Since this is food related I suppose this could go to Cafe Society, but I’m really looking for opinions, gotchas, and information so I’ll put it here.
My wife and I are coming through a period where, for a variety of reasons, we’ve gained some weight and have busy lives. In an effort to make some improvements in our lives we’re looking at meal subscription services (Hello Fresh, Factor, Tempo) for a handful of meals each week. I think we’d start with the minimum meals/week since I view this as a suplement to our normal cooking.
The food is much more expensive than at the supermarket so I suggest you see what your supermarkets have. The exception is the trial periods where they offer deals.
We got my son a Blue Apron subscription as a Christmas present after reviewing several of the most readily available ones. Taste was our top criteria, followed by nutrition, and Blue Apron came out the best on those two aspects out of the major brands we looked at. (We also asked if he preferred doing some prep himself or wanted ready-to-go. He choose the former, because he knows he needs to learn his way around a kitchen.)
I say “major” because I also read in business news somewhere that the meal subscription service industry is doing poorly, and there is some chance that one or more of them will tank. I can’t recall what else I read that made me feel comfortable with giving it a try, but anyhow it’s been a few months since Christmas so you might look for an update on that before signing up for anything.
As to Blue Apron - my son has loved it! He’s been putting on weight since starting grad school, due to a combination of lack of exercise and buying junk like frozen burritos for dinner. Whether he’s lost weight I don’t know, but it has made him enthusiastic about venturing into the kitchen more, and he often sends photos of the food he cooked, which I can see is much healthier than what he was living on before. Ninety percent of the time he thinks it is delicious.
My only negative observation is that BA sure seems to go heavy on carrots. That makes some sense, as carrots will keep well in transit. But I think I’d get a little tired of carrots after a while.
The gift lasted for about three months and now his birthday is coming. We suggested several possible gifts, including another round of Blue Apron, and that was his choice. Given that he was starting from a base of not liking cooking at all, and not eating much in the way of vegetables, I think this is a pretty strong endorsement.
We subscribed to Sun Basket (three dinners a week) for a few years. You pick which meals you want based on food preferences, restrictions, and intolerances. The ingredients required a lot of prep which was aggravating at first but eventually became satisfying cooking lessons. Best of all, we knew exactly what went into our food. After collecting a few hundred of the recipe/prep/ingredient cards we just started buying the ingredients ourselves using the skills we learned.
That’s what I want to do, but without them shipping me any food. I’m single and retired, and I don’t mind shopping or doing the prep, however I’m on a strict low carb diet and finding suitable recipes that are easy to make and won’t break the bank isn’t easy. If I could find a website with the kind of recipes I need/want I would be happy, but I haven’t yet. I’d even be willing to pay for them so I get new ones every once in a while.
We tried a couple and landed on Home Cook as the most delicious.
Their pre-made stuff, from them and other companies, was tasteless mush. My brother has been getting Factor and he said that was also mostly flavorless mush.
The Home Cook meals were genuinely pretty tasty, fairly consistently. They also end up teaching you both some basic cooking techniques (e.g. how to make a pan sauce) for creating delicious stuff and cheats for making food quickly (e.g. building a pizza on top of a pre-made naan).
For us, that was also their undoing. If I know how to cook and I know the secret tricks of how to make meals quickly, then why have the service? But you do still have to sign up and do the apprenticeship to get to that point.
We got a gift cert for a local meal service for Xmas. The whole place, its web site, etc. is run confusingly. We eventually spent most of the cert but are unable to use the final part since it’s under their minimum. No, we’re not going to use it anymore. Not worth the trouble, certainly not worth the price, and the food isn’t that great.
I made stir fry teriyaki with (fake) crab last night. MrsFtG is plenty happy with stuff like that.
I did both Blue Apron and Home Chef, and Home Chef, at the time Home Chef had more options, so that is what we have gone with. I have cancelled and then re-subscribed because they often offer a discounted price for the x-number of meals once you do. I can’t remember how much time passed before they sent the email with the discounted price.
Depending on where you live, the Wegman’s grocery store might be an alternative to consider. They have prepared meals for sale that they make daily, I don’t know if they have any kind of subscription service though.
Yeah, Wegmans is just a few minutes from the house. Except for getting over there in a timely manner, that’s probably going to end up being a better deal. I hope that they will keep for a few days.