As the blooms of spring arrive, I find myself less inclined to spend hours in the kitchen creating complex meals. Life this time of year includes more non-food projects, and besides, I want to be outside, feeling the new sunlight on my face. I love food variety, though, so crackers and cheese for dinner every night definitely doesn’t cut it!

If you wanted to offload meal preparation in the olden days, you had to hire an expensive private chef. Now, a plethora of home menu delivery companies like Hello Fresh and Blue Apron can deliver boxes of pre-portioned ingredients straight to your home for quick recipes. But are these boxes worth the hype? Do they actually live up to their claims of nutritional superiority, convenience, and lower cost? Most importantly, what role might these meal delivery boxes, not at all immune to the pressures of diet culture, play in triggering restrictive or disordered eating habits?

This year, I decided to answer these questions by sampling a variety of meal kit services. I sampled some of the biggest and most colorful names: Hello Fresh, Home Chef, Purple Carrot, and Green Chef. I approached the process from an anti-diet and intuitive eating lens: could these meals satisfy me? Were they pleasurable, enough, and free from the pressures of the food police? And, of course, could they solve my problem of needing-more-time-outside-the-kitchen?

One of the first things I look for in my meals (as should we all) is: will I enjoy them? Choosing foods that are pleasing to our palate is an important part of respecting our bodies. When we are eating intuitively, without artificial rules or restrictions, our body will often guide us towards a satisfying balance of different flavors and food groups. The ability to walk away from a meal feeling finished and at peace with food is also dependent on having had a pleasurable eating experience. So as I combed through the very different selections at each company, I paid close attention to how much fun I was (or wasn’t) having.

The first service I tried was the popular Hello Fresh, certainly the most aggressive mailer of coupons to my house. I found their website pretty easy to navigate, and was pleased with the generally large selection of menu options, displayed by colorful pictures. I don’t love eating meat, so I appreciated their substantial vegetarian options despite not being a dedicated vegetarian meal service. Completely gluten-free meals (for my celiac disease) were lacking, but I could see that it wouldn’t be difficult to swap out gluten ingredients with a few of my own. Tasty-looking options I chose for my two weeks of three meals each included Mushroom and Herb Shepherd’s Pie, Harissa Sweet Potato Wraps, Cauliflower and Chickpea Tikka Masala, One-Pot Black Bean and Red Pepper Soup, and more. Though each night’s menu sounded a little worryingly sparse, I was glad to see Hello Fresh offering the carbohydrate food group with meals! Many other services, leaning hard into the keto fad, didn’t seem to do this.

Recipes in my box of Hello Fresh Meals-looks good in pictures, doesn’t it?

I had a little less fun picking recipes from the Green Chef page. This company, which advertises itself as a “healthy and organic” meal delivery service, automatically tried to enroll me in their “keto/paleo” plan, which includes basically just meat and vegetables. I had to work way too hard to un-enroll and seek out less restrictive options (there weren’t a lot)! I eventually found my way to a week of Creamy Broccoli and Potato Soup, Spiced Tilapia with Avocado-Lime Crema and Japanese Cabbage and Carrot Fritters, but I chose to forgo a second week when I saw nothing else that looked vegetarian and appealing.

Recipes in my Green Chef box-more tasty-looking pictures

I didn’t even follow through with my plan to sign up for a week of Blue Apron, because their menu includes only a small handful of choices, none of which were vegetarian and gluten-free compatible. They don’t even let you see the options before signing up, so I had the headache of entering all my information and then cancelling. Not fun at all!

The next service I tried was Purple Carrot. Unlike most others, Purple Carrot is completely vegetarian, and mostly gluten-free, offering me the joy of choosing from a wide variety of appetizing menus. I had the most fun selecting from this company, and picked Crispy Potato Skillet, Root Vegetable Sancocho, and Macaroni and Cheese for my first week.

Recipe from my Purple Carrot Box-perfectly food styled, as usual

The last company I tried was Home Chef, which looked to be an all-purpose source of easy, familiar meals, similar to Hello Fresh. Their website didn’t have as large a selection, especially not for vegetarian foods, but I found at least three options that looked tasty: Salmon Cakes with Dill Hollandaise, Green Goddess Risotto, and Sweet Potato Tortilla Soup.

Overall, though each company had its quirks and limitations, I did find the process of looking at pictures of food to decide what I wanted to try surprisingly pleasurable, similar to ordering from a restaurant.

Though the initial food selection was generally agreeable for most companies I tried, the process was not without dangerous whispers of diet culture. This was my biggest concern going in (besides cost): that the design and marketing of the meals would feel like a diet.

Turns out, this concern was well-founded. Meal delivery companies lean pretty hard into selling their boxes as an easy way to diet. The websites all advertised “low-calorie” or “healthy” (just a nickname for low-calorie) choices and some peddled an idea that it was worth paying higher (!) prices for “dietitian-designed” boxes that gave you less food (!) overall. Many seemed to uncritically adopt whatever the in-vogue diet was, in this case, often keto or paleo. But the power the food police held at each company varied widely.

Green Chef was one of the most deeply infiltrated by the Keto Police. Most meals fit within this diet plan, and were tagged accordingly. Hello Fresh and Home Chef had somewhat less extreme views, but still labeled some meals as “calorie-smart” or “healthy.” Creating a dichotomy of “good” (healthy) and “bad” unhealthy foods always disconnects us from internal awareness of our body’s needs, and comes with unhelpful baggage of guilt when “unhealthy” choices sound good. In addition, such up-front calorie labeling (literally, on the front of all the meal cards), emphasizes a false paradigm of calories as dangerous. As you’ll see later on, calorie information wasn’t even accurate!

Purple Carrot had a different problem: extreme focus on veganism as a lifestyle, even though vegan options (like providing palm oil margarine instead of butter) don’t always jive with their stated philosophy of being a more “sustainable” company. I like eating plants, but I don’t love being beat over the head with an idea that veganism is always morally superior.

I didn’t even try a number of other plans because I could see right away that throngs of food police were stomping across their websites. Factor advertises itself as expensively dietitian-designed, but the meals are completely pre-portioned and pre-cooked, smelling of just a modern update to Jenny Craig. Their extreme focus on “keto” made me want to tear my hair out, of course, because an RDN should know better than anyone that a ketogenic diet isn’t evidence-supported for long-term health for most people. Sunbasket was similarly too heavy-handed with the keto cuffs, with a uniquely weird process of splitting meal options into basically keto (meat and veggie) vs just carb options, as if some meals were offered specifically as “cheat nights.” No thanks diet culture!

Across all plans, the tightly controlled nature of the portion sizes did make me cringe under a soft touch of food scarcity, even if there was technically enough food to fill my belly. Ingredients are measured to the tablespoon, so even eating a pinch of cheese while cooking risks spoiling things. As you’ll see later, I almost always combined menus or ate more than suggested. This didn’t necessarily negate the purpose of providing fast and easy meals, but for a true anti-diet approach, next time I’d order twice the anticipated serving size (i.e. a 4-person plan to feed 2 people). Filling our home with an abundance of food only lubricates the process of trusting our own bodies, not some box, to tell us how much to eat.

In order to double the amount of food ordered, however, one must consider cost. Meal delivery boxes can be a fun one-time adventure when given as a gift or using a coupon, but does the cost and quality make sense?

Hello Fresh, of the coupon blitz, typically offers one of the least-expensive initial price points, depending on promotion, but cost quickly rises. I paid $25 for my first box of 3 “2-person” meals, followed by $60 for the second, increasing to $75 in week three. A screaming deal to start, but at $25/meal by the end I think I could have gotten just as much food from the deli. The food quality was ok: a few wilted greens here and there, but really surprisingly fresh for whatever circuitous California road-trip it took to get to me. I loved the cuteness of the individually-sized heads of lettuce, but having sour cream included in 4 fast-food style squeeze packs, instead of one tub, was annoying and felt environmentally irresponsible. Home Chef was also cheaper to try, at $34.97/box, but for what seemed like slightly less interesting food choices. However, the normal price (if choosing the cheapest options in their somewhat-annoying variable pricing structure), would have been cheaper at ~$60.

Home Chef Salmon Cakes w/ Dill Hollandaise-another mouth-watering professional photoshoot

Green Chef started a bit higher, at $39/box (for 3 meals for 2), but soon rose to about the same as Hello Fresh, at $80/box. This seemed justified at first, as the vegetables are mostly organic, but the ingredient quality was all over the place. I received some nice crunchy pre-shredded cabbage mix, but the broccoli was mite-infested and had to be tossed (turning my “Broccoli Potato Soup with Crispy Croutons” into “A Potato,” since I couldn’t eat the croutons either). I didn’t love the nakedness of the ¼ cut of a butternut squash in my box, instead of a Hello Fresh-style mini-vegetable (let’s just set aside questions of GMO design for a moment), but the cuteness factor was balanced out a little by the inclusion of a single egg in a tiny custom egg crate.

Purple Carrot was by far the most expensive to trial, at $55 for the 2-person 3-meal plan, but in the end it would have raised to about the same $80 price as Green Chef. The increased price was offset a bit by the excitement of more expensive vegetables, like plantains and fresh snap peas (in February!), but given that the purpose of these boxes (in my mind) is quick cooking replacement when times are desperate, I’m not sure the pricier veggies are really necessary. If you like plant-based meals with lots of variety, though, Purple Carrot will definitely bring the emerald-green.

Home Chef Green Goddess Risotto-if only real life was so sparkly

Nearly as important as price, of course, is convenience and security. If the (my) point of the boxes is to reliably provide fast food, let’s look at how well they each did this, which was pretty different.

Meal delivery boxes arrive on your set day of the week, refrigerated to stay cold, with ingredients for each menu included together in a plastic bag. My Green Chef and Purple Carrot boxes arrived promptly in the afternoon, with all ingredients intact and ready for me to cook by dinnertime. Home Chef’s delivery was also smooth, though I initially panicked when opening the box to find a wrong recipe card (for steak!) Fortunately, my asparagus risotto ingredients were still inside.

Hello Fresh was the only service that prompted food insecurity fears. Their first box didn’t show up until 6:30, far too late in my mind for starting dinner. I felt rushed and stressed, exactly what I was trying to avoid! The second box didn’t even arrive until the next day, which left me panicked and scrambling for take-out, even though Hello Fresh eventually (after some negotiation) refunded my money.

In the end, though I enjoyed the idea of a box of food magically showing up on my porch, I hated relaying on the vagaries of interstate postal logistics for a foundational Maslow’s Hierarchy need. If I were to try meal boxes again, I would count on having something else in the fridge for arrival night, ensuring I would be safely fed no matter what happened!

In an ideal world (and what am I paying for it not an ideal world?) I like my meals to feel fully satisfying: filling my belly, engaging my taste buds, and leaving me feeling well-cared for. Satisfaction is a major pillar of a normal relationship to food, one that is too often denied chronic dieters. So I certainly wanted my boxed meals to provide at least a reasonable level of satisfaction, as well as gentle nutrition: the sense that I am nourishing myself with a diversity and balance of different foods.

The menus from Hello Fresh and Green Chef were all over the place on the satisfaction meter. For the most part, the meals only felt like part of a balanced meal. I don’t consider a bowl of black bean soup with a dusting of tortilla chips (Hello Fresh) a full meal—what about a side salad? A piece of cornbread or a quesadilla? Neither does a giant slab of tilapia with a decorative sprinkling of peppers and squash (Green Chef) hit the spot for me. Where’s the starch food group? I found myself combining menus often: adding the broccoli-potato soup ingredients for a carb increase with the aforementioned Green Chef meal, for example, or combining the Tex-Mex wrap fillings (i.e. chips, cheese, lettuce) with my Hello Fresh bean soup meal.

My version of the Hello Fresh Shepard’s Pie dish

The meals were sometimes well-rounded with flavor, such as Hello Fresh’s Moroccan-style harissa veggie wrap, or Green Chef’s Japanese-style cabbage fritter, but something seemed missing or inadequate with every single meal. I enjoyed the balance of protein (edamame), carb (rice), veggie (broccoli and cabbage) and fat (aioli) in the cabbage fritter meal, for example, but the tiny drizzle of packaged aioli provided left my patties dry and my fat cravings unmet.

Technically many of the meals may have provided a filling amount of calories on paper, but a full belly and a satisfied one are different things! The vegetarian meals were frequently lower in fat and protein than I would have liked, and the meat meals were missing carbs. Many Home Chef meals, some of the least satisfying, seemed to avoid veggies or protein completely. I ended up adding and subtracting to nearly every meal. I threw black lentils and cheese in with my Hello Fresh Shepard’s pie meal, a large portion of my own yogurt in with their masala curry meal (only an absurd teaspoon was included), a salad with my Home Chef salmon meal, and condiments (always included in inadequate amounts) with pretty much every menu.

Frustratingly, not only did many of the menus come with calorie counts, but from what I could tell, these were often grossly overstated. I could only imagine this working to the companies’ benefit: giving an impression of more food value provided than reality. Unfortunately, this also comes with the restriction-triggering side-effect of suggesting to us that our continued hunger is not to be trusted.

For example, take the Tex-Mex Kidney Bean Wrap meal from Hello Fresh, advertised to contain 1050 calories and 104 grams of carbohydrate. The food included in one portion of this meal is: 1 small flour tortilla, 1 cup of kidney beans, ¼ cup of cheese, a few leaves of romaine lettuce, ¾ ounce tortilla chips, 1 tablespoon mayo, 1 tablespoon guacamole, 1 teaspoon honey, and 1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon oil. I did my own calculations, and found the meal to contain at best 940 calories and 80 grams carbohydrate, and this was including 160 calories of your own oil that was to be drizzled on top of the lettuce, which seemed odd, considering that the obvious place for the lettuce was in the already-mayonnaise containing wraps. So now we are down to 780 calories, not including the bits of honey and guacamole that don’t squeeze out of the packages, the ¾ of the cup of beans that doesn’t even fit into the small wrap, and the cheese that spills on the floor. Realistically, one might be looking at an only 600 calorie meal by the time dinner makes it to the table, too light for some, especially since our efficacy at metabolizing food is never 100%.

My version of the Purple Carrot Potato Skillet meal

Most companies did at least provide good tasting food, but this couldn’t always be said for Purple Carrot. In addition to committing some classic vegan and gluten-free meal faux pas, namely, low protein content (wheat, cheese, and milk substitutes sacrifice many grams of protein: a cup of almond milk, for example, contains only 1 gram to cow milk’s 8 grams—more tofu or beans with meals might have ameliorated this), some of their food tasted, frankly, bad. I had had so much fun picking from their expansive menu, but the (unlabeled-ingredients a mystery!) “vegan cheese sauce” packet with my penne was disgusting, nothing like the richness of real cheese pasta. The (similarly unlabeled—how can I enjoy eating something if I don’t even know what it is!?) “root vegetable mix” packet in my sancocho included some strangely fibrous turnip?/yucca?/rutabagas?, and the snap pea skillet, so pretty in the staged photo on their website, just tasted weird.

I walked away from this project feeling like, in some way or another, every meal service had tried to trick me out of all of my food groups, overcharged me, or simply left me unsatisfied. At the same time, many recipes were quite tasty, as long as I made substantial changes to create a full and balanced meal for myself.

I didn’t feel like meal delivery boxes could be a panacea for all the frustrations of the kitchen, but they did add some excitement. Each meal service had its pros and cons. In general, the diet-speak and limited portion sizes were a major con, worse at companies like Green Chef than ones like Hello Fresh or Home Chef. The expense of a regular subscription for any of the services felt too high for me, but the starter and trial boxes were a better value. Produce quality was so-so and delivery could be scary (especially for Hello Fresh), but as long as I kept some extra bread, lettuce, and cheese in the kitchen, meal security was ok. I could imagine rotating through intro offers at various companies in future should I need a brief break from meal planning.

For me, Hello Fresh’s wider vegetarian selection and lower starting price generally put it on top. If your goal was more interesting vegetarian foods, Purple Carrot would be my pick, bring your own cheese sauce. Home Chef could also have value as a budget option without too much diet-speak. Green Chef had some nice meals and the best delivery process, but I’m not sure I could stomach the pushy paleo focus again.

Of course, meal delivery boxes aren’t the only option when meal planning gets tough! Ultimately, frozen meals, take-out meals, and quick standbys like sandwiches or “tapas platters” (i.e. grabbing some fruit, nuts, dip, crackers, deli meat, cheese) will always be there. And if you’d like some help rehabilitating your low-cook meal plan, contact me for a strategy session today!

(Based on a 1-5 totally subjective Anita’s favorite foods scale: Terrible, Poor, Fair, Good, and Excellent)

Hello Fresh

• Pleasure: GOOD
• Food Freedom: FAIR
• Food Security: POOR
• Value: FAIR-GOOD (depending on promotions)
• Satisfaction Factor: FAIR

Total Score: 15.5/25

Green Chef

• Pleasure: FAIR
• Food Freedom: POOR
• Food Security: GOOD
• Value: FAIR-GOOD (depending on promotions)
• Satisfaction Factor: POOR

Total Score: 13.5/25

Purple Carrot

• Pleasure: GOOD-EXCELLENT
• Food Freedom: FAIR
• Food Security: FAIR
• Value: FAIR
• Satisfaction Factor: POOR

Total Score: 15.5/25

Home Chef

• Pleasure: POOR
• Food Freedom: GOOD
• Food Security: FAIR
• Value: GOOD
• Satisfaction Factor: POOR

Total Score: 15/25