The first box sat on our front porch most of a Tuesday while I was at the preschool office, and when I got home at 2:50 the ice packs were still frozen solid. That was the first thing HelloFresh got right.
We signed up for three recipes a week at four servings each. I've planned nearly every dinner our family has eaten since Wyatt was born in 2015, and I wanted to know what it felt like to hand off the thinking for a few weeks. I also wanted real numbers instead of the guesses I'd been making every time a friend asked whether meal kits were worth it. Two boxes in, here's where we are.
Box one: $64.87
The first box came at an introductory discount, $64.87 for twelve servings, or $5.41 a serving. We cooked it the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday before Easter.
- Honey-garlic chicken with roasted carrots and rice. Everybody ate it, including Eli, who got his chicken before the glaze went on. Honestly the best weeknight chicken I've made in a while, and I've made a lot of weeknight chicken.
- Beef and black bean burrito bowls with a smoky crema. Good, a little mild for Matt, who added hot sauce. Eli refused the whole bowl because everything was touching. He had a cheese quesadilla.
- Creamy chicken and spinach penne. Wyatt had seconds. Eli ate it after I picked out every piece of spinach, which took longer than boiling the pasta.
Box two: $97.43
The second box landed the Tuesday after Easter, when the fridge was still half ham, so these three got cooked Wednesday through Friday. It was still discounted, $97.43, which is $8.12 a serving.
- Bulgogi-style beef bowls with quick-pickled cucumbers. Wyatt's favorite so far. Eli ate plain rice and one cucumber slice, so I'm counting that as a refusal.
- Parmesan-crusted chicken with roasted potatoes and green beans. Eli cleaned his plate and asked if we could have it "every day." Wyatt helped me set up the breading station, flour, egg, crumbs, the way I learned it in catering, and he was proud of himself all evening.
- Shrimp linguine with garlic butter. Matt and I loved it. Eli said the shrimp looked like bugs. Rosie ate a pile of plain noodles and an alarming amount of the garlic bread I added on the side.
Eli's score after two boxes: three refusals out of six. That's about what I expected, maybe a little better.
Stretching four servings to five
Four servings doesn't feed the five of us, even with Rosie at twenty months. Wyatt alone eats a serving and a half. So every kit night got a side from our own pantry: a pot of rice, a bag salad, sliced apples, that loaf of garlic bread. Those sides came to $9.25 across the six dinners. Eli's three backup quesadillas were about 62 cents each.
The bigger catch is leftovers. There aren't any. In a normal week Matt takes dinner leftovers to the warehouse for lunch three days a week. With the kits he took sandwiches, which meant deli turkey and bread I wouldn't otherwise buy.
What I like and what I don't, so far
I like the recipe cards, which are clear enough that Wyatt could follow one with me standing next to him. I like that nothing in the box goes to waste, no half bunch of cilantro going slimy in the drawer. And the Sunday reset went faster: planning two dinners instead of five took me about fifteen minutes.
I don't love the packaging. Every recipe comes in its own bag, inside that are smaller bags, tiny tubs of sour cream and little spice packets, and our recycling bin was full by Wednesday. The cards say 30 to 35 minutes. With one cook and a toddler on the learning tower, it was closer to 45 every time. I cooked for a living for six years and I'm not slow, so I don't think that's me.
And then there's the price. The third box, the first one at full price, will be $148.87 including $10.99 shipping. That's $12.41 a serving. Our home-cooked dinners average about $2.75 a serving according to the spreadsheet, so a full-price HelloFresh dinner costs about four and a half of mine.
Two more boxes are scheduled, and I'll run the full numbers after the fourth one. For now the HelloFresh tab in my spreadsheet has six rows, and the honey-garlic chicken card is stuck to the fridge next to the meal plan.
