Fulfillment roulette - you never know what you're going to get
**A year of recurring fulfillment problems has made Blue Apron unreliable** I have been a Blue Apron customer for some time and generally like the recipes, but for roughly the past year, fulfillment and packing errors have occurred on and off with increasing regularity. The problems have included missing ingredients, incorrect ingredient kits, wrong proteins, and incomplete meals. At various points I have had to change dinner plans, make last-minute grocery-store trips, and spend additional money replacing ingredients that should have been included. The most recent examples have been especially bad. In one order, I received the steaks for a Brown Butter Steak meal but the ingredient kit for Crisp Pork Schnitzel. After I reported the recurring pattern, Blue Apron credited only that one meal. Then, in my July 20 order, only one of four meals was packed correctly: * Big Bang Chicken came with whole chicken breasts instead of the required chicken pieces. * Pesto Salmon Grain Bowls came with chicken breasts instead of salmon. * The Wagyu Cheeseburger meal included the hamburger meat, but the entire bag of accompanying ingredients was missing. What makes this so frustrating is that these are not isolated mistakes from one bad week. This has been an on-again, off-again problem for approximately a year. Each incident requires the customer to identify the error, document it, contact support, rearrange meals, and often buy replacement food. A meal-kit company must be able to consistently provide the correct proteins and complete ingredient kits. Blue Apron’s recipes may be appealing, but the service loses its value when fulfillment is this unreliable. After a year of recurring problems and inadequate responses, I can no longer recommend Blue Apron.