Food delivery startups are dropping like flies. Sprig, Maple, SpoonRocket… The list goes on of businesses that couldn’t figure out the right margins to, you know, actually make money each time someone bought their food.
Now compare that to another food delivery startup, Blue Apron, who filed for IPO yesterday following strong year-over-year revenue growth from $341m in 2015 to $800m in 2016.
That’s a lot of quinoa…
On the unit economics side, Blue Apron said they delivered 4.3m orders during the first 3 months of 2017 with an average revenue of $236 per customer. Not bad for an industry known for hemorrhaging cash on every colorfully-bagged meal.
No word yet on the offering size but, according to the filing, the company claims that online sales, projected to compound annually by 8.5% for the next 3 years, account for only 1.2% of the addressable $781B US grocery market.
Put another way with less mumbo jumbo, Blue Apron seems to be steamrolling their way to the next big, successful consumer IPO.