Case Study: Blue Apron achieves near-real-time analytics and faster inventory decisions with Google Cloud Platform

Blue Apron Offering a better recipe for modern analytics

Blue Apron, a meal-kit and food marketplace company, faced increasing difficulty scaling its analytics on a single database instance hosted with another cloud provider. As data volumes and query complexity grew, slow query performance hampered timely decisions about sourcing, packing, and delivering fresh ingredients, and required frequent engineering effort to tune the warehouse.

To address this, Blue Apron moved its data warehouse to Google BigQuery and built an analytics platform with Looker, streaming ~140M events/day via Kafka and using Dataproc/Spark for transformations. The migration produced exponentially faster queries (supporting ~300 queries/day), enabled near–real-time decision making (up to a day faster), reclaimed up to a week per month of engineering time, reduced costs through pay‑by‑query and cheap storage, and improved customer service and marketing analytics.

Blue Apron

Sam Chase

Tech Lead, Data Operations