Meal-kit service Blue Apron to serve up an IPO

Blue Apron's next big delivery will be to serve up its own shares. 

The meal-kit delivery service has filed to go public, five years after it was founded with the idea of sending the ingredients and recipes for three home-cooked meals within one box. The company said it has delivered more than 159 million meals since then.

The New York company is one of the best-known of a wave of companies that sell boxes of ingredients for home-cooked meals. It has a host of competitors, including HelloFresh and Purple Carrot. Blue Apron said in a regulatory filing Thursday that it had 1 million customers in the first quarter of this year.

Blue Apron co-founder Matt Salzberg told CBS Sunday Morning last year that its subscribers order some eight million meals every month.

"It's not a fad to cook at home," he said. "And what we think we're doing is just making cooking at home more affordable, more efficient, higher quality, and better for the environment than the way that people cook at home today, which is going to a grocery store."

Blue Apron's revenue has grown fast, from $77.8 million in 2014 to $795.4 million last year. But it is not profitable, and posted a net loss of $54.9 million in 2016.

It says it plans to raise $100 million, but that is subject to change as bankers gauge demand. Its stock ticker would be "APRN.