Last week I went shopping for food to cook a normal set of meals, for what is maybe the first time in my adult life. After using Blue Apron as my source of ingredients for 5 weeks, this was an experiment to see how cooking for myself, from “scratch”, would actually work out.
I learned a lot from the experience!
Shopping for Two is Impossible
The first thing I learned is just how hard it is to shop for two people in a grocery store. Nothing comes in a size appropriate for two people for one meal! This is a huge benefit of Blue Apron over shopping at a grocery store: if you’re cooking for two people, you’re not leaving tons of food behind!
For one of my meals, I needed a half pound of cabbage to make a coleslaw. The options that I had for size of cabbage were 2 pounds or 3 pounds. Neither of these works well for a half pound meal!
Another example was when attempting to buy ground beef. My recipe called for 10 ounces of ground beef to add to a pasta dish. My available sizes of ground beef were 1.25 pounds, or 2.5 pounds – neither one of these works well for a two-person meal!
The one that ended up getting me in the most trouble was not the ground beef, but the chicken breasts. I couldn’t find any package with two chicken breasts. This is not surprising. So I grabbed a package of what I thought was 4 chicken breasts, figuring I’d just have enough for leftovers.
The problem is that the package I bought was not, in fact, 4 chicken breasts: Instead, these were “thin sliced” chicken breasts, where each breast was extremely thin, and what looked like 4 chicken breasts was actually 8. So now, in prepping a meal for 2 people, I had … 8 chicken breasts. I couldn’t even fit them all in my pan at the same time! With extremely thin chicken breasts, you also get very different cooking time, which hurt the rest of my meal prep ordering as well.
Time to Shop
Anytime you try shopping in a new grocery store, there’s a huge learning curve in learning where all the ingredients are. While I’ve been to the grocery store I used before, and had a general idea of the layout, there was still a lot of the more specific items that i had trouble with – things like rice vinegar, or even the pre-packaged gnocchi. I had a prepared list going in – separated into “produce”, “meat”, “carbs” and “spices”, to try to get a decent ordering – but ended up spending a bunch of time wandering back and forth trying to find the right spot to pick up various items.
In total, shopping for ingredients took 29 minutes from the first item until I checked out of the grocery store. If I were to shop for the same ingredients again, I expect that time would be cut in half: I now have an idea where the specific items that I wanted were – but I expect it would take a lot more trips before I could generalize those skills. While I happen to know where the rice vinegar is now, that doesn’t expand to understanding where I could find a basic gravy mix.
I do think these are things I can learn, and my hope is that by the end of this year, I can make grocery shopping a more routine activity that I can perform without so much … searching.
Cost
One of the reasons that I was interested in trying to shop for myself was to compare the cost of Blue Apron’s meals to the cost of shopping at a grocery store. I’ve always known that Blue Apron is more expensive than shopping for yourself, but was curious what the difference in price was.
This is complicated by the fact that it was impossible for me to buy appropriate size food items for a two-person meal. Obviously, comparing my price for Blue Apron for two people to the price for cooking for four is not really reasonable, and Blue Apron’s cost-per-serving is much higher in a two-person two-meals weekly box than any other option.
If you do choose Blue Apron, their meal kits for 2 people, for 2 meals / week, the cost is $12/serving: $10/serving for the (four total) meals, and $8/week for shipping. This is the baseline I was comparing to.
Initially, when costing out how much the grocery store trip was going to cost me, I was concerned that it was going to be more expensive than that. Using the website for the delivery offering for the store, I selected the necessary ingredients, and came to a total cost – pre-delivery charge – of $53 to purchase the necessary ingredients. (Since I haven’t used the delivery service, the delivery cost would have been waived for my first order; I don’t know how much it would cost after the first delivery.)
For whatever reason, shopping in person resulted in a cheaper result. I don’t know if this is a per-item upcharge on the online ordering system, or I just managed to pick up cheaper items that weren’t available online, but regardless: even with the portion sizes for four people, my total cost for ingredients ended up at $46.73 – but instead of being food for two people, as I had planned, it was food for four people (with plenty of extras).
Some of the cost of cooking meals in this way is obviously better shared across multiple meals: for example, the rice vinegar I bought will likely last for months, and the thai garlic chili sauce can be reused for future meals as well. But even without crediting these items forward, the per-person cost was much lower.
From a pure dollars per-serving standpoint, I ended up paying about $6/serving – or a little less than the $12/serving, if you imagine only two people were eating and not eating leftovers.
Final Thoughts
For the time being, I’ll continue to use Blue Apron for the time being to build up more new food skills, especially as we move out of the winter months into the more spring and summer seasonal dishes. I’m still routinely learning how to prep new pastas, deal with new veggies, and mix new flavors, and given how time consuming shopping is for me currently, it’s well worth the convenience.
Currently, shopping is a time consuming and tiring experience. Making a list, checking it twice, and scrambling through the grocery store to find the items I need is stressful! Continuing to do it will likely result in a better understanding of the layout of the store and where to find things as well as a better stockpile of ingredients that I have and can reuse. Being able to make a quick run through the store to grab staples that I need to prep a few basic meals feels like a good goal to have for later this year.