Blue Apron, a Meal Delivery Service, Files for Public Offering -<br />By MICHAEL J. de la MERCEDJUNE 1, 2017<br />Blue Apron was a pioneer in delivering food kits to customers for assembling meals at home.<br />A successful public offering would make Blue Apron one of the most recognizable names to enter the public<br />markets since Snap, the parent of Snapchat, began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in March.<br />Using the company’s preferred measure of adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation<br />and amortization, or Ebitda, which excludes expenses like stock-based pay and taxes, it lost $43.6 million in 2016, up 32.5 percent from the year before, the filing shows.<br />Both the number of orders per customer and the average revenue per customer also fell<br />slightly in the first quarter of this year compared with the first quarter of 2016<br />It plans to trade under the symbol “APRN.”<br />Blue Apron is seeking to go public as it faces intensifying competition from a host of<br />rivals, including HelloFresh, Sun Basket and the vegetarian-focused Purple Carrot.
