What’s Wrong with Blue Apron?
By: Chris Newman
Tags: Blue Apron, Sustainability, Business, Farming, Food

In the article that brought me to Gimlet Creative’s attention — and in others — two things are argued:

Today’s unsustainable agriculture is aggregated, centralized, and global; technology and global markets drive production with little concern for distribution or ecology.

Tomorrow’s sustainable agriculture should be distributed, decentralized, and micro-regional; ecology and local markets drive production, technology drives distribution.

Blue Apron has both feet in the former model.

via Blue Apron

This is a diagram Blue Apron uses to convince you that its devouring of the farm-to-table supply chain is somehow good for you. Let’s start on the left with “Farm & Producers.”

Blue Apron has “partnered” with some 150 farms and snapped up BN Ranch from serial rancher Bill Niman (of Niman Ranch, which is now owned by Perdue — because of course it is — albeit without Mr. Niman’s involvement, and is still carried by Whole Foods). Blue Apron is expanding the BN Ranch network as quickly as possible and sending its resident agroecologist to babysit the methods and practices of the farms it doesn’t own outright, all while setting the farms’ gate prices with an eye on its own profits.* In short, Blue Apron is setting itself up to either own or control the entire production end of the supply chain. This is exactly the way oft-maligned companies like Perdue and Tyson’s operate.

Then we get to the middle of the diagram: Wholesalers, Regional Grocery Warehouses, and Grocery Stores. Blue Apron owns this outright: they’re the wholesaler, paying rock bottom gate prices to the farmers. They’re the warehouse, with three big distribution centers in the continental United States. And they’re the end retailer, replacing the grocery store with a website and its army of meal preppers, packers, and delivery trucks.

In short, Blue Apron adopted the playbook of the conventional agricultural aggregator/integrator and extended it into the retail space with delivery trucks and meal prep. Despite this being little better than incremental progress, they go much farther and refer to it as “innovation.” It may be the single most offensive thing about Blue Apron.

Or this. Via A Slob Comes Clean

They’re not shy about being a vertical integrator, either. Co-founder and COO Matthew Wadiak (a former protege of the legendary Alice Waters, who herself speaks of Blue Apron with thinly veiled contempt) flat out stated:

“We can pay farmers more, while paying less for meat,” Wadiak says. “By vertically integrating, we’re going to be more lean, and that’s better for everyone.”

Pay farmers more than what, exactly? Anyway, this is where it’s important to mention that Blue Apron is a [terrible] publicly traded company whose sole legal obligation is to its shareholders. When the principles of sustainable agriculture collide with the purses of investors, the latter wins. Always.

*In Blue Apron’s Vision page, it claims “guaranteed markets for farmers,” which is a polite way of saying “we set the prices, we are 100% of your market, we own your ass,” effectively turning farmers into serfs who take on all the operational risk at whatever price their sole customer will offer. This is the model of commodity farming that dominates American agriculture today. Perdue is particularly famous for this crap.