Hi everyone – we had our final box of Blue Apron meals delivered on Friday and I’m really bummed to say we had a major mishap in shipping. When I opened the box, we had sweet pepper and apple cider vinegar that had leaked all over the dry ingredients on the top portion. It completely ruined the one meal bag’d ingredients. I ended up having to throw away the Spiced Chicken Chili ingredients because they had gotten all soggy sitting in the liquid. Blue Apron does a good job packing their food so that the protein is all on the bottom and kept frozen during delivery. There is a cardboard sheet that separates your dry ingredients on the top of that on the bottom. The liquid had drained all into the bottom of the box, and while everything was packaged it was soaked, sticky and smelled from the vinegar.
I took some pictures of all of this and sent Blue Apron an email, letting them know about this packaging mishap.
While their response was professional, I was a little disappointed. You’re paying about $60 for each box and they shipped something that ruined ingredients for one meal. Could they not have even just resent me another bag of the fresh ingredients so we could at least make the meal that was somewhat unsalvageable?
Here was their response email:
Maybe it’s because I work in customer service, but this was very “canned” in my opinion and just left a bad taste in my mouth for their service (all puns intended).
We did make the Cheddar Cheeseburgers and they turned out very well. There was a delicious Romaine Salad with this meal and we loved it. Dan cooked these. They suggested placing the hamburger buns in the oven, but he does a neat little short-cut that makes the grill marks on them and requires no oven! He places them, insides down on top of our 4-slice toaster and lets them grill on there for a few minutes – they are terrific!
Here’s my half-eaten burger 🙂 and the empty half of my plate that was covered in romaine before I remembered that we hadn’t photographed any of the meal prep for this one! (Blogging fail!)
I’m sort of bummed to have to end this 4 week review on a negative note. We enjoyed trying Blue Apron. Would we use it again? Yes, probably, but not continually. Maybe we’ll give it a shot in the summer when they have some recipes that utilize the grill. We love cooking outside and with how the majority of these meals turned out, I’m sure Blue Apron would have some great recipes with in-season ingredients.
One of the great things that Blue Apron does that we loved is you can search for a recipe online or through their app and find out everything you need to make the meal at home and making a trip to the grocery store yourself. This is actually a nice freebie!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this review series as much as we’ve loved cooking and taste-testing for you. We’d love to hear your experiences on meal delivery services and even some of the specific meals you or your families have enjoyed in the comments below!
Thanks for reading – Happy Cooking! 🙂
