On Thursday, Blue Apron (NYSE:APRN) announced its intention to file for an initial public offering (IPO), seeking to raise $100 million from the offering. Blue Apron has signaled its intention to move forward with a dual-class share structure in which management would retain the majority of the voting rights moving forward, with a second share class being created for the IPO and a third share class created for future acquisitions (with no voting rights attached).
Blue Apron is a pioneer in the meal-kit-delivery business model, in which customers who want to cook a meal from scratch can order all of the ingredients to do so, which are measured and delivered to the customer along with cooking instructions. The company targets millennials and has grown substantially since inception, with sales increasing by more than 1000% over the past two years, growing to nearly $800 million per year last year.
The company, which has been in business for more than five years now, has grown its business through a significant ramp-up in marketing and acquisitions, two effective, yet costly, measures which have weighed on Blue Apron’s bottom-line numbers. In the company’s most recent fiscal year, Blue Apron’s net loss widened by 32.5% from a year earlier to $43.6 million as ingredient costs and advertising expenditures increased at a faster rate than gross margin.
The company’s impending IPO will be a landmark one for the food-tech business, one which will likely pave the way for similar IPOs in the future.
