What It's Like to Live Off Blue Apron Free Trials For a Whole Month
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If you're really committed, you can eat a month of free dinners thanks to the numerous meal kit services courting young people right now. But does it really make your life any easier?
By Tasbeeh Herwees
Illustrations by Dan Woodger
It was with deep smugness that, when a co-worker in the office kitchen asked me what I was microwaving for lunch, I told her: a Korean noodle bowl with black rice ramen, Togarashi-spiced shrimp, and ssamjang sauce. "Topped with pickled radishes," I added.
"Wow, that sounds amazing," she said. "Did you make it yourself?"
It would not have been a lie to say yes. I had, after all, boiled the noodles myself, and sautéed the vegetables, and cooked the pre-marinated shrimp in my very own pan. I even pickled the radishes on my own, letting them sit in a pre-seasoned rice wine vinegar. But it still felt like deception to withhold one detail: that all the ingredients had arrived at my door in a Green Chef box, already portioned, chopped, and otherwise prepared for me. All I had to do was follow instructions on a recipe card, illustrated with helpful full-color photos.
I had been using Green Chef on a free trial basis, but it wasn't my first time using a meal kit delivery service. Companies like Hello Fresh, Sun Basket and even Martha Stewart were cashing in on a burgeoning and rapidly growing meal kit industry—and they were offering major discounts for first-time customers, subsidized, in part, by a heavy flow of VC money. Harnessing the kind of wiliness that only an extremely broke millennial with unaffordable tastes could possess, I devised a plan to eat for free for as long as I can using free trials wherever I could find them. And I pulled it off.
Blue Apron was the gateway drug. I'd been hearing Blue Apron advertisements on the podcasts I listen to and scrolling past their Instagram ads for years before I finally gave in. The ads gave discount codes that offered free meals for a week if you signed up—this meant three meals a week, at two portions each. It wasn't the podcast ads that roped me in, though. It was a friend who, one day, sent a referral code to my email—"Don't forget to cancel the subscription before it charges you for the next delivery," she advised.
Free trials didn't necessitate commitment, and as someone who is deeply averse to commitment and hates meal planning, I was sold. I signed up for the Blue Apron meals. The next week a box of groceries appeared on my doorstep, free of charge. But then someone in my apartment complex stole the box, and I had to call Blue Apron, and they sent another one, also free. That week, I ate meals fit for a responsible 45-year-old divorceé with a 401K and a timeshare in Miami: balsamic-glazed onion cheeseburgers with a side of roasted potato wedges; chicken and kale "Caesar-style" salad; and spinach and ricotta pizza with sautéed cauliflower and a clementine salad. I cancelled the subscription before they could charge me for the next box.
Blue Apron's lesser known counterparts distinguished themselves in small but considerable ways: Green Chef provided "healthy, flavorful meals." Sun Basket positioned itself as the "organic" option with "Non-GMO ingredients." They all offered similar free trial deals, and I signed up, one by one. One week, I forgot to cancel a subscription in time, so I called corporate and made my complaints—I was going on vacation that week, I lied to a skeptical customer service representative on the phone, and they charged my card a week before the meals were to arrive. They begrudgingly refunded a portion of the fee, but the box was already on its way to my apartment door.
The meals felt like a small luxury in my busy work week. My meals are usually some combination of frozen grains and veggies—maybe some sort of meat, if I had slashed my kombucha budget that week. Now I was eating "Spicy red curry salmon with basil and kaffir lime" (exotic!) and "herb couscous patties with apple-apricot mostarda, chard and mustard greens" (healthy!) for dinner and lunch. The plans are intended for two, and as someone who is tragically undateable, that meant I was getting double the value.
From advertisements on podcasts and social media, it's clear these services are marketed very directly to younger consumers. The research firm Packaged Facts found that, in 2015, the overwhelming majority of meal kit subscribers—around 71 percent—were between the ages of 25-44 years old. This demographic comprises a generation of Americans who earn significantly smaller salaries than their parents' generation, despite working longer hours and having less free time—characterizations to which I will testify.
The main premise of meal kit delivery services is that they save you time on shopping and chopping—essentially, you're paying a little extra on your groceries to have someone else do the dirty work of shopping and cutting up onions and meting out spices for you. And yet, the free trials didn't save me much time. I had to rearrange my life to accommodate them—making time to be at home when the boxes arrived so they didn't get stolen, getting on the phone with corporate when something went wrong, and having to replace ingredients that were forgotten or damaged upon arrival.
While the meal kits came with step-by-step instructions for every dish, it was still difficult to figure out how to, say, sear a fish for the first time. Brahm Ahmadi, the founder and executive director of Oakland's People's Grocery, an Oakland-based food enterprise that produces educational cooking resources to local communities, says that food education is most effective when other people are involved. "We've not seen education in isolation work very well, and I think, frankly, that is something the meal kits do," says Ahmadi. "They provide education to a single family or a single individual in a home environment. That's not the group setting or social setting that we've seen work most effectively around education. We're social beings and we learn socially." A cue card might get you from raw shrimp to cooked shrimp, but it's not going to teach you how to cook.
There were some things I learned: What polenta is. Shallots are just over glorified onions. That you should always double, even triple, the garlic portion in any recipe.
But the biggest impact these meal kits had, in fact, was on my social life. I was committed to eating for free—which meant I had to forgo lunches with co-workers or dinners with friends, eating Sun Basket leftovers at my desk. I spent a lot of time at home, prepping my meals. The boxes often promised a meal under one hour, but with my rudimentary cooking skills, they usually took me about an extra half hour to make. And I was eating them alone, in the gloominess of my poorly lit apartment. I wasn't sure I would permanently trade in cheap taco truck meals with a companion for more homemade grain bowls and watered-down versions of bibimpap (the meal kits didn't provide much in the way of spice).
On the last of my Green Chef meals, I invited a friend over. "I'll cook for you," I told her. She watched me in the kitchen as I made Dijon chicken drumsticks with a side of sauerkraut potatoes and charred snap peas. I told her it was a Green Chef meal, that all the ingredients came delivered in a box. "Wow," she said. "For a second, it looked like you were actually cooking."
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