Here’s how much you actually pay for Blue Apron ‘free shipping’

“You see a lot of companies leaving the market because they can’t handle the costs,” said Erik Thoresen, a principal at the food industry consulting firm Technomic.

[...] they’re responsible, in large part, for the high price of meal kits: $10 per serving, according to market research firm NPD, compared with $4 for the same meal when the shopper buys ingredients at the grocery store.

Thoresen and other analysts cautioned in interviews that it’s not easy to generalize between companies, because all have different agreements with third-party couriers and each uses different materials for insulation and packaging.

Chen said he and his co-founders are trying to build a meal kit whose cost closely mirrors the price of its ingredients — and is accessible to middle-income patrons.

The service is focused on high-density urban areas, where delivery drivers can pick up kits at commercial kitchens and drop them off to customers.

(Critically, the Sooma model can’t operate outside of large cities.) But Thoresen, of Technomic, is optimistic: long-term, he thinks, meal-kit services face the stiffest competition from companies such as Uber, which operate vast, distributed and on-demand delivery networks.

Even before the Whole Foods acquisition, the online behemoth was dabbling in meal delivery, and building out its own in-house shipping operations to compete with the likes of FedEx and UPS.

Analysts are already speculating about how the acquisition may threaten both traditional grocers and meal kits, which don’t have Amazon’s edge in logistics.

There will be new ways for people to acquire ingredients and prepared meals that we don’t even have a category for yet.