Blue Apron is showing signs of gearing up for a public offering. The meal kit company has been a leader in the online food space for some time, and Slice Intelligence data proves the brand is excelling at attracting new buyers. The number of home chefs buying Blue Apron kits nearly doubled in 2016 compared to 2015. Even more compelling, 72 percent of meal kit buyers across the industry purchased at least one meal from Blue Apron in 2016.
Millennial women have a taste for Blue Apron
Blue Apron has two groups to thank for this massive increase in new buyers: women and millennials. Two-thirds of these buyers are women, and almost half of these meal kit mavens are millennials.
Blue Apron buyers only prep two meal kits monthly
While Blue Apron's buyer growth shows there is a demand for meal kits, it's unclear whether the company will be able to retain existing customers longer term. The average Blue Apron patron only orders two meal kits from the company each month, if they order at all.
“Blue Apron has been among the leaders driving innovation in the online food category, which grew by nearly 50 percent in 2016, effectively turning venture capital investments into strong market share," said Ken Cassar, Principal Analyst with Slice Intelligence. "The competition is and will continue to be fierce, with Amazon and many brick and mortar grocers entering the meal kit market. Even more than market share growth, customer retention will be the most important metric that will define success or failure for Blue Apron.”
About this data
With a panel of over 4.7 million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily.
Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.
Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world. Slice Intelligence is the exclusive e-commerce data provider for the NPD’s Checkout Tracking e-commerce service.