You’re witnessing history folks, it’s my first clickbaity title!
But I really did eat meal subscription box food for a month, and I’ll tell you what happened.
Spoiler alert: I did not lose weight. I actually gained weight. But I’m pregnant so that might have something to do with it…
How I chose the services
First I checked out the options. A few other websites have done similar reviews of these types of things, so I checked out a few of the reviews to get a general feel for what might be good. Some of the reviews were on the older side and didn’t seem to accommodate for newer services, so I also did some digging directly on the websites for the services I’d seen so frequently targeted to me via Pinterest ads, coupon mailers, and podcast sponsorships. I ended up narrowing it down to Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, Home Chef, Plated, and Green Chef.
I checked out Peachdish, Terra’s Kitchen, and Purple Carrot, but they were either not my taste or too pricey/not clearly priced enough. Purple Carrot is entirely plant-based, something I’m not super into and I know my husband wouldn’t be down with for a long term thing. Terra’s Kitchen has no base price, it is priced per meal and the only requirement is that you spend at least $65 for free shipping – which is more than most of the other services’ base price. Terra’s Kitchen is super intriguing, especially since the food comes prepared (as in cut up, measured, etc) unlike most of the other services, but the price ambiguity just doesn’t seem sustainable for me, so we skipped that one. Peachdish has a similar situation to Terra’s Kitchen, although they seem to have at least a set price for each serving ($12.50, making each two-serving meal about $5 more than on Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, or Home Chef – $15 over the course of 3 meals).
How each service will be judged
I am going to be giving each service a score from 1-5 on a few different categories that are important to me (and some that are less important to me but seem to be important to other people, like waste/recyclability).
Taste – 5 is most tasty
Difficulty – 5 is most difficult
Convenience – 5 is… you get the idea , for this category I’m highlighting delivery convenience and ease of use
Meal Selections
Sustainability
Portion Size
“Meal Experience” – this category is super subjective and is basically going to tell you how we felt *~*emotionally*~* about the meal
Price
Ingredient Quality
Overall Experience – again, super subjective, will give you an idea of how we felt about the whole “thing”
Also, right off the top, if you decide to use these, please use my referral codes!
Hello Fresh: $40 off using code PENPROM
Home Chef: $30 off Using this link
Green Chef: “4 free meals” (really 4 free servings of two meals) which equates to basically $40 off Using this link
Sadly I don’t have referral options for Blue Apron or Plated 😑 but support your favorite podcast which is probably being sponsored by them 😂
Now to the good stuff!
Blue Apron
We got Blue Apron first because they’re the most aggressively marketed. They’re fucking everywhere on the internet, and in your ears if you listen to any sponsored podcast whatsoever. I’ll admit I wanted to see what all the self-manufactured hype was about.
From Blue Apron we received ingredients to make Shiitake Mushroom Burgers, Southern Italian Cod Stew, and Seared Chicken & French Lentils
Taste – 3/5
The Shiitake Mushroom Burgers, which we had first, were delicious, and the sweet potatoes they were served with were just as delicious. The other two meals were decidedly “meh” and if they had been the only things we got Blue Apron would absolutely be getting a 2/5 for taste. The burgers get a 5/5 which definitely brings up the average.
Difficulty – 3/5
The meals themselves really weren’t that hard to cook, but the recipes are set up so stupidly that I am giving them 3/5 for difficulty. They basically split each meal item into its own section, rather than sending you back-and-forth between entrees and sides in an order that makes sense to get the meal cooked. It’s not a huge deal if you’re decently comfortable with cooking and you read the whole recipe through before you start cooking, but it does make it tough to follow along and makes it easy to forget what the hell you were doing when you have to do all the math to figure out what should get cooked when.
Convenience – 2/5
They get 2/5 because they have an app and it’s basically functional, which makes it convenient to skip/unskip deliveries, choose your meals for a delivery, and check out recipes and nutrition info. They also deliver on Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. These are the more convenient things about Blue Apron. When you open the box, everything is just kind of haphazardly in there, and you’re not really sure what goes with which recipe until you actually read the recipe, so you have to do all the sorting yourself. Not the biggest of deals until you realize that literally every other service I tried does some variation of pre-sorting the ingredients, and you see that it’s a lazy move on Blue Apron’s part.
The thing that bugged me the most and makes Blue Apron’s convenience rating so low is that they use a delivery service called LaserShip (which Hello Fresh and Plated also use) which clearly has an exceedingly lazy delivery person coming to my building. The way my building is set up we have the front door with a tiny lobby area leading directly to one set of stairs (normal, straight up stairs, no turns in the stairways or anything weird) which goes up to a landing area with four apartment doors, one of which is mine. Literally every other delivery service always brings packages up to our door. LaserShip’s delivery person decided it was cool to just leave it right by the front door in the little lobby area. This means that when I get home from work, carrying my purse, lunch bag, and laptop bag (at least, usually), there’s no way I can just grab the box and go upstairs. So I have to go upstairs first, put my stuff down, go back down the stairs, and carry a large box up the stairs with my baby belly 😭. It’s a First World Problem FOR SURE, but I’m way overpaying for this shit so bring it to my god damn door, k?
Meal Selections – 2/5
Blue Apron’s recipes tend to be a little more adventurous than my palate, and certainly more adventurous than my husband’s very meat-and-potatoes preferences. This is fine if you are looking to get out of your comfort zone. I’m more looking to get INTO my comfort zone of not having to think about what’s for dinner, ever again. I’m not looking for weird fish soup. Sorry not sorry.
PLUS there’s this really annoying thing Blue Apron’s meal selection process does. You get a choice of a few different recipes each week, but once you choose a certain recipe, others get “grayed out” and you can’t pick them. There is no explanation for why they do this, that I saw. Maybe if you dig in the FAQs. Matt suggested perhaps they only let you choose certain “premium” options once per week and limit your other choices once you pick the “better” ones. I thought they might re-use ingredients across recipes and wanted you to pick within a limit so they could send you, say, one whole lemon rather than two halves of a lemon (this is not the case). So, even if you think three of the options look awesome that week, you might have to choose just one of the awesome options and settle for two shitty ones because your favorites were taken “off the menu” so to speak…
Sustainability I’m seriously not the person to ask about this. I don’t feel like I can make a fair judgement because I really don’t know shit about sustainability. I’ll tell you what kind of propaganda Blue Apron feeds you, they say all their meat is sustainably sourced, and even included a little brochure about the (adorable) cows they murder to bring you burgers. I personally don’t love putting a face to my burger, so I didn’t totally appreciate that, but it seems like they make an effort to give their meat animals decent lives at least. Packaging-wise they had the slimmest of all the insulators, using kind of a bubble-wrap foil looking thing to keep the food cool in the box. Almost all of the ingredients were in plastic bags or plastic containers.
Portion Size – 5/5
No complaints on portion size, other than maybe there was too much of the fish stew and the lentils because we didn’t really like it or want to eat it. The portions seemed perfectly acceptable, we weren’t starving after the meals, but we didn’t have leftovers either. A good balance, I would say.
“Meal Experience” – 3/5
Most of the food wasn’t stuff we were into, but it was nicely plated and cooked and I’m sure people with more adventurous palates would have found them to be perfectly adequate. Although the overuse of the mustard vinaigrette in the Chicken & Lentils meal was unforgivable. It was like plain chicken over mustard everything. Bleh. And I actually liked the vinaigrette, just not all over everything.
Price – 4/5
Compared to the other services we tried and looked at, Blue Apron is solidly average, costing pretty much the same as Hello Fresh and Home Chef, all three of which were tied for cheapest of the services I looked at. $10 a serving seems to be pretty standard. If we went out to eat (which is pretty typical for us to do) we’d easily spend $20 or more, and on food that is less healthy and/or wholesome. So for that it’s decent value. I didn’t give it a 5 because I think if I could be bothered to get off my ass and focus on menu building, I could have probably gotten most of the ingredients at the grocery store for less than $60. There are some condiments that would present a larger upfront cost, like white miso paste and “verjus blanc” (still not quite sure what that is), but I already have hoisin sauce, crushed red pepper flakes, garlic, Dijon mustard, mayonnaise, and homemade pizza dough in my freezer which cost next-to-nothing to make. I suppose the main challenge at getting it to cost the same or less at the grocery store is you end up having to buy more than three radishes because you have to buy the whole bunch, and then you have leftovers which you inevitably waste. 🤷♀️
Overall Experience – 3/5
It was a decent overall experience, but I’m glad we did it first and got it out of the way. I know that if we got something like Hello Fresh first, with its cute little boxes of ingredients within the main box, I would have been super annoyed by the fact that I had to sort out which ingredients went with which recipes. Again, First World Problems, but fuck you if you’re judging me, I’m allowed. The food was decent, the ingredients were good quality, and the meals were easy to put together. No huge complaints, but this service probably isn’t for us in the long-run.
Hello Fresh
Taste – 3/5 With Hello Fresh we got “Chicken Gone Nuts” (basically chicken breaded with finely chopped nuts), “Sizzling Beef Stir Fry,” and Creamy Mushroom Pork Chops. They were all perfectly tasty and came with a good amount of vegetable to protein. The chicken came with carrots and broccoli for sides and the pork had a potato/Brussels sprout thing going on. The stir fry had various typical stir fry veggies like bok choy and bell peppers, as well as rice. The chicken was interesting because I had no idea what to expect from the nut breading but it was really good. The other meals were less memorable, but I definitely don’t remember them being actively unappealing so they must have been fine.
Difficulty – 4/5 If I hadn’t received a handy nut chopping gadget as a birthday gift from my in laws a couple weeks before doing this, I would have had to get my food processor down to finely chop the nuts for the chicken, or chop them by hand. If you have ever tried to finely chop nuts by hand, I think you’d agree it’s a nightmare. Another thing that was frustrating was the instructions for cooking the rice to go with the stir fry. I usually cook rice in my rice cooker, which obviously makes perfect rice every time. So I have no reason to know how to stovetop cook rice. Unfortunately, my rice cooker is only designed to cook more than two servings of rice, so since I only had a small amount to cook, I had to do it on the stove. Half the rice ended up stuck to the bottom of the pan. I actually do blame this primarily on the instructions, because the rice cooking instructions I got from Plated resulted in much better rice on the stovetop. Other than those hiccups, the cooking of Hello Fresh wasn’t too bad. I imagine the difficulty really varies week to week depending on the recipes.
Convenience – 3/5 Like Blue Apron, they have an app and it is easy enough to use to choose your meals and skip weeks, but also like Blue Apron, they use a delivery service that leaves your box wherever they feel like – in my case downstairs by the mailboxes instead of bringing it up the one flight of stairs to leave it outside my door, like most other delivery services do. BOO, LaserShip.
They get an extra point because each meal is in its own tiny box inside the big box so there’s no confusion about what goes with which recipe.
Meal Selections – 5/5 There are a lot of choices each week and you can pick whichever three you want to get. They’re not too out-there as far as meal selections, so it would be difficult not to find something you would want to eat. Looking at the app, this week’s options include chicken, steak, turkey, cod, pork chops, more steak, vegetarian tacos, “cauliflower pancetta mac n cheese,” as well as a separate vegetarian plan with sweet potato and black bean tacos, “grilling cheese burgers,” and sriracha sesame wonton pasta. Truly it would be a challenge to not find something you would want to eat on there.
Sustainability I really am not the person to ask (I’ll stop saying that now) but it still did use a good amount of plastic, although different types than Blue Apron. While Blue Apron used some more heavy duty plastic, Hello Fresh really used the kind of stuff you’d find in the produce section of your grocery store, the classic clamshell containers for herbs and plastic bags for veggies. As far as the meat, I don’t recall if it was specifically advertised to be free-whatever.
Portion Size – 5/5 The portions were pretty perfect. The only place I would think of complaining would be regarding my rice that got stuck on the pan. I would have liked to have eaten that pan-stuck rice, had it not been stuck to the pan. But in all other regards I felt perfectly satisfied with the portions, the size of the protein we were given as well as the sides that were provided. Not too big and not too small.
“Meal Experience” – 3/5 I am writing this quite a bit of time after trying the service, and I am giving it a 3 for being thoroughly unmemorable. The meals were easy enough to put together and tasted fine, but I really didn’t have any strong feelings about any of them. They were food.
Price – 4/5 Again, compared with other similar services, the price is right in line with what you would expect. It’s straightforward. Could you probably make these for cheaper? Possibly. But there is a value to your time and energy and this definitely makes your life easier.
Ingredient Quality – 4/5 One point off because the bok choy was pretty shriveled by the time we ate it, three days after getting the box. If your three meals worth of ingredients can’t last three days what’s the point?
Overall Experience – 4/5 I would order Hello Fresh again if I wasn’t so bitter about the fact that they don’t bring the box upstairs…
Home Chef
Taste – 5/5 The flavors of our first set of meals were pretty delicious. We had Crispy Garlic and Lemon Crusted Salmon, Soho Steak, and Grilled Pork Chops with Whole Grain Dijon Sauce. The crispy garlic was life changing. And I was truly surprised that I didn’t hate the creamed kale.
Difficulty – 3/5 Everything was pretty easy to figure out and the recipes are well organized.
Convenience – 5/5 Home chef is one of the only services that actually brought the box up to my door, and for that I am forever grateful. Like the other services, they also have an app that is easy to use to choose your meals and skip weeks. The ingredients are separated out into plastic bags with a sticker that tells you which recipe they are for. It’s not as cute as Hello Fresh’s tiny boxes within a box, but it serves the same essential purpose.
Meal Selections – 4/5 Home Chef has a lot of comfort-foody options, so is good for people like Matt who love their meat and potatoes. It definitely doesn’t push you way out of your comfort zone into eating weird stuff you normally wouldn’t eat. Which is nice sometimes because who wants to be pressured into eating weird stuff all the time. We did get a few more deliveries of Home Chef after the initial test one and, more First World Problems, I got so. sick. of. eating. steak. Just like straight up cow flesh all the damn time. Some people would be all about this but personally I’m more of a cheese and potatoes girl than a meat and potatoes one. I prefer my cows lactating.
Sustainability I would honestly say that Home Chef used about the same amount of plastic as any others. Again, I don’t recall if there was any specific statement of sustainability as far as produce or meat sourcing.
Portion Size 5/5 Like Hello Fresh, the portions were perfectly adequate. Not too much or too little. The sides were appealing.
“Meal Experience” – 5/5 From initial ordering and choosing meals, Home Chef was the one we were the most excited about, because it was the least out of our comfort zone. As far as providing tasty, fresh meals that don’t rock the boat, Home Chef absolutely delivers.
Price 4/5 Same as the first two, totally comparable with other similar services, about $60 for three meals with two servings each.
Ingredient Quality – 3/5 Mostly good, but on subsequent orders I did have a couple of ingredient problems, most notably one of the meals was essentially a steak with a baked potato and one of my potatoes was totally rotten from the inside and inedible. Potatoes don’t go bad all that fast. It was a major bummer because I had to either improvise or go to the store and buy a damn potato even though I was supposed to have been given all the ingredients I needed – and paid for. Side note, Home Chef customer service never got back to me when I complained about the potato and sent them pictures.
Overall Experience – 4/5 I would and did order Home Chef again, but I’ll admit that funky potato did put me off a bit on really having all my dinner eggs in one basket. Also, who knew you could get sick of eating steak? Not me, but man did I ever get sick of it!
Green Chef
Taste – 3/5 I’ll just say it wasn’t disgusting but it wasn’t what I would have chosen to eat. We had Everything Crusted Salmon, Arroz con Pollo, and some other vegetable pasta thing which I obviously didn’t find exciting enough to photograph.
Difficulty – 3/5 It was all easy enough to make, and I’ll touch on that more in the convenience section…
Convenience – 3/5 I am pretty sure they delivered to my door instead of leaving it downstairs, which as you can see is a huge priority. They didn’t use the same delivery service as Home Chef, but it obviously also wasn’t Laser Ship. However, they do not have an app, which makes skipping weeks a challenge. Since I wasn’t impressed I just straight up cancelled the subscription (whereas for the other four services I have just been going in and skipping weeks because it’s easy and I might order again and also referral bonuses what what).
Meal Selections 1/5 I would give them a zero if I could. I tried this service because the sign up deal was pretty good, but I would absolutely not order it again. I hated that they didn’t give ANY option to choose which meals you got. You just got whatever three meals they decided they were delivering that week. Really not keeping up with the competition guys.
Sustainability Supposedly that is one of their selling points. Everything is labeled as organic or sustainable, and their box was lined with some kind of natural fiber based insulation rather than a plastic or styrofoam cooler. They did, however, deliver a lot of items in more heavy duty plastic containers. Sorry but it wasn’t enough for me to overlook their obvious shortcomings.
Portion Size – 4/5 I guess it was fine but again I really wasn’t all that into the options so it was honestly a bit of a struggle to get through a lot of it.
“Meal Experience” – 2/5 I don’t think I can overstate how annoying it was that we didn’t have any choice in the matter of what we got. It made me feel like I had no control over what I was eating. I felt like a child whose parent put a plate in front of them and said “eat this” with no regard for what I wanted. And damn it if I’m not paying enough for my food to feel like a damn adult while I’m eating.
Price – 2/5 speaking of paying… Green Chef is priced quite a bit over competitors, at $12 a serving for the “omnivore” plan. That comes out to an extra $12 a week compared to the $10 servings most other services offer. Add to that that you don’t even get to pick what you get and I’d say it is definitely overpriced.
Ingredient Quality – 3/5 For something that is so hung up on sustainability and organic-ness, there was a lot of pre-packaged stuff like sauces that I think the other services would have either skipped entirely or given the ingredients to make from scratch. I suppose they may have increased convenience slightly, but it definitely didn’t mesh with what other services are doing.
Overall Experience – 1/5 Ugh no I would not order Green Chef again. See above for logic.
Plated
Taste – 4/5 Plated is definitely a little more on the adventurous side as far as meal selections go, but there are plenty of comfort-zone options as well. We had Thai Beef Lettuce Wraps with rice, Seared Steak Quesadillas with Poblano Salsa and Chimichurri, and Salmon and Bowtie Pasta with Pink Sauce and Peas. All of them were pretty good, although the steak in the quesadilla didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Maybe it was the way I cooked it, but it was hard to take a bite with steak without just pulling the whole piece of meat out of the quesadilla. I’d never had chimichurri before and definitely enjoyed it on the quesadilla.
Difficulty – 3/5 The recipes were easy to follow and they even gave good instructions for cooking rice that facilitated not losing half of it to the bottom of the pan. None of these services are super appropriate for complete novices, but if you have any concept of cooking you’d be okay with Plated.
Convenience – 3/5 Three points for a decent app and meal selection and skipping options. Fuck you, LaserShip, for making a pregnant lady carry a huge box of food up a flight of stairs.
Meal Selections – 4/5 Plated has a ton of choices and doesn’t limit you per week like Blue Apron does, but I have to take off a point for me personally that some of the selections tend to be a bit weirder than my palate generally prefers.
Sustainability Truly, and I know I said I’d stop saying this, but I have no idea. Packaging seemed similar enough to everyone else’s.
Portion Size – 3/5 Plated is a weird one. You get HUGE entrees but really no sides to speak of. At least not in the meals I received. Every one of them was pretty self-contained and there wasn’t really anything on the side. But man if it wasn’t a ton of food. I had leftovers of the pasta and gave some to my mom.
“Meal Experience” – 4/5 Generally I felt pretty good about Plated’s meals. They’re a lot of calories though, presumably because of the huge portion sizes. At the time the fact that there were no sides didn’t really register. But they were tasty and interesting without being super off-the-wall.
Price – 3/5 Plated is a smidge more expensive than most other services, and honestly this is a primary reason I don’t think I’ll order more from them. It’s not crazily expensive, perhaps on par with Green Chef (and at least you can pick your meals), but it’s enough that it does put me off a smidge. Especially considering we’re not really getting sides with our meals, which like I said didn’t really interrupt the meal experience, but does make it a little annoying that it costs so much.
Ingredient Quality – 3/5 Mostly good but the lettuce that came with the lettuce wraps was disappointing and honestly when the ingredient is in the name of the recipe I would really hope you’d take steps to make sure it’s quality. I supposed you have to consider that a lot of these will ship a good two or three days before you actually get them, so lettuce that looked great when they stuck it in the box looks decidedly less good when you go to cook it two days after your delivery.
Overall Experience – 4/5 As I said before, I would probably order Plated again if it were not for the cost aspect. The food was good, the selections were good, it wasn’t super hard to make. Their website/app has this tinder-like thing for meals too where you can swipe if you thinkyou’d be into trying a certain recipe or not, which supposedly makes it better at sugesting food for you, but I didn’t use it enough to really experience that feature.
In general my recommendation has to go to either Home Chef, Hello Fresh, or Plated, probably in that order. Blue Apron and Green Chef just didn’t excite me all that much.
Millennials at Home 