Best Meal Kit Delivery Services Reviewed Updated

Since first writing this review of the best meal kit delivery services, some of the companies I profile below have updated their services or introduced new discounts. Others have stopped offering meal kits.

So I just updated it so now it includes just three meal kits. They are HelloFresh vs Sun Basket vs Blue Apron.

FYI, we’ve finally tried Purple Carrot vegan meal kits. My review is here.

meal kit companies reviewed

Updates from meal kit delivery services reviewed

Here are some of the latest news from meal kit companies mentioned in this review as well as others.

Blue Apron Updates

Now that Blue Apron has partnered with Whole 30, you’ll be able to get Whole 30 meals delivered to your door.

If you’re eating vegetarian these days, now you can order Beyond Burgers with your Blue Apron meal kits!

Finally, new customers get $200 off across 6 orders. Plus, your first order ships free! No coupon code necessary. Just order through this Blue Apron link.

Factor Meals Coupon Code

Enjoy Up to $276 off with Factor Meals!

Use coupon code FACTOR276 at checkout.

Green Chef Promo Code

Want to Save This Article?

Save this article and we’ll send it to your inbox. Plus, we’ll send you more great links each week.

Save Article
By submitting this form, you consent to receive emails from Leah Ingram

Get $200 off across five boxes from Green Chef. Also, your first box ships free. Use coupon code GREENCHEF200 at checkout.

HelloFresh Updates

The HelloFresh deal right now is this: get 22 free meals, plus your first box ships for free. Finally, you’ll get three surprise gifts.

How do you get this HelloFresh offer? Use promo code HELLOFRESH22 at checkout.

Home Chef Offers

Get 75% off your first box from Home Chef. Then, enjoy 60% off your second and third boxes.

Also, Skinnytaste meals are back on Home Chef menus by popular demand this January, with familiar favorites and all-new delicious, better-for-you meal kits! Look for the Fresh Start badge on the menu to get carb-conscious or calorie-conscious meals delivered to your door. Available for a limited time only.

Purple Carrot Discount

New customers can receive $80 off their first four boxes. Just use promo code AFFILATE23 at checkout.

This offer is through February 28th, 2023 only.

Other meal kit and meal prep service deals

There are many more companies that make and ship meal kits or offer subscriptions to meal prep services. Even though I haven’t covered every single one in this blog post, I wanted to share some deals that you can get with them.

Why we started using meal kit delivery services

Why did my husband and I first consider using meal kit delivery services? Because we were in a menu rut. I found myself making the same few meals repeatedly. It was boring. Cooking wasn’t fun anymore. Plus, we were trying to eat healthier.

The three companies we tried originally that allowed us to make fresh meals conveniently and affordably were HelloFresh, Sun Basket and Blue Apron

Have you checked out the most popular subscription boxes by location? Where does your state rank?

Overview of how Meal Kit Delivery Services work

If you’ve never tried a meal kit service, let me go over the basics of how most work. When you sign up with a meal kit service, you make a few selections upfront.

  • How many meals a week you want
  • How many people you’ll be serving
  • What your dietary preferences are
  • What your preferred delivery day is

With all the services we tried, we had to provide a credit card. However, we were not roped into any long-term agreements.

You could sign up for one week and cancel the next. All of the meal kit delivery services we tried let us pause our service if we were traveling.

When your service is active, you can go in and choose your menu up to three weeks in advance. Also, you can change your menu selections or even the number of meals you were receiving up to a week before your next delivery.

This latter convenience was super helpful when our daughters came home for spring break and we wanted to up our delivery from two meals per day to four meals. Then, when they went back to college, we went back to two meals per day.

Meal kits offer both dinner and breakfast options

Most meal kit delivery services are designed to give you dinner options for two to three nights per week. Many of the ones we tried have also added breakfast options.

Sun Basket had an overnight oats options. HelloFresh has had egg dishes, pancakes and a bacon flatbread that I actually made for dinner one night. Yeah, breakfast for dinner!

Whether you choose two meals a week or five, meal kit delivery services deliver that week’s box in one delivery. That means you have to ensure you have room in the refrigerator so when you unbox your ingredients, you have somewhere you can put them so they stay fresh.

Popularity of meal kits

Since starting using meal kit delivery services, I’ve noticed how many of these boxes are showing up on my neighbors’ doorsteps throughout the week. Or, frankly, how many of the boxes are flattened and put out on recycling day.

Bottom line: meal kits are hugely popular. Inc.com says that in the next 10 years, the meal kit industry could grow to $5 billion.

Now that you have a better understanding of how these meal kit delivery services work, let me move onto my review of HelloFresh, Sun Basket, and Blue Apron. They are listed here in alphabetical order.

Blue Apron Review

Not only did we try companies like Blue Apron, we tried Blue Apron itself. When we were first considering trying meal kits, Blue Apron was what came to mind.

We’d seen advertisements for companies like Blue Apron–plus pictures from friends and family members on Instagram and Facebook of their Blue Apron meals. So we figured, what the heck, let’s give these meal kits a try.

We tried Blue Apron and here’s what happened

Our very first foray into meal kits was with Blue Apron. The meals were easy to choose from, delivery was convenient and we were able to try dishes that we never would have considered making.

Blue Apron pros

We found the array of menu selections that Blue Apron offers quite varied. We could eat from many different cuisines in the same week. Italian. Mexican. American. Everything was delicious.

Also, we learned a few new tips when cooking. These were things we’d never tried before. Like roasting root vegetables.

Sounds simple, I know, but until Blue Apron suggested we do this with a burger meal we were making, I’d never thought of pairing the two.

The meals were definitely delicious. Now Blue Apron also offers wine that you can have delivered by subscription. I love this option!

Blue Apron cons

Our biggest complaint about Blue Apron was that the meals were high in calories. Thankfully, we were only getting and making Blue Apron meals for three dinners a week.

So as long as we ate lighter on the non-Blue Apron days, it was fine. But I’ve never used so much olive oil and butter in my life.

It is important to note that we first tried Blue Apron four years ago. I know that Blue Apron has significantly changed the calorie counts of its dishes.

I guess many people like us complained. So while that was an issue for us way back then, it wouldn’t be today.

When you sign up for Blue Apron using this link, you’ll get $110 off plus free shipping.

HelloFresh Review

Our family loves cooking with HelloFresh meal kits. We get three meals a week, which is the right amount–enough to make dinner interesting a couple nights a week but not too much to be overwhelming.

HelloFresh got us out of our meal rut and into eating a healthier menu. My husband, who tends to avoid anything green, has chowed down on arugula salad and roasted Brussels sprouts–something I’d never witnessed in nearly 30 years of marriage.

Combined with a stepped up exercise program, eating HelloFresh meals three times a week has helped my husband to lose weight. Most recently he told me he was in three belt notches. (Riding our Peloton bike helps, too.)

His better health is all the more reason for us to continue ordering, cooking and serving HelloFresh meals.

Use promo code HELLOFRESH22 at checkout to get 22 free meals, plus free shipping on your first box.

HelloFresh Pros

Each box filled with HelloFresh meal kits comes with 8×10 recipe cards. On the front is a picture of the meal, plated and finished.

On the back are step-by-step instructions. I’ve taken to using a cookbook stand to hold the recipe card up on the counter when cooking. It’s so easy to see. 

meal kit delivery services

Each recipe card includes the prep time, the cooking time, and the number of calories per portion. I have never had a HelloFresh meal that took more than 40 minutes to prepare and cook.

Like other meal kit services HelloFresh ingredients are pre-portioned so there is no food waste. Also, the packaging itself is small and not wasteful.

The garlic comes pre-peeled, a nice convenience. Many veggies do, too.

Why we like HelloFresh ingredients and recipes

HelloFresh does a good job of presenting meals with at least three main ingredients.  With a former football player husband, there would be no way I could present a dinner that barely fills the plate. In nearly every instance, HelloFresh meals did not disappoint.

In a few months of using HelloFresh, we’ve already determined some favorite recipes, which we’ve made again. That’s the great thing about these recipe cards. You can keep them on hand–maybe even put them in a loose-leaf notebook–and use them in the future, with ingredients you purchase at the supermarket.

With HelloFresh delivery is always free. I like that.

Use promo code HELLOFRESH22 at checkout to get 22 free meals, plus free shipping on your first box.

HelloFresh Cons

Over six months of using HelloFresh, we’ve had very few problems. In fact, the problem we had was our own fault, not HelloFresh.

One week we were too busy to cook the night the boxes arrived. When we finally got to making a meal kit, some five days after delivery, the vegetables weren’t good anymore.

So word to the wise: if you sign up for a meal kit service, make cooking it a priority. Otherwise, you’re just wasting food and your money.

Sun Basket Review

What sets Sun Basket apart from other meal kit delivery services like Blue Apron, HelloFresh and others is that its ingredients are USDA certified organic, making it an organic meal delivery. When you sign up for Sun Basket, you can also opt to make it a vegetarian meal delivery service.

Bonus: when we had a vegan friend visit, he confirmed that some of the Sun Basket vegetarian options were, in fact, vegan.

Sun Basket Pros

We first tried Sun Basket during a time when both of our daughters were home from college and they had friends visiting. Some of these friends are vegetarian and vegan so it was great to have the vegetarian meal delivery option. In fact, at one point I had four twentysomethings in my kitchen, cooking a vegan Sun Basket meal.

Most recently we tried Sun Basket again. This time we, the parents, are the ones who have decided to go vegetarian.

Given my previous, positive experience with Sun Basket, I knew they would be the best choice for vegetarian meal kit options. In fact, given my praise for Sun Basket in the past, the company offered to send us meals for free for one week.

You can often find a Sun Basket deal on Groupon.

Impressive portion sizes

Unlike some meal kit delivery services, which portions are so small you leave the dinner table hungry, this was not the case with Sun Basket. The meal the kids made was supposed to feed just four people, but there were seven people sitting down to dinner that night.

While we did add a salad to the menu, the bulgur vegan stew from Sun Basket served us all. It was delicious and filling.

The vegan and vegetarian friends loved it and asked to take a picture of the recipe card so they could make it again when they went back to college.

This most recent time cooking with Sun Basket, the portions were, again, hearty. Technically, the Pomodoro pasta dish we made served two only. However, our oldest daughter was visiting and the meal for two not only served three of us but we had leftovers to boot.

Works well with Noom eating program

Even better, our daughter is following the Noom eating plan, and the whole wheat pasta that Sun Basket provided was a green food. If you are a Noom devotee, you know that getting the most green food possible is a win-win.

That is, no food is off limits with Noom. Instead, food is divided into green (for go), yellow (proceed with caution) and red (ok to enjoy but in limited quantities.) This way of looking at food is one of the reasons that some people believe that Noom is the last weight loss program you’ll ever need Sign up today.

Certified organic

Another pro for Sun Basket–the fact that everything is USDA certified organic. That’s a huge deal if you’re trying to eat clean. 

Sun Basket has meal kits for all different kinds of eating:

  • Carb Conscious
  • Mediterranean
  • Plant Lovers
  • Clean Eating

Sun Basket Cons

Sun Basket charges for delivery. It is $6.99 each time. The meals per person are also more expensive than any other meal kit delivery services. However, for people who want to eat certified organic food, the price may be worth it.

And that’s it. That’s the only cons I could come up with for Sun Basket.

Meal kits that no longer exist

Sadly, there are a handful of meal kit and delivery companies that could not survive. This includes Plated and Freshly.

So, if you came to this meal kit review article looking for information on Plated or Freshly, I’m sorry to break that news to you.

Overall Thoughts on Meal Kit Delivery Services

What I have loved about using meal kit delivery services is getting back to the act of cooking from scratch. It’s something I haven’t done in a long time, beyond making a salad or creating a dish in my Crock Pot.

For me cooking everything from scratch is flexing a muscle that has gone lax. It feels good to use my brain this way. Blue Apron, HelloFresh and Sun Basket  have allowed me to do this.

I realize that I could be using a cooking app or recipe in a magazine to cook from scratch. But cooking that way requires a trip to the supermarket, measuring out ingredients and more. That’s not always a good use of my time and money.

Conclusion about meal kit delivery services

In the past I’ve had good intentions of cooking from ingredients I bought. However, sometimes life got in the way, and I ended up not using or forgetting about at least one ingredient. And suddenly it’s become a mystery liquid in the vegetable crisper.

With a meal kit delivery service, yes, I’m paying for the convenience of someone else getting me my ingredients. However, I’m also avoiding wasting money on ingredients that, well, go to waste.

To me that’s a smart way to spend my time and money. It makes me a smart shopper and feel like a sophisticated consumer. I’m confident you will feel the same way, too.

5 Comments

  1. We are Hello Fresh fans too. I had the same issue with chicken breasts vs. thighs that led to a couple disappointing meals. However, I did figure out a way to determine which type of chicken is included in a meal. If you login on the app and go to My Menu, you can scroll down to see the list of ingredients, which shows the type of chicken. I do this when I’m making selections a few weeks in advance so I can avoid chicken thighs….

  2. Leah, I had to laugh at your comment about Blue Apron recipes being high in calories; I’ve never used so much olive oil in my life! But we just canceled BA because almost every meal had “spicy” in the name, and my wife does not like spicy food. Also, BA loves pickling, and my wife doesn’t like vinegar at all. How do these other services compare in terms of spicy/hot offerings and vinegar-based marinades?

    1. Hi, Bob:

      Thanks for the comment. I don’t recall ever having vinegar in a Peapod or Sun Basket meal kit. It appears infrequently in HelloFresh. Just this past week it came with a slaw recipe, which I loved; hubby hated it. (He, too, doesn’t like vinegar.) Some of the recipes are spicy but I’ve learned to a) not choose them when choosing the next week’s menu and b) if I missed the spicy part, not using that spice or only using a wee bit. I’ve never had an issue with things being too spicy with HelloFresh, and I have a wimpy palate. Hope that helps.

      Leah

  3. We have tried 3 so far, including Hello Fresh and SunBasket. It’s interesting that you experienced such great customer service with Hello Fresh. We had a bad experience in that department and there was no attempt to keep us as customers when I quit over it. Basically, I had put in preferences that we were gluten-free, and there was a week where there were not enough GF options, so I asked to skip. They wrote back, saying ok, and here were some good options for us the following week. Apparently, even though I’d already said to skip the week in question, because I didn’t write back to “confirm” that, it came anyway…and they refused to remove the charge. We’ve been happier with Sun Basket, and feel good about the organic meals.

    1. Carrie:

      I’m sorry that happened to you. It did take some getting used to HelloFresh’s scheduling and how far in advance you have to make selections. The most difficulty we’ve had is the one time when we wanted to change the date of our delivery, missed our window, and ended up going two weeks without a box when customer service said that wouldn’t happen. I’m glad you’ve been happy with Sun Basket.

Comments are closed.