$41.69, $88.87, $88.87. Those were the three EveryPlate charges on our statement this month, and the third one is why I canceled on Wednesday, two days after the last box landed on the porch.
I've now tried three meal kits on this family: HelloFresh last spring, Home Chef in September, and EveryPlate this month. EveryPlate is the cheapest of the three by a wide margin, and it's the one I went in most hopeful about, because the per-serving price looked like it might live somewhere near our grocery budget. Here's what three boxes looked like for five people.
The numbers
Each box had three recipes with four servings each, delivered on Mondays. The first box came with an introductory discount. The second and third were full price, shipping included.
- Box 1, January 5: $41.69 (12 servings, $3.47 each)
- Box 2, January 12: $88.87 (12 servings, $7.41 each)
- Box 3, January 19: $88.87 (12 servings, $7.41 each)
- Total: $219.43 for 36 servings, an average of $6.10 a serving
For comparison, HelloFresh averaged $9.58 a serving over our four boxes and would have been $12.41 at full price. Home Chef was $10.91 at full price. Our own home-cooked dinners are running about $3.05 a serving this year. So at full price, EveryPlate costs almost two and a half times what I spend cooking from Aldi, and even with the discounted box averaged in, it's exactly double.
Four servings don't feed the five of us, so every kit meal got a side from our own kitchen: rice, a bag salad, roasted potatoes or a bowl of oranges. Those added about $1.50 to $2.50 a night, and they all went in the spreadsheet with the box.
What the food was like
The recipes were simpler than HelloFresh's, which turned out to be a point in their favor at our table. Fewer sauces, fewer garnishes, more things I'd call dinner instead of a project. We had a honey garlic chicken over rice, beef tacos with a lime crema, a creamy pasta with sausage and spinach, pork chops with mashed potatoes, and a cheesy chicken and black bean skillet, among others. Most took 30 to 40 minutes and needed nothing fancier than a skillet and a sheet pan.
A few honest notes, good and bad:
- The kits expect you to have oil, salt, pepper and sometimes butter or sugar on hand. Easy for us, but not nothing.
- The meat portions looked like four modest servings. With Wyatt at the table, they were really three.
- Produce was mostly fine. One box had a soft zucchini and a lime that had seen better days.
- The packaging is a lot: a big box, ice packs, and a plastic bag for each recipe. Our recycling cart was full by Wednesday every week.
- None of it is oven-ready the way Home Chef's trays were, so it didn't solve my office days. I was still chopping onions at 3 o'clock with my work bag on the chair.
What the kids ate
Eli refused about half of the HelloFresh meals last spring. With EveryPlate he ate some version of six of the nine, mostly because the recipes were plain enough that I could pull his chicken or pork out before the sauce went on. The tacos were a hit with everyone. The creamy sausage pasta was not. Eli said it "looked wet," and Rosie, who will usually eat anything with cheese on it, threw a spinach leaf at Biscuit. Biscuit ate it, so at least somebody was happy.
Wyatt ate everything on his plate and then made a peanut butter sandwich, every single night. That sandwich is a real cost the kit never showed me.
Against Aldi, one recipe at a time
To get a fair comparison, I took the beef tacos, the meal everyone liked, and priced the same ingredients at Aldi the following Monday, scaled up to feed all five of us: ground beef, tortillas, cheese, sour cream, a lime, an onion, a little cabbage and a tomato. It came to $14.37, or $2.87 a serving. The EveryPlate version was $29.64 for four servings, before the rice I added to stretch it.
That's the whole story in one recipe. The kit saved me writing a list and a little bit of thinking, and it cost about twice as much to do it.
Of the three kits, EveryPlate came closest to our budget, and if it were just Matt and me, I could see the appeal of never writing a shopping list. For five of us, with a ten-year-old who eats like a linebacker, the math doesn't hold. The last box is flattened in the garage, except for the one Rosie has claimed as a house.
