Blue Apron (APRN  ), the meal-kit company that took over headlines as one of the most anticipated IPOs of 2017, is facing difficulty as its profits further decrease. At the beginning of their time as a public company, Blue Apron initially offered their shares at $10 each. Currently, the 5-year old company is suffering from a 50% decrease in shares, bringing their share price to $5 each. In doing so, the meal-kit company is offering its shares at a significantly lower price than the actual cost of the meals themselves. Following the end of the second quarter, Blue Apron reported a loss of $31.6 million. While some analysts are locating the source of Blue Apron's current failures as a result of Amazon's (AMZN  ) highly publicized purchase of the American supermarket chain Whole Foods (WFM  ), Blue Apron's warehouse maintenance issues have led to a loss in customer satisfaction, resulting in declining revenue.

© Blue Apron

Blue Apron's recent plans to launch a new and improved warehouse in Linden, New Jersey from its old New Jersey-based warehouse has reportedly resulted in difficulties in meal-kit delivery and quality. Along with the leave of Blue Apron Chief Operating Officer and co-founder Matthew Wadiak in July, the transition to a new distribution method located in a new warehouse has been met with delays. In response, Blue Apron has announced that they are having "unexpected complexities" with the warehouse transition process, complexities that include the cost of training over 5,000 employees on the new warehouse systems. Blue Apron CEO Matt Salzberg dove into more details on transition period in a call with analysts, stating "There is ...cost associated with that training of people who are not doing day-to-day proactive work while they're being trained, as well as impact from people who are doing work who are just early in their life cycle of being trained."

© Blue Apron

The difficulties surrounding the delivery of meal-kits have brought down the OTIF rates, or the percentage of meal kits that arrive on time with the right ingredients. As a result of such blunders, customer retention has also decreased, a factor that places the New York City based meal-kit supplier in financial jeopardy. In a Barclays research report prior to Blue Apron's second quarter earnings, analysts have reportedly commented on the underlying implications of the declining amount of customers for Blue Apron, asserting that "heavy investments in customer acquisition that are happening now and for the foreseeable future won't translate to sustained growth or scale, and as soon as funding runs out growth will collapse."

In line with the analysts' projections, current Blue Apron Chief Operating Officer Brad Dickerson admitted that the company would be "reducing [their] marketing spend in the back half of the year, an obvious additional impact to the business's top-line growth."

Consequently, Blue Apron's projections for revenue have significantly decreased, with the company's revenue estimate of $380 million to $400 million for rest of 2017, compared to the $421 million in revenue gained in the second half of 2016. Now without much marketing influence and shifting positions in their executive board, Blue Apron will have to rely on the faith of their investors.