Home Meal Delivery Services
- Thread starter Acylum
- Start date
I figured I'd bump this thread to get updates on recommendations on meal delivery services. My fiancée and I are interested in simplifying our meal planning. We both are decent cooks, but are in a bit of a rut with recipes. She has gluten and nut allergies, I will eat pretty much anything and everything. Any recommendations?
Bumping this. Any updates on favorite meal delivery services? We PREFER to eat at home but we're terrible about stocking up on groceries. Thinking about trying meal delivery just a couple days a week. Also might sign my kids up, who room together at college and maybe a couple meals a week they actually won't waste their money on Door Dash.
I'd really like to do something like this. Like the previous poster, we've hit a rut in dinner choices and seem to rotate about the same 5 things. Not sure if we need a food delivery service or some sort of recipe idea program.
We have done Home Chef and Factor. Nothing wrong with either, but got monotonous. We dropped them and are doing Daily Harvest now. We can recommend Daily Harvest, but they are not complete meals with a protein. Very good for breakfast (smoothies) and lunch (bowls/soups/baked meals). Organic and low cal.
I like Hello Fresh. I don't remember having anything that I didn't like, and have saved several recipes to make myself later. I usually shut it off in weeks where I know I'm going to be busy or traveling, and then turn it back on. Funny thing is that if you shut it off they'll send you an offer to send you like 16-free meals to start back up.
In the past, I've done Blue Apron and Hello Fresh. Of the two, I liked Hello Fresh better. I will say that I haven't done one of these in a while though, probably 2 years since I've subscribed to one.
We just take recipes from https://www.hellofresh.com/recipes and use our own ingredients now, lots of good recipes that are pretty simple to make, but varies the choices enough.
Occasionally you'll find a recipe with some weird ingredient you can't find in the store, but if you google it you can usually find a replacement.
Occasionally you'll find a recipe with some weird ingredient you can't find in the store, but if you google it you can usually find a replacement.
Become like school lunches and make a schedule. Figure out what you want for the week and then you can go once a week to the store and together that night or morning, make 3-5 meals for the week and freeze them for a quick make that day. Then it's just hitting the store to grab fresh produce or things.
If you schedule it out, you can call or online shop small town to large town grocery stores and they will either deliver it to you or have it ready for you just to drive through and pick it up. After you have done this for a month or so, you have your basic go to's and then create and try something new each week that you either say stinks or you put that into your rotation. Honestly you can get through about 4 weeks and not repeat any meal if you don't want to.
We had to cancel Hello Fresh. We had consistent problems with meat packages leaking and getting meat juice on produce. While getting a refund was easy, you didn’t have a meal. Seems to be a common problem with Hello Fresh of meat thawing and leaking.
Freaking meat juice…am I right?
*my wife and I also ordered meal size of four people so we had leftovers. Something to consider.
Freaking meat juice…am I right?
*my wife and I also ordered meal size of four people so we had leftovers. Something to consider.
I've tried Plated and Home Chef. Both are little pricey compared to home cooked meal per serving, but it's a nice replacement for not having to go out to enjoy some new food. Quality depends on how well you cook it but the recipes themselves are pretty interesting. It seemed fairly flexible and we could skip weeks if we didn't want to. I can't speak to all subscriptions, but the customer service for Plated was very good to work with when we had an issue with delivery, which wasn't their fault, but Plated no longer does the meal delivery after the sale to Albertson's.
We stopped after few month of Plated and maybe a few weeks of trial for Home chef, but we've saved the recipe cards we liked got so we could just make it from scratch for cheaper. The main difficulty about doing that, though, is everything in the meal kit is pre measured in special sized cans or packets, so if you plan on doing that it might be worth documenting those. It also seemed like both had few sets of recipes they recycled often, so if you're hoping to try various different recipes, it might be worth hopping around to various options and check out different recipes with their new customer discount deals that always exist.
We stopped after few month of Plated and maybe a few weeks of trial for Home chef, but we've saved the recipe cards we liked got so we could just make it from scratch for cheaper. The main difficulty about doing that, though, is everything in the meal kit is pre measured in special sized cans or packets, so if you plan on doing that it might be worth documenting those. It also seemed like both had few sets of recipes they recycled often, so if you're hoping to try various different recipes, it might be worth hopping around to various options and check out different recipes with their new customer discount deals that always exist.
Schwan's has been selling home delivery meals for decades. While spendy, they are still less expensive than Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, and all these other home delivery outfits just now joining the party.
Schwans is pretty much all frozen and/or already cooked, right? Hello Fresh is fresh ingredients that you use to make recipes from scratch (essentially). Doesn't really seem like an apples to apples comparison.
And I'm not sure how much Schwan's stuff costs, but you almost have to try to pay full price for Hello Fresh. Our last order cost $60 for 3 meals at 4 servings each. The couple orders before that were $51 each, must have had better promos. We don't use them consistently, but will get a couple weeks each quarter or so.
So you believe Hello Fresh buys all of their meat and produce in a fresh state?
It's a free market, but what you're paying for is portion control package food sold as fresh, with a fancy enclosed recipe. Like Schwan's, their selling convenience, but with a steeper up charge.
Used to do Hello Fresh, all the meals were good, but it was expensive.
I've started using the https://www.eatthismuch.com/ to do my meal planning. It is pretty self explanatory, you input what type of diet(calories, macros, and any food restrictions) you'd like to eat and how many meals per day. It generates meal planing for every day and then I can import the groceries I need directly to instantcart. I just show up at the grocery store and everything I need is for that week is there. It has saved me a ton of time and money, and has some good recipes so far. It doesn't always do a good job tracking the actual number of each ingredient you need so i do have to make some manual adjustments after the groceries are imported into instantcart.
I've started using the https://www.eatthismuch.com/ to do my meal planning. It is pretty self explanatory, you input what type of diet(calories, macros, and any food restrictions) you'd like to eat and how many meals per day. It generates meal planing for every day and then I can import the groceries I need directly to instantcart. I just show up at the grocery store and everything I need is for that week is there. It has saved me a ton of time and money, and has some good recipes so far. It doesn't always do a good job tracking the actual number of each ingredient you need so i do have to make some manual adjustments after the groceries are imported into instantcart.
