We’ve seen more people cooking at home and we expect this to continue for some time.” We aim to serve our customers as safely as possible and continue to focus on our sustainable growth strategy. This allowed us to limit the need to change production lines and gave us more time to pack meal kits as we ramped up headcount at our facilities.Īs we have hired permanent and temporary employees to continue to meet demand, we have begun to introduce variety back into our menus.

To meet the new demand, we directed our efforts toward scaling our operations, and in doing so, we simplified our recipe offerings at the outset. We have seen increased demand for meal kits since late March as a result of the pandemic, with the initial sharp increase in demand at the end of Q1.

How has the coronavirus pandemic and associated economic fallout affected your team's day-to-day operation and focus?

Several months into this unexpected demand surge, we asked Kozlowski - who previously served as Etsy’s COO before taking the helm at Blue Apron - to reflect on how the company has evolved during the era of COVID-19, and how they’re setting themselves up for long-term success. “This allowed us to limit the need to change production lines and gave us more time to pack meal kits as we ramped up headcount at our facilities,” she said. In an interview with Built In NYC, CEO Linda Kozlowski explained how reducing the number of menu options in the early days of the pandemic helped Blue Apron ramp production lines to meet demand. The company reportedly onboarded 200,000 new customers in the first quarter of this year, prompting a rapid scaling of its meal kit assembly and delivery system while maintaining socially distant working conditions for staff. Take New York-based Blue Apron, which has already been reporting growth across key revenue and customer metrics after a disappointing initial public offering in 2017. The meal kit industry has capitalized on this shift, with consumer spending on ready-to-cook food deliveries doubling year-over-year in the month ending April 11. That trend has now dramatically reversed as the coronavirus pandemic and accompanying lockdowns have forced restaurant-goers to rediscover home cooking. At some point in the mid-2010’s, Americans started spending more at restaurants and bars than at the grocery store.

Blue apron linda kozlowski