Meal kit delivery services – a subjective but honest review after 9 months by Ariane and Berni Oelkrug!
The world is spinning faster and faster and it seems everybody including us, has less and less time to spend a huge amount of it on the essential things such as preparing dinner for our family every single evening.
We tried a few things such as menu planning for the week and going shopping accordingly.
This works great for a while but easily turns into a rut where you eat the same meals over and over again.
The hardest part was getting the portions right. We would either end up having too much and overeating which would not play great with our “bathroom beast” (the weight scale) or we would have leftovers that would sit in the freezer and forgotten. The food would be rediscovered months later only to be thrown out or flushed down the toilet.
It was also easy to fall off track with meal planning which then ends up in multiple grocery store runs every week.
Not only did we waste a lot of extra time and energy, but it was also even more difficult in this time of Covid-19 with long line ups.
We were looking for a solution to our problem that would:
a) Save us time of doing meal planning and shopping for all the ingredients
b) Give us good portion sizes that would be completely eaten without overeating most of the time and would not leave us with leftovers
c) Allow us to discover a huge variety of new recipes
d) Have a balance of kids’ favorite meals that would be pretty much inhaled when served but also healthy and not-the-usual food you would come up with if you had to name 10 most common meals
e) Reduce packaging and food waste
f) Basically, reduce our weekly shopping to everything needed for breakfast, beverages, lunch snacks and to restock our pantry
This is our meal kit delivered to our door!
Meal kits sound like a great fit here. We would usually order 4 meals per week!
Aside from those 4 meal kits we would enjoy our usual “pizza and movie night Friday”, some kind of BBQ meal on the weekend, and more than likely a take out night on the busiest weekday.
Here are the meals all divided in the box.
Each meal comes with a recipe card.
There is quite a large selection of meal kit providers that all deliver in the Greater Toronto area, but most likely also beyond our area.
All of them have certain things in common
a) you subscribe to a meal plan
b) choose how many servings you need per meal
c) choose how many meals you want to receive per week and then – if you are not satisfied with the default recipes it will choose for you
d) pick from a variety of recipes for that week.
e)usually you would have around 10 different recipes per week that you can choose from, including vegetarian, meat and fish options.
If you forget to skip a week before the deadline for next week’s delivery (for us this was on Tuesday midnight for Chef Cookit or Wednesday midnight for the others), you will automatically be signed up for the recipes for next week.
All the meal kit providers still assume that you have some basic things in your pantry, so those would not be part of the delivery.
These things include:
salt, pepper, sugar, butter, oil, very rarely eggs (but this I think only happened once or twice, even eggs were included in the delivery). Other spices that go beyond salt and pepper would definitely be included.
Our workflow is usually as follows: we would sit together as a family on a Tuesday evening and go through all the meals that are available for the next week.
As a default, I would have already set all the providers to skip all the following few weeks, so that we are sure that we don't accidently get some random meals delivered because we forgot to skip the following week.
In the entire 9 months we have been doing this, we actually only had two weeks we missed.
One was where we forgot to skip the following week with one provider so we had some random meals delivered the following week (we didn’t starve though and our dinners were still quite good) and another week we actually completely forgot to order ANY of the options of all meal kit providers, so we didn’t get ANY food box at all…and felt the pain of making a meal plan ourselves for the following week…that is when you suddenly see how much time you have gained.
The meal kit delivery boxes are insulated quite good and the proteins are packed directly above some large packs of ice.
These ice packs can be recycled which we really like.
On top of the proteins usually, all produce is packed which is still kept quite cold for a long time, so that you do not have to worry when your food box is delivered midday on your porch and will sit there for a couple of hours until you can pack them away into your fridge.
I would definitely trust the packing to keep cool for half a day or so in the sun.
We have had different delivery times in the past, some times quite late in the day, but currently, the box would already be there at 7am when we open our door.
When we started our journey, we tried Good Food (www.makegoodfood.ca) first as we found a review about it which sounded quite good and sparked our interest.
At the beginning, we were pretty impressed with the new variety of recipes and especially with the variety of ingredients in their meal that we would have never thought of being part of our dinner routine or even thinking of preparing some things in the way the instructions told us to do.
There were some things that unfortunately forced us to move on to another provider.
First, we had the feeling there was some imbalance of meals that all were on the lemony side.
In one week we had 3 out of 4 recipes that all relied on the use of lemons for the taste.
Second, we had an instance where the protein for one meal was completely missing in the food box, where we, fortunately, got credited one free meal in the next week.
But then when we had the third screwup – a box that was supposed to be delivered within 24 hours of being packed on a Monday and only arrived on Tuesday evening with all the meat and fish at room temperature – we got into a fight with them, they wanted to credit us for a completely new free box the following week, but we insisted on getting a refund and terminated our subscription.
The next company we tried was Chef’s Plate (www.chefsplate.com).
This meal kit is on the low-end cost-wise but we would also say it is more kid-friendly if you have picky younger eaters, as the recipes are somewhat tailored more to families and you find dinners in the plans that you have most likely eaten or even prepared before.
The recipes seem to be a bit easier to prepare, but that could have just been our feeling.
So, this is definitely still a good option for a week when we are a bit lazier than usual ;-) So we still keep our account for this delivery service as well as the following, so that we are able to easily switch between them and have the freedom of choice.
The next company we tried was Miss Fresh – which was taken over by another meal kit provider called Chef Cookit recently and changed names.
Miss Fresh offered quite interesting new recipes. The type of recipes reminded us of Good Food and also the quality of the produce and proteins that they delivered felt and tasted like they were of better quality.
Another great thing is that they are the only meal kit we have tested so far that allows you to choose 3 portions per meal, which actually is a better fit when having smaller children who will not eat a full portion.
This ended up being our new favorite. It was a bit pricier than Chef’s Plate but it gave us some new recipes where we said after trying them “wow, this really tastes unusual but really good” and the kids discovered some new favorite meals!
Unfortunately, we have to say that the quality – but not the price – went south when Miss Fresh was acquired by Chefs Cookit. We still tried it a couple of times, mostly when the recipes they were offering were something new and sparked our interest, but for the last couple of months, we used to end up ordering with Hello Fresh more often than with them.
Our current favorite is Hello Fresh. They now offer the most variety in their meals and can choose from 22 recipes a week where the other companies only offer 5-10 choices.
To be honest here: you will not save money when you add meal kit deliveries to your weekly dinner plan.
For the 4 of us having 4 meals a week delivered it would be:
$ 143.84 dollars per week for Chef’s Plate
$144.20 dollars per week for Good Food
$149 dollars per week for Chef Cookit and
$164.98 dollars for Hello Fresh.
What we noticed with the recipes is we can definitely source the ingredients much cheaper than what we are paying for in the kits, but then I guess you always have to choose what your time is worth.
While writing the last sentences here we actually also completed our dinner preparation for today: Pulled Pork Spring Roll Bowl.
It was YUMMY!
One of those where the kids finished everything and nothing was left in any bowl.
I can tell you it also feels good when you are able to cook something and it looks comparable to the picture on the recipe card ;-)
Somehow that adds a feeling of having accomplished something cool that day, definitely better than just getting takeout.
We are using these services now for around 9 months and are the proud owners of 146 recipe cards and have to say that so far we only had 2 meals that came up twice.
Some of these recipes could easily be cooked by sourcing the ingredients yourself, some of them though include spice mixes which somebody experienced in mixing different species to achieve the desired taste could probably reproduce, but we definitely don't belong to that group.
Below you will find some references regarding the different meal kit delivery services including the web page links, how many servings and meals per week they offer as well as referral links where you will benefit when signing up.
For example, you will get $40 dollars off your first box when you order using the referral link for Hello Fresh.
References:
2 or 4 servings per meal
2, 3 or 4 meals per week
2 or 4 servings per meal
2, 3 or 4 meals per week
Referral Link: https://www.chefsplate.com/?r=3pc-WTu2y5F
2, 3 or 4 servings per meal
2-7 meals per week
Referral code: BERNHARDOELKRUG
2 or 4 servings per meal
3 or 4 meals per week
Referral Link: https://www.hellofresh.ca/pages/raf_lp11?c=HS-YOHSCY788&utm_source=raf-share&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=clipboard&utm_couponvalue=$40&utm_invitername=Bernhard