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