NEW YORK, NY – Last year, The Washington Post wrote an article on the decline of the American home-cooked meal. The Post reported that in 2015, less than 60 percent of suppers served at home were actually cooked at home.
Four years ago, Blue Apron CEO and Co-Founder, Matt Salzberg, found himself experiencing this increasingly common problem. "The idea for Blue Apron really just came from a personal need that my Co-Founder and I had in our own lives," he explained in a recent interview with Forbes. "We wanted to cook at home more often, we wanted to try new ingredients and new recipes, but we found it really expensive and difficult to go shop for everything at all the different stores."
His solution? To start a new subscription-based food startup that offers meal kits – a big box of precisely premeasured ingredients, with easy cooking instructions – that promise to make cooking “more fun, more enjoyable, and more affordable for most people.”
Blue Apron, named for the color worn by French chefs in training, is now serving 8 million meals a month and delivering them fresh to customers in nearly every state. At a cost of roughly $10 per meal, Fortune estimates Blue Apron to have a market value of $2 billion.
So what ingredients go into a successful startup? Salzberg told Fortune’s Susie Gharib that he attributes Blue Apron’s growth to the company’s “recipe model” that focuses on supply chain efficiencies and eliminating middlemen. Salzberg works directly with farmers, planning menus with them and coordinating what ingredients to plant – all exclusively for Blue Apron customers. Salzberg says this allows Blue Apron “to get people fresher food at better prices.”
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