How wasteful is a meal delivery service?
October 17, 2016 1:28 PM   Subscribe

One of my friends suggested that we subscribe to Sunbasket, and we've tried them out for a few weeks. (I've got the next few weeks skipped). How wasteful is a service like that?

Is more packaging consumed versus the amount of packaging used by grocery stores? Is more transportation involved? How wasteful is this compared to other means of getting groceries? Are employees treated similarly as employees in grocery stores?

The service is pretty helpful due to life reasons, but all of that is bugging me. I think I found something similar that is local, so I am trying them out this week. They reuse the box and ice packs your stuff comes in. I think life might override what is best for a while because I need the help.

I submitted feedback on their site and got a reply from someone there who mentioned that they started in the packaging department and that it was cold but the company provided warm clothes as well as benefits. He also pointed out the recyclability and compostability of all the packing materials.

There was an article about the poor conditions in Blue Apron's packaging conditions.

Does anyone have more insight in to this?
posted by bleary to Food & Drink (21 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
I am a Blue Apron subscriber, and have been for a year. I can't speak to how Sunbasket packages their stuff, but 99.9% of BA's packaging is recyclable - the only part that can't go in my recycling is the freezer gel stuff inside the cold packs at the bottom of the box. BA even incentivizes you to return packaging to them if you want - we don't do this, because we have super-easy single-stream recycling so we can just dump everything into the bin, but if you save up 2-3 weeks of packaging and send it back to BA, you get credit towards future weeks.

I also know that there's a sticker on my box most weeks that lists the provenance of the food, and most of it's from California - not local to me (Portland) but local enough to BA, and arguably more local to me than the non-organic vegetables I would get from my local Kroger/Safeway, a lot of which comes from South America.

You're right, there was that article a while back about trouble at one of BA's pick/pack facilities, which isn't great, but I'd wager the problems there are similar to problems at any factory/facility of this size and aren't special to the delivered-food industry.

Honestly, I love Blue Apron (and the couple others we tried before settling on BA because we like their recipe mix) because I like to cook but I don't like to provision/plan menus because I'm busy, and when I'm not busy I'm almost criminally lazy.

I love that there's a service that will do the shopping/planning for me, and for me that trumps buying everything within six blocks of my house. YMMV on that, of course, but that's my feeling on it.
posted by pdb at 2:50 PM on October 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


Best answer: This is a very hard question to address in any evidence-based manner, related to the nebulous concept of "waste". I think you'll do better if you can specify what types of waste/efficiency/costs you are interested in, both for yourself and for others trying to help. Do you mean energy waste or efficiency? Do you mean food waste? Do you mean time waste? Do you mean landfill waste? Do you mean money waste? Do you mean all of these together? Do you mean something else entirely? Nevertheless, I will try to provide some relevant ideas and references for further reading.

Recyclable packaging is a red herring IMO. It still takes plenty of energy (and greenhouse gas emissions) to create that packaging, and to move it around, and to recycle it.

Distance from food growing to food eater is also not terribly related to energy costs or GHG emissions, see here and here for some research on that.

Food loss and food waste are huge problems for the world, and about 1/3 of all our food is currently wasted. It may be that food services help reduce your food waste at home, but who knows what food is wasted at their packaging facilities?

Food delivery services probably have you spending more money on food, and paying more middlemen. Is that a pro or con?

Food delivery probably involves more food-pound-miles of transportation, compared to picking up your own food on the way to or from work. Food delivery almost certainly involves more GHG emissions, compared to walking or biking to get your food from a market or restaurant where it has been delivered in bulk. I have looked at the scholarly research, but there is basically nothing (yet) that I can find specific to Blue Apron et al. You may enjoy this scholarly overview of food delivery and trends from a global perspective.

All these difficulties are why many people (citizens, scientists, policy makers, etc) simplify by talking about "carbon footprint". I think it is far too early for a scientific analysis of carbon footprints of food delivery services compared to other methods, but you can learn a lot by checking out your total household carbon budget, using the EPA carbon footprint calculator.
posted by SaltySalticid at 3:14 PM on October 17, 2016 [4 favorites]


Best answer: Logged in to answer this to find pbd had said all I was going to say.

From what I read about the problems at the plant it was more to do with inter group dynamics in the neighbourhood they set up in & hired from than problems in the plant in general, but then I'm not really sure what a business can do about that. They also have more than one fulfillment center as far as I'm aware.

Foodwaste wise I know I used to fill a small tumble compost bin in about a month and it now takes me at least twice that long & I'm often scrapping around for extras like weeds to top the batch off.

I am eating way healthier than I used to. I have had more salads & veggies since I started using Blue Apron than I used to. I have reset my portion sizes back to what they were before I moved to the USA & lost 10lbs. I have discovered I rather like kale now I know how to cook it, & collard greens I have tried a lot of ingredients I would never have tried and I now know enough to go buy those healthier food locally and I'm actually planning to grow some of them next year as I liked them so much. I look forward to making dinner & we rarely fall back on take out during the week like we used to.

Oh and I go to the supermarket once a month for a big shop instead of weekly like I used to so I save money & resources there, with a quick weekly stop at the local Whole Foods for veggies & bread.

Your ethics are of course up to you & what you feel comfortable with.
posted by wwax at 3:31 PM on October 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


I haven't subscribed long term, but I did get to try it out for a few weeks when friends were out of town and forgot to cancel their deliveries.

To me, my main problem with the whole meal delivery concept is that you could just buy a few cookbooks (or even just follow a few food blogs or watch Food Network occasionally) and get recipes every bit as good as the ones the delivery services send. The recipes aren't above and beyond other types of recipes, or universally infallible, or anything like that. And the ingredients sent aren't obscure or hard to shop for.

So, with that in mind, I do find the packaging wasteful. Because you could take that recipe to a supermarket, buy the ingredients, and come home with far less packaging for the whole trip than the delivery service will send for just the ingredients for one meal. And the packaging from the supermarket will be about as likely to be recyclable (the delivery services don't send magic packaging or anything), about the same carbon footprint, etc.

On the other hand, I can see plenty of situations where the meal delivery services might be the right solution for someone (can't get to the supermarket, live in a very rural area where some ingredients are difficult to source, chronic illness leaves you low on spoons, general fear and confusion about cooking, etc). However, for me, yes, they seem wasteful.
posted by Sara C. at 3:34 PM on October 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


I actually disagree that you'd come home with far less packaging at the grocery store. Somewhat less, but most grocery store vegetables/meat are pretty packaging intensive already. I made Blue Apron tonight and the packaging was as follows:

Cabbage: None, beyond the shipping box
Carrot: Plastic baggy
Buns: Plastic baggy
Meat: Plastic packaging, paper backing
Mustard, Mayo, Vinegar, beets, cheese: Plastic bags inside a paper bag

Until you get to the mustard and stuff that's exactly what's I'd get from the store (I'd probably throw the cabbage in a bag, too). Those little things do take up more packaging, but they're small. Over the long run, the many tiny containers of mayonnaise surely do add up to more than one big jar, but by my comparison that's the biggest packaging differ from grocery shopping.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 4:17 PM on October 17, 2016 [4 favorites]


There are tradeoffs everywhere in the name of "efficiency." My "high efficiency" washing machine uses less water per load because it senses the amount of laundry. I have noticed that it takes almost twice the amount of time to do a typical load than my old machine as it trades water for electricity.
You can't win. LOL.
posted by jtexman1 at 4:41 PM on October 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


Best answer: I tried it and we categorically refused to continue because of the degree of waste. The packaging is indeed wasteful - when you look at the teeny tiny bags and bottles used to package teaspoons of spice and .5 ounce dashes of oil or vinegar, that really adds up compared to just buying a quart [glass] bottle of olive oil, 8 oz [glass] jar of mustard, or [glass] jar of spice that will last you months. You'd need dozens of those tiny bottles and bags before you get the containing equivalent of a large and recyclable glass container.

But it's really the ice packs that did me in. Paying money to ship these very, very heavy packs of "nontoxic gel" which they tell you to slice open and "discard" (i.e., trash) - I can't get past that. I used a certain number of them in my freezer as power-outage-defrost-preventer, saved a few more for my picnic coolers, and then...? Man do they pile up. I made a yeoman's effort to offer them on Freecycle and to my local recycling Facebook group. There is no market for them.

In the end, for our household, we could not square trading the time and effort it takes to meal plan and shop with what seemed to us like egregious degrees of packaging and shipping waste, just to have clever recipes (we don't have to contend with extreme time constraints, illness or transportation issues, and I can understand why people find these services useful when they have such challenges). Grist is not a fan.

And saying "hey, it's recyclable!" doesn't wash much for us, because recycling is such an imperfect solution. I have never forgotten when I learned that "reduce, reuse, recycle" is in that order for a reason - the most environmentally ethical thing to do is reduce consumption. Recycling is the least best way to address waste problems.

But I agree, it would be really powerful to do a cradle-to-grave waste analysis on meal delivery services. We just don't have the full picture, and as pbd notes, it rapidly gets complex. I just know that on my end, from what I see as an in-home consumer, I couldn't live with it, and I knew i could generate less household waste shopping for myself.
posted by Miko at 5:24 PM on October 17, 2016 [7 favorites]


The biggest downer for me with meal kits (aside from the cost) is the non-recyclable cold packs. The represent the most waste by weight, and you can only keep so many of them to reuse.

I also wish I could let them know not to send things like soy sauce, butter, and balsamic vinegar. I always have those on hand, and the waste to product ratio for those items is terrible when sent by Blue Apron (e.g. a tiny plastic bottle with 1oz of soy sauce, or a little plastic tub with 1 tbsp of butter).

I don't know how Sun Basket works, but Blue Apron's habit of alerting me of shipments only after it's too late to skip that week really irks me, and I'll probably cancel altogether because of it (you can't put your account on hold, only manually skip up to ~6 weeks ahead).
posted by reeddavid at 5:31 PM on October 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


I order from Hello Fresh all the time and I think that is does create more waste in terms of packaging. But when I make meals from scratch myself, I end up throwing away tons of food. Like, if you are making a meal for one person and you can't handle eating the same meal for like 12 meals straight, it's just too much. So it's like, do I want to waste packaging (with Hello Fresh), waste food (by cooking from scratch), or waste money and calories (by ordering takeout).

You could maybe look into the Purple Carrot. It's all vegan food, but they use recycled material for packagings as much as they can (or so they say). You can recycle the plastic bags, the boxes, etc. They say you can re-use the ice packs but if you don't want them, you can let them thaw, pour the gel into the trash or garbage disposal, and then recycle the plastic casing.

I saw that report about Blue Apron and it didn't sound great, although I can't imagine menial low-level jobs of packing stuff is ever great at any company. I also personally got Blue Apron once and didn't think my meals were that good. Lots of canned items.
posted by AppleTurnover at 5:52 PM on October 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


We really like Sunbasket. With Sunbasket, you can print a return label and send the packaging right back to them to reuse. We save up two boxes' worth, squish it all into one box, and give it to the mailman. As a benchmark, we are a household that washes and re-uses all Ziplocs, and line-dries all laundry.

I don't find the packaging excessive at all. What I really like is the sustainable local seafood. All the ingredients are fresh and super high-quality. For example, for tofu, they use Hodo Soy in Oakland - it is the best tofu ever. I re-use the little plastic jars that their sauces come in, and all the ziplocs too.

We also get a CSA box, and they are complementary. I see Sunbasket as "cooking school in a box" - it's really added to my kitchen repertoire. The use of fresh herbs and lemon is especially educational.

I've done taste tests of their ingredients side-by-side with the CSA and the supermarket. Their vegetables do tend to be fresh and tender and tasty, on par with the CSA and far superior to Safeway.

I'm not affiliated with them - just a happy convert.

Note: I tried the Munchery for a bit, but then I read about how the streets in front their plant in the Mission district was always double parked and strewn with food waste, so I feel you life-vs-ethics pain.
posted by metaseeker at 6:40 PM on October 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


Like, if you are making a meal for one person and you can't handle eating the same meal for like 12 meals straight, it's just too much.

It's worth noting that the meal delivery services (unless there is one out there that offers a "party of one!" option where they send you recipes and ingredients that result in exactly one portion of food) result in the same thing. When I tried it, each box contained two meals which yielded 4-6 portions each. Sure, they only send one carrot etc, but it's still a wasteful model for a singleton. Even with two of us eating, the leftovers got a little repetitive. Especially because we didn't end up liking one of the recipes, in the first place, and had to eat that like 3 times in order to avoid wasting food.
posted by Sara C. at 6:55 PM on October 17, 2016


If anyone's interested in solving that issue without a meal box service, there are a lot of AskMe threads with good advice on cooking for one, freezer friendly meals, etc.
posted by Miko at 7:44 PM on October 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


If you already cook and don't let half the food you buy grocery shopping go to rot, it's probably more wasteful.
If you don't cook and instead get takeout or delivery and also let a lot of the groceries you buy go bad, it's probably better so long as you actually cook all the meals.
I would base it against your current consumption not a theoretically perfect consumption. We probably waste as much packaging but much less food using blue apron (Also critically much less money). But we're exceptionally wasteful otherwise.
posted by ch1x0r at 8:48 PM on October 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


Response by poster: Miko: "If anyone's interested in solving that issue without a meal box service, there are a lot of AskMe threads with good advice on cooking for one, freezer friendly meals, etc."

I've been going through many of those and taking notes. Every time I start planning a shopping list I still get overwhelmed, but I'm trying to manage expectations so that I don't try to do it perfect all at once (I notice that tends to whomp down on me and squash me flat)
posted by bleary at 7:22 AM on October 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: So, with the packaging, I agree that recycling materials is not so great compared to just not using materials. The ice packs, ugh. Also, organizing all that recycling costs spoons right now.

Re labor conditions. I figure that conditions might be similar to other related jobs but I am pretty ignorant on this.

Re footprint. I often use footprint for things like this but I'm not sure what all it covers. Hence trying to breakdown the question to learn about end to end impact for things like the resources used in creation of the materials, transportation, and processing the end results whether that be recycling or sending to landfill. The packaging problem seemed immediately obvious. But given I am ignorant about the footprint of packaging involved when it comes to other food distribution channels I have no basis of comparison. ...And packaging is obvious, but I'm probably missing other things so I figured it was the tip of an iceberg.

I think when I have more of a handle on life I'll look in to CSA and farmer's markets along with optimizing my shopping and planning. and I have access to a lot of grocery stores in walking distance, which is fortunate. I live in Chicago in the Albany Park neighborhood. I have bipolar type 2 (mostly in control but I tend to exist on the dpressed side of things) and just got a diabetes diagnosis* so things are complicated at the moment.

* the askme's about food and diabetes along with the pantry askme's are very very helpful.
posted by bleary at 7:44 AM on October 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


Response by poster: SaltySalticid: " this scholarly overview of food delivery and trends from a global perspective."

That link expired, but I got part of the title of it. Is it this one?

Frazão, E., Meade, B., & Regmi, A. (2008). Converging patterns in global food consumption and food delivery systems. Amber Waves, 6(1), 22.
posted by bleary at 7:51 AM on October 18, 2016


blearly: yes, that is it. Sorry for the inconvenience. My original link still works for me, takes me to .pdf version of otherwise same article. Weird.
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:41 AM on October 18, 2016


As another slightly out of the box (hah!) potential solution: I have been using https://onceamonthmeals.com/ since August and I love it. I enjoy cooking when I WANT to cook but don't like HAVING to cook on specific days; there are only two of us; and I also get overwhelmed by meal planning/shopping.

With this site, you can browse for recipes and pick them out, select how many servings you want, and it will automatically generate for you the following:
1) a shopping list
2) a sheet of prep instructions (chop three large onions, brown 2 pounds beef, etc)
3) Recipes
4) cooking day instructions
5) printable labels with cooking directions
6) an inventory sheet

I usually shop and prep one day and cook the next. It eats up a weekend, but then all I have to do is go to the freezer once a week and take out an assortment of meals, put them in the fridge to thaw, and heat them up on their appointed days. Both me and my picky spouse have really enjoyed the recipes so far, and I like getting to eat tasty home-cooked food without having to expend the emotional energy of picking and prepping and cooking every week. I usually keep an assortment of quick sides on hand (think steam-in-microwave veggies or rice, packets of instant mashed potatoes, etc) to round out the meals.

I always used to think of freezer cooking as something kind of old-fashioned and square that only, like, people with survivalist bunkers did, but I am a total convert.
posted by oblique red at 1:28 PM on October 19, 2016


Response by poster: Status report for meal kitting:

I did a search for Chicago meal delivery companies. I ordered 3 meal kits from a local company called Meez Meals. I've assembled one meal so far, and it was straightforward and tasty. It's a Chicago based business. Food shows up in a pizza delivery bag with 2 freezer packs, and for the next order they pick those up while delivering the next ones.

I don't have a lot of experience to go on for the recipes and ingredients yet. On first impression, I think I like the sunbasket approach of sending things less assembled because I've used them as a teaching tool. That's only my experience with one meal. But I can probably get a similar experience from books, trial and error. Online and offline friends can also help. And if I feel like going out, I have a hackerspace with a kitchen area and the area hosts have office hour times.

The pros are:

It's opt-in instead of opt out! I can toggle based on needs. With sunbasket I need to remember to toggle. To be fair Sunbasket allows users to opt-out for more than one week at a time. After a few emails back and forth with customer service where I explained my questions and situation, they paused my account until next year when I can ponder all this again.

They are in Chicago, which allows them to use less packaging. The delivery bag and freezer packs are reused.
posted by bleary at 6:35 AM on October 20, 2016


Response by poster: Status report for emeals. I read about the service after seeing it mentioned a few times in other askme threads. It is a fabulous idea but the recipe plans aren't quiet right for me. I like being able to pick up things from local stores to cook, and I have access to a lot of Middle Eastern (right words?) stores as well as stores with produce catering to people from all over. I didn't see any plans that could take advantage of that, and a lot of the recipes used cans and packaged goods. I thought perhaps I could substitute fresh ingredients, but the recipes weren't geared towards my neighborhood. So, excellent idea, not quiet right for me. When you cancel the trial period, they give you a chance to provide feedback. I explained some of this and said perhaps they could try having a selection of foods for people to pick from based on what is available to them so that they could generate a meal plan with recipes that fit.

I just checked the onceamonthmeals site. It looks similar to emeals but I think it will have the same drawbacks.

I bet there is some meal plan service like those two that do what I want. Does anyone know of one?
posted by bleary at 6:43 AM on October 20, 2016


Response by poster: Oh, and more of a follow up on the Sunbasket ingredients and UX from the Meez one

The first meal kit from Meez had a sauce pack, which gave me less control over portions and materials than a Sunbasket kit. The sauce was tasty, but the accompanying broccoli was a little less fresh than what I've received from Sunbasket (I bet that might vary over time). The experience of preparing things was less fun than with Sunbasket kits, but those require slightly more time and cognitive load which I have less of at the moment.
posted by bleary at 6:53 AM on October 20, 2016


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