It has also faced steep costs of building out delivery infrastructure for fresh food.

The company spent roughly 18 percent of its $795.4 million revenue in 2016 on marketing, posting a net loss of $54.9 million. Like other meal-kit companies, Blue Apron has spent heavily on marketing to compete for customers who often switch service providers, or cancel their subscriptions altogether. Snap went public in March and surged in its first day of trading, but shares are now just above their IPO price after declining revenue growth and widening losses raised questions about whether the Snapchat app owner would ever be profitable. Snap Inc's SNAP.N IPO earlier this year has shown investors that growth at all costs is a mistake,' said Kathleen Smith, principal of Renaissance Capital LLC, a manager of IPO-focused exchange-traded funds. 'Amazon's deal for Whole Foods earlier this month added to concerns, but Blue Apron's high marketing costs were a negative factor. The Whole Foods deal announced in mid-June would hand the e-commerce company a ready-made distribution system for food delivery in the form of brick-and-mortar grocery stores. Amazon already has a small meal-kit business, delivering ingredients and recipes to customers in a handful of U.S.

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