I’ve Subscribed to HelloFresh for 9 Years Now. Here’s Why I Think It’s the Best Meal Kit Service Around

Tired of takeout? No time to grocery shop? Like to cook — or at least, learn how to?

If you’d say yes to any of the above, I have one word for you: HelloFresh.

This meal-kit plan offers a compromise in dinner prep, charting a course between ready-made and do-it-all-from-scratch. My spouse and I have been HelloFresh fans for nearly nine years now. Here’s how it works, and why it works for us.

HelloFresh Plan Prices

No. of meals per week	Box price per week*	Box price	Box price	Box price
	2 people	3 people	4 people	6 people
2	$56.95	$70.93	$90.31	$130.87
3	$70.93	$100.90	$130.87	$190.81
4	$90.91	$130.87	$170.83	$250.75
5	$110.89	$160.84	$210.79	$310.69
6	$130.87	$190.81	$250.75	$370.63

*Box prices include $10.99 shipping fee

What Is HelloFresh?

Founded in Germany 15 years ago, HelloFresh began operating in the U.S. in 2013. Basically, it’s a pre-portioned meal delivery service. Every week, the company ships a box full of ingredients for dinners and/or lunches to your door, in quantities you designate (3 meals for 4 people, 4 meals for 2 people, etc.). You get to assemble and cook said ingredients, following the recipes included in each box. Result: A full, freshly prepared meal, with (almost) no planning or shopping, need for research, or wasted/unused stuff afterwards.

How HelloFresh Works

Once you enroll, you start choosing your weekly meals from the HelloFresh website or app — you can schedule up to a month’s worth in advance — or let the company pick meals for you. A box with all the fixins’ for those meals arrives on the same day (a day you choose) each week.

The boxes are lined, with meats packed in dry ice and the other ingredients assembled in brown paper bags, each neatly labeled with the meal name. Also enclosed are illustrated recipe cards, on stiff pieces of paper, which list the ingredients and their quantities, the tools you’ll need, and a step-by-step description of how to prepare the food.

Each delivery contains all the key things the meal requires, from a bag of rice to a tablespoon of spice, with everything packaged in a bag, box or packet. You should have on hand some staples: common seasonings like salt, pepper and sugar, and shortening, like butter and oil.

Sometimes there’s an extra goodie — a dessert or piece of fruit, say — thrown in (usually a promotional item, with a coupon and instructions on ordering more). So be sure to empty the box carefully. It’s a good idea to refrigerate everything right away.

The company charges your meals on your credit card each week.

What We Love About HelloFresh

The Convenience

People often claim they “don’t have time to cook.” But cooking really doesn’t take all that long, especially if it’s a simple three-component (protein, vegetable, starch) meal. What they actually mean, much of the time, is they don’t have time to plan: to think up meals, make grocery lists, and go marketing.

I know my mom — a devoted follower of culinary magazines and chef Julia Child — always found this organizational aspect the most onerous part of meal prep, even when she was a full-time homemaker; so, you can imagine what working couples feel. By designing the menus and delivering the foodstuffs, HelloFresh handles all these logistics, so you can focus on the fun part: stirring, mixing, rattling pots and pans. You know, the actual cooking.

No Waste

Buying fresh ingredients is great in principle, but it can be hard to get the right amounts if you’re cooking for only two people (ever try to buy a single clove of garlic?). So you resign yourself to a) shopping daily, b) a lot of spoilage, or c) eating salad for four days in a row because we paid good money for that whole head of lettuce, damnit.

HelloFresh sends the exact ingredients you need for each dish, in the exact quantities you need. If you are just a couple or have a small kitchen, you really appreciate not having a cupboard or fridge cluttered with ingredients that are just going to go bad after you use them once.

Highly Customizable

In the nearly nine years I’ve been doing HelloFresh, I’ve seen their menu offerings expand tremendously — not only in number (more on that later), but in options. Recently, they’ve started letting you swap out ingredients in a dish, like broccoli for green beans or ground beef for pork, so your meal can be exactly as you want it.

Cuisine-wise, there’s greater and greater variety, too, with choices running the gamut from American to Vietnamese to what I dub HelloFresh Fusion (e.g., stir-fry shrimp tacos with sriracha mayo and coleslaw).

Easy to Make

Taking around 30-35 minutes to make, HelloFresh’s meals are pretty simple to whip up, even if you’re not an experienced chef. They come labeled with degrees of difficulty, but the vast majority rank as “easy”; the “medium” or “hard” ones generally just take longer to cook, or involve more steps or labor-intensive tasks, like stirring risotto for a solid half-hour (but that’s how the rice gets so creamy-good).

Nor does the prep require a lot of skill: It’s mostly chopping, peeling, or zesting, plus a fair amount of stirring, pan-frying, or sautéing. The recipe cards lay things out step by step, detailing the timing and order in which you should do each task. They also come with helpful tips, like “wet your hands before handling ground meat, to prevent sticking.” In fact, using HelloFresh can teach you a lot about cooking and creating dishes.

5 Things I’ve Learned From HelloFresh

• Roasted vegetables rule. HF recipes usually call for baking veggies (or occasionally sautéing) rather than boiling them, often with a sprinkling of oil or maple syrup on top. The crispy, caramelized result has made a convert out of this former hater of Brussels sprouts and broccoli.

• Don’t be scared of seasoning. When used properly — that is, adding a pinch before and after cooking an item — salt enhances flavor; it doesn’t overwhelm it. Same goes for other spices: pepper, chili flakes, and even sriracha.

• Chicken stock is a secret weapon. HF recipes often include a packet (about a tablespoon’s worth) of this liquid mix of chicken bones, vegetables, and herbs. The concentrated stuff instantaneously enriches anything you add it to.

• Grease skillets with oil, not butter. HF usually has you sauté or pan-fry things in oil — preferably olive oil. Reason: It has a higher burn temperature than butter, reducing the risk of scorching. It’s healthier, too.

• Starchy water is superior. When boiling potatoes or pasta, be sure to save about a half-cup of the water before draining the pot. If you have to add liquid to mashed potatoes or a sauce, the starch will intensify the flavor and thicken the dish, as opposed to diluting it. Also: Instead of dumping sauce over pasta, add the pasta to the sauce in a pan. It’ll get coated and absorb better.
  

What We Don’t Love About HelloFresh

Need to Set a Reminder

While HelloFresh alleviates a lot of planning, you do have to remember to choose your meals (you can do about a month’s worth at a time) unless you want the company to pick them for you. Also, to cancel the delivery at least five days in advance if you’ll be away or unable/unwilling to cook one week.

Cumbersome Website

In between their regular dinners, lunchtime options, and new ready-made meals, HelloFresh offers almost too many choices: I counted 80 options one week. If you’re looking to switch meals, you have to remove one of the scheduled ones and then add another. This results in a lot of tedious scrolling up and down and back and forth (on the website at least; some prompts make it easier to do on the mobile app).

While you can sort and filter meals in various ways — by prep time, calorie count, cuisine, dietary restrictions or preferences — the one thing you can’t do is filter by price. Premium meals, which cost extra ($6.99 and up), are lumped together with the standard ones, making them impossible to ignore. Of course, that’s done deliberately to entice you — if they were all in one section, you could easily skip them — but it’s not nice for people trying to stick to a budget. Also annoying: The site pushes a bunch of suggestions for extras (like dessert or bread) before it’ll let you finalize your order.

Skimpy Portions

Some people feel that the servings are small (though nutritionists would probably argue that they represent the recommended amounts of protein, carbs, etc., for a healthy diet). Actually, HelloFresh recently increased the portion sizes, probably in response to client demand: Meals total anywhere from 650 to 1100 calories. Still, if you’re a big eater, you’re often left wanting more. And of course, you’re out of luck if you love leftovers.

Service Glitches

Given how many meals HelloFresh ships, and how often, its performance is remarkably consistent. Deliveries arrive on the designated day at pretty much the same time. Occasionally, boxes arrive with missing or spoiled ingredients. If that happens, you get a partial refund for that meal — which is nice, but doesn’t help when you’re cooking that night. Also, the quality has sunk a bit of late: For example, we’ve noticed that vegetables have stopped coming pre-washed, and stems always need trimming.

Final Verdict on HelloFresh

Sadly, HelloFresh isn’t really practical for singles, who often have the hardest time avoiding waste, buying the right amount of fresh food, or practicing economies of scale. But if yours is a household of two or more, this meal kit delivery service can be highly convenient.

In terms of both economics and effort, HelloFresh offers a middle ground between full-bore meal making and eating prepared-by-others food. It does a lot of the grunt work — designing the recipes, assembling the ingredients — leaving the fun part, the actual cooking, to you. And it’s not onerous, either: 30 to 40 minutes out of your life, and dinner’s ready. As a bonus, you’ll learn a lot about cooking and recipes.

Yes, it costs more than buying groceries and cooking from scratch. But time is money, too. And the quality time my spouse and I have spent in the kitchen together, collaborating on HelloFresh’s creations? Priceless.