Name: Blue Apron CEO Shares His Recipe For Success
Uploaded: 2016-04-18
Duration: 3 min 55 s
Description: And how the company remains cost-effective

Matt, take us back to the the time when you decided to start Blue Apron. What were you trying to accomplish? Yeah, well the idea for Blue Apron really just came from a personal need that my co- founder and I had in our own lives. I mean we wanted to cook at home more often, we wanted to try new ingredients, new recipes. Well we found it really expensive and difficult to go and shop for everything at all the different stores that we have to do it at and so, we really just said wouldn't it be awesome if we had a service that delivered recipes and all the ingredients you needed to cook those recipes in the right amounts. But you were counting on really a behavior change that other people would feel the same way. Because most people don't have time to cook They either get take out, or they go to a restaurant. But, here they are you've gotten them to cook at home. We didn't do something like invent Twitter where we're trying to create an entirely new paradigm for communication. Really we knew people were cooking at home and we said, can we find a way to make it more fun You know, more enjoyable and more affordable for people. All right, and then there's the logistics side of all of this where you are using fresh ingredients. You are dealing with hundreds of farms, and you are delivering all of this stuff fresh to pretty much every single state in the United States. How did you pull this off? We have this really interesting business model which allows us to cut out middlemen and plan a perishable supply chain in a way that hasn't been able to be done before. And that's because we have this recipe model where we can design recipes around supply chain efficiencies. So when we do that, it allows us to get people fresher food at better prices. It allows us to coordinate with farmers to plant ingredients in the ground with those farmers to be harvested just with our customers, and we can distribute them in a pretty cost- effective way nationally because of those efficiencies that result, so. And you have a unique meal every single night. This is so unusual, because not even a restaurant comes up with Something repeatedly day after day. Yeah. They have repeats. So this whole thing just seems l so unique and not really practical or pragmatic business .>> Part of the reason that people cook with us week after week after week, and that's what our customers do, is because of the variety. And the reason we call the company Blue Apron is because chef's around the world wear blue aprons when they're learning to cook. And so for us the symbol of lifelong learning experience in cooking and that's what our customers like to get out of what we do. You started out almost four years Years ago delivering a couple hundred meals a month. You're up to eight million meals a month. You've been growing like crazy. Are you profitable? Are you making money yet? Well we make money on every delivery we do. Mm- hm. You know, we actually just recently raised a bunch of money a little less than a year ago to invest in growing. $ 135 million let's not be shy about that. Yeah. $ 135 million from Fidelity. But if you look at our business on a unit economic level in terms of When we spend money on marketing and when we sell a product, how much we make on that product, our business is very profitable on that unit level. What does success mean to you? Success is relative. And I don't think we'll ever have made it in the world because even if Blue Apron becomes a gigantic company there's always more that you can do. I think this comes back to one of the core tenets of our business which is life long learning You know, you never stop learning and you never stop improving. And that's something we built into the name of the company, it's something we built into our product offering and it's something we built into our corporate culture. so there is no point where we say, hey look, we've made it because there is always more that we can do. And there's just so many things that we're still working to do to improve our offering, to grow what we do, to make a bigger impact on the food system. By expanding our supply [ UNKNOWN ] operations we really you know truthfully we have projects and things we want to accomplish that will take us decades. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Blue Apron CEO Shares His Recipe For Success

And how the company remains cost-effective