Blue Apron opens up meal kit access with Walmart

Blue Apron is tabling its subscription format in a new partnership with Walmart.

New York-based Blue Apron said yesterday it has begun offering four meals without a subscription to online customers at Walmart.com. The strategy behind the initiative is twofold, the meal kit company explained: Suspending the subscription removes potential barriers for trial, and the plan introduces Blue Apron to a substantially wider audience.

“Through our work with Walmart.com Marketplace, we will be able to scale our e-commerce presence and introduce restaurant-quality meals without a subscription to a new group of customers who may not have considered meal kits before,” Dani Simpson, Blue Apron’s chief marketing officer, said in a statement. “This is just the beginning, and we look forward to expanding the offering throughout the year.”

Blue Apron launched the plan yesterday with three meal kits that serve from 8 to 12 — featuring cheeseburgers with roasted potatoes, chicken rice bowls, and rosemary chicken with roasted potatoes — and a Heat & Eat selection containing six single-serve meals that are ready in 5 minutes or less, featuring beef Bolognese, beef meatballs and chicken stir-fry.

Blue Apron is the only meal-kit provider on the Walmart Marketplace platform. The boxes will be directly fulfilled by Blue Apron, maintaining the scale of its direct-to-consumer model and supply chain.

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The meal-kit pioneer is promoting the concept during this week’s Walmart Weekend, an online savings event exclusive to Walmart members that runs from 3 p.m. ET today to 7 p.m. Sunday.

“We are thrilled to work with Blue Apron to offer an assortment of meal kits to Walmart customers,” said Sheetal Patel, GM of food consumables, health and wellness, Walmart U.S. Marketplace. “At Walmart, finding ways to help our customers live a little better each day is at the heart of everything we do.”