Meal Subscription Service Packaging
Fresh Realm
Reusable Box
Returnable Packaging #
Problems
Cooling
Produce Bruising
Contamination
The boxes are 17-inch-square cubes made of polyurethane. Inside, five drawers house metal plates that help maintain the desired temperature. The drawers can hold up to four grab-and-go meals or the ingredients for two meal kits, Lippold said.
The boxes are delivered by FedEx. Once the food is removed, the customer puts the container back together and slaps on a return label. FedEx picks it up and returns it to FreshRealm. The company then sanitizes the box and puts it to use again.
Meal Plan Statistics
3 percent of people 18 and older had tried a meal kit in the last year.
Freshly
Blue Apron #
Tomato Sherpa
Called "The Vessel"
In 2012, the average household made 56 trips to the grocery channel—16 fewer trips than in 2001
In 2013, vegetable side dishes increased dollar sales 16 percent and salad kits jumped 26 percent from the previous year
"How to Recycle" Page
"Recycling Locator"
Sealed Air
Mushroom Packaging
Plated
Jute Insulation
Green Produce Bags
Our green bags absorb ethylene gas (a compound that increases the rate of ripening), making them great to reuse next time you buy produce.
Items in box
Bottles
Plastic Bags
Paper Bags
Plastic Containers
Cardboard containers
Gel Packs
Insulation
Jute
Box itself
Break down and recycle curbside
Box is 100% curbside recyclable
Gel packs need to be emptied and recycled at specific place
Reusable
Emptied
Recycled at specific facility
Returned
Returnable Items
Go online and print shipping label
Need to go online to return
Go online and print shipping label
Tear away shipping label
Tearable shipping label
Send two boxes worth of items at once
Hello Fresh
Collapsable box
Each recipe has separate box, remove plastic window
Gel is water soluble
Carbon Footprint
Justification-- "We serve dinner to thousands of people every night. Think about it: if all of those people separately got in their cars, went to the grocery store, realized they needed something else, went to another grocery store, and finally went home – well, there’d be a lot of hangry (hungry + angry) folks out there. Plus, the gas from the pizza delivery when you’re inevitably too tired to actually cook dinner begins to add up. In comparison, one stop on a FedEx delivery route is chump change from the Carbon Bank." - Home Chef
Blue Apron valued at 2 billion dollars
Blue Apron: monthly delivery rate north of 5 million meals
Blue Apron: According to an August Pacific Standard report, it delivers to 85% of the country from two distribution centers nationwide — meaning that before it makes it to your doorstep, there’s a decent chance your lacinato kale and premium ground beef crossed the better part of the United States in a refrigerated truck.
(ironically it's a grocery store most of the time)
Hard to find
Hard to understand
Thoughts:
Hard to think someone who doesn't have time to go grocery shopping has the time to recycle all these items at their proper place rather than curbside
Fossil Fuels needed for delivery
Ingredients being shipped = pollution
for someone who lives miles away from a grocery store, the fossil-fuel impact of hopping in the car and picking up a meal’s worth of ingredients — which were likely also shipped across the country, or even across the planet — might be worse.
A single serving at Blue Apron costs $9.99, a price that Salzberg says is 60 percent less than if you shopped for the ingredients yourself.
The estimated total value of food loss at the retail and consumer levels in the United States was $161.6 billion in 2010. The top three food groups in terms of share of total value of food loss were meat, poultry, and sh (30 percent, $48 billion); vegetables (19 percent, $30 billion); and dairy products (17 percent, $27 billion).