You may have heard about Hello Fresh, one of the many new food delivery kits that are increasing in popularity these days. I first heard about Hello Fresh from a couple whose YouTube channel I follow. They have shared numerous videos of them cooking their Hello Fresh meals and they looked pretty good. A friend of mine has been using Hello Fresh for a while and sent me a coupon for a free box, so I decided to try it out.
I chose a box for two people over a family box, and we selected the option that allowed for any kind of meat. You can choose vegetarian, meat, or request that your box not include beef, or not include pork. In hindsight, I should have chosen the vegetarian box because the recipes looked better. Each box contains three meals and you can schedule the day you'd like your box to be delivered.
The box was delivered and it was huge! And pretty heavy! They have a ton of ice packs in there of course to keep everything refrigerated. Our box included a stuffed pepper recipe (with turkey), a spicy cumin steak recipe, and a lemon pan seared chicken recipe, which is the first one I cooked.
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Each meal comes in a box like the one pictured above, with a recipe card showing you the ingredients, what the meal should look like, and then it has the instructions (with pictures) on the back.
The picture below shows the opened box with all the ingredients, and the back of the recipe card showing step by step instructions and pictures of how to cook the meal. All of the food in the box was still cold, none of the produce was moldy or anything, and the chicken was vacuum sealed and had a use by date of months down the line.
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This recipe was pretty straight forward and easy to make, the instructions were easy to follow and the pictures helped. The only issue I have with the instructions is that it underestimated the cooking and prep time.
And here is the final result in the picture below. My lemon pan seared chicken recipe against their version pictured underneath. The food tasted really good, I was pleasantly surprised! I figured with how much this service costs the provider, the food may be low quality but it didn't seem to be.
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We tried the other two meals but they were not a hit. Jon and I aren't huge fans of spicy food so we ditched the cumin spice on the steak meal and it was very bland and boring. The rest of the meal was more effort than it was worth. The turkey stuffed peppers were decent, but I have recipes that are far quicker and easier to make.
I would not pay to use Hello Fresh for several reasons. First, you can't choose what you want to eat, you just get what you're given and for us we only liked 1 of the 3 meals we were sent. You can look ahead of time at what the meals will be (up to about 2-3 weeks ahead) and pause your delivery until a week where you want those recipes, but at that point it seems like the same amount of effort to just plan your own meals and buy the ingredients.
I have no issue going to the store and buying what I need, I actually enjoy that most of the time, my problem is knowing what to cook in the first place. Hello Fresh has their recipes online so you could just download them and do it yourself by buying your own food. The service is really for people who don't know what to cook and don't want to go to the grocery store, and there's a high price for being that lazy. Three boxes will cost you $60 and here in Oklahoma, we could eat out three times at Chili's or Logan's (two entrees plus an appetizer) for that same amount of money, which I would much prefer to do because I know I'll love the food. Therefore, Hello Fresh was not a hit with me.
Give me better meal options and reduce the price, and I would go for it.
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