Blue Apron

How it happened

Blue Apron was a meal-kit delivery pioneer valued near $2B as a private company and went public in mid-2017 at a roughly $1.9B valuation. High customer-acquisition costs and churn, plus competition from Amazon and others, sent shares tumbling well below $1B, and in September 2023 it was acquired by Wonder Group for about $103M in equity (~-95% from peak). Employees long doubted the core model: Glassdoor reviews across 2022-24 repeatedly argued the meal-kit business could not turn a profit against HelloFresh and delivery apps, and described a revolving door of senior leadership with near-yearly reorgs and layoffs. Customer-support staff, meanwhile, described metric-heavy monitoring and near-impossible call quotas.

Employee accounts paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗. See our methodology.