12-year Blue Apron customer — this was finally our breaking point
My husband and I have been Blue Apron customers since 2014, and I also paid for an annual Blue Apron+ membership. After watching quality and reliability decline, our August 11 delivery was finally our breaking point. We selected five recipes. One was canceled before delivery and multiple ingredients were substituted. When the box arrived, only one protein was included, along with numerous other missing ingredients. Not a single recipe had everything required to prepare it. The entire delivery was unusable. Worse, both potatoes and mushrooms were marked “Use By 08/07/26” despite being delivered August 11. After delivery, Blue Apron continued sending emails with additional cancellations, changes and refunds. They even sent an “important update” saying our potatoes had arrived in a mesh bag with a metal clasp and required different preparation instructions. They hadn’t—the potatoes we actually received were packaged in a plastic microwaveable steam bag. The fulfillment failure is bad enough. The complete lack of customer service has been worse. I contacted Blue Apron via text August 11. An AI agent transferred me to a human and warned of unusually high wait times. Nobody responded. I followed up the next day requesting a refund. Nothing. I then emailed a detailed explanation and requested a full refund to my original payment method. I received only an automated response saying they were experiencing higher-than-normal volume. I followed up via text again. As of August 16, I have received no substantive response from anyone at Blue Apron. The silence was so complete that I genuinely wondered whether Blue Apron had ceased operations without notice. Blue Apron eventually sent customers a mass email acknowledging that its transition to a new fulfillment partner “has not gone smoothly,” that customers have received missing and unexpected items, and that “We’ve broken your trust.” They cannot currently provide a timeline for when service will normalize. That email should have gone out much earlier. Customers deserved the opportunity to skip deliveries while Blue Apron knew it was experiencing serious problems. Equally troubling, their email doesn’t acknowledge their overwhelmed and effectively nonresponsive customer service at all. That’s now one of the primary problems. Fulfillment mistakes happen. When they do, customers must be able to reach the company that took their money. After approximately 12 years, we’ve skipped all upcoming orders and canceled Blue Apron+. I’m now disputing the remaining charge for this unusable delivery and will ask my card issuer about the unused portion of my prepaid annual Plus membership. Had Blue Apron promptly acknowledged the problem, refunded the order and communicated honestly, I probably would have given them time to recover. Their prolonged inability to respond has damaged my trust more than the original fulfillment failure. We genuinely loved Blue Apron for many years. Unfortunately, after this experience, I don’t know what they could do to rebuild enough trust for us to order again.