Wonder Nabs Blue Apron for $103 Million Amid Meal Delivery Consolidation

As competition for consumers’ meal delivery spend heats up across businesses ranging from direct-to-consumer (D2C) sites and major food brands to restaurants and aggregators, Wonder is now set to acquire Blue Apron.

The meal kit company announced Friday (Sept. 29) that it has entered into an agreement to be acquired by the omnichannel food hall company, founded and led by Jet.com founder Marc Lore, for around $103 million.

“Wonder is creating the mealtime super app, serving a broad range of occasions that feature cuisines from some of the world’s best chefs and restaurants while leveraging our culinary engineering and vertically-integrated model,” Lore said in a statement. “At-home meals play a key role in this vision and have been on our strategic roadmap since the beginning.”

In the prospect of acquiring the meal kit company, Wonder saw a chance to “accelerate our strategic position,” Lore said, and “create immediate opportunities for synergy,” broadening the omnichannel food hall’s scope.

The move is not Wonder’s first major shift in its approach to the meal delivery space this year. The company pivoted dramatically at the start of this year from its initial intent to deliver meals via mobile restaurants that come straight to consumers’ doors to a more traditional model.

Plus, within the last year, Blue Apron has seen several major shakeups. The company shifted to an asset-light model earlier this year following major layoffs and its reception of notice from the New York Stock Exchange at the end of last year that, for a time, it was not in compliance with continued listing standards.

“You have seen the industry in general shift much more towards the focus of profitability. So, everyone’s been … buckling down, looking at profitability and focused on longer-term scale as opposed to sharp spikes in growth,” Blue Apron CEO Linda Findley told PYMNTS in an interview earlier this year.

Blue Apron and Wonder are not the only meal companies that have seen major changes in the past year. On Monday (Sept. 25), months after diet company Wellful acquired shuttered weight loss company Jenny Craig, it relaunched the latter as a D2C meal delivery service.

In July, confectionery giant Mars’ Food & Nutrition division announced its acquisition of meal kit company Kevin’s Natural Foods, which sells its products through its D2C online shop as well as at tens of thousands of retail locations, for an undisclosed amount. Plus, in June, it was reported that hospitality mogul Sam Nazarian, CEO of nightclub and restaurant group SBE, had acquired ghost kitchen platform Nextbite.

Many consumers are ordering food of all kinds for home delivery, PYMNTS Intelligence reveals. The study “Connected Dining: Rising Costs Push Consumers Toward Pickup,” which drew from a survey of more than 2,100 U.S. consumers, revealed that about 1 in 10 restaurant orders are placed for delivery. Plus, the report “12 Months of the ConnectedEconomy™: 33,000 Consumers on Digital’s Role in Their Everyday Lives” found that, in November, 40% of consumers said that they had had groceries delivered in the previous month, and 31% said the same of meal kits.