Over the past month, we have tried several meal delivery services to test them out and see how we feel about them. I wanted to share these thoughts with you!
For this and our overall rating, we looked at the following categories:
- Overall cost (incl. shipping)
- Actual serving sizes
- Taste
- Ease
- Variety
- Packaging
- Other
Below are our notes on each category. If you want to skip ahead to go to overall rating, go forth and scroll on down!
Overall Cost
All delivery services seem to tout their price per meal but unfortunately those don't include the shipping cost so, it can be a bit different. For instance, EveryPlate says $4.99 per meal but, with shipping it's actually $6.49. That being said, at an overall cost for 3 meals @ 2 people, EveryPlate still landed at $38.93 with shipping, roughly $20 behind HomeChef and HelloFresh at $59.70 and 60.93 respectively and BlueApron and SunBasket both landing in the $70 range.
For us, EveryPlate won the most bang for our buck here.
Actual Serving Sizes
For most meals, we got 3 meals @ 2 servings but for BlueApron we tried 2 meals @ 4 servings and Home Chef 2 meals @ 2 servings. Regardless, they all provided extremely solid portions (except for the oven-ready meal from SunBasket that was simply not enough!). They were full meals and true to them. For Hello Fresh and EveryPlate, we even occasionally had leftovers.
For us, both Every Plate and Hello Fresh won this, giving us full serving sizes (and the leftovers were a plus).
Taste
Now this certainly comes down to the variety and the meals we chose. There were some winners within all of the boxes, including the Italian Noodle Soup from HelloFresh, the oven-ready szechuan noodles from SunBasket, the chicken pita from BlueApron, the stuffed peppers from EveryPlate.
But, the clear winner for taste was HomeChef. The szechuan noodle bowl took 20 minutes and was easy and delicious with crunchy wonton noodles on top and the jalapeño popper burgers were easily swapped out for turkey instead of beef and were absolutely delicious.
Ease
All the recipe pages have a bit of nuance to them on how they are laid out. Some have the ingredients you'll need from your pantry listed, some even have the utensils you'll need listed too, and some require far too many bowls. All of them were not too difficult to do - definitely some easier than others.
I'd say the winner was a tie between HelloFresh and HomeChef. These were extremely easy and laid out. Each recipe clearly listed the steps out with the things needed and did a step by step without treating the chef like they knew nothing in the kitchen.
Variety
Similar to taste, I think this truly came down to the meals we chose. If you are a vegetarian, I will say there is less variety among EveryPlate whereas HomeChef really allowed me to customize this based on my eating habits (e.g. swapping beef for turkey in the burgers). Additionally if you are specific to organic foods, then SunBasket may be better for you. Overall, I'd say that they all have a lot of variety, it just depends what kind of food you'd like to cook, what you can eat, and what you typically cook based on this.
For us, EveryPlate and HomeChef tied giving us some changes to what we typically cook and tools for what we can now cook very easily.
Packaging
We hate when there is so much plastic and unnecessary packaging. BlueApron used so much plastic, having everything individually wrapped and precisely measured. Other companies (e.g. HelloFresh and HomeChef) wrapped the meals together, which was nice but perhaps unnecessary. Luckily HelloFresh used paper bags for them while HomeChef used a plastic one. The HomeChef bag though we used to discard meat juice and any other trash trying to make good use of the plastic.
SunBasket was great for minimal waste however, their packaging is only recyclable where denim can be recycled and while that may be possible regularly. In a pandemic, where do I go?
Ultimately though if you are looking for minimal waste and ease of discard, EveryPlate is the place to go. All the vegetables and ingredients are given in a small cardboard box that can easily slide in your fridge to keep it separated for those meals (so you don't accidentally use a pepper for something else) while also not giving you plastic upon plastic to open.
Other
We all love a nebulous "other" category. This elaborates on deliveries, when it was delivered, and any other fun things to note about these.
EveryPlate is typically delivered on Tuesdays and late in the day. Though the prep and cook times are accurate, it seems like it would be difficult to try and plan to cook this on the day it was delivered as it was like 8pm. Not many options for vegetarians but, overall, easy and you got your moneys worth.
Hello Fresh could be delivered any day, around7pm. There are more complex recipes than EveryPlate (for better or for worse) and everything was packaged in a more individual bag so if you wanted to bring something over to a friends, you could grab the bag and go.
BlueApron was pretty much the only "no" for us. Lots of plastic and the meals were not intuitive to follow. It felt as though we were doing one thing when we could've done another. Though BlueApron wasn't right for us, I think it would be helpful to someone just getting into cooking.
SunBasket is the only organic produce meal delivery service I've seen. These are unique meals that incorporate new ingredients that I would typically not have other wise (e.g. arrowroot powder). These were a bit fiddly recipes that honestly, ended up being totally fine but not mind blowing or something I was excited to make again (or really can easily, without going to an organic market to find arrowroot powder).
HomeChef had some great variety and allows a lot of customizations which is nice. It charges you per meal and shipping is free over $40 so, if you end up getting 1 meal/2 people or 2 meal/2 people, it changes based on that instead of an overall cost (which is good and bad). But, for people with dietary restrictions the customizations can be nice. Also it's very easy to get the recipes out as they are all in plastic bags separately. Additionally as a fun bonus they gave us a binder for recipes that we are now using and all the recipes have 3 hole punch so it's easy to keep them all around.
Overall, it was nice to try all of these and we will be getting them in the future for sure but, I think we will just stick to one or two of these instead of all five again. Also, if you can get free trials from folks, do. They get a benefit and you get the benefit of trying them though, if you can't, there are many discount codes online to find!
Below were our final ratings.
1st - EveryPlate
2nd - Home Chef
3rd - Hello Fresh
4th - Sun Basket
5th - Blue Apron
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