Hello fresh - why?

Because it's easier for me. That's all

Cheap when they are 60 or 70% off. Makes a change try new recipes. Don’t need to buy full bottles of ingredients you won’t reuse. We’ve used on holiday in an apartment abroad was $18 for 6 meals via groupon.

Contains the right amount of ingredients, you don’t have to buy 4 if you only need 2 of whatever.

I dont like Hello Fresh, but I do like Gousto.
I initially set it up when I had to go away for a couple of weeks and left my 21 y ear old and 16 year old home alone, and needing to know they wouldnt starve.
We are all AuDHD. To be honest it has been a revelation for me. Ive struggled massively with shopping and meal planning, and had lots and lots of waste when I tried to do sensible things and get veg boxes. My shopping style in a supermarket is like the food equivilent of the middle Isle of Lidl, Lots of random things that looked fantastic, maybe were on offer, and possibly make one meal between the lot for a bill of £200, and alot disappearing into the freezer and bin.
Ive tried, I really have, I can cook, in fact I can cook really really well, but I cant organise a weekly shop to save my life.
Gousto has lifted alot of the hassle. The mental load of having to think wtf to cook. We dont have it every night, but midweek maybe 4 nights out of 5 which still allows space to do some other stuff. The kids will also come and choose some of the recipes each, and starting next month, will be each cooking a night a week each too,

We used them for the first time this summer. DS has had a long summer as he sat GCSEs so finished mid-June and he said he'd like to learn to cook over the summer so I felt the boxes would be convenient for that. I bought all the boxes on new customer discounts so they were good value. DS chose what he wanted to cook from the website and has cooked entirely unaided by us. He started off being a bit slow and dinner was late for the first week or so. Then his skills improved and he got faster. He's cooked 4 to 5 times a week all summer, it's been lovely to come home from work and not have to cook and I will really miss it when he goes back to school next week. I found it to be a really good way for teens to teach themselves to cook and we'll do the same thing with DD in a couple of years. The meals have been tasty and varied. He's learnt a lot and enjoyed doing it.

We used Gousto first and then Hello Fresh once we'd used up the Gousto discounts. For us, Gousto was better - there are 4 of us but DS is the kind of skinny, sporty teen with hollow legs who needs a lot of food so we liked being able to buy a 5 person box from Gousto. I also found the Gousto recipes had more side veg than the HF ones and for us the quality of the meat was better. With HF we bought a 4 person box which was generally a little small for our needs and then some meals had no veg so that was an extra thing to get and think about and i really disliked the quality of the minced beef. If I use HF again, I won't buy any meals involving minced beef. I liked that HF bag up each meal's ingredients in one bag rather than having to sort it all out and divide into meals like you do for Gousto, though that's not a big deal.

This week was our last box as school goes back next week and I've run out of Gousto discounts but I'm sure I'll use them again at some point with an offer. I liked them a lot more than I thought I would.

I agree - cooking from scratch isn’t superior - just a waste of my precious time

Because we love to be judged by people who think always cooking from scratch makes them a morally superior person

I do agree with posters saying the quality of some of these can be poor. We stopped getting Hello Fresh because the chicken was stringy and I couldn’t even consider red meat or pork because it was mostly gristle - your cheapest, lowest quality cuts. The veggie options weren’t great either as they were carb heavy with very limited veg. Gousto however is amazing; I rarely trim the chicken and the mince is great providing you cook it slow. My older son and I are fussy with meat so I stay away from ‘quick cook’ meat recipes and generally choose chicken, fish, prawn or veggie. I do find the veg can be a bit limited so I tend to have my own in a different fridge drawer or frozen to add where we fancy.

If I didn’t work, I’d either not use it or maybe once or twice a week.

I also don’t think saying they’re for basic cooks is fair; those recipes can be a right faff if you don’t know what you’re doing - they often give completely unnecessary steps like mixing things in different bowls. My husband can make them but uses every utensil in the kitchen 🤣 Hello Fresh used to wind me up with the sheer amount of garlic I built up: need one clove? Here have a whole bulb every week to slowly rot in your fridge

I don't really understand why the supermarkets haven't picked up on doing this in store.
It'd be a great I think.
We are currently using Green Chef as they had a deal. It's honestly fab. Good portion sizes and quality ingredients.

This is what would bother me. However, I recognise I'm in an extremely fortunate position compared to some on this thread. I have plenty of storage, fridge and freezer space and I positively enjoy planning meals. This was true even when we had young kids and my husband and I were both working full-time. I didn't always cook anything much, I used ready meals or beige freezer food at times, and I didn't beat myself up about that, but I always had something in that would fill us all up in a vaguely healthy way. Always plenty of fruit around, and we all ate that.

Haven't read the whole thread yet, but has anyone mentioned that on Ocado you can indeed click a button and get all the ingredients for a recipe added to your basket? You can then delete items if you already have something like flour or oil. Here's an example. https://www.ocado.com/webshop/recipe/almond-crusted-cod-with-lemon-and-parsley-butter-/194471?ad=265613%7C6361268%7C201605%7C6361284 (I promise I don't work for Ocado!)

On a side note, the new JanePlan TV advert has, I think quite cleverly, compared the price of a takeaway coffee to one of their meals...

I've been tempted to try them, but heard quite a few people say the quality isn't that great. My reason would mostly be because I'm just cooking for myself everyday. I like the idea of not always having to eat the same meal or variations of it several days in a row in order to not waste food.

I'm autistic and have ADHD. I'm also a pretty decent cook. However, my DM wasn't and brought us up on convenience freezer food with the occasional roast dinner or stew. Only veggies were peas, carrots and Brussel sprouts. Strictly no "foreign food" allowed - so no Chinese, no pizzas, no curries, no pasta. Only traditional "English" food based on meat and potatoes.... That means I've had to teach myself how to cook, and at the ripe old age of 48 I'm still learning about different recipes and foods, and I'll probably always be learning more. I love to cook and love many different cuisines. DM complained a couple of weeks ago that the sausage roll I brought back from Greggs for her was "too spicy to eat."

Anyway.

I really struggle when there are unlimited possibilities.

To take a basic example - I decided to teach myself how to make Yorkshire puddings. Loads of free info, so I googled it. Oh my fucking god. Every site had a different recipe, with "expert" instructions that just contradicted each other. It took me WEEKS - and I do mean that literally - to be able to decide which recipe looked the best and to try it out.

That was a few years ago now, and obviously now I have figured out my own little way of cooking Yorkshires.

I've used Gousto in the past. It was so much easier for me to use than scouring the internet for days to find the "right" recipe. And I've kept the recipe cards and used them again and again and again.

I deliberately only chose recipes from Gousto that were new to me - so each time I've learnt a new recipe and been given the exact ingredients that I need. Some of the things I would have had anyway, others not - eg/previously I didn't have rice wine vinegar in my cupboard.

Gousto has been brilliant in helping me expand recipes that I know I can do well. And when I'm struggling with meal planning, having a visual book of recipes I can flick through for inspiration is a bloody godsend.

I only use Gousto now when they have a special offer as it's not particularly cost-effective but it definitely has its benefits for someone like me who struggles with executive function.

I had a voucher which made it cheaper than buying meals for 5 days. And it meant we tried something new instead of eating the same dinners on repeat. Also, showed us how few ingredients you need to make a decent dinner!

No such thing as a free lunch?

Can you not appreciate that for some people leeway to decide what to cook on any given day is not what they want.

When I get home from work I often don't have much time before I have to go out again and more often my brain feels like a wrung sponge. A store cupboard of ingredients will make me reach for a tin of baked beans or the menu for my favourite Chinese. A paper bag of components in the correct quantities with a simple instructions will make me make a proper meal.

Anyone who wants a free box drop me a message with your email address and I will send you a code.

I get a box about once a month.

It's convenient and it gets us to try new recipes out.

If we enjoy it then we keep the recipe card and make it ourselves.

I don't personally like them as the quality of the ingredients is poor.

But you have to be monumentally stupid to not understand that the convenience of having a little bag of ingredients and a recipe card for each day, and not having to think about what to make, is a huge draw.

When did you last try them?

Point still stands though. You cut your cloth to suit ingredients wise (meat / no meat) but keeping some basic staples in the cupboard (herbs, spices, pasta, tinned tomatoes, coconut milk, stock cubes etc) is not expensive and allows you a bit more leeway as to what to cook on any given day.

We can't all afford to keep our money tied up in meat for the freezer