Introduction

Blue Apron was one of the first meal kit companies to enter the market in 2012 and took only 3 years to be valued at $2 billion (Filloon, 2019). Figures 1 and 2 show examples of the business-to-consumer (B2C) product that Blue Apron sells.

Figure 1. Example of a Blue Apron meal kit after delivery.

Figure 2. Example of a prepared meal from Blue Apron.

In June 2017, Blue Apron became the only meal kit company to go public. However, despite its success, Blue Apron has struggled to remain relevant as it grapples with specialty food competitors and a sharp decline in value since going public. In light of this, it’s not surprising that their Twitter presence seems to have stagnated as well.

                      To explore the patterns that show up in Blue Apron’s social media data, we’ll focus on Twitter. In the last 6 months, Blue Apron does seem to have experienced descent engagement from its audience in the categories of retweets and favorited Tweets (@blueapron, 2020). However, when we look at the most recent Tweets, we see that the vast majority of Tweets are apologies from the company to individual customers, who have complained about problems. Now, if that’s simply Blue Apron’s strategy and what they want to use the Twitter platform for, that’s one thing. Though it’s difficult to believe that’s their strategy when they continue to do posts showing attractive pictures of food that get very little engagement.

                      For the purposes of this analysis, a conceptual data model is shown in Figure 3 that reveals a disjointed Twitter process that doesn’t take full advantage of the platform. Nor does the current strategy do a very good job luring back followers after the Twitter feed’s steady decline in followers (Blue Apron Overview, 2020).

Figure 3. Current Blue Apron Twitter process. As context, a conceptual data model was chosen to show what a system contains and its purpose is to organize, scope, and define business concepts and rules as defined, typically, by business stakeholders and data architects (What is Data Modelling?, n.d.). Since the focus of a conceptual model is to showcase an organization-wide representation of business concepts and how they relate to one another, Figure 3 was chosen to represent the current flow of data and processes that can be optimized.