Thanks for the mention on alternate company. I’ll check this out!
This sounds like an opportunity for a high end grocery chain - pre-planned and packaged uncooked meals with returnable packaging, most of the advantages of Blue Apron, appeal to the concerns about environmental impact, and increase store traffic. Good choice if the store is already a Peapod partner.
They provide a calorie count, and because nearly everything is from scratch, you can enter the component parts.
Thanks!
I did a few meals from Plated back before they became a subscription service. I got a half-price deal so I got 2 meals for 2 servings each for $30. At that time, you could choose which meals you wanted and I had always wanted to try cooking a duck breast. If I had gone to the store and bought all of the spices and ingredients I would have spent easily 3-5x as much. Sure I would have some left, but I suspect it would have just gone bad.
I was really happy and would have ordered more but they went to subscription and I didn’t want to have the default being delivery and to have to cancel if I didn’t want something. Anyway, I learned a few techniques; I can now cook a duck breast and make a quick pickle so I consider it a win.
It’s largely a matter of cost vs. time. Are you willing to pay extra to have ingredients delivered to you instead of buying them for less at a market? If you take the time, you can simply buy all the ingredients you need in a weekly shopping trip, using countless recipes available online as a basis. This also lets you better customize your pending meals. These kinds of services won’t completely eliminate the occasional need to shop anyway, and they may include meals or ingredients you dislike.
In fact, these services post their weekly recipes online, so you don’t even have to pay or search for recipes if you want something new or are feeling unimaginative, and you can freely change things up anytime.
On the other hand, if the extra cost is worth more than your time and effort, then this service is a good fit for you.
Time is money, but everyone has a different exchange rate.
Semi-old thread but I didn’t want to start a new one so necromancy ho.
I’ve been using Home Chef for a few weeks/couple months now and I like the structure it imposes on me. For background, I’m a grad student living alone on a stipend (which isn’t exactly amazing money, but is decent for the cost of living around here).
It’s not the cheapest in that I theoretically could go to the store and make food for half the price, but there are several reasons it’s an incredibly good option for me:
[ul][li] Finding recipes can be fairly difficult. You have to filter out the billion only vaguely dissimilar chicken breast recipes, the recipes that are like 2000 calories, the ones that use out of season or foreign ingredients, the expensive ones, and so on (sometimes British recipes blindside you with variants of products like single cream which aren’t exact analogues to anything in the US).[/li][li] Assuming you find a recipe, surprisingly few only have one or two reasonably sized servings. I do not want 8 (or even 5) servings of most things I make. I need some variety.[/li][li] If I don’t have food around to cook, I can often spend hours looking for recipes and shopping. Or go get fast food.[/li][li] It can be rare to find full meal recipes, and doing the above 3 times in the pursuit of eating a balanced meal is even more awful, and there’s only so many unseasoned vegetables before they get old.[/li][li] I hate meal planning, I don’t think I’ve ever successfully planned a meal for the next day because I don’t know what I want to eat tomorrow yet! I’m not hungry, who knows what I’ll be in the mood for?[/li][/ul]
While that last one theoretically would be a problem with Home Chef, it’s not really that I won’t eat something if I happen to have it, just that I get paralyzed by indecision planning for it.
When it comes down to it, and my finances has shown I’m correct, is that Home Chef actually is a net savings for me. I spend less time and gas driving around to grocery stores trying to find obscure ingredients for this odd Korean dish. I don’t waste food, I don’t live off a diet composed of an annoying amount of Panera salads and the rarer chipotole or pizza. I get to eat relatively nutritionally balanced meals.
The fact that you can select from a few meals is also nice. Generally each week I aim to try an adventurous thing, a less healthy thing (though I usually don’t grab anything too unhealthy), and then fill out with relatively healthy dishes I’ll like (sometimes the adventurous and unhealthy one are the same).
I haven’t met anything I couldn’t stomach for two days yet, though one dish I did have to take my break day between the first and leftovers day (since I’m one person and I get 3 meals a week, I actually get 6 days of food from them since each meal serves 2, which leaves one off day where I need to plan my meal or satisfy some insane craving or whatever).
I don’t think it’s the right option for everyone, but not having to worry about and plan for food reduced a lot of my stress a lot. And again, while I theoretically I could spend less on food while having a balanced and healthy, in practice I have never managed to succeed at this, often spending more on unhealthy prepared food (the worst of both worlds).
We do Hello Fresh a couple of times a month. My work schedule is all over the board and my husband will only cook under protest; ergo, more often than not we’d started relying on takeout, which is never a good thing.
I echo a lot of the pros already mentioned. Some people don’t like the prep work involved. You chop a LOT of veggies with Hello Fresh. That doesn’t bother me, but it might bother somebody with arthritis or some other fine motor issue.
Cost? $69 for three meals for two people. If you break it down, it’s slightly less expensive than ordering takeout 3x/week or going out to eat. Heck, it’s even cut down my grocery bill – I rarely step into a supermarket those weeks we have it. That’s another thing: I love cooking but I don’t like meal planning. Hello Fresh takes that latter away from me.
You don’t have to order every week. Once you set up a subscription they give you a calendar display on your account page showing your delivery schedule. You have until a particular day/time the week before to pause the next week’s delivery. If you miss that deadline, they’ll automatically ship next week’s meals to you.
You can choose which meals you want. I don’t know about the other services, but Hello Fresh has a “no pork” option, for example, or a “no seafood” or “vegetarian only” along with a few others. They have upcoming menus on the site and you can pick and choose which dishes you want to try.
We chose Hello Fresh over Blue Apron because I’m a Jamie Oliver fan and he develops recipes for them. He’s big on nutrition and simplicity. Blue Apron, from what I gather, is more of a foodie type service with restaurant-type meals. At least that’s what a friend of mine said after trying it :shrug:
I have used Blue Apron off and on for a couple of years; have also tried Hello Fresh and PeachDish. I recently discontinued Blue Apron because lately I don’t have much time to do any cooking at all.
Advantages:
Minimizes time shopping. You still need to provide salt, pepper, and cooking oil, and stuff to round out the meal. (Most could use a side salad or extra vegetable) Still, it saves time to have the main ingredients provided for you.
New food items: I’d never heard of freekah before I subscribed to Blue Apron. I loved it! On the other hand, there’s quinoa. I don’t care how healthy it is, I’m not eating it again.
And that brings up a disadvantage: you sometimes get ingredients you don’t really care for. While there is some flexibility in meal choices, it’s often hard to avoid getting items you might find unpleasant.
PeachDish had some wonderful recipes, but they also included dessert items or candy in each box. For most people, that would be a nice extra; for me, though, as a weak-willed diabetic, it wasn’t much good.
I only tried Hello Fresh a couple of time; they were okay, but I thought their packaging was excessive. Might mention here that one big plus with Blue Apron is that they will take back the packaging that is not recyclable in your area.
Really?!? My Hello Fresh packaging minus the ice packs is as minimalist as you can get: There’s the cardboard box for each dish. The produce is minimally packaged. My one weak complaint would be that they sometimes provide too much seasoning or they give you a pantry item (albeit in a small quantity) I already have open.
We have a rather liberal mandatory recycling program in my town. What they won’t take goes into the trash. I’ve never heard of a company taking back packaging 
I’ve been using Blue Apron off and on for about three months. This month not at all- just seemed like nothing looked very good so waiting for the next month’s meals to show up in the schedule.
As others have mentioned, the best thing about it is introducing new meals. I work in a home office and my boss gets Blue Apron as well and she cooked us some Korean type dish with “rice cake” noodles which I’d never had before that were really good. The chilled chicken ramen (though in retrospect, it really didn’t need to be cold) had a umami type seasoning that was pretty great. It’s little touches like that that make it fun but for the most part, I can find most ingredients at my store so it’s just the novelty of new recipes and the lack of having to bring every thing together that is the plus.
I’ve had two disappointing meals- a cod dish that was just bad (so bad I skip all future cod dishes from them) and a lamb dish I was really looking forward to but the spices were very bitter. Otherwise, the rest of the meals have been very good.
Lastly, we get the 2 person deal and we are leftovers users so while I do appreciate the portion control, it means that I put a lot of effort into a meal that only covers one night. I have an hour each way commute and my husband doesn’t cook at all so I wouldn’t do Blue Apron on a weekly basis- it’s more for my own enjoyment of cooking but it does mean I have to commit to more cooking that I’d usually do.
I keep wanting to try a service like this, but the ship times are off for me. Every one I’ve looked at can ship to me on Wed/Thu/Fri (no Monday or Tuesday deliveries).
The thing is, I like to cook, and cooking on the weekends is a breeze. I want this kind of service for weeknight cooking, specifically Monday, Tuesday, and then either Wednesday or Thursday (I’ll either cook or we’ll go out one or two of those days).
So if I got a delivery on, say, Friday, would the stuff last until the following Monday or Tuesday?
I got a free week as a gift from someone.
Admittedly, I tend to be a pickier eater. The two recipes I made were not to my liking. With the third, the meat was not sealed properly, so I wasn’t going to eat that.
It absolutely isn’t worth the money if you’re not getting meat and/or fish. And it isn’t for people who don’t eat pretty much everything. But it is convenient.
It’s quite easy with Blue Apron. Use one of their shipping boxes, put in at least two weeks worth of packaging (cleaned and dried, if necessary), print a return label (found on site, when you print the label a notice is automatically sent to the post office), set the package on your front porch or next to mailbox, and it’s picked up next time your mail is delivered.
This was great for me, because this area has limited recycling of plastics. We have curbside bins for paper, cardboard, metals, glass, and yard and kitchen waste – which is great – but they only take certain types of plastics. So being able to send back stuff to Blue Apron meant I didn’t have to put these items in the trash.
they do have services now that cook the food for ya so all ya have to do is warm up and eat … heres a list … with prices and pros and cons
Thanks for posting that link, Nightshadea. I’m going to look into those “precooked” delivery services – those might come in handy, at least until I have time to start cooking for myself again.
My sister does Hello Fresh; it seems to be a lot of work and expensive but whatever suits her fancy. Basically if you’re used to eating “man sized” portions of pizza, burgers,and whatnot you won’t like it. Most of the meat is OK, but extremely lean and skimpy by what I’m used to (my sister retorts “that’s all you’re supposed to be eating”). The vegetable and pastas sides can range from good to bizarre, it seems to be less Americanized than what I’m used to. but the only dish I found completely inedible was the sweet and sour pork.
One thing these types of meals teach you IS portion control 
Don’t expect any kind of man-sized anything, no matter if it’s Hello Fresh or Blue Apron or whatever. One of my friends who did Blue Apron has a husband and two teenage boys…she’d order an additional 3-meal supplemental to make sure there was enough for everybody.
The British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is behind Hello Fresh. He develops recipes for them, which is why Hello Fresh has that “less Americanized” vibe. He’s also very big on nutrition; ergo, all the veggies.
That’s my problem with those services. I’ve looked at most of them (checked out their menus on their websites) but always run into the same thing: I’m not an adventurous eater. I like nice, simple food. If somebody ever came out with a service like this that did meat and potatoes, simple pastas, basic chicken dishes, etc. I’d be all over it. But too much of this gourmet stuff doesn’t appeal to me, the spouse, or both.
I did blue apron last year. I really enjoyed it when I still worked night shifts. It minimized my time going shopping. I enjoy picking out my own recipes on pinterest and other baking sites that I haven’t used it in awhile.
I used the vegan option.