If you have a mailbox, you have almost certainly received a coupon for discounted or free meals from HelloFresh, the country’s largest packer and shipper of ready-to-make meal kits. With a price point that sits nicely between a week’s grocery shopping and several nights of takeout, HelloFresh boxes attempt to offer flavor, variety, and value. So what’s it really like? I tried the service for two weeks. Here’s my HelloFresh review.
The recipes
You can filter the weekly options into categories like “Fit & Wholesome” (these tend to be lower calorie and lower carb), “Veggie,” “Quick & Easy,” “Breakfast & Lunch,” and “Pescatarian,” and “New” recipes, which is a nice option because, like lots of meal kit delivery services, HelloFresh does rely on repeats if you use it long enough. If you’re looking for regular delivery of narrower dietary focused options like, paleo, or gluten free or Mediterranean, look elsewhere.
What I liked:
This is not the first time I’ve used HelloFresh meal kits. I ordered them years ago and my overwhelming feeling about the meals was that they were…fine. Recipes were basic, and felt repetitive. Now it’s the biggest player in the meal kit game (as of 2023 it had over 75% of the market and owns a number of other companies like Green Chef and Factor), and HelloFresh has improved new recipes. Each one I tried delivered on flavor and added a few fancy flares to what could otherwise have been simple, boring meat and veggie dishes. Would I make an apricot glaze for my chicken? Quite possibly. But would I make prosciutto-wrapped chicken with an apricot glaze, chive mashed potatoes, and a dijon vinaigrette-dressed salad all on a weeknight after work? Probably not.
I also appreciated the dishes that offered swappable proteins, meaning a meal could be made with turkey, beef, pork sausage or, in some cases, made vegetarian, so your week can be more balanced.
What I didn’t like:
While you can choose from a fairly wide variety of dishes, it’s easy to tell what produce is in high supply. The two weeks I tested HelloFresh, they were apparently trying to move some zucchini , and it featured heavily as a standalone side dish or as a feature of grain bowls and pastas. I have two small, not particularly zucchini-interested children, and so I passed on a few recipes I might have otherwise liked to avoid it being Zucchini Week in my house.
The ingredients
What I liked:
All of the ingredients were of a similar quality to what I’d expect at a supermarket (not always the case in other meal kit tests here at Epicurious). Produce stayed fresh for several days in the fridge and arrived, for the most part, unbruised or broken. The meats and fish are vacuum-sealed, so you can wait a few days longer to prepare them than protein straight from the butcher or fish counter. In my experience with them, one of the main selling points of meal delivery services is that they allow you some flexibility in your meal planning, so having ingredients that last is a plus.
What I didn’t like:
One recipe was missing a key ingredient. That’s not shocking—it’s a periodic complaint from lots of weekly meal kit users, and in the case of HelloFresh the mistake may be related to its massive scale. But when you’re making a Spinach Orange Salad and there are no oranges, that’s a problem. Some of the HelloFresh recipes I received also came with some minor swaps that I didn’t ask for. I chose a recipe with a mixed greens salad which arrived with an all-spinach salad. As mentioned, I have two small kids who have some…opinions about what they eat. They’ll eat a mixed green salad. They wouldn’t eat the spinach. I don’t consider this an error (if the spinach is what’s fresh, I’d rather have the fresh ingredients) it’s just something anyone who uses the service should be aware of, especially if they need particularly family-friendly recipes or have particularly picky eaters.
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