You are preparing, mixing, cutting and cooking everything yourself. You're given the raw ingredients just like you'd buy yourself at the grocery store and given an easy to follow recipe to do everything yourself. If you've never cooked before, you are definitely in their target demographic. The recipes are generally simple enough and explained well enough that it would teach you the basic cooking skills you lack.
It sounds like grocery stores could provide that service pretty easily now that they have online shopping. Send them a recipe and they put the ingredients into a shopping bag ready to go.
They could, but flour is sold in sacks. With blue apron you get your 2/3rd cup of flour not the full sack. The labor to measure out is too high, and you need larger scale factors than a store would have to make automating that work out.
To some degree. The portions the meal kits ship for things like spices are only what's needed for the recipe. For people who don't have a well-stocked larder that's probably one of the big advantages of these kits.
