For the month of October and ten days into November, we tried HelloFresh. You know, the meal service that every podcast raves about? Yeah, that HelloFresh. The alternative to doing groceries and planning meals. To make a long story short, I suppose I ‘rage quit’ HelloFresh; but not for the reasons you may suspect.
There are many noble reasons to use a service like this and I enjoyed it thoroughly for the reasons you would initially guess. They are the same reasons anyone tries it, I suppose.
Save money on takeout
After the initial month, I did some number crunching and it’s true you save money on takeout if you order takeout. We haven’t been eating out often because of the virus but we enjoyed eating out often and found we were getting take-out even twice as much perhaps to make up the difference. HelloFresh was a lot less expensive and offered an interesting mix of some of our favourite takeout style meals. Tex-Mex cooking, fun pasta, chicken dishes, things like that. Find that you’re spending a lot of money on take-out right now and maybe don’t want to go to the grocery store. This is a really useful solution.
Have your meals planned for you
You can literally sit down and plan months and months in advance with HelloFresh and I liked that and there is a fantastic mix of things, especially if you don’t really have too picky of a palate. There are of course low-carb options, low-calorie options you can dig into the nutritional information and find that it is very versatile. That said, it’s not 100% versatile and you can’t swap out ingredients and things like that so the dish in the menus are as you see them but there is a great selection so even with our few needs and desires as far as our menu goes it was easy to fulfill those. they really ring true with their slogan of dinner solved.
Less food waste
Here is the number one reason I opted for HelloFresh and the number one money saver I had foreseen. Even the best-planned kitchen will have some food waste and in a poorly planned kitchen that can be very expensive. With this meal plan and many others like it, you get a portioned amount of ingredients so there is absolutely no food waste and if you follow the directions or recipes exactly, then you get very little scrap and you are supplied paper bags with the meal ingredients in them you can then use for the garbage disposal. It is a minimalist hack if there ever was one.
Portion control
If you have eyes bigger than your tummy, this may be a solution that you would like in controlling the calorie amount per portion. As mentioned, you can go into the nutritional information, but pretty much any meal is going to be somewhere between 500 and 800 calories per meal, which fits into many people’s caloric budgets. Paired with one other lighter meal and you can really dial in a really useful diet mechanism. That said, we’ll get into some negatives I had found and one of them has to do with not being able to dial in your menu as you need it.
So the last reason was why I signed up. I didn’t see the reason I ‘rage quit’ HelloFresh on the horizon, and I say ‘rage’ in the most light-hearted way possible. I put in the comments section upon the cancellation of my account that we may return, as the service just does not fit our lifestyle at the moment. I meant every word of that; and it’s not that our lifestyle has changed since beginning the service but that it perhaps didn’t fit in the first place and these are some reasons why.
The smell of cooked food
I’ve never liked the smell of a kitchen. I worked in a kitchen. I know that greasy residue. I know that dishwater stink, and I don’t like it. There’s something to be said for some fried spices and fresh garlic and those scents are wonderful in the right kitchen at typical households though the overhead fan and it doesn’t work to suck out those smells and I don’t like them living in the kitchen overnight. HelloFresh uses a lot of really fresh ingredients and really basic French cooking seems to reign supreme and there lies the onions and the garlic and the smells of broiled meat when you somehow luck out with a true Maillard reaction in every meal. All very tasty, don’t get me wrong, but smells like that are very hard to get out of a kitchen and I am not the type that enjoys that smell in my house. We rarely cooked things that were overly fragrant like that, so it was abrasive, to say the least.
Every dish in the house is suddenly dirty
This could be a pro for some people who want to feel like a chef by way of using every single utensil in your kitchen. I may be exaggerating in a way since you really need a pan and a skillet to prepare most of the meals but they have you make use of every inch of cutting board several bowls to prepare foods in and it may take two pans to prepare most meals two pots and a skillet and it just feels overwhelming. being minimalist or not cooking for a family were just cooking for two adults we often would get by with cold meals or charcuterie or one-pan dishes we probably turned on our oven, therefore, we rarely used every dish in the cupboard and clean up was usually a snap. With this food service so clean up was never a snap, it seemed that there was as much cleaning as they had you cooking.
The macros were off
Being someone susceptible to overeating, I had found that carbohydrates were the culprit and these meal plans offer very little in the way of flexibility. I could choose lower carb options but none of them were zero-carb and none of them really went out of the way to avoid pasta, potatoes, or high sugar additions to what could be very clean and healthy meats. even the best choices we’re outside of the macros that I would ultimately desire.
Electricity consumption
This coupled with the last point I’d like to make that was a big negative in my point of view was the clincher, and that made me discontinue HelloFresh. As noted, we do often eat cold meals, minimalist meals, small meals, and one-pan meals in this household so we’d ever use the oven maybe twice a month. Cookies occasionally. Christmas dinner. Other than that, the oven was off and ours was spotless. Even meals with few ingredients that appear to be one-pan cooking often required broiling on a sheet pan in the oven. I can get that is a popular thing to do, and it creates some delicious char. It just is not my style to dirty extra pans and use extra electricity. The electricity bill definitely did rise with the use of this meal plan because of the expectation that we would want to have our oven on broil for half an hour or at least 475 degrees. That was a massive outlier compared to our average consumption. when I first factored in the money saved from this plan I had overlooked electricity consumption because it seemed to me it wouldn’t be something that factored in when in fact it was the largest factor I should have looked at. For every dollar saved from going out at likely cost me one of the same in Hydro cost.
The smoke detector got a workout
As noted we never used our oven so it was clean and us not knowing how sensitive are smoke detectors it got a workout for the months we tried HelloFresh. Every night we cooked, it would go off. We attempted to change the sensitivity. It didn’t seem to make a difference this creates smokey char and a wonderful meal if you enjoy smoke and scents in your kitchen then this may be for you but I, unfortunately, do not enjoy those things. Coupled with the cost of electricity, the fact that the smoke detector was terrorizing our family pets had me sit down in front of the plate about to be adorned by this delicious meal and quit this service. I had planned to revisit my budget and do a pro and con comparison at the end of the month as I had with the month previous, but 10 days into November I hard-stop decided ‘no’. I hesitate to say there are hidden costs because it depends on your average consumption to begin with. The panicked and whining dogs around my feet were the things that sent me looking for the big cancel button in the app. For those that wonder, a cancellation was a breeze and I’ve yet to be sent guilt-trip emails or win-back discounts.
Maybe some other time…
So if you enjoy fresh food, no grocery lineups having your meals delivered and planned for you HelloFresh is a great experience. The food is fresh; the recipes are interesting and everything tastes wonderful. The service is excellent from pillar to post. If however you rarely use many dishes when cooking according to a particular menu for health or lifestyle reasons or don’t like the smoky char or scent of cooking food in your house, this may not be for you. As the saying goes, your mileage may vary, so these are just my two cents from an unsolicited Viewpoint of someone who tried this with their best foot forward. After 2 weeks of using HelloFresh, I could envision no other way! I wanted to remain a loyal customer from now to the end of my days. However, another two weeks proved it wasn’t for me. Perhaps someday we’ll return or there will be some more eclectic choices available. Nix the oven and get some lower carb options or minimalist dishes and I’ll be checking in.