Meal Choices and Pricing
With 28 recipes available each week, Hello Fresh offers the
most choice and was a breeze to find three meals to order. They also have
extras - dessert and sides (veggie plate, garlic bread) – you can add on to
really round out the meals and even extend a two-person kit to feed a family of
three.
You’ll pay more for these options, $13.15 per portion
(assuming three meals for two people) or $79 a week, which was the priciest out
of all the companies I tried. This is also just the base price, as like their
competitors, they also charge more for quicker 20-minute options (+ $2.99 a
serving), special occasion recipes (think Father’s Day), or multi-protein meals
(+$9.99 a serving).
Customer Service and Ordering
You can pick meals and skip deliveries up to five weeks in
advance. Their skipping option was more difficult to find as you need to go
into week and click the “edit delivery” button to navigate to the skip options.
Then, there’s also a question asking customers why they’re skipping the week,
which I find to be an annoying and unnecessary feature.
What is useful about the “edit delivery” area is that you
can change the delivery date for each week individually (i.e., some weeks you
can have it come on Sunday while others on Thursday) and even the plan option
(i.e., three meals versus four meals) without having to change the entire
subscription. From a customization standpoint, Hello Fresh is a leader with
this feature and they deliver six days of the week in Toronto (everyday but
Friday) so creates flexibility.
Ease of Cooking
As we entered spring, Hello Fresh started dedicating recipes
for the BBQ, which is a great idea as I really would rather not turn on the
oven during the warm weather. The cheesy brie and beef burger was delicious, a
honking thick beef patty and more than enough brie to create a gooey decedent
bite. I was just a little miffed about the recipe’s suggestion to add an egg to
the beef mixture for a firmer patty – if anything it made it waterier and didn’t
bind together as well, causing the patty to break apart easier.
Even the potatoes get finished on the grill in a foil-pouch.
Just put them on 10-minutes earlier than what the recipe calls for as we found
them still undercooked after the burger was ready so ended up eating them
separately.
Compared to other companies, Hello Fresh also didn’t require
as many tools – most recipes only call for two pots and/or pans. A recipe like the barramundi and brown butter lemon
sauce with roasted potatoes and sugar snap peas could have easily become a
multi-tool recipe with competitors. With Hello Fresh, there was just a sheet
pan to roast the potatoes and everything else was prepared in a frying pan (with
recipe actually saying to use the same one) making clean up easier.
The Taste Test
The recipes did have fewer flavouring components compared to
others as most do not come up spice mixtures, instead relying on the
ingredients themselves and salt and pepper. So, something like the barramundi I
found a little bland.
Nonetheless, for dishes that use flavourful ingredients, I didn’t
miss the spice kits. The gnocchi Bolognese had a lovely zest tomato sauce and when
combined with the consommé, vegetables, and parmesan was a tasty dish.
While I would have like the cheesy chicken enchiladas to be
saucier, they were still great and easy to prepare frying everything in a pan,
wrapping the ingredients into a tortilla and baking with cheese and sauce on
top. For a dish like this, Hello Fresh did include the necessary spices to make
the meal taste like Tex Mex.
There were a lot of good vegetarian recipes as well. The Philly
style portobello hoagies smartly calls for chefs to remove the gills from the portobello,
so you’re left with a less watery mushroom that once mixed with peppers,
onions, cheese, and spicy mayo makes you realize you don’t need the beef. And
Hello Fresh uses Beyond Meat as an ingredient for some of their vegetarian recipes
if you’d rather go for a fake protein.
Environmental Factors
I did like that Hello Fresh uses little packaging compared
to others, even if it can sometimes create a slight detriment to taste. It’s a
simple solution: pick up a couple of multi-purpose seasonings and use those to
supplement the recipes that need a flavour boost. Creating less waste and helping
the environment is worth it.
Conclusion
For those who do not mind paying a bit more, Hello Fresh was a great experience. Overall, I had a lot of success with their recipes and the amount of choice and flexibility with deliveries is helpful for those who like to plan. And if you’re going to use delivery services regularly, finding one that uses less packaging is also a great touch.
