Google Cloud Platform Case Studies Blue Apron: Offering a better recipe for modern analytics

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	Blue Apron: Offering a better recipe for modern analytics Google Cloud Platform

Blue Apron: Offering a better recipe for modern analytics

Google Cloud Platform

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
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. Read More
About 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. Read More
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. Read More Log in to view content
Contents

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

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.

About 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.

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.

Impact #1	Blue Apron is now able to make near real-time business decisions to better manage food inventory and delivery by reducing query times exponentially.
Impact #2	The company has improved customer service and optimized business processes with faster insights.
Impact #3	Blue Apron has reduced costs while reclaiming up to a week per month of engineering time previously spent on optimizing its data warehouse.

Impact #1

Blue Apron is now able to make near real-time business decisions to better manage food inventory and delivery by reducing query times exponentially.

Impact #2

The company has improved customer service and optimized business processes with faster insights.

Impact #3

Blue Apron has reduced costs while reclaiming up to a week per month of engineering time previously spent on optimizing its data warehouse.

Benefit #1	Accelerated decision making by up to one business day.
Benefit #2	Enabled streaming of 140 million events per day.
Benefit #3	Running 300 queries per day.

Benefit #1

Accelerated decision making by up to one business day.

Benefit #2

Enabled streaming of 140 million events per day.

Benefit #3

Running 300 queries per day.

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Overview

Blue Apron: Offering a better recipe for modern analytics

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit