Our Hello Fresh experience
I think most people are familiar with Hello Fresh and their competitors these days: meal kit boxes delivered to your house weekly with full menus and ingredients. Mac and I are back in the swing of cooking on a regular basis, and I was looking for a way to mix things up. I saw a Groupon deal for Hello Fresh and decided to give it a go. We used our deal and ordered boxes for about two months. Here’s what I like and don’t like about Hello Fresh. *All opinions are my own. This is not sponsored.*
Pros:
- It’s easy. The ingredients arrive measured, portioned, and ready to go with a visual, step-by-step recipe card. The meal kits require very little food prep to get the ingredients ready, and many of the meals come together quickly.
- The options. You create your own menu each week from a choice of about ten meals (you pick 2 – 3 meals depending on your plan), so you’re not eating the same thing every week.
- You get variety. I don’t know about y’all, but I get into cooking ruts. I own a bookshelf full of cookbooks but make the same 10 meals on rotation. This helped spice up our dinner options.
- You also learn new tricks and tips. The perk of having chefs create the menus is that they think of food like chefs and give you lots of new ideas. We had a burger recipe that was topped with an onion jam (made from reducing red onions in balsamic vinegar). This was so amazing that we are going to make it with our usual burgers.
- You have flexibility. You pick a delivery date (from the options available), and you pick how frequently you want deliveries (you can skip weeks).
Cons
- You can only make one food preference choice. I eat neither seafood nor pork. I could only pick one group to exclude, so I chose seafood. Our first week, I didn’t check the menu before our box shipped, and we wound up with a pork and kale entrée.
- The food is fresh-ish. We found that the produce was best if eaten in the days immediately following delivery and didn’t last very long. I’ve read a lot of other Hello Fresh reviews saying the same thing. Don’t plan on keeping these meals in the fridge for a week.
- The cost. Hello Fresh can probably save you a lot of money if you eat out frequently. It costs about $10 a person per meal. We cook at home 4 – 6 days a week, so this was not cost effective for us in the long run. This was the main reason why we chose to stop our service.
Interested in trying Hello Fresh? Enter here for a chance to win a free box!
