Blue Apron COO Matthew Wadiak steps down in post-IPO shakeup

Blue Apron announced several changes at the executive level today, including co-founder Matthew Wadiak stepping down from the COO role to become a senior advisor.

Wadiak’s changing role comes after a painful IPO for the meal kit delivery service, which first had to reduce its original IPO price and has since seen a significant drop in its share price. Some good news finally hit earlier this week with a slew of confident reports from banks, but it’s still well below its original IPO price of $10.

“As a co-founder and member of our executive leadership team, Matt Wadiak has played an instrumental role in driving forward Blue Apron’s mission to make incredible home cooking accessible to everyone,” CEO Matt Salzberg said in a statement. “His contributions to the company have been immeasurable and we thank Matt for his unwavering dedication over the past five years.”

Amazon may have crushed the company’s ambitious IPO when it announced it would make a $13.7 billion bid to acquire Whole Foods in the middle of its road show to pitch investors. While not an explicit entry into the meal kit delivery business, Whole Foods gives Amazon a network of local stores with fresh ingredients in major metropolitan areas. That possibility has become increasingly more like a looming reality with several moves, like the registering of a trademark and some apparent meal kit tests.

Since then, things have not gone too well:

Blue Apron exposed a large market for meal kit delivery that became an $800 million business over the span of a few years. Amazon is well known for bulldozing into new markets at will, whether that is video streaming or servers, and it would appear that Blue Apron now has to deal with a very serious existential threat. That may include a changing of the guard at the top as it reorients itself to deal with the specter of Amazon.

Here are some of the other changes: Tim Smith, currently Blue Apron’s VP of supply chain is being promoted to SVP of consumer products reporting to CEO Matt Salzberg; SVP of operations Pablo Cussatti also will report to Salzberg.

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