Dinner On-Demand: The Costs of Pre-Portioned Meal Deliveries
By Adelaide Cummings
March 27, 2017
The large cardboard box arrives on your doorstep like any other package. Excited about what might be inside, you rip through the tape, revealing shiny, aluminum colored padding and rectangular ice packs. Under the insulation, you find bags of varying size labeled with ingredient names. There are brown mushrooms, a can of chickpeas, a packet of spice mix, flatbread, and a tiny condiment-sized container of creme fraiche. You pull out more bags and ingredients for three nights of dinner and spread them across your kitchen floor. Eager for meals to come, you begin to read the recipe cards that will instruct you as you begin cooking.
Several weeks ago, I had the opportunity to try making dinner using Blue Apron, a leader in the field of meal delivery services. Blue Apron is the largest company of its kind in the United States, selling 8 million meal kits a month. Meal delivery services are subscription companies that put together recipes and pre-portioned ingredients, relieving customers of shopping and planning dinner for a couple nights a week.
As a college student, I am reluctant to stock the kitchen with ingredients that I may only use for one recipe. It was exciting to see ingredients like creme fraiche, similar to a loose version of sour cream, and za’atar, a Middle Eastern spice blend. Everything was portioned to the exact amount needed for the recipes, which would save me from measuring and would reduce my food waste.
The first recipe was an easy to prepare yet indulgent butternut squash risotto, and by the end of the week, I was hooked… kind of. From these delectable meals, I had collected a heap of plastic containers, plastic bags, cardboard, and paper. I began to wonder about the environmental costs of using a meal delivery service.
In the United States, most food is wasted at the household level, where families throw out about 25% of the food and beverages they purchase. Blue Apron helps to reduce the amount of food wasted at the household level by sending people only what they need to use for that recipe, so that less food is wasted or left forgotten in their fridge. On Blue Apron’s website, the company claims that in 2016, they saved 2.8 million pounds of food, citing a study done by BSR, a global not-for-profit consulting company. BSR allegedly found that the facilities had 5.5 percent food waste compared to 10.5 percent at supermarkets. While impressive, this study is not available to the public and is considered proprietary information, limiting my ability to verify these claims.
In addition to food waste, waste from packaging is of concern to many meal delivery service customers. I surveyed 34 past and present meal delivery service subscribers, and 35 percent expressed dissatisfaction with packaging from meal delivery services. Blue Apron has addressed this concern with an online “Recycling Locator” tool that locates nearby recycling facilities. Additionally, the company gives customers the option to send the materials back to Blue Apron. Despite these efforts, customers are left with more packaging to deal with than if they had just taken a trip to the supermarket because the ingredients are pre-portioned to meet the needs of each recipe.
So what is the overall impact of meal delivery services like Blue Apron? Although the Blue Apron meals were delicious, convenient, and high quality, more research is necessary to assess their environmental costs. Despite their unknown impact, Blue Apron and other meal delivery services still have their appeal. Instead of ordering takeout when you get busy, you can order meals online in advance to be delivered to your door and cooked fresh. However, there is room for improvement, especially from an environmental perspective. Working to reduce the amount of packing used in shipment or to use compostable packaging might be a start. After all, feeling good about the food you are eating is not only about taste, but also understanding how the food got to your table.
