I Retested HelloFresh After a Few Years Away and It’s Much Improved

If you have a mailbox, you have almost certainly received a coupon for discounted or free meals from HelloFresh, the country’s largest packer and shipper of ready-to-make meal kits. With a price point that sits nicely between a week’s grocery shopping and several nights of takeout, HelloFresh boxes attempt to offer flavor, variety, and value. So what’s it really like? I tried the service for two weeks. Here’s my HelloFresh review.

You can filter the weekly options into categories like Fit & Wholesome (these tend to be lower calorie and lower carb), Veggie, Quick & Easy, Breakfast & Lunch, and Pescatarian. There’s also New recipes, which is a nice option. Similar to other meal kit delivery services, HelloFresh does rely on repeats if you use it long enough. If you’re looking for regular delivery of narrower dietary focused options, like paleo or gluten-free or Mediterranean, look elsewhere.

What I liked:

This is not the first time I’ve used HelloFresh meal kits. I ordered them years ago and my overwhelming feeling about the meals was that they were…fine. Recipes were basic and felt repetitive. Now it’s the biggest player in the meal kit game (as of 2023, it had over 75% of the market and owns a number of other companies like Green Chef and Factor), and HelloFresh has improved new recipes. Each one I tried delivered on flavor and added a few fancy flairs to what could otherwise have been simple, boring meat and veggie dishes. Would I make an apricot glaze for my chicken? Quite possibly. But would I make prosciutto-wrapped chicken with an apricot glaze, chive mashed potatoes, and a Dijon vinaigrette–dressed salad all on a weeknight after work? Probably not.

I also appreciated the dishes that offered swappable proteins, meaning a meal could be made with turkey, beef, pork sausage or, in some cases, vegetarian, so your week can be more balanced.

What I didn’t like:

While you can choose from a fairly wide variety of dishes, it’s easy to tell what produce is in high supply. The two weeks I tested HelloFresh, it was apparently trying to move some zucchini, which featured heavily as a stand-alone side dish or as a feature of grain bowls and pastas. I have two small, not particularly zucchini-interested children, and so I passed on a few recipes I might have otherwise liked to avoid it being Zucchini Week in my house.

What I liked:

All of the ingredients were of a similar quality to what I’d expect at a supermarket (not always the case in other meal kit tests here at Epicurious). Produce stayed fresh for several days in the fridge and arrived, for the most part, unbruised or broken. The meats and fish are vacuum-sealed, so you can wait a few days longer to prepare them than protein straight from the butcher or fish counter. In my experience with them, one of the main selling points of meal delivery services is that they allow you some flexibility in your meal planning, so having ingredients that last is a plus.

What I didn’t like:

One recipe was missing a key ingredient. That’s not shocking—it’s a periodic complaint from lots of weekly meal kit users, and in the case of HelloFresh, the mistake may be related to its massive scale. But when you’re making a Spinach Orange Salad and there are no oranges, that’s a problem. Some of the HelloFresh recipes I received also came with some minor swaps that I didn’t ask for. I chose a recipe with a mixed greens salad, which arrived with an all-spinach salad. As mentioned, I have two small kids who have some…opinions about what they eat. They’ll eat a mixed green salad. They wouldn’t eat the spinach. I don’t consider this an error (if the spinach is what’s fresh, I’d rather have the fresh ingredients), but it’s just something anyone who uses the service should be aware of, especially if they need particularly family-friendly recipes or have particularly picky eaters.

There were also a couple issues with portion sizes. Like most meal delivery services, HelloFresh offers preportioned ingredients. One dinner included four precut portions of chuck steak, but each one had a different thickness. That meant they all needed different cook times and temperatures to get to the same doneness. If you didn’t have much experience checking a meat’s doneness (or don’t have a meat thermometer, an indispensable tool every home cook should own), and you just relied on the cook times on the recipe card, you’d end up with some meat that’s raw and some that’s overcooked.

The promise of meal kits is that they make home-cooked meals faster and meal prep less of a hassle, but with the exception of the options labeled “Fast & Fresh” or “20-Minute Dinners,” all the recipes took over 40 minutes, and some took over an hour between prep and cook time. These are somewhat more complicated meals than some other meal kits, so I wasn’t shocked by cook time, but it is something any HelloFresh user should prepare for.

What I liked:

Some of the recipes featured flourishes I wouldn’t have used on my own. The scallion-infused oil for sticky rice, for example, which the recipe called for prepping in the microwave (actually a useful, easy hack), was a nice touch.

What I didn’t like:

For the sake of this test, I cooked everything exactly as the cards instructed to get an idea of what the cook time would actually be for most people. Nearly every recipe I received took more time to prepare than the recipe card suggested.

HelloFresh meals also require more equipment and pantry staples (oils, butter, sugar, etc.) than some competitors. If you cook regularly and view HelloFresh as more of an add-on to your weekly meal planning, this won’t be a big deal; you’ll almost certainly have everything on hand. But if you rely on meal kits for most of your weeknight dinners, you may need to make a quick shopping trip once your recipes for the week arrive.

HelloFresh charges $9.99 per portion, per meal for most plans, and you can choose the number of people you want to serve: two or four. (Note that the minimum plan of two portions and two meals per week costs $11.49 per portion. The $9.99 price point kicks in at three meals per week.) Shipping is $10.99 per box. So if, for example, you order three meals for two people it will be about $71 a week. Some meals are considered Premium Picks and feature more expensive ingredients like scallops. They carry an additional charge between $2.99 to $9.99 per serving.

I could easily reheat almost every dinner I made and they worked well as leftovers. So if you’re a single person doing a two-portion plan, you can stretch them into multiple meals.

If you’re doing meals for four you get a full double order of the two person option. So if you’re feeding a family with younger kids who don’t eat all that much, you may end up with some food waste. In my house with a kindergartner and a toddler, I found it to be too much food for dinner, but not enough to provide a full portion for leftovers.

One issue with the initial sign-up: You can’t browse options without ordering. Once you create an account and enter your address and payment info, you’re immediately on the hook for the first box. The day I signed up was within five days of my assigned delivery date. There was no option to skip, postpone, or otherwise cancel my order without reaching out to a customer service agent. So while HelloFresh does allow you to peruse its upcoming menus before you sign up, if you want to filter those menus to look at different offerings for dietary restrictions or get a better idea of how you’ll be building your weekly box, beware the automatic subscription.

One of the most convenient differences between meal kit companies and many grocery stores is that all your food ships to your door. But before getting into the details of HelloFresh’s packaging, I want to acknowledge here that shipping these weighty boxes—made weightier by ice packs—does come with some environmental impact. Exactly how that impact compares to the other ways we get our food every week is complicated. For its part HelloFresh details its sustainability practices on its website here.

However, the point of this review is to look at the experience of actually using HelloFresh, so I’m going to stick to the practical impacts of the company’s shipping.

What I liked:

The cardboard box was easy enough to recycle in my curbside fiber bin as was the paper-based insulation layer inside the box. The freezer packs are drainable, and recyclable (just make sure your city can recycle #4 plastic). The meal kits are each sealed in brown paper bags. This is nice because it means there are not a bunch of loose ingredients rolling around the fridge, but the paper bags do take up more shelf space than the ingredients would on their own. Proteins come packaged separately and are often hiding under the ice packs (so make sure you check the box thoroughly!).

What I didn’t like:

Draining the freezer packs was a pain. Even if it’s safe, which HelloFresh claims it is, I didn’t love the idea of pouring gels and liquid packs down my drain. Also, the heavy ice packs, can smoosh the food if the box gets jostled in transit.

HelloFresh delivers on value and offers dishes that felt fancier than what I might cook on a weeknight. The recipes are a nice challenge for a novice cook looking to learn some new techniques and offer enough interesting elements to keep more experienced cooks interested. If you’re looking to enter into the world of meal kits, this is a safe and tasty way in.