Are Meal Kit Deliveries The Right Choice For You? {guest post}

December 5, 2017  •  Informational

I’ve long been wondering about meal kits and whether they make sense or not, so when Mark from reviewing this.com offered to share his experience with a guest post, I said yes. His review covers primarily Home Chef, but you can link to other reviews in the post. You know I’d rather we all get into the kitchen and cook, but sometimes that just isn’t possible!

Meal kit delivery sounds like the sort of thing that our moms and grandmas would be horrified by, but in increasingly busy times, where people are commuting longer hours than ever, the less time spent worrying about delicious and nutritious meals the better.

If you’re living in a big city, with a local supermarket on every other block, and every deli carrying some fresh food, it’s not difficult to stop and pick up ingredients for a great recipe on the way home from work. But when I have to take the time to find a recipe, and then dispose of unused ingredients, well, it’s a less positive spin on cooking.

That’s one of my own frustrations with home cooking. Food waste is a very American thing: 40% of food in the United States gets wasted. Any waste is bad, but waste that could be used to help others who might be in difficulty? That’s just unconscionable.

There are any number of meal kit delivery services around. Blue Apron is probably the best known of these, but they’re also best known for being a company in a lot of trouble these days. Don’t let the poor image of one company put you off the concept though!

Home Chef is one of the most prominent alternatives as you’ll learn in this home chef review, vying for some of that meal kit delivery market share. Let’s take a closer look at what’s offered.

The solution

Home Chef tackles my issues concerning buying ingredients to prepare freshly cooked meals, by simply providing the right amount of ingredients for the recipe they’re sending me. It’s literally impossible to waste food this way, and that instantly makes me feel better.

Another great thing about Home Chef is I know how much room to keep for a food delivery, which is good to know if you live in an apartment.

Essentially, as you read through the details of their offering, you’ll see a lot of reasons why this type of service is a pretty great idea.

Getting started

Home Chef might come across as a little aggressive in their marketing/sales pitch to prospective customers. To them, that means giving $30 off your first order – just for signing up! That’s not too shabby! On the off chance that’s not enough to entice you, as you go through the registration process, they’ll throw in a further $10 discount, just to make sure you don’t abandon that cart.

Once you process all of these discounts, and see how cheap your first order will be, you get to a pretty important part of the sign-up journey: what kind of food you want. That’s actually a little inaccurate: it’s more about the food you don’t want, so you tell them to exclude fish or mushrooms or whatever. They want to know what kinds of recipes to suggest to you, so won’t suggest things you don’t want to eat.

Beyond that, it’s a pretty standard eCommerce site. If you’ve bought and paid for anything online before, you’ve got this.

Pricing

All that’s been written so far has been pleasant, but by now, you’re probably wondering how much a service like this will actually cost you, so let’s break it down.

Home Chef will charge you per delivery, so when you’re setting up your account, you decided how often you’ll receive one, and how many servings you need in that delivery. I think that’s a fair way of pricing things, and I can’t really think of a better way of doing it. In fact, the vast majority of meal kit services work in a similar fashion. As you’ll find in similar sun basket reviews, each meal will run you around $11 per serving. In addition, nearly all of these companies offer you a promo code for your first order, so it’s savvy to pick up a sun basket promo code in this instance.

I still haven’t mentioned an actual number for the cost, because I just want to make clear before I do so that it’s not a straightforward question, and there are a few variables that will affect the cost. I can only relate to what I did.

You can order three meals per week, with two servings per meal, to be delivered on Tuesdays. With the $30 and $10 discounts from signing up, it works out to $19.70, while the ordinary cost will be $59.70.

That means that regular pricing works out to about $10 per meal. I think that’s a reasonable price for what you get.

Conclusion

Apart from reducing food waste, the sustainable packaging of Home Chef is something that appeals to me, so overall, there are a lot of wins for me in this kind of service. I’d recommend taking a look at their recipes, and at least taking advantage of their introductory offers.

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