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Most meal kit companies have pitched themselves to Americans as a way to save time at the grocery store and to cut back on wasted food. But a meal kit dinner for a family of four will frequently cost $40–$50, plus shipping—not exactly cheap eats. So in a crowded meal kit marketplace, Home Chef stands out with notably lower prices than the rest of the field—generally ranging from $7.99–$9.99 per serving, when lots of other kits start around $9.99 per plate and go up from there.
I cooked Home Chef meals for my family of four for two weeks, trying to determine if the service actually offered a good value. Here’s my honest review.
What are Home Chef’s recipes like?
The majority of Home Chef’s offerings skew very basic: Think seared protein with a sautéed vegetable side. But there are enough changeups available—including meatloaf, tostadas, and soups—to mix it up a little while still appealing to picky eaters.
What I liked:
While most of Home Chef’s dishes are simple, the results were well-seasoned and satisfying. And some dishes did stand out from the meat-and-potatoes style options. The recipes for brown butter sage gnocchi and maple-glazed trout both added a few intermediate culinary techniques, like frying herbs and candying walnuts, both of which made the dishes more fun to eat. You’ll typically find those more interesting techniques and bigger flavors in a subcategory of the menu called the Culinary Collection, which can cost as much as $4 more per serving.
What I didn’t like:
As someone who cooks on a regular basis, I found many of Home Chef’s recipes to be a bit too basic. There were some flourishes, like a thyme and peach preserve glaze over pork chops and a sun-dried tomato pesto mixed into turkey meatballs, but overall the meals felt less exciting than those I tried from Blue Apron.
If you have kids at home, that simplicity can be a boon. While I might have preferred a little more variety and flair, Home Chef’s simple recipes went over better with my kindergartener and pre-schooler.
What ingredients does Home Chef use?
Home Chef meal kits include preportioned proteins, prepared packets of sauces and stocks, and usually just one or two items of fresh produce. They aren’t typically organic.
What I liked:
The quality of the proteins and produce matched conventional items I would pick myself at the grocery store. Home Chef tends to send more pre-prepped ingredients, like diced squash or segmented broccoli, than other meal kits I’ve tried. That cut down on prep time and made Home Chef’s recipes easier and quicker to throw together than many I’ve tried from other services. The recipes also all include a “cook within X days” guideline, which was helpful for planning my weekly menus.
I also appreciated that Home Chef allows quite a bit of customization in terms of proteins, depending on the subscription plan you choose. You can swap in, say, scallops, not only for salmon or shrimp recipes, but also for chicken or beef ones if you want to. Just make sure that whatever you choose actually makes sense in the recipe—a dish that involves baking chicken probably won’t come out as well with fish, which would get overcooked if you followed the recipes timing instructions. The recipes don’t change even if the ingredients do. Swapping in seafood may trigger an upcharge, but other swaps, like poultry for pork, usually do not cost extra.
What I didn’t like:
The precut veggies are a double-edged sword. Yes, they’re easier to use, but though everything arrived in grocery-store fresh condition with no soggy leaves or fried edges, they also don’t last as long in the fridge. Produce also occasionally came un-prepped without explanation. After several meals that included trimmed green beans, one arrived with untrimmed beans, which unexpectedly added to the prep time.
Sides were sometimes just cooked vegetables with a packet of salad dressing drizzled on top. It was a fast, easy solution to be sure, but didn’t taste as fresh as using a dressing I assembled myself. Considering some recipes already called for a quick pan sauce or glaze, I wouldn’t have minded spending a few extra minutes to add a bit more flavor to my side dish.
How long do Home Chef meals take to make?
What I liked:
Speed is the upside to simple recipes. One “Express” meal of peach-and-thyme-glazed pork chops with garlicky green beans took only 20 minutes from counter to plate. In most cases, produce prep was not more involved than dicing a presliced bell pepper section or cutting up a zucchini.
Home Chef also offers Oven-Ready meals, which are the company’s answer to sheet-pan dinners. You assemble and bake everything in one aluminum pan that arrives with your shipment. One recipe had me roast potatoes in the pan for 25 minutes, which left ample time to oil and season the salmon fillets that nestled next to the potatoes for another 8 minutes. I really appreciated the low lift on nights I was juggling kids and work DMs while cooking.
What I didn’t like:
The meals that weren’t Oven-Ready required at least two nonstick pans plus mixing bowls. That’s not a huge amount of equipment, but considering how uncomplicated the recipes are, it made more mess than I thought it should.
How much does Home Chef cost?
Pricing for households with four or more people is where Home Chef scores big points. The minimum order is two meals a week for two people and costs $12 per serving. After taxes and shipping that comes to $61, which is in line with most other meal kits. But if you choose a family plan, which includes anywhere from four to eight servings of a meal, the price per serving drops to $7.99 per serving. That’s about 20% less than kits like Blue Apron or HelloFresh. For the standard plan, swapping in more expensive proteins like the aforementioned scallops can bump the price as high as $16.95 a portion. For the family plan, you can’t make any swaps.
What I liked:
The fact that you can get meals for households up to eight is unique to Home Chef. If you want to get that much food from other kits, you’ll probably need to cobble together two orders for four, which will almost certainly cost more than the $7.99 a person Home Chef charges.
What I didn’t like:
That lower cost did come with some trade-offs in the final product. Portions were smaller than those of some competitors I’ve tested and relied more on prepared ingredients (premade marinara sauce or salad dressing) rather than freshly made ones.
Home Chef also offers add-ons that don’t fit the inexpensive theme. Microwaveable lunch meals run $10 per portion and selections called bundles had items like a heat-and-eat pepperoni flatbread with pre-chopped salad kit and cost $15. Those are closing in on fast-casual take-out price levels.
Home Chef packaging and delivery
What I liked:
Meats and fish came smartly packaged in a separate zip-top bag on the bottom of the box, so they didn’t accidentally get torn and leak on everything else. The rest of the ingredients for the Oven-Ready meals arrive inside the pan, which makes assembly quicker. You can also recycle both the insulated box liner and the large bags, which is not always the case with meal kit packaging.
What I didn’t like:
Most ingredients, with the exception of larger produce, came packed in small, nonrecyclable plastic bags. That packaging is intended to keep items fresh longer, but the precut produce still tended to wilt or get mushy a little sooner than if I had just received it as whole vegetables.
The ice packs are a little annoying to dispose of. I had to let them melt, cut them open, and dump them. Recycling the bags themselves required a trip to my local recycling center.
And while I know the Oven-Ready meals include aluminum baking pans for convenience, if you already own sheet pans, they just become something else to recycle.
Is Home Chef worth it?
Home Chef’s meal kits, when compared to some of the competitors like Blue Apron, HelloFresh, and Green Chef, are quite basic—a protein and a vegetable side, sometimes zhuzhed up with an extra sauce. But they also come at a lower price than all those other kits, which is ideal if you’re looking to serve your whole family. Home Chef can take the place of any no-frills cooking you might be planning to do anyway, offering easy additions to your weekly menu that will actually save you some cash.
