Drew Tries Stuff: Meal Delivery Kits Revisited

                For those of you who have really been around since the start of all this, you might recognize this as a topic I covered… holy shit, five fucking years ago. Wow. I might need to lie down.

                Anyway, a lot can change in five years, and certainly I am no longer in the same situation I was for the last round. Cards on the table, this second attempt of meal-prep-delivery services was prompted by what I imagine to be a very common factor: the pandemic and subsequent lockdown. While there’s no getting around the occasional excursion to buy groceries, I wanted to limit potential exposure as much as possible.

                Sidenote: Wear a fucking mask. I can’t believe this is something that needs to be stated, but evidently that’s where we are. Cowboy up and deal with it. Yes, all the time you’re in public spaces, you don’t know who is at risk. I am a healthy-looking, wide-shouldered giant of a man, and thanks to my arthritis meds I’m also immunocompromised, making me more vulnerable to infection. Looks don’t mean shit, invisible illnesses are real, wear your fucking mask.

                Back on topic, as you might imagine the desire not to die had me looking for alternative means of getting food, and meal delivery kits suddenly seemed like a bolt of genius. This time, there were more options in the market, so after a bit of digging around I decided to give Hello Fresh a whirl. I chose them because they offered a little more weekly variety without all of the good ones being upcharges (plenty still are, just not all). Honestly though, I don’t expect the findings to change much from service to service, at least not based on reviews I read.

                So, with a pandemic keeping us all huddled in our homes, how do meal delivery kits stack up five years later?

Convenience

                It is nice having food delivered to my door promptly, and Hello Fresh does an excellent job of including just about everything you will need. If you’re thinking of buying a meal delivery kit, however first I would highly recommend you go out and purchase the following things:

-Sticks of butter
-A zester
-Just so much goddamn olive oil

                As I mentioned last time, meal delivery kits love to make you zest shit. So much so that, I kid you not, one of the “Handy Kitchen Tips” I got on my first meal was a recommendation to buy a zester. If you’re not the kind of person who already owns a zester, you sure as shit don’t want to try that with a knife. I do get it, citrus travels well when chilled and zest packs of ton of easily accessible flavor. Just trust me that this is ~$10 well spent.

                Butter and oil are like pots and pans: cooking essentials, but they might have you using more than you keep on hand depending on the selected recipes. Outside those essentials though, everything does come in the pack, and the meals are relatively easy to prepare. Their time estimates are still substantially off, but that will vary a lot from person to person.

                As far as convenience goes, the meal delivery kit does pretty darn well, which isn’t too shocking since that’s it’s primary selling point. But a meal is only as good as the food contained in it, so let’s move on to…

Selection

                At a glance, Hello Fresh appears to have a wide assortment of meals available, and that certainly is true if you only look at a single week, maybe even a month. Having had this for a while now, I’ve gotten the chance to start noticing patterns. As it turns out, they actually have a narrower range of options than you might think, rotating them in and out through the weeks to create new arrangements of choices with minimal new content. There is enough to keep changing things up, but only so many that will appeal to an individual palette. Consequently, I’m starting to have to pick repeats, which is all well and good for meals I loved, less so when it’s nothing but third-string choices. My other option is to skip the week entirely, which I’ve had to do more the longer I’ve had the service.

                Then we move on to the upcharges. Now look, I understand that some of this is inevitable. People want to cook fancy shit they like, and a meal delivery service can’t afford to make scallops a standard options. I get that you have to build a system that accommodates client desires at a sustainable price. That said, some weeks it feel undeniable that everything desirable to cook comes with an extra price, whereas the standard value options don’t feel worth the money. Customization is all well and good, just not when it lowers the value of the core product.

                For me, I don’t mind it so much because I’m happy to skip a week when it isn’t appealing, however if you were looking to make this a more dependable part of your week, the selection consistency might be a concern. But if you want to branch out and make some modifications, we need to deal with the…

Education

                Some people take on meal kit delivery services as a springboard to learning how to cook. Unfortunately, the meal delivery kit people seem to realize that if you did master those skills, they would be less essential, pandemics notwithstanding. Preparing a Hello Fresh meal will have lots of dicing, chopping, roasting, searing, and whisking; basic tasks that any new cook can muddle their way through. The trouble is, because they provide the ingredients, the dish is hard to recreate alone and your recipe has a lot of gaps.

                I liken this to Weight Watchers: how their point-system is ostensibly to simplify tracking calories, but in reality locks you in to their program. Because you’re not learning to track nutrition as a whole, you’re learning to function only within their system. They don’t want you to have independent tools, those don’t come with yearly fees.

                Meal delivery kits work in a similar method. Want to redo last week’s recipe? Great!  How much chicken? The amount they sent? That was probably a pound, let’s just guess. Okay, now the potatoes. How many? Shit. Let’s move on to the sauce, where we need jam they sent in a pre-measured packet, same with the chicken stock, and the balsamic vinegar, meaning we have the precise amounts for none of them, to say nothing of the ratios. You can always guess it, I certainly have, and create a dish that’s a weak imitation of the one that came before, making the delivery kit appear to be even better in comparison.

                I’m not saying every meal needs to be a full-on education in the science and fundamentals of cooking, but a fully-functional recipe doesn’t seem like too much to ask. Except if you can make it yourself, why order it next time it’s available, and so the cycle goes. In its current incarnation, the process feels a lot more like assembling dinner than cooking it.

Overall Impressions

                I realize I came in hard on this one, but $20 per meal is not a small amount of money to me, nor for a great many other folks out there. I think anyone diving in to this deserves to know what they’re buying, especially give how annoying these generally are to cancel. That said, for all my griping, I still have Hello Fresh after several months now. Will it continue once the world normalizes and I’m no longer so fearful of public spaces? Hard to say, I might keep them around for a week out of the month just to vary things up.

                For right now though, I consider the tradeoff worthwhile. If you’re looking for a way to avoid the stores and have a zester with a burning need to be used, then meal delivery kits might just be the solution you’re looking for.