloFresh and Home Chef, package all the ingredients for a meal in a single, huge plastic bag, leaving you to find space for several full 2-gallon bags in your fridge. But the ingredients for the week of Blue Apron meals kits come less put-together, meaning there are loose items like clamshells of tomatoes or blocks of cheese that you can tuck into corners (just don’t lose track of them!) and let you use your refrigerator normally. The loose items also meant, in most cases, relatively small delivery boxes.
What I didn’t like:
I received the occasional scuffed squash or bruised tomato, which didn’t affect the dishes, but might have affected the state of the produce if I had let them stick around my kitchen longer.
The insulated bag and ice pack are all essentially trash and unrecyclable.
Is Blue Apron worth it?
With prices in line with most large meal kit companies, Blue Apron is a decidedly high-quality meal kit option. Recipes take bigger swings with ingredients, cooking techniques are pushed a little further, and meals taste impressively professional. If you consider yourself an accomplished home cook, but don’t have the time to plan and procure ingredients for the fancy meals you know you’re capable of whipping up, consider letting Blue Apron write the menu.
