Blue Apron has a New Year’s resolution: sell healthier meals, and get more customers.
This week, Blue Apron launched home-delivered meal kits with WW — formerly known as Weight Watchers — that meet WW’s wellness and nutrition standards. The Blue Apron-WW program offers a weekly rotation of recipes, from sweet potato chili to baked chicken with kale, potatoes and caper mayo.
The pairing comes as Blue Apron struggles to hold on to its customers and its stock has sagged below $1. The company has never turned an annual profit. In the last quarter, the company’s net revenue decreased 28 percent year-over-year to $150.6 million, due largely to lost customers.
With WW’s widespread membership to Blue Apron’s food services, Blue Apron CEO Brad Dickerson said he sees a plan to turn the tables in 2019. Blue Apron’s most recently reported customer count stood at 646,000. Last quarter, WW had 2.8 million members in North America.
“Historically, we’ve been going out and acquiring one customer at a time,” Dickerson said. “This is a great way for us to get our brand in front of multiple customers at a time.”
At its start six and a half years ago, Blue Apron was a pioneer for fresh, prepared meal-kits delivered to customers. But meal-kit momentum has slumped in the past few years, and a slew of startups were either sold or put out of business. In the meantime, large grocers like Kroger and Albertsons are shaping their own meal-kit programs.
In July 2017, the company’s stock debuted at $10 a share but was plagued with bad timing from the start. Blue Apron went public just after Amazon announced plans to buy Whole Foods, a deal that sounded alarms that the online retailer might move into the meal-delivery space. On Thursday, the share price closed at 92 cents.
In November, Blue Apron laid out a plan for profitability in 2019. It focused on the company’s direct-to-consumer business, especially for customers who already showed a strong affinity for the brand. (The top 30 percent of Blue Apron’s customers generate more than 80 percent of the company’s net revenue, the company said.)
