Original subtitles

- The United States is and always has been

a melting pot of cultures, customs, ideas,

and yes, food.

One of the things that I love most about food

is that it can, and always does evolve.

Coming up with new inventions, new innovations,

that's an American tradition,

and we've been revolutionizing the world of food

just like every other part of our society

since our founding days.

In fact, there are a lot of iconic foods

you probably associate with other countries

that were actually invented right here in the US of A,

like English muffins, yeah, that's ours.

The Cuban sandwich, that's an American innovation.

Even salad dressings like Russian,

French, and ranch, invented here too.

American innovations also include

the first chocolate that didn't melt in summer heat,

the first condensed soup, and so much more.

Today we're getting a look at American inventions

and innovations up close.

We'll go behind the curtain at world famous Dippin' Dots

where we'll see how a process originally created

for feeding cattle gave us a brilliant

re-invention of ice cream.

Plus we'll see how Blue Apron is changing the grocery game

by using innovative machines on the assembly line.

You won't believe how they're shipping millions

of specially designed packages

every month across the country.

And we'll see behind the curtain at the jelly bean company

that blew up the jelly bean world

by figuring out how to pack hundreds

of crazy new flavors into the center of their beans.

This is "Modern Marvels, Inventions and Innovations."

[upbeat music]

What is innovation?

To me, it's that spirit of asking "Is there a better way?

How can this improve?"

Maybe it's improving a process

or making something more efficient,

or maybe it's creating something completely new.

The biggest and most beloved innovations

have changed the world as we know it,

like the light bulb, the automobile, and the supermarket

[upbeat music]

Today, I'm at one company that is reinventing the grocery

process that had been in place for a hundred years.

From the idea of the company itself

to the processes and machinery they've implemented,

the whole thing is one big innovation, Blue Apron.

Founded in 2012, Blue Apron is one of the leaders

in this $5 billion meal kit industry,

doing almost half a billion dollars

in revenue last year alone.

I'm currently inside their 495,000 square foot

custom built, state-of-the-art facility.

And it is very big, bigger than a New York City block.

And today we're going to find out

how they take 125 truckloads of ingredients,

portion them, organize them, and pack and ship

hundreds of thousands of meals every single week.

Grocery stores are responsible for about 43 billion

pounds of food waste in the US.

That waste costs you money.

Blue Apron's developed a host of innovative approaches

to getting food to table that minimize waste

and maximize efficiency, and that saves you money.

At the same time,

it's setting new standards for the industry.

Their innovations, including some of the most cutting edge

machinery I have ever seen,

are changing our entire relationship with food,

how we cook it, how we package it, and how we shop for it.

And I want to figure out how they do it.

Each Blue Apron box contains a recipe for a meal,

as well as a set of perfectly portioned ingredients

to make the meal with.

The menu is constantly changing to keep things interesting,

as well as focusing on what's in season.

Before we see the process of how they work their magic,

I want to see some of the finished meals.

It starts with a meal prep box.

Meal prep is an old idea busy Americans have long employed.

Cook on one day, but prep all the meals

for your entire hectic work week.

But Blue Apron is re-inventing the whole idea

of meal prep with their new box.

You take one day to prep and cook four different meals

and then reheat them through the week.

So let's see what's for dinner.

John Adler, a former chef in my hometown of Brooklyn,

is Blue Apron's VP of Culinary and Physical Products.

It is his job to make sure

all of Blue Apron's meals are delicious.

- So what you have here is chicken, pork chorizo meatballs,

and then some mashed sweet potatoes and broccoli.

I'm just curious with something like the mashed potatoes.

If you can tell what's different about our mashed potatoes

then maybe most mashed sweet potatoes.

- Okay, you got it.

Mm, I love the consistency of it

- But now I'm going to, I'm going to name something for you

that you're going to say, "nah, that's a dessert."

Mascarpone cheese.

- Mascarpone.

- Mascarpone is how you get that creaminess.

What we do is we start to think about what's a plus one?

What are different things that we can add to the experience

where someone is going to feel like

it was memorable and exciting?

- [Adam] Think about all the different ingredients

that come in a Blue Apron box.

Meats like duck, chorizo,

produce like chickpeas and bok choy,

not to mention sauces and seasonings.

So does Blue Apron deliver all those different foods

to your door in one box, fresh and ready to cook?

Well, it's time to meet Blue Apron

president and CEO Linda to find out.

- Shall we go?

- [Adam] You lead, I follow.

- All right.

- [Adam] Let's do it. I'll hold your apron strings.

See how it did that? It's, oh forget it.

Because the menu is constantly changing,

the machines and assembly line have to be adaptable

to handling all the different ingredients,

sauces, spices, basically everything and anything

you can think to cook with.

Blue Apron has a major challenge,

how to keep all these different ingredients

with different storage temperatures

fresh through their entire process

and all the way to your doorstep.

- So we have receiving docks that actually bring in

all the produce, all the protein, et cetera.

So we have a very specific cold chain handling process

to make sure ingredients stay at the right temperature

for that ingredient.

- Okay.

- So for example, tomatoes should not be

as cold as say milk.

- You hear that?

Hey, you don't put your tomatoes in the fridge?

- Never put your tomatoes in the fridge.

- Come on, people, it crystallizes.

How many trucks are going to be coming in? I mean.

- You know, we can have anywhere from 100 to 125 a week.

So we've got about 25 trucks coming in

per day just for receiving.

- And if I may, I just want to show one thing,

that despite the fact that this is meal kits you can order,

you're getting actual produce.

This isn't like a freeze-dried reconstituted pepper.

And here is where Blue Apron's innovative process

offers a big advantage over a traditional grocery store.

- If anybody's bought one of those peppers

in the grocery store, you know how expensive they are.

- Yes.

the waste surrounding the system.

So if a lot of those peppers are going to get thrown out,

then each individual pepper has to cost more.

We can give it to you at a much better cost because

of the fact that we know it's not going to be wasted.

[upbeat music]

- [Adam] Blue Apron's approach is new,

but the idea of inventing new ways to help busy families

get dinner on the table has a long history.

One of the first companies to do it

wasn't even aiming for the dinner table.

They were aiming for a TV tray.

The year was 1953.

The company Swanson was already

a successful purveyor of frozen poultry.

But that year they had a whopping 260 tons

of frozen turkey left over from Thanksgiving,

and faced a dilemma and how to monetize

their expensive surplus.

Then a brilliant idea, to carve up those birds

and add sides of stuffing and sweet potatoes

and freeze all three in a partitioned aluminum tray

that can be heated up at home.

Swanson had just invented an American legend, the TV dinner.

And get this, some husbands even wrote angry letters

to Swanson at the time, miffed about losing

their fancy full-blown home cooked meals,

but a TV dinner is frozen and stays frozen

until you pick it up at the supermarket.

A gourmet meal kit with fresh ingredients

delivered right to your door,

that is a new innovation entirely.

Think about an avocado.

You hand test them at the supermarket to make sure

they're in that small window of perfect ripeness.

How does Blue Apron make sure the multitude

of avocados they send out arrive at your doorstep

within that tiny window?

- Avocados has always been a tricky ingredient for meal kits

because very hard to get that perfect ripeness.

You know what's even harder,

having it stored, shipped to a customer,

and then having it be the perfect ripeness

when it gets there.

how much pressure it takes to penetrate into that fruit.

It's called a penetrometer.

So we're gonna penetrate into the fruit.

- Are we allowed to say that?

This is a family show.

- We want the ripeness of the fruit

to be between 10 and 15 pounds per square inch.

So I'm gonna place the avocado

with the cut side right underneath our device.

Perfect.

- Avocado, it's almost like a tightrope walk.

It's like the ripeness, you need to nail that sweet spot.

You have to do that for one component of one recipe

in one kit that may have multiple recipes in it.

So this is a small sample of the produce quality assurance.

We haven't even yet entered the cold chain.

A cold chain is a variation of the standard supply chain

where foods are transported from producer to consumer

at a certain temperature to maximize their freshness.

But at Blue Apron, they've taken it to the next level.

Instead of the one size fits all approach of either

refrigerate or don't refrigerate, they've innovated

and have subdivided their cold chain to include three

different temperature coolers along with their freezer.

And because of their innovative approach,

their ingredients are stored at their own ideal temperature,

locking in freshness and keeping the prices down.

Besides being immensely complicated,

Blue Apron's cold chain runs at an insane size.

This is like the biggest, best pantry ever.

-[Adam] When it comes to inventions and innovations,

American candy makers have done their share and then some.

Over 100 years ago, New Yorker Leo Hershfield

changed American childhood when he invented a new candy

that combined a chocolaty taste

with a taffy consistency, the Tootsie Roll.

Tootsie Roll's taffy base gave them durability,

making them the very first chocolate

that wouldn't melt in summer heat.

In an era before refrigerators and AC,

that was a very big deal.

Tootsie Rolls were also the first single serving candy

to be individually wrapped and sold for one cent.

For the first time, even the poorest kids

could pick up a penny candy at the corner store.

One of those poor kids went on to become

a 20th century pop culture type, Frank Sinatra.

Old Blue Eyes loved Tootsie Rolls so much

he was reportedly buried with some,

and the iconic treat is still going strong

in the 21st century with 64 million Tootsie Rolls

rolling off the line every single day.

Here at Blue Apron, they have completely refashioned

the traditional assembly line

with innovative concepts like the cold chain,

which starts right here in this enormous room

at their flagship New Jersey facility.

This is like the biggest, best pantry ever.

- [Mike] Absolutely, this is our cooler number one.

- [Adam] Okay, peppers, eggplant, tomato.

This is the right climate for them?

- Absolutely.

- You'll have three, four meals in a box,

but again, you don't know if the customer

is going to cook them right away,

what order they're going to cook them in.

So they have to be hardy enough for a whole week, correct?

- Yep, and by keeping them at their perfect temperature,

you know, that 45 to 55 degree range,

- [Adam] Right.

we're going to extend that shelf life.

- Absolutely.

Blue Apron has four different cooler storage spaces

all designed to keep every ingredient

within its ideal temperature range.

[upbeat music]

Back in the '80s, a microbiologist named Kirk Jones

came up with a food innovation

that also involved cold temperatures,

but he was thinking just a smidge colder,

negative 320 degrees.

Dippin' Dots revolutionized the idea of ice cream

when they burst out the scene in 1988.

Jones was working at a company that used liquid nitrogen

to freeze yogurt into feed pellets for cattle

when he had a brilliant idea.

What if you applied the same technique to ice cream?

His revolutionary concept created a brand new product,

super dense, ultra creamy, tiny little spheres of ice cream,

and every Dippin' Dot you have ever tasted

was made right here in Paducah, Kentucky.

- We get about 2.8 million pounds of cream per year,

2.8 million pounds of skim milk per year.

We get liquid sugar and corn syrup,

and all that goes into the process of making

three and a half million gallons of Dippin' Dots per year.

- [Adam] That equals 87 million servings of Dippin' Dots,

or 174 billion actual dots, each one of which

begins its life right here in a batch tank.

At this stage, the mix is just like any other ice cream mix.

- Once our mix is pasteurized,

it'll go into one of these flavor vats.

Today we're making birthday cake.

There's a blue, a white, a pink, and a teal.

Each different color goes into a different vat.

We keep those colors separated

over into our cryogenic pelletizers.

- [Adam] Here is we're Dippin' Dots diverges

from every ice cream maker that came before it.

Instead of using a regular freezer

to freeze their ice cream mix,

they use liquid nitrogen, a process called cryogenics.

And no, I don't mean freezing people when they die.

For the record, that's cryonics.

That's the subject of a very, very different show.

- Liquid nitrogen is so incredibly cold,

320 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.

And because of that, it can freeze food,

especially ice cream in an instant,

which is such an advantage because it can result in

really, really, really small ice crystals

so that you don't detect them by the tongue,

which is why Dippin' Dots have become

really popular over the years.

You're eating spheres of ice cream

instead of a scoop of ice cream.

- [Adam] And this is where the magic happens.

Droplets of the mix fall directly into liquid nitrogen,

which at a chilly 320 degrees below zero,

freezes the dots with much smaller ice molecules

than conventional ice cream.

This gives Dippin' Dots

their trademark smooth creamy texture.

The dots also look very different.

They are tiny, smooth individual spheres,

as opposed to traditional ice cream, which is an emulsion.

The dots are then collected at the bottom of the processor

and taken onto packaging.

- Each bag holds one gallon of ice cream.

There's roughly 25 servings in a gallon of ice cream.

Each serving has about 2,000 dots.

She's filling each bag individually.

From there, he's taking the bags

and running it through a sealer.

On the other side of the band sealer

is our quality assurance person,

and she's checking the color, make sure the blend

and the proportion is right.

They're packaging six of those bags to a case.

- [Adam] And Dippin' Dots have to be stored

in a freezer at negative 45 degrees.

That is far colder than what's used

for conventional ice cream.

- This is all the different ice cream that we're storing.

Each row is a different flavor.

So all the different SKUs that we handle

are in this freezer.

- [Adam] The Dippin' Dots stay fresh here

until they're ready to be shipped to kiosks

in all 50 States by the 11 countries around the world.

Some now classic candies like the Tootsie Roll

burst on the scene is brand new inventions.

Others like the jelly bean evolved over time.

Jelly beans are a hybrid of two much older confections.

They have the chewy center of Turkish delight

combined with the shell of Jordan almonds.

The term jelly bean first appears in 1861

when Boston candy maker William Schrafft

encouraged customers to send his jelly beans

to Union soldiers during the Civil War.

With their egg-like shape, jelly beans soon became a staple

of Easter baskets everywhere,

but they didn't change much until a candy company

called Jelly Belly came up with the idea

of a gourmet jelly bean in the 1960s.

At the time, jelly beans only came in simple flavors

like lemon and licorice,

and those flavors were only added to the shell of the bean.

Jelly Belly's big innovation

was to pack the center of a jelly bean

with a huge variety of new and interesting flavors.

- So the mini gourmet jelly bean that we made at that time

was the precursor to Jelly Belly.

And in 1976, we added in these peanut butter

and coconut flakes and coffee and juices and purées.

- [Adam] By using these flakes, juices and purées,

Jelly Belly is able to pack big flavor

into these tiny beans.

And once again innovated a candy that had predominantly

remained unchanged for over 100 years.

And their revolutionary flavors built Jelly Belly

into the candy titan it is today,

beloved by everyone from preschoolers to presidents.

- We sent three and a half tons of candy to the inauguration

for President Reagan in red, white and blue colors,

which we actually had to come out with blue

because we hadn't made a blueberry bean yet,

which has been a top selling flavor ever since.

[relaxed music]

- Today, the Jelly Belly factory in Fairfield, California

cranks out an astonishing 20 million jelly beans

every single day.

- So here at Jelly Belly, we have over 150 flavors,

and they all have to start here

in our kitchen as a cooked slurry.

So every year we end up going through

about 20 million pounds of sugar,

about six million pounds of corn syrup.

So the factory is about 250,000 square feet.

It takes between seven to 14 days

to make a Jelly Belly jelly bean from beginning to end.

- [Adam] The first step is to make the center of the bean.

- It's real cinnamon oil that's going into

the center of a Jelly Belly jelly bean.

So each kettle is going to produce about 150,000 beans.

And we're going to make about 20 million beans today.

Now the color is going in.

- [Adam] The hard work starts to pay off downstairs

where the cinnamon slurry drops into these molding trays

and first takes the shape of a jelly bean.

- While the candy is a hot liquid form,

we want to shape it to the exact dimensions

that we want of each piece of candy.

So we have over a thousand beans per tray.

We do over 30 trays a minute.

- [Adam] And we are talking about

some seriously pampered jelly beans.

After resting overnight, it's time to hit the spa

for a steam bath, followed by sugar shower.

Yes, you heard me, right.

- So the beans go through a steam bath

to get them a little moist

so that they can go through a sugar shower.

They then go down into this elevator,

up all the way down to a robot to be stacked.

So after these beans are stacked,

they will be resting overnight.

- [Adam] It's time to add syrup, sugar, flavor, and color

to form the shell around the center of the bean.

- Every run is a bank of eight pans.

He's doing about 150,000 beans in each pan.

So he's going over a million beans.

We're going to take those beans now that they have a shell

and we're going to put a confectioner's glaze

and they're going to sparkle and shine.

- [Adam] But not every bean will make it into a bag.

This screen separates Jelly Bellies from belly flops.

- So when the bean is the right size,

it goes through this screen and works its way up.

This is a belly flop,

it's about five beans all stuck together.

So a belly flop is a Jelly Belly bean

that is not the correct size, color, or shape.

- [Adam] Only flawless beans

get that famous Jelly Belly logo.

- We started to print the beans because we had imitators

that were not the original Jelly Belly.

So this machine runs a set of rollers

that will put that Jelly Belly logo as it goes through.

So now we're going to go see how we pack it into a bag.

[relaxed music]

This is probably my favorite robot in the whole place.

These are our grab and go bags.

This is the best bag out there.

So this is the final stage.

We've made that bean, it's now packed and ready to go.

So we make about 2,000 beans per second,

and about 15 billion beans per year.

- [Adam] These Jelly Bellies are finally ready

to head out into the world,

destined to create smiles wherever they land.

Back at Blue Apron, it's time to hit the factory floor,

but here they call it the kitchen.

That's because unlike a typical factory floor

which produces the same product day in and day out,

on this factory floor, just like a kitchen,

hundreds of different foods are prepared

in a lineup that changes every single day.

To do that, Blue Apron have had to innovate.

Each individual machine had to handle a wide variety

of foods that come in a huge array

of different shapes, sizes and texture.

What do we have here?

- [Linda] We have scallions on the auto-bagger.

Last year alone, we sent out

23 million scallions to customers.

- Which is insane.

but what's most amazing is that tomorrow,

it could be pita bread or radishes.

- Basically this machine takes the bags that will hold

various ingredients and they've been printed

with the information about those ingredients,

turns it right side up and then feeds it through this slot

where she can focus on checking the scallions

and putting them in the bag. - [Adam] Okay.

- And then when it gets to the end,

it trims the top off and seals the bag.

- Oh, that's where it seals it.

- [Linda] Exactly.

- [Adam] I just also would say that she has not only

done quality control on the scallions,

but to actually be packing these things

while they're moving, it's like hitting a moving target.

And tomorrow she will have to QC and pack

a completely different item

like butter leaf lettuce or chives.

That alone seems pretty impressive.

Where to next?

- Well, there's a lot more to see.

So let's move on.

- Lead on.

- All right.

- You're doing excellent work!

You're doing the Lord's work right now.

-[Adam] Sometimes names can be deceiving.

Just because a famous dish has a particular place name in it

doesn't mean it was invented there.

- The providence of some of our favorite foods

that we think are from elsewhere

are actually American inventions.

- [Adam] English muffins were not created in England.

They were invented in New York by baker Samuel Bath Thomas.

He debuted his toaster crumpets

with their beloved nooks and crannies in 1880

and dubbed them English muffins years later.

The Cuban sandwich must've been born in Cuba, right?

Nope, Florida.

By 1900, the Cubano sandwich was well established

as an inexpensive lunch for Cuban laborers

in Florida's cigar factories.

Tampa and Miami have been at odds over who should be

recognized as the true creator of the Cuban sandwich,

with the Tampa city council even introducing a resolution

with the exact way to make a historic Tampa Cuban sandwich,

down to using precisely three pickles.

But there is no mistaking the home country

of this next food invention.

- Ranch dressing is so popular and so ubiquitous to America

that in other parts of the world, ranch flavored foods

are sometimes called cool American.

- [Adam] Ranch is a buttermilk based dressing

with dried herbs and spices.

And with its versatile creamy tang,

it completely reinvented the whole idea

of what a salad dressing could be.

Before ranch came along, traditional dressings

stayed pretty much where they were designed to be,

on top of salad.

But from the beginning, ranch was different.

It swiftly move far beyond the salad bowl,

becoming a dip, a sauce, a relish,

even a popular flavor of Doritos

- Ranch has become the number one favorite dressing

for Americans, it has become a dip for fried food.

It has become a topping for pizza.

There's really nothing

- [Adam] Ranch got its start in Alaska in the early 1950s

when a Nebraskan named Steve Henson

started mixing up his own buttermilk salad dressing

for his fellow oil workers.

Fresh herbs were hard to come by, so instead he added

dried garlic, onion, and herbs to spice it up.

The dressing was a hit and Steve took his recipe with him

when he and his wife left Alaska and bought a guest ranch

in the hills above Santa Barbara.

They dubbed the ranch Hidden Valley,

and here is where ranch dressing

started to venture beyond the salad bowl.

With Henson serving it on steaks,

potatoes, and vegetables.

In fact, guests loved Steve's signature ranch dressing

so much they soon demanded to have it at home.

But shipping a buttermilk-based dressing was impractical,

so Steve created a spice packet of just the dry ingredients

and mailed it to customers all around the country

to mix with milk and mayonnaise.

Clorox later bought Hidden Valley ranch

and finally developed a bottled version in the early '80s.

Ranch is a distinctly American invention,

and American inventiveness and know-how

are also key to Blue Apron's success.

They have built an assembly line unlike any other on earth.

To accommodate their constantly changing

roster of ingredients, they have custom built

some of their machines.

What is this magical contraption?

- So this is our cup filler.

So what you can see is the ingredient

gets put into the machine, in this case it's hot sauce.

And what it's doing is it's actually

filling the cup directly.

And then you can see there's a sheet of labels

that comes down on top of the cups

and gets sealed with heat to seal off the actual cup.

- So it's both label and lid.

- [Linda] Right.

- [Adam] Now remember, this machine has to handle

a different ingredient every day.

It's hot sauce today,

but tomorrow it could be basil pesto.

So what innovation did Blue Apron come up with

to make sure the allergens from say a peanut sauce

aren't transferred to a chimichurri the next day?

- This machine is self-cleaning.

So it can go through its own cycle

over a period of like six to eight hours,

where it will completely sanitize and clean the machine

so there's no transfer of allergens

or ingredients from one serving of the next.

- And there's a guy over here

doing one of the coolest damn things I've ever seen.

He's using the vacuum created by those suction cups

to lift and stack 24 ramekins at a time.

This is the greatest thing I think I've ever seen.

Tor those of you at home, in case you were keeping count,

this machine fills a ramekin, labels it, seals it,

weighs it, helps it channel into being packed,

then provides an amount of suction

for him to use this incredibly cool tool to load it.

And then self cleans!

I would marry this machine.

-[Adam] Probably the most ancient problem

when it comes to food

is simply this, how to prevent it from spoiling.

In recent centuries, two big innovations

have made it possible to preserve food

far longer than ever before.

One was refrigeration, and the other canning.

The idea of canning food actually goes back

to the Napoleonic Wars,

when the French government offered a prize to anyone

who could figure out a way to preserve food

for their large armies.

A brewer named Nicolas Appert finally won the prize

with a brand new technique.

He sealed food in an air tight glass jar

and then dumped the jar into boiling water.

Now both protected from air and cooked,

the contents of the jar were prevented from spoiling.

But if there is one name that is almost synonymous

with canned foods in the American mind today,

it's this one, Campbell's soup.

[upbeat music]

- Campbell's soup, it's iconic.

It's something that you see in art, of course.

And it's something that you see at the grocery store,

and it's something from childhood that became kind of

a cultural staple of American cuisine,

in a way that is very uniquely American.

- [Adam] In the late 19th century,

America's soup makers had a problem.

Soups were inexpensive to make but very expensive to ship.

Then in 1897, Campbell's lead chemist John Dorrance

came up with an innovation that would change

the canning industry as well as the American pantry forever.

He developed a way to remove the water from soup

while still retaining its essential ingredients

and flavors.

Campbell's then sold it in a smaller condensed soup can.

- Basically that made it much less expensive to ship

and much less expensive for the consumer.

And that's kind of how it became very popular.

You would add the water to the soup and heat it up.

Soup used to cost 30 cents a can

and it knocked the price down to 10 cents a can,

and made it very profitable for Campbell's.

- [Adam] And Campbell's soup is still a staple

of the American kitchen today,

to the tune of over 1 billion cans sold every year.

Back at Blue Apron,

This amazing machine cranks out 5,000 bottles an hour

or 100,000 to date.

- So what you're seeing here are these little tiny

individual bottles that get filled with everything

from vinegar, which is what we're running right now,

Sherry vinegar, - [Adam] Okay.

to soy sauce, to Worcestershire sauce.

Anything that's sort of liquid like a tablespoon or two

of an ingredient that you might need for a recipe

comes in through this bottling line.

- Isn't that the cutest damn thing you've ever seen?

It's a mini milk jug.

So generally when you get one of these in a Blue Apron box,

it's just the amount that you need for the recipe, right?

- Exactly, 'cause we've all had that experience

where you go to the grocery store

and you buy a large bottle of

you know, Sherry vinegar, for example.

And if you don't use Sherry vinegar all the time.

- At all.

- Right.

- With this, you're getting exactly what you need.

- [Adam] Check out all the tasks

this amazing machine performs.

It fills those tiny bottles with exact right amount

of Sherry vinegar, then it caps the bottles.

Then another mechanism tests the caps to make sure

they are tight enough so nothing leaks in the box,

and after that's done, yet another mechanism

labels the bottles.

Just look at this machine in total,

we're starting with this beautiful little bottle.

This machine fills it, caps it, tightens it,

tests it, labels it.

This is a pure mechanized beauty.

- It's amazing, it's also a lot of fun to watch.

- It is ridiculously fun to watch.

[both laugh]

Just because things are done a certain way

does not mean that it's the best way.

From around the 1850s to the early 1900s,

the grocery store remained unchanged.

When you went to a grocery store,

you would give your order to a clerk

who would put it together for you.

But Clarence Saunders thought this led to wasted time

and to unnecessary expenses.

So in 1916, he opened his own grocery store in Memphis,

Tennessee where he let shoppers serve themselves.

He gave it an unusual name, calling it Piggly Wiggly.

His reason for the name remains a mystery,

but its success was not.

Saunders began to issue franchises,

and soon other stores would adopt this same practice

of letting the customer shop.

Once customers had the freedom to choose their own groceries

brands began to compete for consumers' attention and loyalty

and shopping in America would forever be changed.

Blue Apron is also innovating how Americans get their food.

We've seen receiving, QC, all the amazing people

and machines that prep your Blue Apron ingredients to a T.

Now it's time to hit the packing line.

Another part of the traditional factory process

that Blue Apron has complete the re-imagined.

Unlike a traditional factory, Blue Apron isn't making

just one product that then goes into a box to be shipped.

Instead, each individual Blue Apron box

has multiple meal kits in it,

each one fully customizable by the customer.

So packing is a multi-step process.

So each packing bay is stocked with the components

for multiple recipes.

- Yeah, this bay may have two recipes on it

with a few ingredients from each of those recipes,

- [Adam] Okay.

and the rest of the recipe gets completed

further down the line.

- [Adam] How far down does it go alphabetically?

- [Linda] We basically have up to

12 to 14 lines in this room.

- So 12 to 14 lines, each cranking out

maybe three to five different recipes each.

- Yeah.

- So this is kind of where all the hard work that we've seen

in the loading dock, the quality control,

this is where it all comes together.

- Absolutely, this is where the magic happens

and then the box goes off to the customer

and hopefully it makes their week.

- [Adam] Blue Apron is reinventing the assembly line,

and sometimes re-invention can be more impactful

than the original invention.

- [Announcer] The fruit cocktail gelatin ring

like this neat little number.

- [Adam] For example, by the early 1900s,

gelatin dessert mix had already been around for years,

but it wasn't until a New Yorker named Pearl Waite

began experimenting with a mix of gelatin,

food coloring and sugar that his wife dubbed jello

that the idea took off.

With the help of a smart ad campaign

that focused on women's magazines,

Jell-O sales skyrocketed to $250,000

in only one year.

That's more than $7 million today.

And for many people immigrating,

it was their first taste of America,

as Jell-O's owners at the time,

the Genesee Pure Food Company, gave out free samples

at Ellis Island in an effort to convert

the arriving immigrants to loyal customers

of the treat Jell-O was advertising

as America's most famous dessert.

Back at Blue Apron, there is only one step left.

This is crazy.

How big is this room?

- It's huge.

This is the full length of the building.

So you're really seeing end to end here,

and the entire structure.

- So what, what is this room?

- So we were on the pack line before,

and this track comes from the pack line.

So basically the boxes feed up here,

come through, and come down and go around.

- [Adam] Uh-huh.

- And this is the sorting room.

So this is where everything starts to be sorted

into pallets - [Adam] Okay.

to be put on different line hauls

to go to different parts of the country.

- Oh, there it goes.

- [Linda] Yeah, there it goes.

- [Adam] This is crazy.

- And there's a thermal liner in the box.

So the temperature is coldest on the bottom of the box,

getting warmer up on top of the box.

We've designed these boxes to be able to sit

on someone's front porch for 24 hours

and stay at temperature.

- Wow.

It gives our customers a full day to bring it in their home,

- [Linda] Yup.

and a full week to make these recipes

in the order they want.

That is awesome.

[upbeat music]

- [Adam] Oh cool, that's the wrapping machine.

- [Linda] Yeah, isn't it great?

- [Adam] Oh, that is awesome.

God forgive me, I want to ride on that so badly.

I tip my cap to the marvelous inventors and innovators

out there who never let the status quo stop them

in their search for a better way.

Whether it's a candy fit for a president,

a dessert that's out of this world,

or maybe just a better way

to get fresh ingredients out to the masses.

You have to appreciate all the inspiration and perspiration

that go into elevating the delicious world around us.

I know I do.

I don't know where we're headed,

but I can't wait to see what's next.

Okay, beam me up.

I guess we're not there yet.

[upbeat music]