GRADUALLY, AND THEN SUDDENLY: How Blue Apron Became a Massive $2 Billion Disaster.

After losing another $23.7 million in the last three months of 2019, Blue Apron is laying off 240 workers and shutting down the shop at its Arlington, Texas warehouse location. Blue Apron will keep, for now, its California and New York assembly-and-distribution shops, while leaders ponder peddling what’s left at a paltry $50 million price tag. Meanwhile, customers continue to desert Blue Apron, down to 351,000 in the last quarter of 2019, from 557,000 the year before.

Selling off Blue Apron that low would mean a loss in the neighborhood of $143 million for Blue Apron’s capital investors, including Fidelity and Goldman Sachs. That hurts, but as usual, retail investors took the worst hit. Stock-market playing rubes, who bought in when Blue Apron went public at $11 a share, have lost more than 80% on their investment—and that represents a recovery. Shares were trading for $3.60 at the close on Wednesday, up from 2018 when Blue Apron was worth less than a dollar.

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As Marketwatch reported, Blue Apron hopes to get swallowed up by another company, possibly food giants Kraft Heinz, Walmart or even Starbucks. All of those companies have presences in almost every city. They could, in theory, produce ready-to-cook meals at scale and duplicate costs like storage and sourcing items.

We’ve been a big fan of Blue Apron since shortly after its debut in 2012, but as the above New York Observer article notes, “Blue Apron lost even its novelty factor. Instead of having the uncooked-meal-delivery game to itself, Blue Apron signaled a potential opportunity for a horde of far more established competitors, all of whom had lower costs and more diversified revenue streams.” There are now plenty of competitors to experiment with, but we’ll miss the blue box arriving every Tuesday.

Related: Blue Apron is closing its Dallas area meal-kit fulfillment center, cutting 240 jobs.