Running Head: Blue Apron Holdings, Inc.

Blue Apron Holdings, Inc. became the first and largest subscription-based meal-kit provider in the United States. Blue Apron was a New York-based startup that attracted millions across America, allowing them to expand its company and distribute its products around the country. It is known as a meal kit service that delivers weekly boxes containing ingredients and recipes to be cooked by the consumer in a short and reasonable amount of time. Blue Apron creates numerous recipes per week that consist of fresh and seasonal high-quality ingredients, allowing customers to pick and choose which recipes they would want to receive at their doorsteps each week. All meals come pre-portioned and packaged in refrigerated boxes to stay fresh for at least 24 hours after delivery. Blue Apron collaborates with farmers to receive the freshest and healthiest meats and ingredients possible while constructing menus based on seasonal crop rotations.

To order your meal kits from Blue Apron, customers can visit their website or use their mobile application. You can choose between two meal plans, one that serves two people or the family plan that serves four people, each offers between two to four meals per week. Blue Apron is a unique way to receive meals at your convenience with no commitment per subscription, allowing you to cancel or skip meals at any time. It is the new and cheaper alternative that prevents the hassle of you spending time and extra money going grocery shopping while preventing you from buying excess produce that will be later disposed if unused. Blue Apron created a whole new experience on purchasing produce and in preparation of food while becoming the largest grocery distribution platform in the country.

Thesis Statement

Blue Apron had been a very successful company during its prime years, but these last few years haven’t been so great for the business. As their business began to plunge, more problems surfaced and during that process Blue Apron had to find themselves a new CEO. Chief executive officer and founder Matthew Salzberg, left when their stocks declined to more than 70% and lost many customers due to the lack of advertising and customer service. The main issues this company is facing is the loss of many customers, how to attract new customers, and losing to other similar companies due to the lack of marketing, advertising, and better services. With many new meal kit companies competing with Blue Apron, to overthrow their business they must begin planning new strategic moves to help differentiate themselves from the other competitors. With all meal kit businesses offering the same or similar services, Blue Apron must invest more on customer retention and its marketing and advertising. To do so, I will be examining three different strategic methods on how to gain more customers, promote Blue Apron and its services, and help improve their future productivity.

Mission Statement

A mission statement is the statement given by a company that sets them apart from others as it identifies its purpose and reason for functioning. The mission statement given by Blue Apron is, “To make incredible home cooking accessible to everyone”, as it offers incredible recipes and ingredients to its customers with a grocery store alike experience at your fingertips while developing a sustainable food system. Blue Apron’s innovation has changed many peoples outlook on the logistics behind food consumption, as it focuses on giving its customers healthier meal options at an affordable price.

Vision

Blue Apron’s vision is “To build a better food system”, focuses on the process of how food is produced and distributed to its consumers. Since eating healthy or maintaining a healthy lifestyle occurs to be an issue in today’s society, Blue Apron has teamed up with farmers to produce the best quality ingredients and has built a foundation on how to distribute goods while creating standards on how to grow produce and raise animals as a way to reduce a negative impact on the local ecosystems and the environment as a whole. To make sure of that, Blue Apron does not support the use of added hormones, mistreatment of their animals, usage of any sub-therapeutic antibiotics, and does not source genetic engineering techniques for breeding.

Core Values

Blue Apron’s core value is “building a consumer lifestyle brand that symbolizes the emotional human connections that are formed through the cooking experiences we create.” Its main goal is to create new experiences in the kitchen while using fresh ingredients to promote healthy lifestyles. It is well known that cooking and eating together is a basic human need and harbors connections that we would otherwise have a hard time making. Blue Apron tries promoting its service to families, young adults, and aspiring chefs. Blue Apron exceeds the perceived level of customer satisfaction that should be warranted from a company of its likes.

Executive Leadership

After many startup ideas, one hit the jackpot becoming a 2 billion-dollar company after three years in business. Blue Apron was created by three men, Matthew Salzberg, Ilia Papas, and Matt Wadiak, who created the business to provide a new experience in the kitchen. Salzberg started off as the Chief Executive Officer of the company but later stepped down after the company suffered production problems and a decline in its sales growth. Salzberg resigned from being the CEO but will continuing to serve the company as a chairman of its Board of Directors. He was soon replaced by the Chief Financial Officer, Brad Dickerson, as Dickerson’s main focus on improving the company in a long-term perspective. President, Chief Executive Officer – CEO Brad Dickerson who was Blue Apron’s former CFO, is now the president and CEO of the company. Dickerson earned his Bachelor of Science degree in accounting at the University of Akron and also earned his M.B.A. degree from Loyola University Maryland. As he joined Blue Apron’s staff in 2016 and quickly jumped his way up to a CEO position in 2017. Prior to Blue Apron, Dickerson served as a chief financial officer for about 8 years at Under Armor, Inc., within the eleven years of experience there. Also, he also served as the CFO of Macquarie Aviation North America, which gives him a significant amount of experience in the business industry and also the perfect person to become a CEO for a company whose business was failing due to financial circumstances.

Chief Financial Officer – CFO

Tim Bensley joined Blue Apron’s team as of May 2018. Prior to Blue Apron, he served as chief financial officer for Acosta, Inc., and obtained a few CFO positions with PepsiCo, Inc. He was the chief financial officer and senior vice president for PepsiCo Americas Foods for about three years and prior to that he served as chief financial officer of Pepsi Cola North America. Bensley has a B.S. degree in engineering from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and an M.S. degree in project management from Boston University.

Founder, Chief Technology Officer – CTO Ilia Papas was one of the three men who founded Blue Apron back in 2012 and till this day has secured and maintained his position at Blue Apron as chief technology officer. Before the creation and finding of Blue Apron, Papas had worked as a director and technical architect for Optaros, Inc., in Boston Massachusetts. Over the years he has helped several companies with constructing and designing and helped Walmart.com with their health category via the internet. Papas also has experience as a software engineer at Molecular, now known as Isobar and has his Bachelor of Arts degree in computer science from Tufts University.

Chief Marketing Officer – CMO

As of 2014, Blue Apron’s chief marketing officer is Jared Cluff. Jared Cluff has had quite an amount of experience as he worked for many online companies and service such as Fab.com, Ask.com, Match.com, and E*TRADE. Before he started working at Blue Apron, he was the senior vice president of marketing for Fab.com. He has held positions such as chief operating officer, senior vice president of marketing, director of online marketing, and quite a few more. Cluff received his Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from the prominent school of Stanford University and also earned his M.B.A from Northwestern University.