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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2026
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I stopped ordering HelloFresh because it was ultimately more affordable to buy my groceries.
You stopped ordering HelloFresh because you discovered it may have been touched by hands soaked in piss.
We are not the same.
I'm just over here not ever ordering from these obvious rent-seeking scams.
Yeah I looked into them for my elderly parents but all you're essentially getting is a frozen microwave dinner. I can buy those from the store myself for half the price.
Hello fresh isn't a frozen microwave dinner company. They mail you ingredient for you to cook your own meals.
That is literally the point, you chose a recipe they send you the exact ingredients you need, you cook it. Tbh not even a bad idea, less wasteful, easy meal planning, less trips to the grocery store. If it were cheaper i would be using it.
It would be a great idea to just be inside a grocery store... like a section of just pre portioned meal kits... priced by cost of the actual ingredients found in the store...
My local store does that with online shopping. You just add to the cart one of their recipes, then they add those ingredients to your shopping cart and send you a link to the recipe. Only a small range of recipes, though.
Harris farms in Sydney if anyone is interested.
They could even intentionally select sets of recipes with lots of the same ingredients to give people options without taking up a lot of space, while also rotating them every so often for variety.
They could, but they don't. They use a ton of single use plastics.
I was expanding upon the parent comment's suggestion that grocery stores could facilitate ingredient purchasing for predetermined recipes; a cooler/shelf combo placed near the front of a store for instance.
So ingredients you have to then put together yourself? Isn't that just "groceries?"
Instead of sending you a bunch of mint when the recipe needs 5 leaves, they send you 5 leaves. The idea is less waste.
The 5 leaves are wrapped in plastic and cost more than a bunch, so you're not "wasting" a bunch of mint you won't use, but you're wasting plastic and money.
It's for rich people with nothing to do.
I tried a couple of these companies when they first came out and they had offers through my credit card that made it very cheap. The recipes were alright, but it was fun to cook them with the kids as they didn't get bored with the prep work before we can actually cook, but they aren't cheap and they aren't less wasteful. I can eat left overs, I can't eat the extra plastic.
Yes, but shipped to you and with a recipe for you to follow.
Someone forgot to swap their account’s address when they moved, so I got a Hello Fresh box for free when I moved in.
The food inside is mid and the recipes are super basic. Soooooo much plastic waste too. Everything is wrapped individually and excessively.
The food was fine though (I ate it after the rightful owner didn’t show up for a week)
We started with them a week ago, in a country with a lot stronger workers' rights than the US.
We usually do weekly shopping and cook pretty much every meal at home. My goal was to reduce the cognitive load of meal planning for the week. Seems it costs about the same, and following new recipes it's a cognitive load, too.
At least we've been eating more varied.
I see some value for people who don't know how to cook. You pick a recipe that sounds good, they send you all you need, (With no extra, so no worrying about what to do with the left over that will properly end up going to waste) and a guide on how to cook it.
I considered trying one of these services to find new recipes. Never ended up doing it, seem like a good choice seeing this.
I have been using meal kit services like Blue Apron and Hello Fresh for years. They offer multiple types of meals, from simple “microwave this box then eat the contents” to more refined meals that you make from scratch. The first category doesn’t make sense to me, then you could buy a frozen meal cheaper in the store. The latter category is definitely not for anyone who can’t cook. For example, today I made mashed potato, roasted carrots, pork chops, with orange sauce. I use these services because I like spending 30-40 minutes in my kitchen, preparing a nicely plated, tasty, fresh meal instead of getting takeout or eating leftovers or frozen food. The value they provide is that you don’t need to go grocery shopping, and you don’t need to think about it or plan it other than taking 5 minutes to updating the meal selection every couple weeks.
In past years with crazy inflation in grocery prices, they have not been able to raise prices as much, so it’s not more expensive than shopping yourself. Unfortunately, they have been cutting costs by lowering the quality and quantity of ingredients, and, apparently, by exploiting their workers.
Hmm, yeah I suppose that does sound a tad to advanced for someone who truly doesn't know how to cook. I still think that if someone was trying to get better at cooking, this service sound like the most approachable way to go about it.
They publish their recipes: https://www.hellofresh.com/recipes
Personally, I'd just consider a cookbook, or a recipe blog.
Probably depends on country, but the ingredients were very poor quality and any thing but "fresh" when i tried it.
We also stopped ordering from them because of cost, and like, sometimes they just wouldn't deliver our shit some weeks, with no explanation (even though we were promised an explanation). We'd have planned our grocery shopping around these orders so when one delivery didn't show up, we'd have to go panic shopping and meal planning (we have two kids so meals are important).
Ultimately it was more expensive, created more stress than normal, and it wasn't worth it at all.
Also, unless you pick your meals carefully each week, every single fucking meal was like something vegetarian or a panko-breaded fried fish. So boring and bland and tiring and time-consuming to do the breading all the time.
blue apron, factor, are OP "tvdinners"
TV Dinner subscriptions
Truly a product of our times.
lol. I never used them either. Was cheaper to cook at home too.
or just buy something from a food shop, that makes meals.
80%-90% markup ordering groceries making cheaper places like Aldi and market basket the same prices as stop and shop before the recession by the time you check out.
That's a huge leap between affordable and saving money and biting the bullet and paying 30$-40$ more for a whole grocery trip.
Another reason why cars aren't so bad because of you don't have one the markup of ordering groceries is gonna make you wish you had one and it'll drive you mad.
I stopped because of their island.