Name: Everything You Need to Know about Blue Apron
Uploaded: 2016-08-24
Duration: 5 min 5 s
Description: COO Matthew Wadiak breaks it down

[ MUSIC ] So we're here with Matt Wadiak, who's the co- founder of Blue Apron. It's a hot startup, it's a meal kit delivery service. It's been around for almost four years now. So I thought we could use one of our amazing green- rated fish from Monterey Bay Aquarium today [ INAUDIBLE ] and do A little potato, cucumber, and heirloom tomato salad. This is like really typical of what a Blue Apron meal might be. And then I thought we could do a little pole bean on the side which will be a delicious [ UNKNOWN ] for the fish. We'll make a little tri- color bean salad. You don't have to be super fancy with your cuts. That's a lot of our cutting done right there Gonna take a shallot and just do a rough cut on this shallot here. Peeled a little garlic or run a knife through it. If you take it down to a paste, it blends in really nicely. Can you toss these in the pot of boiling water? What got you passionate about cooking and food? Cooking isn't just about being in the kitchen and the activity of cooking. Cooking is about supporting more broadly an agricultural system that makes sense. My focus was really bringing that kind of food to folks in New York and eventually that culminated into starting Blue Apron a few years ago with my cofounders. And it was always at our heart when we started the company to really work with great food and great ingredients. When we started serving millions of meals, so the scalability of our food system just isn't there to provide food access of this quality to that many people. So, we had to go out and talk to all kinds of different farms of all sizes and really work to improve the kinds of foods they're growing The type of food. The type of soil that they're growing food on. Just cover the shallots with garlic with that red wine vinegar. Make a little mustard vinaigrette. That's good. You can pull the beans out and throw them in the bowl there. Stop the cooking process. Take this and just quarter it and then dice it up. Yeah a little bigger. And then if you just wanna cut these into rounds, straight down. We'll add our green beans, take a couple of these basil leaves off. And then I have some nice greens from the market here. So next thing we're gonna do is cook our barramundi here. This fish specifically is from a sustainable farm in Vietnam. They chose it because it's one of the most sustainable fish to raise. [ MUSIC ] We'll do that fish, I mean how seasonal and fresh does that look? And that's basically it, this is our Blue Apron ask meal that we made together, and I think we've done a pretty good job here, right? Yeah. How much do you incorporate consumer feedback whether it's good or bad in terms of maybe changes you make to your food, or maybe adding in an ingredient or shying away from an ingredient based on what [ UNKNOWN ] Kind of thing. Yeah we always try to do foods that people like. Usually it's not the food that people don't like so much it's the way it's prepared. And it's our responsibility as chefs to really think about that and consider that which is why we Spend so much time here in the test kitchen. So you're obviously very popular, if millions of kits are going out each month. But how do you kind of attract new consumers to this? We really penetrate, as an industry, such a tiny percentage of the population. So many people have never tried Blue Apron before, so we're still growing really quickly as a company. I mean, most of our new customers are coming from people telling other folks that this is something that's really changed their life and empowered them to cook in the kitchen. [ MUSIC ] In the food system, we have this sort of antiquated distribution system where A farmer sells food to a terminal market. He sells it to a distributor who sells it to a retailer who has a big brick and mortar shop where they sell 10, 000 SKUs. And then that goes to a consumer after it's a few weeks old already. By creating less steps in the supply chain our farmers can make more money and our consumers can pay less. So when compared to a grocery store, we actually cost less for the same ingredients, have higher quality, and it's fresher. And you get to cook incredible ingredients at home with somebody [ UNKNOWN ]. That's like a win- win Win, win, win. How popular is this service outside of major metro areas? By geography, our customer base is actually really evenly split all over the country by population. I think some of the people who live in more condensed cities, find it convenient for different reasons, because they don't have to go and schlep, and walk all over, and take the subway. For example in New York, you can carry groceries in rural areas. A lot of folks don't have great access to food. We send our food to food deserts. We create easy access and if you're a busy parent and you're trying to drive around and pick up your kids and do this and do that. It doesn't matter where you live. It's convenient to have it come right to your house. Matt, thanks for taking time to talk to Fortune. I really appreciate it. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. And thanks for dinner. Yep.