Hello fresh - why?

I've never used them personally, or Gousto.

But I would a e thought the reasons were pretty obvious.

You choose meals and they deliver the exact ingredients along with the recipe. The recipes and ingredients are quite straightforward and quick.

Otherwise you end up got to look up recipes, shop for often long lists of ingredients. You end up with leftovers that you might struggle to use up. You might be encouraged to try a meal that you would otherwise have bothered with.

What does it matter?

Agree. Choose online and everything is delivered with no waste. I get Gousto. It has actually taught my children to cook and made me far more aware of the variety of veggie dishes.

I think all you need to ‘understand’ is that people aren’t all the same. Our brains don’t all work the same way. We don’t all have the same demands on our time.

I have plenty of time as I only work about 20 hours a week; my kids are quite self-sufficient older teens; I don’t have elderly parents or relatives to look after. So I have the time to shop and plan and cook.

Many of my friends work full-time. Some are single parents. Some have children with complex needs. Some are looking after elderly relatives. Some have ND which can make planning and time management difficult. Some have ALL of these barriers all at once. I don’t honestly know how they even find time to have a shower or a cup of tea. Surely you can understand why someone like that might make use of one of these services?

Plus as others have said, not everyone is a confident cook. Great for you if you are, but there are probably things you have no idea how to do while others can do them easily 🤷🏼‍♀️

Says the genius who can’t even write a short sentence properly.

TBF, i like Gousto because I am fairly lazy and pretty stupid when it comes to planning what to cook for tea and buying the ingredients and doing the actual cooking every day of my sodding life… this makes it far less tedious and we seem to have plenty of leftovers so it works for us at the moment.

Yeah if you see my post upthread I agree, they clearly are trying to cut costs. For us, for a midweek dinner, it's fine. But we are like @Blondiie 's friend - DINKY couple with full on jobs who are both really basic, not particularly interested, cooks so it really broadened what they were eating, cut down on takeaways, and they can’t be faffed looking up new recipes

There’s little to no food waste but some of the packaging needs to be more recyclable.

I used to love it but then it seemed like the bulk of the recipes were minced beef/pork and I didn't want to pay ££ extra for salmon etc.
maybe I should give it another try.

They take a well established recipies and then strip out many if not all of the non core ingredients in order to make it easier to cook. I get that they want to make things more accessible for the 'non cook' audience but to me it was at the expense of required flavours and making dishes incredibly bland. It seemed like cost cutting rather then making things less complicated.

Interestingly when I started Hello Fresh I thought they were nice recipes but portions a bit small. Now I realise, like many people, my home portion sizes were probably a bit big ! I do sometimes add more veg, especially ones that come with salad which is just leaves.

I hate meal planning, shopping, weighing things. Other half can't cook really so the A4 recipe card with pictures means he can.
When my MH is not good, I don't even bother to choose the meals, just cook what they send

I’ve had Gousto before and it’s a massive bargain when you use the offers. Easily cheaper than buying the stuff yourself. I didn’t take to it though, I found if faffy and didn’t really rate the meals much and binned it when the offer period ran out. I did like the “mental load” aspect though. My friend absolutely loves it and really it’s perfect for someone like her -DINKY couple with full on jobs who are both really basic, not particularly interested, cooks so it really broadened what they were eating, cut down on takeaways, and they can’t be faffed looking up new recipes to try when you can click and it comes to the door.
As others have said, they are good for teens to cook unsupervised which is good when you are all busy.
There are zillions of things that people pay a “premium” for when they could do it themselves - why buy the ingredients when you can farm and forage them? Why buy food at all when you could just eat dust?

I used Hello fresh for about 18 months.I.wanted to cook real food for my family without always need to think of the weekly plan.
It also seemed to free up my fridge space, I seemed to buy too much before this..So I only had what I needed.
I stopped , because I couldn't order 3 meals it had to be 2 or 4.
I mostly was really happy with it, the food was very fresh.

Rude. Hope you got a kick out of it.

I started getting Gousto a few weeks after my husband died very unexpectedly. I had completely lost my appetite, often forgot to eat and lost masses of weight and I wasn’t overweight to start with. It’s been brilliant - I don’t have to think about what I might want to eat, and the step by step instructions mean I have to use minimal brain power while cooking. ASD ds enjoys cooking the recipes too so he’s learning useful life skills and he’s gradually expanding the foods he will eat. I can’t understand how people think the portions are stingy - we think they’re enormous! There’s usually quite a bit more than we can eat so we get leftovers for lunch the following day too. I’ll stop/take a break in a while but for now it’s a godsend

I tried a box on offer thinking it would be a bit of a change and liberating.... but tbh I found it a huge faff, the veggie options were dire and both DH and I felt horribly unwell after eating the fish cakes we made (turned out to be Basa which is an Asian catfish). Put me off ever trying again. Cheap and nasty ingredients with a plethora of plastic packaging - no thanks.

Portion control

Not having to think up or find recipes

Honestly @eggplant16 - I've tried for years, I'm not far off 50 years old. I'm still very capable of destroying a very simple meal if left to my own devices.

I know how to cook and store. Buying in bulk isn't very useful if you live on your own. Did you mean to be so patronising?

I had Hello Fresh for a bit but cancelled after the promotional period. I did think there was a lot of unnecessary packaging.

The flour thing nearly caught me out a couple of weeks ago, I hadn't checked the card until I was about to start making something and it asked for plain flour which I didn't have.

We do it occasionally (and Gousto) when we get offers of 20% or 50% off.

Otherwise yeah it is pretty expensive.

But the bonus is that it means you don't have to think about what to cook (I get fed up of deciding whether it's jacket potatoes, spag bol, fajitas etc etc on rotation 😂) and can make a lovely new dish like Korean chicken or a Sri Lankan curry without the faff of having to source all the ingredients yourself.

You also don't waste fresh ingredients. I bought celery for a recipe at weekend, used one stick and can guarantee the rest of it will die a death in the bottom drawer of my fridge!

I had it for a few weeks with some voucher codes. I was expecting to hate it, but honestly it was amazing. As the only cook in the house and working full time it gave me an enormous amount of brain energy and time back. If I could afford it all the time I probably would for a few meals a week! Negatives for me; too much packaging (30g blocks of cheese etc), veggie options often felt "cheap," and once or twice the fresh produce didn't last long enough - fermenting sweet potato chunks and leaves that had really gone over. When I'm tired and fed up I really do consider signing up again for a few weeks though!

What’s mix sets? Sorry if its a stupid question

@mrspaulhollywood oh okay, I always assume that's a cost thing, with them trying to reduce how many expensive ingredients they give you. For example butter and flour and honey used to be included; now it's a pantry ingredient. I have to say, for a midweek dinner I don't really care. We order 4 meals a week so we do cook more exciting things at the weekend.

You’re missing the point - it’s not cooking from scratch (I rarely do that) but a good range of interesting recipes with the convenience of not having to do any planning.
Many people who use them are excellent cooks but don’t have the time.

each meal works out about £3.70 per person and that's with selecting pricier options like salmon and free range meat where I can. Plus the family chooses a lot of meat-heavy dishes in general that cost more- I'd have all veggie if I could but I'll pick my battles.
It's probably twice the amount that a savvy cook would spend but so worth it