Green Chef Review: A Meal Kit With Organic Ingredients and Big Flavors

It’s not always clear what’s meant when a phrase like “clean eating” enters the conversation. Is the term just a catchall for someone’s idea of healthy food? Have the salads you’ve been making for years been dirty this whole time? Green Chef is a meal kit company that leans into the idea of clean eating, which they define as “eating foods that are as close to their natural state as possible, ideally organic with limited processed ingredients.” Specifically, that means “organic whole fruits and vegetables, lean protein and whole grain options, and good fats [like nuts, seeds, and fish], while limiting added sugar and sodium.”

Of the half dozen meal kit delivery services I’ve tried, Green Chef offers the widest variety of options for keto (low-carb, high protein), gluten-free, vegetarian, and vegan meals. Green Chef also states that all their meals are made using “organic produce, cage-free eggs, antibiotic-and-hormone-free chicken, and sustainably sourced seafood.”

The focus on high-quality ingredients and food that works for various dietary preferences is nice, but a good meal kit should also make your weekly cooking easier and your meals more enjoyable. To figure out if the food was any good, I cooked three Green Chef meals a week for two weeks for my family of four. Here’s my honest Green Chef review.

Companies that advertise themselves as promoting clean eating don’t always sell food that’s rich and filling. But the recipes I ordered from Green Chef offered surprisingly polished and comforting food, like a creamy risotto with Parmesan broccoli, which was about as good as anything I could have ordered for takeout.

New subscribers to Green Chef will be prompted to choose at least one of eight general dietary preferences: Mediterranean, Gut & Brain Health (which a Green Chef spokesperson said are “higher-fiber meals featuring antioxidants and healthy fats that aim to support energy and immunity while helping to improve digestion”), Calorie Smart (lower calorie options), Quick & Easy, Plant Based, Protein Packed, Keto, and Gluten Free. Your choices will filter your menu options each week, prioritizing whatever your focus is at the top of the list. You can still pick meals from any of the other categories at any time, and each week has more than 80 different meals to choose from.

What I liked:

Green Chef recipe kits generally used one of a few templates: roasted or sautéed proteins with veggie sides, rice and grain bowls, flatbreads, salads, soups, sandwiches, and pastas. Even though, overall, the dishes were simple—think roasted pork loin and green beans—Green Chef adds little creative pops of flavor to each dish. A sriracha and apricot jam pan sauce turned a simple meal of chicken and broccoli into something I’d be happy to serve guests. Lemony chicken cutlets were accompanied by fennel-orange spiced roasted vegetables and couscous cooked in chicken stock. Salmon Caesar salad swapped out standard croutons for crunchy baked Parmesan frico. Each week, the menus include a range of global influences and generally it feels like there’s plenty of flavor variety to choose from.

What I didn’t like:

Green Chef loaded up my weekly menus with frequent appearances by one or two types of produce that happened to be in season. For example, several of the dishes offered in a given week contained broccoli. There isn’t an option to mix and match side dishes, so unless you’re really craving broccoli, it can feel a bit tedious.

Green Chef prides itself on its status as the first certified organic meal kit service. Almost all of the produce you receive is organic (and noted if not), and you can select organic meats and seafood for a small upcharge. Depending on the recipe, you will need some basic pantry ingredients like cooking oils, butter, sugar, salt, and pepper.

What I liked:

All of the produce I received seemed carefully picked for size and quality. Meats were prepacked and portioned, and generally uniform between servings. That’s important because if you have fish fillets of dramatically different thicknesses, they will cook differently. Produce and meat stayed fresh for up to five days after receiving it (seafood should be cooked within two days, though).

What I didn’t like:

My kit for flautas was missing tortillas, which felt pretty crucial. I noted a similar issue when I tested Green Chef’s parent company HelloFresh. Missing ingredients are a problem that will likely pop up if you use any meal kit frequently—the complicated logistics of portioning and packaging everything on a massive scale makes mistakes inevitable. It’s something you should prepare yourself for if the whole reason you order them is because you don’t have time to shop. Mostly your boxes will be correct, but occasionally they will not.

If you’ve used other meal kits you’ll find the way Green Chef works entirely familiar. Most of the prep work—chopping, slicing, dicing—is done for you. But assembling all your ingredients for easy access near the stove is important, because once you start cooking, you’ll need to move through the steps rapidly.

What I liked:

Most of Green Chef’s produce is either entirely precut or segmented into smaller pieces that require a minimum of chopping or slicing, which is usually about five minutes of work. I liked using ingredients I might not normally grab to add flavor, like the aforementioned apricot jam or dried figs used in a pan sauce. None of these recipes called for techniques that felt especially difficult—I’m confident someone straight out of college who hadn’t cooked anything much more complicated than simple pasta could comfortably pull off the recipes—and yet the flavors were more complex than those in the weeknight dinners I usually cook for my family.

What I didn’t like:

The time it took to actually execute the recipes was usually longer than the prep and cook times stated on the recipe card. Some came in right on time, while others took nearly twice as long to complete as I juggled multiple pans, ingredients, and temperatures.

It’s worth knowing that these are often not one-pan meals. You’ll need both saucepans and sauté pans as well as hand tools like a zester or Microplane and citrus juicer.

Finally, a “quick and easy” lunch dish I ordered included precooked chicken with directions to heat it in the microwave. I didn’t care for the resulting rubbery texture; be aware that these time-saving lunches may sacrifice some quality.

The price depends on the number of meals and number of servings per meal you order. For two people ordering three meals per week (that’s the minimum), you’re looking at $13.49 per serving, or about $81 per box. The best price-per-meal comes in at $10.99 per portion and requires ordering four (or more) portions for six meals. Shipping is an additional $10.99 per box.

What I liked:

Portion sizes are filling, and everything I made (except the one 10-minute, microwave chicken lunch) reheated well as leftovers, which improves the value if you’re a one- or two-person household.

You can also add on snacks, appetizers, desserts, bagels, sampler boxes of meat and seafood, breakfasts like oatmeal and egg bites, and La Colombe canned coffee drinks among other options.

What I didn’t like:

Green Chef costs more money per meal than its counterpart, HelloFresh, and maybe because I wasn’t hand-selecting the produce, I didn’t notice a huge difference in quality (beyond the lack of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers) between the organic ingredients from Green Chef and the non-organic ones from the other kits. While meal kits often promise to save you money at the grocery store or on takeout, $13.49 is approaching what I’d expect to pay for a basic take-out entrée from a restaurant.

Your main ingredients arrive in a brown paper bag for each meal, with any whole produce loose inside, and precut produce, spices, or sauces in plastic bags. Proteins arrive in preportioned, vacuum-sealed plastic pouches.

What I liked:

Each meal’s ingredients, except for the proteins, come packaged together. That made storing and organizing each meal easy. Proteins arrived partially frozen on top of ice packs, so there was little risk of spoiling even if they were out on the porch for most of the day.

The insulation layer was paper-based, and could be easily recycled with the cardboard box. Green Chef’s boxes were a bit smaller than those of some other meal kits I’ve used.

What I didn’t like:

In order to dispose of the ice packs, I needed to empty their contents into the trash before recycling the plastic pouch. Because Green Chef leans into its sustainability, it’d be nice if everything in the box was as easy to recycle as the box.

Sometimes brands that heavily promote the idea of clean eating or healthy meals deliver dinners that leave you feeling like you’re just eating food as fuel. Green Chef’s meals are not that. They’re easy to execute and offer big flavors. The weekly menus I received were varied and exciting enough that I looked forward to making them and experiencing new ingredient combinations. If you’re trying to eat a certain meal plan, like keto or gluten-free, or just looking to work more vegetables and whole grains into your weekly dinners, Green Chef offers you a hassle-free way to make it happen.

To read more about other meal kits like Blue Apron, Home Chef, Sunbasket, and HungryRoot, read our full list of Best Meal Delivery Services here.