Those recipe/food delivery boxes....

[hairyxmasturkey]

For those of you who use gousto/hello fresh and have young kids... do you rate them? How do you make it work? Currently doing a weekly Ocado of about £100 per week for a family of 4, will I end up spending more or less?
Are there enough choices that the kids will eat?

You could chooses recipes from a book. You would then have to work out what you need to buy and then either go and buy it or trawl through your online shopping.
With the meal boxes ton literally just click on the picture of the recipe and then the food turns up with everything needed.
Then you just take each meals bag of stuff out when you want to cook, which is nice as I can make DH and the kids cook and I don’t get a barrage of questions about food we have this’ where is that’
That’s the appeal to me - no thought needed but It’s too expensive to be more than an occasional treat.

I found the ones that send the ingredients too expensive unless you get the introductory discount. I also found that the veg wasnt particularly fresh after the 3-4 days it took to get to the last recipe. I did find that it encouraged us to eat a bit more differently as we tended to eat the same or similar each week.

Thank you I'm really interested in your responses and may well use a discount code!

Yeah it's not so much about the cost, I just didn't really want to spend MORE than I am already. Maybe if I did the 'other' stuff in bulk from Lidl it would work out the same.
I love Ocado- the deliveries work well for us and I can't fault their customer service etc.
Thanks for the suggestions of meal planning- I have twice spent an age planning weeks worth of meals but I found it took up a lot of time, we got bored of it, and I gave up on it- also I didn't want to write out all the recipes so I forgot what ingredients I needed. We ended up eating the same things over again. I will have a look at the pre-done meal plans though thank you for the suggestion!
Re batch cooking I don't know when people have the time!! But when I have done it it is always stuff like spag Bol and lasagne and although I love those it's a bit repetitive and carb heavy.

Perhaps a 'stuff' shop at Lidl, bit of batch cooking and gousto/hf box is the answer

Batch looking saves time. Just double up everything for one week and freeze one half of it all and you have loads of extra meals as and when you want a night off.

If definitely wont save you money but will save you time and effort and for many that it worth the extra expense.

Op what I found with meal planning is that we had the same thing every 2 weeks. And there was no new stuff.

What I did was get everyone to write down a list of meals/snacks they really liked. Then I added to it stuff I wanted to try. Then did a 4 week planner. I wrote down week 1 on a sunday, based on a mix of peoples preference, what I wanted to try, what we had in etc. Then the following week did the plan on sunday, but could see what we had had the week before ao easy to not replicate it. Then week 3 based on week 2 and 3 and so on.

It's working pretty well for us. Like I saw the gousto box has mixed things up a bit and the one that comea this week will give me 8 new recipes. At least 2 of last weeks we will do again and the ingredients were pretty basic tbh. It won't take long to build up a stash of the basic sauces and spices (I had loads anyway) and then it's just a case of remembering stuff like chillis and ginger and stuff.

Try the gousto box (can pm you a link with 60% off your first box, then 30% off your next couple). Then do the welcome offer for Hello fresh and see what you think from there.

We have used both, but I definitely prefer Gousto for the choice of meals. I'm a pretty competent cook but I also found the HelloFresh recipe cards harder to follow for some reason.
There are three of us (DH, I and teen DS) so we buy a menu for two, then pad out with extra veg, bread, salad etc. Mostly it's fine, but neither DH or I are big eaters.
I love the ability to try new things with no commitment to buying a jar of spices etc that I may never use again. I also really enjoy cooking and it's a bit of a treat for me to cook something new, without having to use up the headspace to plan it and buy the ingredients.

I've just signed up for a trial Gusto box, I think it was around £17 for four meals for two but that was half price and no way I am paying full price.

It's good to try different things, easy to prepare and reasonably healthy.

I have had a couple of boxes from Hello Fresh in the past, both on special order. There might be no food waste but the amount of plastic was obscene.