Meal Kit Delivery Services

Everything else
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Wife and I have all of our kids out of the house so its just the two of us. Cooking for two kind of sucks, multiple trips to the store in a week if you want fresh produce (and we throw away a ton of produce, we always seem to buy more than we end up using and end up throwing out a ton of stuff). If you are cooking something fancy you have to buy shit that you might only use once. And then left overs, always sees like there are left overs and I don’t like eating left overs.

So, we decided to try some of the meal kit delivery services like Blue Apron. Most of them have nice deals for first time customers that work out to be about half off. The most common plan for two people is three meals a week, at roughly $10 a person at the base costs.

We have tried a bunch of them now. Thoughts on them to follow.

Blue Apron. This seems to be one of the most popular/advertised services. It was not bad, but it was our least favorite.

Hello Fresh. Again, not bad, but not our favorite. Ranks ahead of Blue Apron though.

Home Chef. Love this one. So far always great tasting meals. Priced similarly to Blue Apron and Hello Fresh but easily better than both.

Marley Spoon. Good, but a little pricier than the other plans so far. This one is the Martha Stewart branded offering.

Sun Basket. The best we have tried so far. Amazing quality ingredients, lots of offerings like paleo, etc. About $2 more a meal than the others we have tried.

We go back and forth between Home Chef and Sun Basket depending on the menus. All of these services make it relatively easy to pause or cancel your deliveries.

We are trying Green Chef next week. This one is priced a little higher and has a more restricted menu than the other ones, but they still have a first time customer discount that works out to roughly half off. I don’t see us ordering from them again unless the meals just completely floor us. We also considered Peach Dish, and will likely try them at some point going forward.

Anyway, if you have not tried any of these services I’d recommend trialing them all for a week. Especially if your are a two person household. A lot of them have family packs that are designed for two adults and two children too. All of the ones I mentioned have first time customer discounts that work out to basically half off. So like $5-6 bucks a plate for food that is delivered to your door. The packaging for all of them is super impressive. Very well insulated with cold packs that keep everything fresh and safe regardless of when you actually pick your box up off your door step and put it in your house.

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I did Blue Apron for about a year and I thought it was great. I did the vegetarian option and found it to be a great way to introduce myself to the wide variety of meals that can be achieved in the absence of meat. I ended up stopping since I hate just cooking for myself - I actually hate the clean up more, but that is the price of being single. I’m surprised that the you liked this service the least, Olaf, since I have been very happy with it. However, I also have no experience with the other services so my ignorance may be my bliss.

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Hey thanks man. Have talked to people that didn’t like Blue Apron that much either. Going to try Sun Basket first! Been looking for a meal delivery service that was worth the cost for awhile.

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It’s funny, Olaf, I read your first paragraph and you could have been describing me to a tee. I’ve been tempted more than once to try these services for exactly the same reason. Thanks for the reviews and recommendations.

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I kind of don’t get these services. They seem incredibly expensive (like at least $5-6 per person for a single meal) for what basically amounts to delivered groceries.

Why not just get groceries delivered every few days, and save a ton of money?

I guess I could see circumstances (limited food storage options, etc.). I’m not criticizing those who use them, but I don’t really understand it.

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More healthful version of Chinese delivery, maybe.

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It’s pretty much exactly what Olaf said above. Balancing large numbers of complex ingredients + small numbers of mouths + few leftovers is very difficult. I can make cheap and healthy without much waste but it ends up being like pasta and broccoli or maybe chicken breast and rice. Even when I stir fry a good 1/3 to 1/2 of the veggies by volume go uneaten bc of spoilage, or I just dont want to eat a whole red cabbage before it goes bad. So the irony is that I might spend MORE money cooking myself; in fact it’s hard for me to cook a meal for less than 10$ unless I’m making a super stripped down affair. Like, cooking just hamburgers and a side is probably 10-15$ a person.

In theory you’re getting a complex amount of ingredients with little waste. If otoh the package is nothing but a handful of asparagus and some uncooked chicken - yea, really no point in paying for that (unless you live in such a place going to the grocery store is a huge hassle for whatever geographic reasons).

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I have a coworker that uses them. His response around questions like that was that it helps him learn new recipes along the way. I can understand this somewhat. If you’re stuck in the rut of eating out or ordering take-out, chances are you don’t have many recipes up your sleeve anyway. You might not actually know what you would like to cook in the first place.

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That and you might well be getting specialty ingredients that are difficult to come by in your local groceries, much less the severely restricted options of your average grocery delivery service. Or a higher grade of ingredients.

I think I am at a point where it’s more cost effective for me to just cook for myself and I already have plenty of recipes that I am itching to try, but man would I have liked services like this back when I was struggling to get started with cooking.

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The combination of exact required portions (so as a single person, not throwing out a huge container of spice you only use once), convenience if you’re someone who works 60+ hours/week, not having to think about what you’re making/what you want, very clear direction on how to prepare the food – I’ve heard the meal cards for Blue Apron are the best at explaining things in a way even the most novice of cooks can understand and follow – and a chance to try out new things. Definitely not a service for everyone and something that is probably better value if you’re in a huge city with expensive groceries. It’s been something I’ve considered signing up for a few times now but haven’t been able to justify the cost here in the Midwest.

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My wife and I do meal boxes as little date nights in. We both enjoy cooking, and we mostly treat it like an expensive cookbook. A box every few months and some new recipes for the rotation.

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I admit I’m a food “quality” snob. I don’t necessarily eat cuisine but I like to eat fresh and high quality. So that really jacks up my cost to cook. Water crackers are like $3.99 a box; store made fresh guacamole is like $5.00 a container; hormone free prime ground beef is like $6.99/lb., that container of butter lettuce is like $4 a head, etc. When every ingredient is taking 2-4$ at a minimum multiple ingredients get real expensive real fast.

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Guess I always just figured leftovers weren’t so bad if the food’s good. Yeah, I might drop $50 in ingredients for a Mexican setup, but then I’ve got all the stuff I need to make burritos, tacos, rice bowls, flautas, and quesadillas for days. . .

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It’s also great for people like myself who somehow made it to adulthood without learning to cook, and if left purely to my own devices would subsist entirely on scrambled eggs.

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I’m struggling to see this unless you make really elaborate burgers. Even if I bought all the ingredients at Waitrose I’d struggle to spend $15 equivalent on a burger, and many of the ingredients last for a long time (eg onions, gherkins).

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I appreciate the draw of services like these, and I’ve heard from quite a few folks how much they like them. I’ve been tempted to try one of the first time offers, mostly to see what sort of stuff comes in the box. We generally like to cook, and I adore leftovers. I also love grocery shopping nearly every day, buying small quantities of fresh stuff and using it up quickly. Costco is for bulk stuff that lasts a while.

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Roughly:
2 lbs ground chuck = 6$
Vidalia Onion = $1
Bibb lettuce (one head) = $2
Fresh vine tomatoes (1 lb) = $2.50
Sliced Cheddar Cheese (.5 lb) = $4.50
Brioche buns (4 ct) = $3.50

That’s closing in on $20, not counting a side. Would we get more use of the things like tomatoes/lettuce? Probably. But 10-15 a person isn’t a crazy figure. Beef is not cheap. :(

If you buy some of that in larger quantities, you can save a bit, but then you have to use it all to maximize that advantage.

I cook for two. I can’t even begin to tell you how much produce I waste.

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I tried a couple of those services, and I found the most attractive part was exposure to recipes that I wouldn’t necessarily try on my own but ended up really enjoying. That said they are very expensive and it’s incredibly wasteful shipping small amounts of food to your door with cold packs, etc. I stopped doing them, but if I lived in an area without a ton of restaurant variety I’d probably stick with it.

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That is a low price for beef, actually. I sometimes see ground beef for like $3.50-4/lb but usually it’s just about to expire and only really usable if you’re going to cook right away. More usually we are talking $5-6/lb with grass fed etc more like $8/lb.

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Yeah, but you can get a lot of burgers out of two pounds. Can you really not buy smaller quantities? Your bog standard supermarket package of beef mince here is less than half a kilo, so basically a pound. And obviously at a proper butcher or even a counter you can buy precise quantities.

And there’s no excuse for wasting mince, anyway. Turn it into chilli!

That seems staggeringly expensive for an onion, too. The most expensive onions I can find on the Waitrose site (again, posh supermarket, so not the most expensive/high quality ingredients you can find, but certainly at the upper end of the price spectrum) are 40p each. The cheddar seems overpriced as well.