Blue Apron Review 2023

After weeks of testing meal kits, I named Blue Apron the best meal kit delivery service overall. Read on for why I think it's the best service for most people.

After trying six meal kits over the span of 2 weeks, Blue Apron proved to be the best meal kit delivery service overall. I found that the recipes were consistent and well written, the produce was fresh and the ingredients were smartly packaged. Before trying them out for this test, I had never used meal kits myself. Blue Apron was one of the services that turned me into a meal kit believer. It hits the sweet spot for a great meal kit: The food is interesting and tasty, it doesn't require a huge amount of effort to make or clean up and it has a reasonable price per serving.

After comparing 6 meal kit delivery services over 2 weeks, Blue Apron came out on top.

Even though this was my first meal kit delivery experience, I was already familiar with Blue Apron, which has come to dominate the meal delivery space—there's a reason it can offer the most recipe options of any kit I tested. I first learned about Blue Apron through the then-ubiquitous advertising the brand did soon after its launch—I would hear ads on podcasts, on subways and on television.

Since its establishment in 2012, Blue Apron has expanded considerably, offering a huge variety of rotating recipes for specific diets, with different proteins and varying levels of effort required. Though there are now a huge field of contenders in the meal kit delivery space—more than 150, the Washington Post reported in 2022—Blue Apron remains a household name. That said, there are a ton of other meal kit options that might appeal more to you if your household leans vegetarian or if you’re looking for a more budget-friendly option. (Blue Apron meals start at $8 per serving, but some services, like Dinnerly, my best value pick, offer meals for several dollars less per serving.) Here's why Blue Apron won best meal kit delivery service overall in my tests.

Blue Apron

Price per serving: From $8 | Minimum meal size: 2 servings | Maximum meal size: 4 servings | Minimum order: 2 meals per week | Number of weekly menu options: 70+ | Dietary options: Chef favorites, wellness (with WW-recommended selections), family-friendly, fast and easy, vegetarian

Best for:

Skip if:

Blue Apron stood out because of the many options it offers for households like mine, where not every member has the same skill set or dietary restrictions. Considering these constraints, this kit was the best I tested.

Browsing Blue Apron's menus is easy through the website or the app. The site presents a photo of the finished meal, and options are sortable by a variety of tags and how long the meal takes to make. You can also filter by how many servings you want—maxing out at four per meal in this case, which is something to consider if you have a larger household than mine (though you can order multiple kits if needed). You can see which meals are vegetarian, which meals are on the "wellness" menu (with nutritional information included) and which ones require little prep work. Blue Apron also gives you the flexibility to supplement your home cooking with everything from breakfast to fine-dining upgrades. You can include additional proteins in your meal kit box, like shrimp and chicken. And there's even a wine-pairing program, if you’re so inclined.

Blue Apron offers a wide array of menu options to choose from, including vegetarian and ... [+] family-friendly recipes.

I also appreciated the variety of culinary traditions Blue Apron's recipes used. While some meal kits stick to Italian-, Mexican- and American-inspired recipes, in the weeks I was testing, Blue Apron included Japanese, North African, Korean and Chinese influences. That variety ensures that longtime subscribers to Blue Apron won't get bored by the same set of flavors every week, and it also introduces the opportunity to experience cuisines you might not otherwise. If you’re not into those flavors, that's also fine—you can simply pick something else. The meals I cooked from Blue Apron were some of my favorites from the entire testing process. I particularly loved the togarashi-spiced duck with crispy rice, a recipe that smartly used rendered duck fat to add unctuousness to the rice, and offset the tender, slightly sweet duck meat with Japanese togarashi spice. The chicken shawarma bowls were also a favorite in my household, since they allowed me to simply supplement my husband's bowl with chickpeas instead of the meat option.

I admit that when I launched into testing meal kit delivery services for Forbes Vetted, I approached the assignment fairly convinced that they weren't for me. I’m a classically trained cook who has been an editor at Food & Wine and the editorial lead at Food52. Finding recipes I’m excited to make hasn't ever been a problem for me, and I love browsing grocery stores and farmers markets as inspiration for what I want to make. Still, after a long day of talking about food, and sometimes cooking through several recipes, I’m tired of food prep. Weekday meals are just as likely to be a microwave burrito as a beautifully plated panko-crusted salmon fillet.

In my household, I’m a cooking enthusiast—but my husband, Nick, isn't. That means I usually cook a few times a week and then we supplement with takeout, restaurant meals or one of the few meals my husband knows how to make (boxed rice and beans or one of two sheet-pan dinners). There's nothing wrong with these options, but they do get monotonous after a while. As part of my testing, Nick cooked at least one of the meals from every kit, while I took notes on things he found confusing or difficult, since I figured that having two perspectives from different culinary backgrounds would be helpful.

An elevated weeknight scallop and truffle risotto from Blue Apron. Click the image to add to your ... [+] weekly menu.

What I didn't expect was how lovely it's been to have different ready-to-go recipe options on nights when I don't want to cook. And of all the services, Blue Apron provided the best variety for both our skill sets. Nick made the oven-baked squash and pinto bean tacos—a dish that required little more than putting the ingredients in a pan, roasting them and assembling them into tacos—and they were satisfying, delicious and a snap to clean up. One of the meals that I made was seared scallops with truffle risotto. While I thought this recipe had one too many things going on, I nevertheless enjoyed making and eating it—I would never have had the energy to make risotto on a weeknight without Blue Apron's prep work.

Since some people will use a meal kit to learn cooking fundamentals, I considered whether services empowered us to make tweaks and replicate what we liked. While I was testing, I made sure to faithfully follow every recipe exactly as written, but I appreciated that it would be easy for accomplished cooks to put their own spin on them. I still probably wouldn't order a meal kit for every meal—I just like conducting my own culinary experiments too much. But during busy weeks, a meal kit delivery service is a great way to have a nourishing dinner that's less expensive than takeout, with the added satisfaction of having made your own meal. Count me as a convert.

Meal kits aren't just about the meals themselves—you also have to deal with ordering, unboxing and organizing your ingredients. Some services do this better than others; Blue Apron was one of the best. Most people aren't going to have six meal kit delivery boxes arrive at their door over the course of 2 weeks, but when that happened to me, I began to notice—and particularly appreciate—how meal kit delivery services organize the ingredients that they’re shipping you. Blue Apron puts the smaller ingredients required for each meal—packets containing a tablespoon of honey or vinegar, or a small amount of seasoning—into plastic bags labeled with their corresponding recipe. That turns out to be enormously helpful for both seasoned and novice cooks. Hunting through the refrigerator for a minuscule amount of mustard is no fun, and it was easy to just grab the packet with all the ingredients I needed from the fridge. Blue Apron does leave out meat and large produce from those packets—you still have to locate a bell pepper, or a bag of mushrooms—but it was still much easier compared with other meal kits that just left all the ingredients loose.

Blue Apron's packaging made it easy to find individual recipe components in a crowded fridge.

Meal kits also vary greatly when it comes to serving sizes. Blue Apron's portions seemed just right. I cooked through the meals that had two servings and ate them with my husband, and we never finished a meal feeling hungry or ended up with a bunch of leftovers. Other meal kits we tried either made too much or too little food for two people.

I’m a writer, cook, recipe developer, recipe cross-tester and all-around food enthusiast, and I brought all of these skills to meal kit delivery service testing. I graduated from a certificate program at the International Culinary Center—now folded into the Institute of Culinary Education—and have worked as an editor in food media for the past 7 years, with stints at Food & Wine, Food52 and the now-defunct website MyRecipes.

Beyond my own expertise, I talked to a few experts to learn what makes the best meal kit delivery service. For this piece, I spoke to chef Jose Garces of Iron Chef America fame, who has been involved in creating recipes for meal delivery service CookUnity, and James Beard–nominated food writer and chef Kiki Aranita, who has both written for and subscribed to meal kit services. I’ve also written two other tested best lists for Forbes Vetted on the best pillows.

For most households, I recommend Blue Apron as the best meal kit delivery service overall. However, if you’re looking for a no-frills meal service that's less expensive, I recommend Dinnerly as the best value meal kit. As a service, Dinnerly lacks some of the nice touches Blue Apron has—there's no ingredient organization, no recipe cards or photographs—but the meals start at $5 per serving rather than Blue Apron's $8. If you’re looking to use a meal kit to learn how to cook, I’d recommend Home Chef, which had the best-written recipes of any of the meal kits that I tried and veered away from including ingredients that would be hard to source on your own. For the best range of vegetarian and omnivore meals, I recommend Sunbasket.

I narrowed down my meal kit delivery candidates to popular meal services that weren't aimed at any particular dietary restriction or allergy, and then cooked through at least a week's worth of meals for each of the six meal kit services I tried. For my final two contenders—Blue Apron and Home Chef—I added another week of meals to cook through. I also had my husband, someone who is much less enthusiastic about cooking than I am, make one vegetarian meal from each service and provide notes on where he found the recipes confusing or ran into difficulty.

For each kit, I considered flavor, variety, the diversity of culinary influences and the clarity of recipe cards and instructions. I also looked at how easy the user experience was when it came to ordering and selecting meals, plus what the kits looked like when they arrived—whether there was any kind of organization or just a big box of produce.

For the most part, no. Blue Apron provides you with the ingredients and the recipe for each meal, but you have to cook it yourself. The exception is the company's heat and eat meals, which are already fully prepared and just require you to heat them in the oven.

You can get two, three or four meals per week with Blue Apron. Each meal has the option of serving two or four people. You do have the option to order multiple meal kits if you need to feed more people, or to supplement them with the Blue Apron add-ons.

Depends on the meal! Proteins—steak, fish, chicken, etc.—can usually be frozen easily. The produce included may or may not work well in the freezer. It's worth checking the individual ingredients to see. Here's a great guide to what foods you can freeze and how from the New York Times.