Money Under 30 is usually your source for honest reviews on financial service products. Money is indeed our sweet spot but we know our readers can benefit from first-hand experiences on services they want to use their hard-earned money on.
That’s why we’ve covered meal delivery services as well. We ordered and tasted the top options ourselves so you know what you expect.
HelloFresh offers 45+ weekly recipes and 100+ seasonal and convenience items to choose from that can please a variety of different diets and preferences.
The recipes are easy to prepare with simple step-by-step instructions that anyone can follow, and the pre-portioned ingredients provided are always fresh.
- Easy meal prep with simple instructions
- Range of options to please everyone
- Eco-friendly and convenient packaging
- More expensive than some competitors
- Delivery window can be inconvenient
What is HelloFresh?
HelloFresh humbly refers to itself as both “America’s #1 Meal Kits” and “America’s Most Popular Meal Kit.” At least one of these claims is objectively true. According to Statista, HelloFresh has 7.1 million active subscribers in the U.S. as of the end of 2022 compared to the second-largest meal kit company, Blue Apron, which had only 298,000. You don’t even have to do math to see that it’s not even close.
HelloFresh is headquartered in New York but delivers to every U.S. state except for Hawaii and Alaska. This meal delivery service works with over 1,500 suppliers to source their ingredients and uses a short supply chain to keep food fresh and create as little waste as possible. And when they do over-purchase, they donate the extra food to charities and food banks.
Wondering about HelloFresh’s climate impact? Back in 2020, the meal kit service committed to offsetting its carbon footprint by 100%. They use renewable energy to prepare their meal kits and successfully reduced their carbon emissions in 2021 by the equivalent of what about 7,000 cars would produce.
HelloFresh pros and cons
Pros
- Easy meal prep — Simple instructions and recipes categorized by difficulty.
- Diet-friendly — Customize your weekly order with a range of delicious, health-forward options.
- Packaging — Eco-friendly and convenient packaging with a box-fit system that results in fewer carbon emissions.
- Value — Pre-portioned ingredients for less waste on excess food, up to 60% cheaper than dining at a restaurant* and 25% cheaper than takeout.
Cons
- Price vs competitors — More expensive starting price than other services at between $9.99 and $11.49 per serving.
- Not allergen-friendly — No option to set dietary restrictions for allergies.
- Delivery window — 12-hour delivery window can be inconvenient.
How does HelloFresh work?
HelloFresh is a subscription-based meal kit service that requires you to sign up for an account to order. After setting up your account, you’ll choose your meal plan type, pick your meals, and get your box.
Here’s what that process looks like step-by-step.
Create your account
To create a HelloFresh account, the first step is to personalize your plan. If you’re signing up for HelloFresh for the first time, you’ll select one or multiple meal plans that will be used to recommend meal kits to you going forward. These meal plans that include options to please just about everyone are:
- Meat & Veggies – exactly what it sounds like, meals featuring meat and veggie-based sides.
- Veggie – meat-free meals that center around fresh produce for the vegetarians out there.
- Family Friendly – picky-eater-approved meals that require less prep and clean up.
- Fit & Wholesome – Calorie Smart meals that are under 650 calories each.
- Quick & Easy – dishes that take 15 minutes or less to prepare so you spend less time at the grocery store or meal planning.
- Pescatarian – seafood and veggie dinners.
Next, you customize your plan size. You can choose either two- or four-serving meals and between two and six recipes per week.
Note that I used our Money Under 30 HelloFresh link to sign up and get a serious discount.
You can change your meal plan, delivery frequency, or the number of meals per box at any time.
While technically there’s “no commitment,” you do lock into a subscription when signing up. This means you’ll have to remember to cancel or change your plan after your first box is delivered if you don’t want it to auto-renew for the next week. Alternatively, you can skip a week or pause your subscription. More on these later.
After you’ve personalized your plan, you’ll provide an email address to create your account, then pick a weekday to receive your first box and every box after. Then you get to…
Choose your meals
HelloFresh will recommend meals for you every week based on your meal preferences, but you can swap out any meal kit for another one from the menu using the plus and minus buttons.
There are 45+ weekly recipes and 100+ seasonal and convenience items each week to choose from. This number includes variations when you swap an item for another item as well as a few lunch items, so you can easily customize your weekly order. On average, each menu includes about seven or eight vegetarian options.
Whether you’re using the website or app, you can see the following details for each meal kit:
- Time to prep
- Calorie count
- Difficulty rating
Each recipe is tagged with a difficulty rating of Easy, Medium, or Hard. Most recipes are easy or medium — it’s rare that one be hard. You can see the full recipe and nutrition facts for every meal kit as well.
You can make changes to any order up to four days in advance of when it is scheduled to be delivered. Finalize your selections by this date to make sure you get what you want in your box.
HelloFresh Market
After you’re done picking your entrees, you’ll go to the HelloFresh Market where you can pick extras from a variety of quick breakfasts, lunches, snacks, desserts, and other essentials to add to your box. The categories are:
- Quick Meals: Efficient and tasty options to make any meal marvelous.
- Quick Breakfast: Hearty, nutrition-packed breakfast bites to kickstart your day.
- Sides & Compliments: Easy add-ons to make any meal into a feast.
- Desserts & Treats: Drool-worthy desserts and treats for those who have a sweet tooth.
- Proteins: Extras of high-quality proteins, perfect for those aiming to add more protein into their diet.
- Fresh Produce: Best-of-the-season fruits and veggies.
- HelloFresh Flavors: Carefully crafted add-on condiments and flavors.
Everything under the HelloFresh Market category is hand-selected with a different assortment based on your location, so you might definitely see at least a couple things that you’re tempted by.
Get your box
Your box will arrive between 8 am and 8 pm on your selected delivery date. Boxes are lined with paper insulation and filled with ice packs to ensure they stay fresh for that (wide) delivery window. Both the lining and ice packs are recyclable. Even though my box didn’t arrive until 7 pm, everything still felt chilled and looked great.
Something unique about HelloFresh is how the meals are actually packaged. Rather than putting all of your ingredients in your box for you to sort through, the ingredients come already separated by meal with only the meat excluded.
What does each box include?
HelloFresh meals come with the main ingredients you need including meat, produce, and sauces. The only things that aren’t included are pantry staples you probably already have, like oil, butter, salt, pepper, and sugar.
HelloFresh pricing and plans
The price per HelloFresh meal kit depends on how many meals you get in each box and how many servings each meal makes. Here’s a breakdown:
- 2 servings: 2-6 meals per a week for $9.99 – $11.49 / serving
- 4 servings: 2-6 meals per a week for $9.99 / serving
There’s a shipping cost associated with your deliveries that varies to guarantee prompt delivery of your meals at their freshest. You can expect this to usually be about the standard of $10.
HelloFresh sign-up offer and discounts
» Get Free Breakfast for Life + 16 Free Meals when you sign up using our HelloFresh link!
HelloFresh is affordable because in addition to that generous sign-up offer (who doesn’t love free breakfast?), it offers discounts on discounts.
There’s HelloRewards. This is a referral program where you can share a coupon with a friend who hasn’t used HelloFresh before and get credit to your account when they sign up. You can even send free boxes to friends and family members.
HelloFresh typically offers additional discounts for the following individuals:
- Nurses
- Military
- Medical providers
- First responders
- Hospital employees
- Teachers
These discounts are available through the company ID.me both for new and returning customers.
Recipe options with HelloFresh
With so many recipes to choose from, there are a few different ways you can make the decision easier on yourself. For example, you can filter for a particular meal plan to only see options within that plan and pay attention to the listed tags on each recipe. Some tags you might see include:
- Cal Smart
- Carb Smart
- Spicy
- Easy Cleanup
- Seasonal
- New
- Veggie
If you’re dieting, especially if you’re restricting calories or carbs, HelloFresh makes it possible to find meals to work for you. Cal Smart for example includes meals that come to a total under 650 calories and those that are Protein Smart come with 38g+ of protein per serving.
HelloFresh includes several vegetarian-friendly dishes on every menu and you might even see dishes with plant-based proteins. There are also no gluten-free meal plans or exclusive keto meal plans, though you may be able to find some recipes to fit these diets.
Customizing your meals
There are dozens of options each week to change, swap, or upgrade proteins and sides, and/or add proteins to veggie dishes. For example, you can exchange ground beef for ground pork, or you may be given the option to opt for cauliflower rice instead of jasmine rice, or go with roasted broccoli instead of roasted carrots (though I prefer the broccoli personally).
A handful of meals can also be customized or upgraded for an additional cost. For instance, you might pay an extra amount per serving to add salmon to an otherwise vegetarian meal or add a side salad. Maybe you’re tempted by cheesecake from HelloFresh Market.
Dietary restrictions
HelloFresh can’t accommodate food allergies or strict dietary restrictions. Although they do everything they can to prevent cross-contamination of common allergens, there is no way to ensure that your food definitely won’t contain things you’re allergic to. Allergens, like soy and tree nuts, are tagged so you’re alerted.
There is no gluten-free meal plan for those with celiac disease.
HelloFresh recipe cards
Easy-to-follow recipes feature large pictures of each main step along with bullet point instructions. You’d be surprised just how much of a difference it makes to have bullet points instead of paragraphs for the step-by-step instructions.
You can also search any recipe in the HelloFresh app or website, where they are organized exactly the same except the steps are arranged vertically.
Here’s a look at the front and back of a card.
Who Is HelloFresh good for?
There aren’t a lot of people I wouldn’t recommend HelloFresh to. This service can support you with meal planning, save you time grocery shopping, and help you stress less when dinner time comes around.
HelloFresh is great for beginners who want to learn to cook with easy recipes, people who are dieting, and people who value sustainability. The HelloFresh Global Food Waste Study by HelloFresh shares that their meal kits can create at least 25% less food waste from the prevention of overbuying and improving farm-to-table distribution.
» Sign up and try HelloFresh today!
Who Is HelloFresh not good for?
I probably wouldn’t recommend HelloFresh to vegans, home chefs who appreciate the finer things, or people trying to slash their grocery bills.
You’ll have to look to other healthy meal delivery services if you want lots of meals to choose from that fit more specific dietary needs. Green Chef, for example, is a certified organic company with healthy choices offering many diet-friendly plans, gluten-free and plant-based meals. A note on that though: Green Chef is actually owned by HelloFresh so you may notice some similarities, like the packaging. We compare these in our Green Chef vs HelloFresh breakdown.
If your goal is to save money, HelloFresh meal kits are probably not for you unless you spend more than than around $8 per a serving at home.
My experience using HelloFresh
What I tried
No review (especially on food) isn’t complete without a personal experience for an honest opinion. In my first HelloFresh box, I tried these three meals:
- Turkish-Spiced Chicken in Apricot Pan Sauce With Lemon Almond Rice & Harissa-Roasted Carrots – absolutely delicious.
- Ginger-Ponzu Turkey Patties With Broccoli Cabbage Salad & Sweet Chili Mayo – fantastic and more interesting than what I usually make myself at home.
- One-Pan Smashed Black Bean Tacos With Creamy Slaw, Pickled Onion & Red Pepper Crema – easy and shockingly good.
The Turkish-Spiced Chicken in Apricot Pan Sauce is one of my favorite meals not just from this kit but from the entire month. These meals were easy and genuinely fun to make thanks to the visual recipe cards.
Each recipe took me about five minutes longer to put on the table than estimated, but I couldn’t be bothered to care once I started eating.
What I liked
If it’s not already obvious, I was a big fan of HelloFresh. It makes total sense to me why millions of people choose this service. Here are a few things I loved.
Recipes
Everything about HelloFresh recipes is easy, and this has a lot to do with the recipes themselves.
First, HelloFresh recipe cards are simple and actually teach you how to cook. Each step is well-explained and pictured with what your food should look like after completing that stage, which is really helpful whether you’re a novice cook or not. There are no confusing steps to riddle through or vague instructions to decipher. HelloFresh tells you that a drizzle of oil is equal to 1 teaspoon. There are even tips after a lot of the steps to reduce cleanup or improve textures and flavors along the way.
Plus, the cards feature a section of advice to execute the trickier parts and a “Bust Out” section that tells you all of the tools and ingredients you’ll need that aren’t included in your box. And not only do the cards tell you what pantry items to grab, but they tell you how much you need of each so you can still cook with pre-measured ingredients if you really want to.
Range of Options
HelloFresh doesn’t mess around when it comes to variety. You’ll see recipes inspired by different parts of the world on every menu and several different types of meal plans to match your preferences. Whether you’re looking for bold global flavors or tried-and-true classics, you shouldn’t be disappointed (I know I wasn’t).
Packaging and Convenience
Unlike other meal kit delivery services that throw all of your ingredients for the week into one box for you to sift through yourself, HelloFresh packages its meal kits in convenient paper bags. Each bag is labeled with the name of the dish (plus a QR code you can scan for the recipe) and contains all of the ingredients needed to cook that recipe. There were no loose potatoes to track down, sauce packets to sort through, or other miscellaneous ingredients to match with their recipes.
The bags made for a really convenient and clean experience. I could dispose of recyclable ingredients as I was cooking right in the bag and I didn’t have to look back and forth from my box to the recipe card to make sure I wasn’t forgetting something. And of course, paper is a whole lot better for the planet than plastic. In general, HelloFresh used very little plastic and most of what they did use was recyclable.
What I didn’t like
Although I have a lot of great things to say about my experience with HelloFresh, no meal kit is perfect. Let’s talk about the ugly (and I’m not just talking about that weird carrot I got and forgot to take a picture of).
Unhealthy meals
One of the main disadvantages of HelloFresh is that a lot of the recipes could be considered “unhealthy.”
Many HelloFresh meals feature lots of dairy and carbs, and some don’t even have a true vegetable. You’ll see a lot of things that are creamy, smothered, and otherwise indulgent on the menu.
Obviously, the ball’s in your court. You can pick healthy dishes and substitute ingredients to make them more nutritious, but this meal delivery service isn’t perfect for those who hate calories and fat without taking the time to pick the proper meals.
The cost of HelloFresh
At between $9.99 and $11.49 a serving, HelloFresh’s prices are about average for meal kit companies. But the average for meal kit companies is still pretty high compared to what a lot of Americans spend on home-cooked dinner.
If you’re buying as an individual or couple, you’ll probably end up spending more on HelloFresh than you do at the grocery store.
Delivery window
This is a relatively small complaint, but one I have to get off my chest anyway. I waited all day for my HelloFresh box. I was eager! I knew it would be arriving on Wednesday, but the delivery window was 8 am to 8 pm and I didn’t have any way of actually knowing which end of that window I should expect. My box didn’t arrive until around 7:30 pm. It’s tough to plan for a 12-hour delivery window.
This is a pretty common complaint on review forums too.
How do you cancel your HelloFresh subscription?
HelloFresh’s cancellation process is pretty straightforward. You just go to your Account Settings and scroll down to the bottom box that says “Cancel my plan.”
When you select this, you’ll see a page that shows your benefits if you have any and the alternatives to canceling. These are changing your delivery date, chatting with customer support, or skipping a week. Select “Cancel anyway” if you’re sure. It’s awkward but you can do it.
Do you get leftovers with HelloFresh?
I had no problems with HelloFresh’s portion sizes. I ate exactly half of each two-serving meal and felt full, then reheated and enjoyed the meals as leftovers too.
But whether or not the portions will be good for you depends completely on the meals you choose and your appetite. For example, if you choose vegetarian meals, note that you might not actually get more food to make up for the lack of meat.
HelloFresh customer service
I went ahead and called customer service because I wanted to see both how long it takes to reach support and how good the support is. I was connected with a friendly and helpful agent named Mira within 30 seconds of calling who answered my questions right away (I asked if there was a way to reduce your delivery window — there’s not).
To contact customer support, call Customer Care at 1 (646) 846-3663 for help with everything from canceling your account to getting a status update on your order. You can also chat with someone through the site.
If you don’t want to talk to anyone, check out the Help Center for FAQs and account management help.
Is HelloFresh worth it?
HelloFresh is popular for a reason. The meals are easy to prepare and delicious, and the prices are average (for meal kits).
Consider how much you would pay someone to meal prep and grocery shop for you to decide if HelloFresh is worth it. When you pay for HelloFresh, you don’t have to worry about meal planning for a few days out of every week.
HelloFresh reviews are largely positive, but there are plenty of angry customers too. I read the complaints so you don’t have to. Basically, make sure you understand how your subscription works — specifically how much you’ll be charged and how often — and how to cancel or pause if you need to.
Are meal kits right for you?
How much do you value home-cooked meals? How much do you stress about what to make for dinner each night? How much do you love or hate grocery shopping?
Meal kits are easy to prepare and convenient, but they can be more expensive depending on how much you spend per serving when you plan and make your own meals. If the price is your number one concern, try comparing your average grocery bill to the price of a subscription.
The competition
HelloFresh definitely ranks among our list of the best meal delivery services, but it can’t hurt to compare. Another option, perhaps that is one affordable, might be more your jam.
HelloFresh vs Home Chef
Home Chef is our most recommended meal delivery service because it offers diverse and customizable meals that can be both healthy and great for an individual or a whole family.
Rated #1 in customer satisfaction and our favorite meal delivery company.
Home Chef offers multiple meal choices each week with ample variety to meet dietary needs. While not the most adventurous or customizable meal box out there, Home Chef delivery fresh, quality ingredients and tasty recipes consistently.
- Recipes are easiest to follow
- Customize meals with your favorite protein
- Super fresh ingredients, all measured out
- No vegan option (vegetarian only)
Prices for Home Chef start at $9.99 per a serving for 30+ rotating meal options to choose from weekly.
Home Chef allows you to ‘Customize It’ and select the protein for some dishes. Features like that make it a superior option for families with picky eaters or dietary restrictions, or for those looking to switch up the dinner routine. There’s also a 100% satisfaction guarantee if you’re not satisfied.
» MORE: Our most recommended Review of Home Chef
HelloFresh vs EveryPlate
EveryPlate provides fresh, tasty, home-cooked meals at the most affordable price for a meal delivery service we’ve reviewed.
EveryPlate is an affordable meal kit company focusing on simple comfort food recipes that are easy to make and tasty. The budget-friendly options with EveryPlate are up to 56% cheaper than top meal kit services and can save you up to 30% on your groceries.
- One of the lowest cost meal kit services
- Easy meal prep
- Minimal plastic packaging
- Somewhat limited menu
- Few vegetarian and gluten-free meals
EveryPlate starts at $4.99 per a serving. Yeah, you read that right. It’s the most affordable meal delivery service we’ve reviewed. To reduce operating costs and pass on more savings, EveryPlate uses simpler packaging and recipes. This means fewer ingredients, fewer steps when you’re cooking, and fewer dollars per meal out of your pocket.
Their menu is more limited and there are less veggie options but that comes with the territory of the give-and-take with the affordability of EveryPlate.
» MORE: Read our full EveryPlate Review
Summary
I can honestly say that my first HelloFresh delivery won’t be my last and that I will be ordering again. HelloFresh is a flexible meal delivery service that’s family-friendly and great for couples and individuals. If you like variety and want to save yourself precious time and energy, HelloFresh is an excellent choice (even if you’re still learning to cook).
HelloFresh is probably not for you if you’re looking for more premium meal kits, are on a really tight dinner budget, or are looking for healthy and/or plant-based options.