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

Blue Apron Offering a better recipe for modern analytics

Blue Apron, a U.S. meal‑kit retailer on a mission to make home cooking accessible, faced scaling challenges as data volumes and query complexity grew on its prior cloud data warehouse. Those limits slowed analytics needed to manage sourcing, packing, and timely delivery of fresh meals, creating a bottleneck for inventory and operational decisions.

By moving its warehouse to Google BigQuery and using Looker for exploration, Blue Apron streams ~140 million events per day and gets near‑real‑time insights—query times dropped exponentially, enabling about 300 queries per day and accelerating decisions by up to a business day. The change improved customer service and process optimization, cut costs via pay‑per‑query and cheaper storage, and reclaimed roughly 25% of up to two engineers’ time (about a week per month).

Blue Apron

Sam Chase

Tech Lead, Data Operations