If you’re in a Blue Apron delivery area, want at least a couple of dinners per week planned out for you, and you don’t mind doing a lot of prep work and cooking, you should try it. The tl dr: My Blue Apron experience has been 90 percent positive. It’s rare that we Re/code reviewers get to test new products and services for as long as a year and really get to know the upsides and downsides of them, so this is a revisitation. But Blue Apron was interesting and inexpensive enough - $60 per week for three dinners for two people - for me to keep trying it. Plated, unfortunately, screwed up one of my orders. I first tested Blue Apron last winter, along with other food-in-a-box services like Plated and NatureBox.

This is all because of an online meal-kit service called Blue Apron. Now, several years later, I regularly make stuff like pistachio-crusted catfish, winter mushroom ramen noodle soup and zesty vegetable and finger-lime pozole (I had to Google 'pozole'). Sometime between college and starting out in New York as a broke media person, I became a 'five-meal rotational chef,' which is to say I’d make the same five simple meals at home over and over again.

Blue apron meal prep cost