Blue Apron: Offering a better recipe for modern analytics
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Looker
- Google BigQuery
- Google Cloud Dataproc
- Google AdWords
- DoubleClick by Google
Tech Stack
- Apache Spark
- Kafka
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
- Food & Beverage
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Demand Planning & Forecasting
- Inventory Management
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
About The Customer
Blue Apron’s mission is to make incredible home cooking accessible to everyone. Launched in 2012, Blue Apron is reimagining the way that food is produced, distributed, and consumed. The company helps its customers create incredible home cooking experiences by sending culinary-driven recipes with high-quality ingredients and step-by-step instructions straight to customers’ doors. Blue Apron also offers a monthly wine subscription service and a la carte culinary tools and products through its marketplace. The company is based in the United States and operates in the retail industry.
The Challenge
Blue Apron, a pioneer in the meal kit delivery service industry, faced challenges in managing its complex operations. The company needed to source ingredients at the right time, quality, and price, pack orders efficiently and in exactly the right proportions, and ensure meal kits were delivered to the customer fresh and on time. As data volumes grew and queries became more complex, it became difficult to scale their existing data warehouse hosted on another cloud provider. The only options were choosing ever-larger server classes and increasing storage throughput by purchasing a higher number of provisioned IOPS. This led to a need for a more efficient and scalable solution.
The Solution
To improve speed, scalability, and cost efficiency, Blue Apron moved its data warehouse to Google BigQuery and built an analytics platform using Looker. Looker takes full advantage of the power of Google BigQuery, making it easy to build a data exploration platform. Blue Apron’s applications publish event data to Kafka— approximately 140 million events per day—and data is then streamed into Google BigQuery, which performs lightning-fast queries on both streamed and static data. Now, business users and analytics teams can make decisions based on near real-time information in Looker, instead of waiting until the next business day for results. For data cleansing and transformation, Blue Apron uses Google Cloud Dataproc to run fully managed Apache Spark clusters on Google Cloud Platform.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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