HelloFresh

I have been using Hello Fresh for a month now so that is 3 meals for 4 weeks which is 12 in total so I think that is enough experience to write a review.

My main complaint is 2 times my meals was missing 1 ingredient. Sour cream in 1 and cheese in the other. Quality control really needs to double check the boxes. Good thing I had them on hand or I would have been more angry. This is the main reason for my lower score.

I also think they should cut down on all the chopping and other prep things you need to do. I am looking for a good nutritious home cooked meal that doesn't take to long to prep or use to many dishes. Some of the meals are definitely not a time saver after you include all the washing of the pots and bowls you have to use. 

I really wanted to like meal kits and Hello Fresh... now I am not so sure I do.

I tried Hello Fresh for over a month. The meals from the box are really good and taste great. The ingredients are fresh and the recipe cards are perfect for my beginner level of cooking.

 

I was worried about the waste of the packages the meal kits come in but Hello Fresh has made almost everything recyclable. With services like this you are always going to have more waste than buying food from the grocery store but I was pleasantly surprised how little there is.

 

The one thing I didn't like was being tied to a subscription. Our family has a pretty busy life and I don't always want or need the meal kits every week. In fact it would be good maybe twice a month. The problem is I have to remember to log into the website to cancel every week. I much rather specify what weeks I want the meal kits.

The family meal box says it is for a family 4 which is 2 adults and 2 kids. The portions are fine for the adults but the portions for the kids are really small, especially the meat. Apparently each adult according to customer service should get 150g of meat, I am not sure what the kids get but from the 450g to 500g I get of meat, 300 is suppose to be for the adults so that leaves 150g to 200g for the kids. This is fine for really small kids but I have kids who are 9 and 12 and they are still hungry after dinner.

So if your kids are 8 or older you may need to skip the cheaper family plan and go fro the Classic Plan for 4 people. On the family plan they really should specify how old the kids should be if a family is considering going on the plan.

After seeing advertising all over the place I decided to give a meal delivery service a try. In the end I choose Hello Fresh over Blue Apron since Hello Fresh has been in the meal business for much longer, almost a decade. 

Overall I rate the experience as average. I used the service for over 4 months and have since canceled it. I may try it again but would probably choose another company to try out. I like the idea but I found Hello Fresh not as fresh (ironically) as I would like. I am a vegetarian so I am not sure about the meals with beef or chicken. 

The reason I used it for so long is that I did enjoy the recipes and the different vegetarian meals they came up with. My meal boxes always came on time I am just not sure why the vegetables were as fresh as a regular grocery store. Is it the product Hello Fresh has at their warehouses? Is it the shipping? Is it the packaging not keeping things as cold? I don't think it is the packaging as things came cold esipecially in the fall and winter months here in New York.

I hope my review helps someone out.

I used Hello Fresh for a while and I did enjoy it at first but I slowly found the number of meals they offer every week to be not enough selection for me. Their recipes and ingredients are really good but I wanted more selection as I always don't feel like chicken all the time. 

I really like the idea of these weekly boxed meal services so I ended up switching to Home Chef which has more weekly meal selections and is just as tasty as Hello Fresh is. Hello Fresh is by no means a bad service they just need to offer more recipe selections.