$460.04. That's what four HelloFresh boxes cost us between April 15 and May 6, and it's the number I typed into the spreadsheet the night I canceled, May 12. I said I'd run the full math after the fourth box. Here it is, with nothing rounded until the very end.
The four boxes
Each box was three recipes at four servings, twelve servings a week:
- April 15: $64.87 (introductory price)
- April 22: $97.43 (still discounted)
- April 29: $148.87 (full price, including $10.99 shipping)
- May 6: $148.87
That's $460.04 for 48 servings, an average of $9.58 a serving. Without the two discounts, every box would have been $148.87, or $12.41 a serving.
There are five of us, so each kit dinner needed a side from our own kitchen to cover the fifth plate and Wyatt's seconds: rice, a bag salad, fruit, garlic bread. Across twelve dinners those sides cost $21.36. Kits plus sides come to $481.40 for 60 plates, which is $8.02 a plate, or $40.12 a dinner.
Eli refused six of the twelve dinners, exactly half. Each time he had a cheese quesadilla instead, at about 62 cents, which adds $3.72. I'm leaving that out of the per-plate number because his kit portion was still bought and paid for. It became Matt's lunch the next day, which is the closest the kits ever came to leftovers.
That's the other cost that doesn't show on the box. Four servings meant no leftovers, and our dinner leftovers are normally Matt's lunch three days a week. During the kit weeks he packed sandwiches, which added about $9 a week in deli meat and bread, $36 over the month.
The same twelve dinners from our kitchen
My spreadsheet puts our home-cooked dinners this year at about $2.75 a serving, mostly from Aldi with Kroger and Costco filling in. Twelve dinners for five at that rate is $165.00.
- Kits plus sides: $481.40
- Our usual cooking: $165.00
- Difference over four weeks: $316.40, or $79.10 a week
And that's with two discounted boxes. At full price, three kit dinners plus sides would run about $154.21 a week, against $41.25 for three of our usual dinners. That's $112.96 more every week, about $489 a month. Our whole grocery spending for May is on track for around $1,130.
Why April didn't look worse
Here's the part that would have fooled me if I didn't keep books for a living. Our April grocery average was $258 a week, only $8 over budget, even with three of the four boxes landing in April. That's because during those weeks I quietly cooked down the freezer and the pantry to cover the other dinners and the lunches. The chest freezer is a lot emptier now than it was in March. That wasn't savings. It was borrowing from May, and May is paying it back.
What the money bought
To be fair to HelloFresh, the recipes were the best we've ever cooked from a box, and a few beat what I'd have planned. The honey-garlic chicken and the parmesan-crusted chicken went over with all three kids, which almost never happens. Wyatt learned to set up a breading station. My Sunday planning got shorter, and I liked opening the fridge to a bag that told me exactly what to do.
There was one more thing I didn't expect. Cooking somebody else's recipes three nights a week showed me how stuck our rotation had gotten. I'd been cycling the same fifteen or so dinners for two years. The kits put fresh ginger, gochujang and a couple of quick pan sauces back into my cooking, and none of those cost much from Aldi or H-E-B. I'm adding one new dinner to the plan every other week now, written in a different color on the fridge so the boys know to brace themselves.
But the cooking took longer than our usual weeknight dinners, about 45 minutes against 25 or 30, and on office days that mattered. Half the time the six-year-old ate a quesadilla anyway. And a full-price box is $148.87 for three dinners, which is more than half of our $250 weekly budget, before breakfast, lunches, milk or a single roll of paper towels.
So the kits got canceled, and I don't regret the four weeks. We paid $316.40 for a good look at how other people plan dinner, and I got the numbers I wanted instead of guessing at them.
I also kept two recipe cards. The honey-garlic chicken is already back in our rotation, made with bone-in thighs from Aldi at $1.49 a pound, and it costs about $8.70 for all five of us.
