Blue Apron President and CEO Linda Findley joins Caroline Hyde to discuss Blue Apron’s latest earnings and how the company is dealing with post-pandemic trends and supply-chain issues.
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Let’s talk first and foremost about well the future as we look
at a loss that continues. Do you hope to gain profitability. How

do you see the world evolving in meal kits. And indeed now
you’re branching into deliveries now of a fully made process

food. So we see this as a pretty pretty standard impact of
seasonality with a little bit of a twist this time. So Q3 in the

market industry tends to be the highest cost quarter.
No matter what because of the fact that we’re very concerned

about food safety and it’s the summer months so we tend to use
extra packaging extra ISE etc..

So Q3 is historically usually our lowest revenue quarter and
highest cost quarter and that’s pretty consistent in the

industry. Based on seasonality.
What we saw this year was actually a very interesting spike in

pent up travel demand that actually came into the business just
from people who were trying to get travel in before school

started. Maybe they hadn’t been able to travel earlier because
of Covid.

The interesting aspect about this quarter is we demonstrated
what we had intended to which is we’ve been really focused the

last two years on building value per customer. And so our
revenue per customer a levy and orders per customer remain

extremely high and post pandemic trends.
Even with the high travel that we actually saw this quarter. So

we look at that as a very positive sign ongoing for the
business.

When we think about the ability to drive customer growth on top
of that and then push towards profitability.

But at this point with the 78 million that we just raised and
closed this past Thursday into the business we’re really going

to lean into marketing to scale on top of that and focus on
growth for the next year to really drive that customer

acquisition number up on top of those key customer metrics have
been so strong. And you’re also changing what you can offer to

the customer at the moment. You have still well the ingredients
being delivered the menu option. But you now have heat meat

which is sort of your foray into prepared single serving meals.
How is that going and what you’re really targeting in that. It’s

really about flexibility. So the thing is we want to provide
very high quality meals to our customers and make sure we’re

meeting their needs where they are. So the core meal kit is
still very successful for us. We have the highest quality

ingredients very high animal welfare standards and great
recipes. Now we’ve also introduced you can buy single boxes on

our market where you can actually just buy a reconfigured box
without a subscription. And then we layered heat meat on

recently as well to give people different options to be able to
add more food more meal occasions with heat meat. Specifically

what our customers were looking for were the ability to
supplement their core meal boxes with prepared meals for lunches

or for on the go when the kids are going to soccer practice or
something and you need something really quick. But they wanted

the blue apron quality.
So this is becoming very additive to the business as we expand.

And then we continue to introduce new products that will
actually open up new audiences to us as well. It’s interesting

you’re talking about you know how costly ISE can be in the
summer and how that is a difficult element.

All I can think of is some supply chain issues in the moment.
The cost of food in particular going up. How is that affecting

your business.
We’ve definitely seen cost pressures when it comes to food when

it comes to logistics. And we try to manage that very carefully
on the food side. What’s interesting about Blue Apron is we are

a direct supply model.
So 70 percent of what we put in the box comes directly from the

producer and we have great relationships with the suppliers in
order to maintain quality at a reasonable price. And so we’re

very focused on continuing to manage those costs without
sacrificing anything about the experience in the box. And we did

see a lot of those cost impacts come into Q3 which is expected.
We also saw a lot of the logistics costs come into Q3 as well.

But what we think we’ve seen at this point based on our
discussions and negotiations with our suppliers is that most of

that impact is already visible. So in other words what you’re
seeing in Q3 as far as impact. Again that’s always our highest

cost quarter anyway is really something that we can predict and
manage going forward. And we expect margin to actually recover

coming into Q4 and then of course in the 20 22.