Blue Apron rebrands for a future beyond subscription meal kits

Blue Apron is breaking free of subscriptions.

The meal kit delivery service, known for its boxes that include a recipe and all the ingredients customers need to cook a meal themselves, has relaunched this week with a refreshed logo and new mascot alongside a new, reimagined business model that now lets consumers make purchases a la carte.

The brand’s old subscription-based membership is now optional, and while those who like it can keep it or sign up for their own meal-kit subscriptions, customers now also have the option to order meal kits for one-off deliveries. There’s also new “Dish by Blue Apron” line of pre-made meals, and an “Assemble & Bake,” line of one-pan meals that Blue Apron says take five minutes of prep time or less. Both extend the brand into new product categories.

“As we thought about our legacy Blue Apron offering, we felt that it was a bit too inflexible for what our customers were needing, and also not offering quite enough convenience,” Whitney Pegden, Blue Apron’s senior vice president and general manager tells Fast Company.

Blue Apron rebrand plates up a new purpose

Much of the brand’s original value proposition when it launched in 2012 was that it “could help you learn how to cook, and teach you new skills, and expose you to new, cool ingredients,” Pegden says. “Recently we’re finding that more and more, customers just need help.” The new Blue Apron is meant to be a “shortcut,” to help get dinner on the table.

After seeing its net revenue fall by nearly half in the late 2010s, Blue Apron was bought by the Walmart-owned Wonder Group for $103 million in 2023. It’s now one in a portfolio of brands that make up Wonder’s food delivery super app alongside Tastemade and Grubhub. The idea is households don’t want to eat the same thing every night, but no matter what they’re looking for, Wonder will have it. Blue Apron’s relaunch and new product lines show that under new ownership, the brand is outgrowing its meal-kit-subscription-only model to meet more needs.

Meet Sous

The brand’s new mascot the Blue Apron Sous, as in sous-chef, is an illustrated chef that shows up as a man, woman, or child wearing a blue apron. Sous is meant to convey that the brand is “with you in the kitchen, helping you out, almost like you’re sous-chef to get the meal on the table,” Pegden says.

For Blue Apron, being a helper no longer necessarily means having customers cook all on their own—or relying on recurring customer payments. The hope is that the less restrictive model will lead to more sales.

“One of the big bets we are making with this relaunch is that by not locking people into a subscription and requiring them to get a box every week,” Pegden says of the Blue Apron rebrand and repositioning. “If we can give you all the freedom you want to shop when you want, how you want, then actually people will continue to use us more and we’ll attract a broader audience.”