Does anyone do the Hello Fresh service? Is it worth it and do you find that its's more or less expensive than putting your own meals together? I'd love to hear some thoughts on it.

Thanks

I said do it.

We signed up for it because AMEX was offering a promo and we got $50 off 3 or 4 times. We more or less enjoyed the meals, but if you are any decent at cooking and perusing recipe books to find what you like to not be cooking the same things every week, it's not worth it IMO. We are still enrolled in it but we basically opt out every shipment. Since our Amex offer, we've only gotten it another two times. One was because my wife forgot to opt out and the other was because we were pretty busy that week and wanted some easy meals.

I'd say it's easily double just grocery shopping yourself and putting together your own meals. The variety is nice but not enough to justify the upcharge nor was it anything really out there that we would never think of making ourselves and realized we've been missing out with getting it.

It somewhat cuts back on your prep time because everything is already portioned out, but you're going to spend just as much time chopping and cooking.

I did Sun Fresh for a few weeks and got bored with it. My biggest complaint for all these companies is that they think families only come in even numbers.

Their meals are really hit or miss and the selection sometimes isn't great.

It's cheaper to just buy everything yourself. They have all of their recipes listed on their website. Just go on there, find what looks good, then make a grocery list based on that.

My wife gave my contact info when we tried HF several years ago.

I finally had to drop F bombs to get them to stop calling to get us to sign up again.

I tried a couple of boxes from Hello Fresh and it was ok. I liked the variety and the food was generally good but I didn't think it was a good value for what you got.

I like eMeals. The recipes integrate with H-E-B curbside so I can push what I need over. The meals aren't particularly memorable but they are good for weeknight cooking.

I mean those box services got me into cooking so I am not gonna complain

Silly question……Are they geared mainly as meals for 2? The Wife and I are 60, and simply don't eat as much as we used to, and with her retiring, leftovers are not as big a need.

B-1 83 said:

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Silly question……Are they geared mainly as meals for 2? The Wife and I are 60, and simply don't eat as much as we used to, and with her retiring, leftovers are not as big a need.

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Yes you order effectively a 3-5 meals and each is two servings. As a single guy when I did it 3 meals really meant 6 for me

We've been doing it for over a year now.

Is it cheaper than buying your own ingredients and putting meals together? No. Of course not. If I had the time or desire to do that, I would be doing it.

What we like is that we get good variety and try things we otherwise wouldn't. Also it forces us to cook 3-4 nights a week instead of going out, so in that way it saves us money.

The other thing is we weren't very good at meal planning and ended up wasting a lot of food. That has improved a ton with hellofresh.

So, in summary, it's worked well for our family. I would recommend you try it for a few months and see what you think.

We enjoy it. I have decent cooking skills and instincts, my gf is less experienced. Here's why we like it:

• It tastes good. I can only remember maybe 2 meals that I thought were bad
• We don't waste food. I know it's more expensive than precise meal planning, but when you factor in how much food we were wasting by only using a little of this and half of that, or forgetting about the salad we bought and just throwing it away 2 weeks later, I think it actually saves us money.
• It eliminates the "what do you want to cook/what do you want to eat" conversation
• We order out less. When you are tired or hungry and you have some random ingredients to throw together, we are much more apt to order out than come up with something. When you have a packaged and prepared recipe card sitting in the fridge, its much easier to just spend the 30-45 mins cooking and then eat something "home cooked".

We switch on/off sporadically now but we really like it when we do it.

I'm a big Hello Fresh fan. It's not the cheapest option nor always the absolute best ingredients but it's worth it for the convenience and variety.

My wife is vegetarian so i just add on my own whatever meat I feel like but often they vegetarian meals are great and I don't even feel like cooking up a chicken breast with it.

It can feel like they use the same base ingredients over but the variety is certainly there. They create enough variety to where we rarely have the same meal more than once every 3-4 months.

But really what you're paying for is the convenience. I think the veggie meals average out to around $7.50 - $8.00 a meal. Add in some chicken and that's still cheaper than most fast food meals much less going out.

Yes we could make it cheaper on our own but there is no waste and it is a fairly healthy 30 min meal with no stress. Makes our grocery shopping easier.

I say try it.

I've tried several of the meal kits. I would put a vote in for Blue Apron as my favorite.

aggie_wes said:

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We've been doing it for over a year now.

Is it cheaper than buying your own ingredients and putting meals together? No. Of course not. If I had the time or desire to do that, I would be doing it.

What we like is that we get good variety and try things we otherwise wouldn't.Also it forces us to cook 3-4 nights a week instead of going out, so in that way it saves us money.

The other thing is we weren't very good at meal planning and ended up wasting a lot of food. That has improved a ton with hellofresh.

So, in summary, it's worked well for our family. I would recommend you try it for a few months and see what you think.

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We used it for a while until my wife learned she needed to cut out gluten.

The bolded parts are what we liked too. It actually did save us money because we both work so we hated fighting the grocery store a couple of nights a week after work. The easiest option would have been to eat out/take out so... It's pretty nice knowing you can leave work and go straight home and you don't have to expend any energy/thought on what's for dinner.

It also does a good job of portions and no waste.

We're three weeks into it.

Much the same experiences as already posted.

All of the meals are good, a few really great (Mu Shu Pork) we loved.

Cost is irrelevant. As mentioned we eat out less. When we factor in waste, it's only a little more expensive than buying our own groceries, and that difference falls into the "inconsequential" category for us.

At our ages, two meals is at least three and a couple times four.

Using the bag for trash/waste it's quick, easy and minimal clean up.

All this being said it's probably something we'll do for awhile and then stop. Will keep all the recipe cards to make when we want to.

I find it fun.