A pioneer in the food delivery ecommerce business is soon to be owned by one the most famous empire builders in online retailing.

Blue Apron is an online retailer that helped to create the meal planning and ingredients ecommerce market. It has been acquired in a stock deal valued at about $103 million.

Wonder Group acquires Blue Apron

Blue Apron is being sold to Wonder Group, an online food-to-home delivery company, founded by serial ecommerce entrepreneur Marc Lore.

Lore pioneered combining digital community with ecommerce with the launch of Diapers.com in 2005. Amazon.com later bought the ecommerce business for $545 million in 2011. From 2011 until 2016, Lore next launched Jet.com, a general merchandise and shoppers club. Walmart acquired Jet.com for $3.3 billion in 2016 and named Lore as president of Walmart.com.

He worked at Walmart until 2021 and then went on to start Wonder Group. Lore’s Wonder Group is now acquiring Blue Apron to build out its business-to-consumer ecommerce model for home food delivery and meal preparation.

“Wonder is creating the mealtime super app, serving a broad range of occasions that feature cuisines from some of the world’s best chefs and restaurants while leveraging our culinary engineering and vertically integrated model,” Lore says. “At-home meals play a key role in this vision and have been on our strategic roadmap since the beginning.”

Why does Marc Lore want Blue Apron?

With the acquisition of Blue Apron, Wonder Group is purchasing a company that processed more than 8 million orders for more than 350,000 customers in 2022. It will give Wonder Group a bigger base to expand and diversify its online food delivery operation.

“When the opportunity presented itself to unite with Blue Apron, pioneers in the meal kit industry, we knew it would accelerate our strategic position (and) create immediate opportunities for synergy,” Lore says.

Under the terms of the merger agreement, Wonder will acquire all outstanding shares of Blue Apron Class A common stock for $13.00 per share in cash. The companies expected to close the transaction by the end of December.

“The transaction delivers immediate and certain value for Blue Apron stockholders at a significant premium over recent trading prices,” says CEO Linda Findley.

Blue Apron generated revenue in 2022 of $458.5 million. That’s down 3% from $470.4 million in 2021. It had actively been looking for a buyer, according to various industry financial reports.

Blue Apron is No. 195 in the Top 1000. The database ranks the largest online retailers in North America by web sales.

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