Recent subscriber data explains just why Blue Apron is exploring mergers and sales. The company’s customers dropped from about 557,000 at the end of 2018 to 351,000 a year later — that’s a drop of nearly 37 percent in the space of a year. Orders dropped by nearly a third, too. And while Blue Apron has been targeting “high affinity” (read: particularly loyal) customers, its average income per customer only climbed slightly. Blue Apron is losing its audience, and those people who are left aren’t big enough fans to make up the difference.

There has been sign of trouble for a while, including a failed public stock offering in 2017 as well as more than one round of layoffs.

The primary cause of Blue Apron’s woes isn’t clear. It does have competition in the meal kit world from Amazon and Walmart, but there may also be a threat from restaurant delivery apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash. Customers might simply be happier to pay for ready-made meals instead of the ingredients for home-cooked food, even if they spend significantly more in the process. Whatever the cause, Blue Apron may have a tough time revitalizing its business if it’s forced to go alone and can’t pinpoint what it’s doing wrong.

The difference is in the amount of food waste meal kits prevent. While grocery store meals have less packaging per meal, more food has to be purchased and that leads to higher household food waste. It turns out all the cardboard and plastic wrap involved isn’t as bad for the environment as the extra chicken breast that gets freezer burned or forgotten about — given all of the resources that went into producing the chicken breast in the first place.

The meal-kit model also reduces some of the waste that’s common in grocery stores — like overstocking to prevent shortages. And it’s more efficient for one truck to deliver multiple meals than it is for multiple drivers to make a trip to the store. Those last-mile emissions accounted for 11 percent of the average grocery meal, compared to four percent for meal-kit dinners.

These emissions savings are good news considering that meal kits are on the rise. In 2018, US sales reached $3.1 billion, according to the Packaged Facts research firm. Few studies have been done on this relatively new model, but they could help us understand more ways to minimize the impacts of the food system by further reducing food waste and coupling it with advances in transportation logistics and more sustainable packaging.