Blue Apron Delivers Recipes and Ingredients to Make Cooking at Home Easier

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Name: Blue Apron

Quick Pitch: Fresh Direct meets Epicurious.

Genius Idea: Blue Apron encourages people to cook at home by mailing recipes and ingredients to subscribers each week.

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Blue Apron eliminates two of the most common excuses for not cooking at home more often: the time it takes to shop for groceries and the difficulty of finding a recipe for a good dish that's not too challenging to make.

Each week, the e-commerce startup mails its subscribers recipes for three different dishes and the exact amount of ingredients necessary for each meal to serve two people. The recipes are put together by a chef on staff and include some elaborate sounding dishes that all actually take less than 35 minutes to make, like BBQ cornish game hen, seared hanger steak and sweet miso cod.

The ingredients for these recipes are picked out from the same high-end wholesale providers where restaurants get their food. For this reason, the startup is able to keep costs down. Blue Apron charges subscribers $9.99 per meal per person, or about $60 a week. There's no extra cost for delivery or tax, or the recipes for that matter.

"We make cooking fun and easy for people by taking all the work out of it," Matt Salzberg, the company's founder, told Mashable. "We're a new kind of Fresh Direct."

Salzberg used to work on the other side of the startup world as a VC at Bessemer Venture Partners, but he decided to strike out on his own. He launched Blue Apron earlier this summer and secured $800,000 in seed funding from some fairly big names, including the founders of Yipit and Seamless Web.

The company started out by making deliveries solely in New York City, but beginning this Wednesday, Blue Apron will expand to cities throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic region including Boston, Philidelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Salzberg tells us he hopes to expand nationwide "soon enough."

Blue Apron isn't the first web-based home delivery service for groceries. Fresh Direct and Peapod do the same thing and Amazon recently launched a similar service, but it's only available for a select few neighborhoods in the Seattle area right now. However, Blue Apron goes an extra step by creating grocery lists for their subscribers and then delivering these items. Of course, if Blue Apron became hugely successful, Fresh Direct and Peapod could probably initiate a recipe feature fairly easily.

The big downside of Blue Apron is that you have to sign up for all three dishes offered in any given week, rather than picking and choosing the ones you want, though Salzberg tells us the company will introduce other options in the near future. If you don't like any of the recipes offered in the coming week, you can opt out of delivery as long as you do so six days before it's set to be delivered.

The meals are delivered in refrigerated packages on Tuesday evenings in New York and Wednesday evenings in all other cities.

Would you use Blue Apron to cook more at home? Let us know in the comments.

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Series presented by Microsoft BizSpark

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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives software startups three-year access to Microsoft software development tools, marketing visibility to help promote their business and a connection to the BizSpark ecosystem, giving them access to investors, advisors and mentors. There is no cost to join, so if your startup is privately owned, less than three years old and generates less than U.S. $1M in annual revenue, sign up today.