Food delivery services

2baninja

Has anyone tried food delivery services? Not the ones for weight loss, but like Home Chef, Hellofresh, ect. What did you try, how do you like it? I'm not a cook, not into really trying to learn. But this sounds like a way to broaden my taste buds without buying a bunch of food, and spices.

callsitlikeiseeit

my best friend does hello fresh for her family every now and then. they really enjoy it for something different.

quite a few recipes she has kept the cards for and added into her rotation of stuff she makes regularly

nvpixie

I'm currently using Dinnerly. I like it the best of all I've tried so far. I've used Every Plate, but I found that a lot of their recipes were high calorie. Hungryroot was okay, but I got bored with the meals easily. There was a lot of repetition and they were a bit expensive compared to others.

Mouse_Potato

We use Hello Fresh. They are a bit pricey and not terribly reliable, but we've learned a few new cooking techniques and added several recipes to our rotation. A note of caution: Don't add salt after the first instruction to do so. Somebody over there looooooooves the sodium!

Deviette

We use gusto for a couple of meals a week. It's nice to not have to plan some meals and we use it as more of a "instead of a takeaway" and it's really reduced the amount of takeaways we've been eating since we got it. We tend to go for meals that we wouldn't normally make otherwise as when we started we had a mix of the kind of stuff that we'd normally cook and it felt a little pointless. I would say it's reasonably expensive for what it actually is, but if you're not interested in planning and cooking meals, it is a nice and easy way of making it much more bearable and try a bunch of meals you wouldn't normally try.

2baninja

Mouse_Potato wrote: »

We use Hello Fresh. They are a bit pricey and not terribly reliable, but we've learned a few new cooking techniques and added several recipes to our rotation. A note of caution: Don't add salt after the first instruction to do so. Somebody over there looooooooves the sodium!

well that will be easy, I don't even have salt in my house....

2baninja

great, thanks everyone

HoneyBadger302

I used Factor for quite awhile and really liked it. I also had tried Freshly, which was okay, but I preferred Factor. Neither was particularly cheap on a per-meal basis, but added variety and was great to have meals I could grab and go with. My friend did Hello Fresh for awhile, and she liked it as long as she actually cooked everything before it went bad.

I have gotten, and still do, a Misfits box (not every week, but regularly when I'm cooking) - adds some veggie and fruit variety to my meals vs what I'd probably grab at the store. The issue is, not all areas are the same for their boxes - my area seems great, the veggies last a long time, and almost everything was fresh and good to go. My mom, in another state however, was not so lucky and regularly got food that was already rotting and really small portions. She always got refunded easily enough, but the headache just eventually wasn't worth it for her since she almost never got a box that was all good.

WailingDusk

I tried HelloFresh (got about 5 free meals for sign up) and was underwhelmed with the choices for my particular diet. I'm ovo-vegetarian, and so much of their vegetarian meals have dairy or are just really calorie dense. I found 2 things that I could eat, but I still felt like their vegetarian options were too heavy.

COGypsy

I've been using Splendid Spoon for a few months. Vegetarian, but sometimes I add meat for a protein boost. Good variety and you can't beat two minutes in the microwave for meal prep! I hate cooking and something like Hello Fresh would rot in my fridge like every other ingredient I buy, so I've found the ready made meals to be more satisfying than TV dinners and less calorific than takeout.

nvpixie

I would like to try Splendid Spoon but they don't have a lunch-only option and their only breakfast options are smoothies, which I don't really like. Their meals otherwise look very good.

COGypsy

nvpixie wrote: »

I would like to try Splendid Spoon but they don't have a lunch-only option and their only breakfast options are smoothies, which I don't really like. Their meals otherwise look very good.

I mainly use them for lunches too and just zap some combination of frozen meat and veg for dinners. I usually get the 5 soup/grain bowls and 5 noodle bowls. They easily keep for a couple of weeks, so using them over that period of time hasn't been a problem. I'm back to commuting a few times a week so I'm giving the smoothies another shot since I can drink them on the drive in, but I suspect I'll still want at least some small snack or something once I get to the office.

2baninja

This is great, I'm hearing options I've never heard of before. I'm keeping a running tally.....

westrich20940

My roommate has used all sorts of these meal kit things - unfortunately I don't necessarily remember which brands were which. I know the Factor ones she got bc she had a coupon and said she'd never buy them without a coupon/deal bc they are expensive. But I had some of them and they were good. Sometimes she has too many and tells me I can eat them.

She had one brand that she gave to me bc the meals had more calories than she wanted but they worked for me personally.

I will say that most of them that she gets are really simple to make and it's nice if you don't want to buy a bunch of spices that you don't think you'll use. It's also nice bc they come with recipes and if you want to make the meal again, you can buy the ingredients on your own. Like one of the meals was ground pork burgers (which seems simple but I'd NEVER thought about making burgers with pork and they were delicious).

So yeah, for your purposes of just wanting to broaden your tastes I think it's great.

My only personal criticisms are: sometimes the produce that comes with them isn't weighed (it's listed as an amount - ex. One potato - instead of how many ounces of potato). Sometimes the produce isn't as fresh as it should be or that you'd be able to find yourself at the store, which is a pet peeve of mine. And one of the brands gives you an entire bulb of garlic if garlic is an ingredient in anything in your box --- like...an ENTIRE BULB....so then unless you use fresh garlic regularly you just have a bunch of garlic around. At least it'll protect you against vamps.

Deviette

westrich20940 wrote: »

My roommate has used all sorts of these meal kit things - unfortunately I don't necessarily remember which brands were which. I know the Factor ones she got bc she had a coupon and said she'd never buy them without a coupon/deal bc they are expensive. But I had some of them and they were good. Sometimes she has too many and tells me I can eat them.

She had one brand that she gave to me bc the meals had more calories than she wanted but they worked for me personally.

I will say that most of them that she gets are really simple to make and it's nice if you don't want to buy a bunch of spices that you don't think you'll use. It's also nice bc they come with recipes and if you want to make the meal again, you can buy the ingredients on your own. Like one of the meals was ground pork burgers (which seems simple but I'd NEVER thought about making burgers with pork and they were delicious).

So yeah, for your purposes of just wanting to broaden your tastes I think it's great.

My only personal criticisms are: sometimes the produce that comes with them isn't weighed (it's listed as an amount - ex. One potato - instead of how many ounces of potato). Sometimes the produce isn't as fresh as it should be or that you'd be able to find yourself at the store, which is a pet peeve of mine. And one of the brands gives you an entire bulb of garlic if garlic is an ingredient in anything in your box --- like...an ENTIRE BULB....so then unless you use fresh garlic regularly you just have a bunch of garlic around. At least it'll protect you against vamps.

We have so much garlic in our house because of this I swear!

nvpixie

COGypsy wrote: »

nvpixie wrote: »

I would like to try Splendid Spoon but they don't have a lunch-only option and their only breakfast options are smoothies, which I don't really like. Their meals otherwise look very good.

I mainly use them for lunches too and just zap some combination of frozen meat and veg for dinners. I usually get the 5 soup/grain bowls and 5 noodle bowls. They easily keep for a couple of weeks, so using them over that period of time hasn't been a problem. I'm back to commuting a few times a week so I'm giving the smoothies another shot since I can drink them on the drive in, but I suspect I'll still want at least some small snack or something once I get to the office.

That's one of my issues with smoothies. I don't feel they'll truly fill me up enough to tide me over until lunch. The grain and noodle bowls sound good though. Easy to add extra protein or veggies also.

goal06082021

My MIL tried Blue Apron once upon a time. The food was okay; there was an astonishing amount of packaging, though. This would have been circa...2014ish? so I don't know if they've improved the packaging issue, but just everything came packed in its own plastic baggie, and sometimes things were grouped together in a bigger plastic baggie, and stuff like meat was vacuum-sealed in yet another plastic baggie, and spices came in a plastic baggie inside a plastic cup...and none of it was recyclable, either (not that most "recyclable" plastic really gets recycled in most places, but that's neither here nor there).

I have friends who have tried Dinnerly and Sunbasket, and they have had good experiences with those services. Neither of them were relying on the service to provide all of their meals for a given span of time, they also bought ingredients or cooked/ate with family or roommates in addition to making their subscription box recipes. I have no experience, firsthand or otherwise, with the ready-made meal delivery services, but all of them seem rather expensive. I do also like to cook, though, so my personal calculus says the markup is not worth the savings in time it would take to make the same thing myself.

goldenxbeauty

We used hello fresh and really liked it. Only reason we dont still use it is because of the cost but i kept all the recipes.

kshama2001

nvpixie wrote: »

COGypsy wrote: »

nvpixie wrote: »

I would like to try Splendid Spoon but they don't have a lunch-only option and their only breakfast options are smoothies, which I don't really like. Their meals otherwise look very good.

I mainly use them for lunches too and just zap some combination of frozen meat and veg for dinners. I usually get the 5 soup/grain bowls and 5 noodle bowls. They easily keep for a couple of weeks, so using them over that period of time hasn't been a problem. I'm back to commuting a few times a week so I'm giving the smoothies another shot since I can drink them on the drive in, but I suspect I'll still want at least some small snack or something once I get to the office.

That's one of my issues with smoothies. I don't feel they'll truly fill me up enough to tide me over until lunch. The grain and noodle bowls sound good though. Easy to add extra protein or veggies also.

Yes, I looked at a few smoothies. I checked "higher protein" first, but that only means 6g or more, which is not higher protein as far as I'm concerned. Two were under 200 calories, and that, combined with the lack of protein, wouldn't fill me up either.

https://splendidspoon.com/our-meals/

My current breakfast is not terribly high in protein compared to my other meals, but I use a higher fiber cereal and berries, and that 10g of fiber helps keep me full until lunch.