About Blue Apron Holdings

Blue Apron Holdings, Inc. designs original recipes with fresh, seasonally inspired produce and high quality ingredients, which are sent directly to customers for them to prepare, cook, and enjoy. The company creates meal experiences around original recipes every week based on what’s in-season with farming partners and other suppliers. The company sells wine through Blue Apron Wine, a direct-to-consumer wine delivery service. The company also sells a curated selection of cooking tools, utensils, pantry items, and add-on products for different culinary occasions, as well as non-subscription meal kits and wine products, through Blue Apron Market, its e-commerce market. The company offers fresh, chef-designed recipes that empower its customers to embrace their culinary curiosity and challenge their abilities to see what a difference cooking quality food can make in their lives. The company’s core product is the meal experience it helps its customers create. These experiences extend from discovering new recipes, ingredients, and cooking techniques to preparing meals with families and loved ones to sharing photos and stories of culinary triumphs. Central to these experiences are the original recipes the company designs with fresh, seasonally-inspired produce and high-quality ingredients sent directly to its customers. The company also sells wine, which can be paired with its meals or can be purchased à la carte, through Blue Apron Wine, its direct-to-consumer wine delivery service. Through Blue Apron Market, the company’s e-commerce platform, it sells a curated selection of cooking tools, utensils, pantry items, and add-on products for different culinary occasions, which are tested and recommended by its culinary team. The company’s products are available to purchase through its website, mobile app, and beginning in the second quarter of 2022, its meal kits are also available for sale on third-party sales platforms. The company’s customers span ages, geographies, income brackets, and levels of culinary expertise. They include young couples, families, singles, and empty nesters. The company’s passionate community of home cooks tell us, through emails, phone calls, and social media, how much Blue Apron has changed their lives. Central to its operations, the company has developed an integrated network that employs technology and expertise across many disciplines. The company’s supply-demand coordination activities––demand planning, recipe creation, procurement, recipe merchandising, fulfillment operations, distribution, customer service, and marketing––drive its end-to-end value chain. Products Meals On the company’s direct-to-consumer platform, it strives to offer its customers a balanced mix of ingredients, cuisines, familiarity, discovery, and preparation times. The company focuses on offering a variety of choices every week, including a range of recipes designed for a healthy lifestyle, so that customers can make selections based on their individual or household needs and preferences. The company offers its customers four weekly meal plans - a Two-Serving Signature Plan, a Two-Serving Vegetarian Plan, a Two-Serving Wellness Plan, and a Four-Serving Signature Plan. For meal plans, customers have the flexibility to choose any combination of the core recipes offered in any week, regardless of their plan. For each Order per week, this includes a minimum of two recipes with up to sixteen choices on the Two-Serving Plan and a minimum of two recipes with up to fourteen choices on the Four-Serving Plan. In 2022, the company expanded the optionality to purchase non-subscription boxes to third-party e-commerce channels. Based on the number of Orders in 2022 per plan type, approximately 80% of the company’s meal orders were for the Two-Serving Plan, and approximately 20% were for the Four-Serving Plan. The company’s customers can tailor their orders to complement their individual tastes and lifestyles. Some customers prefer to let its recipe recommendation algorithm choose their recipes based on the food preferences they have provided to it, while other customers actively choose several weeks in advance of delivery which recipes to receive. In addition, customers have the option to customize some of their recipe selections, such as the ability to upgrade a protein for a more premium protein, replace a meat with a plant protein, or increase the serving size from two to four. The company also offers Premium recipes, including its Craft offering, that introduce its customers to specialty protein combinations, advanced culinary techniques, and unique flavor twists. Both its customized options and Premium recipes are priced at a premium to its standard rates. The company also sells seasonally-inspired occasion-based offerings throughout the year consisting of multiple recipes for six to eight people, which it sells as part of its subscription meal plan, along with the Blue Apron Market and third-party e-commerce channels. The company’s culinary team, including chefs who are alumni of some of the best restaurants in the world, such as Michelin-starred Per Se and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, begins the recipe creation process with various seasonally-inspired ingredients. The company merchandises its recipes through various campaigns geared toward seasonality, dietary preferences, ingredients, and healthy lifestyles. The company’s approach to menu design seeks to balance ingredient supply and cost while appealing to a variety of customer lifestyles and cooking attitudes across a broad range of demographics and taste profiles. The company is committed to sourcing fresh produce and other high-quality ingredients year-round from its supplier network that includes farmers, ranchers, fisheries, and artisans. The company’s recipes change every week based on the season and often feature specialty ingredients not readily available elsewhere. By merchandising these ingredients into carefully crafted recipes, the company is able to introduce its customers to ingredients they may have never experienced before. The company also collaborates with suppliers to create ingredients specifically for its recipes, such as custom sauces, unique spice blends, or, for example, bespoke ramen noodles from a third-generation noodle maker. The company’s ingredient standards are critically important to it and its customers. Wine Blue Apron Wine, the company’s direct-to-consumer wine delivery service, uses an integrated supply chain and direct sourcing relationships to deliver high-quality wines at compelling values. The company works directly with vineyards and consult with acclaimed winemakers to create custom Blue Apron wines that are specially crafted for its customers and uniquely curated to pair with its meals. The company’s wines included in its monthly wine delivery service are sized for a dinner for two (in 500ml bottles, rather than traditional 750ml bottles). Customers have the flexibility to customize their box, choosing six bottles from a monthly selection of wines that best meet their taste preferences. A pairing key system provides insight into the wine profiles, and enables customers to pair their Blue Apron meals and wines. The company’s wine offerings include curated red, white, rose and sparkling wines, tasting notes, pairing tips, and the story behind each wine. The company is a licensed winery, and ships directly to customers in 31 states and Washington, D.C. As with its meals, customers may choose to actively manage their monthly wine orders by adjusting deliveries to fit their schedules, or they may simply sign up and receive one or two deliveries each month. Wine customers can also order a second box per monthly cycle. In addition to the company’s monthly wine service, customers have the ability to order curated assortments and wine by 500ml and 750ml bottles, half-case, case, or other bundles on the Blue Apron Market, outside of the monthly subscription model Market Blue Apron Market, the company’s e-commerce market, features a curated selection of cooking tools, utensils, pantry items, and add-on products for different culinary occasions, which are tested in its test kitchen and recommended by its culinary team. The company’s recipe cards feature cooking tools and utensils from Blue Apron Market, creating an integrated brand experience for its community of home cooks and repeated merchandising opportunities for it. A selection of non-subscription meal kit boxes and the company’s wines are also sold on the Blue Apron Market website. Digital Experience Customers can find recipes, register their dietary preferences, manage their accounts, and make purchases on the company’s website or on its iOS and Android mobile applications. Brand and Marketing The company is continuing to build a consumer lifestyle brand that empowers its customers to embrace their culinary curiosity and challenge their abilities to see what a difference cooking quality food can make in their lives. Several nights a week, the company’s customers invite it into their homes. The company takes part in some of the most joyful parts of their days, helping them create a meal for themselves, their families and their loved ones. This includes a diverse mix of online and offline channels, as well as strategic partnerships that enable the company to expand its brand to new segments of customers. The company deliberately focuses on the marketing channels. The company also has a customer referral program through which certain existing customers may invite others to receive a single complimentary meal kit box. For all of its products, the company uses a combination of paid, earned, and owned media to increase the awareness of its brand and attract new customers. The company’s content enables customers to connect and interact with its brand even when they are not cooking with it. For example, the company leverages both its digital channels and printed content within deliveries to highlight specific ingredients, provide general cooking tips and techniques and foster conversation within its community of home cooks. In addition, strategic brand partnerships are an important opportunity for the company to leverage the platform it is building to add value for its existing customers and showcase its brand to new customer segments. Finally, as it continues to promote its brand to attract new customers, the company focuses on investments in marketing technology, especially in response to the ongoing elimination of cookie-based tracking. This work includes building out a customer data platform to better manage the company’s first party data and investing in its engineering capabilities to improve overall user experience. Customers The company’s customers represent a broad range of demographics, including a wide range of age groups and incomes. Customers of all kinds are able to successfully incorporate Blue Apron into a wide variety of lifestyles. Intellectual Property The company seeks to protect its intellectual property rights through a combination of trademark, copyright and patent, and other intellectual property protections under applicable law. The company registers domain names, trademarks and service marks in the United States and abroad. The company has two registered patents related to product packaging. Regulation Food companies, such as the company, are subject to extensive government regulation. Federal statutes applicable to food production include the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the Federal Meat Inspection Act, the Poultry Products Inspection Act, the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act, the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Food Safety Modernization Act, and the Federal Trade Commission Act. All meat and poultry products that the company sources are processed in facilities inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), or by the equivalent agencies in countries deemed eligible by USDA for exporting meat and poultry to the United States. History Blue Apron Holdings, Inc. was founded in 2012. The company was incorporated in Delaware in 2016.