Recipe boxes with less packaging and veggie options?

[Motherofgorgons]

Doing a lot more cooking these days as DH and I both WFH. Tried a recipe box for the first time: Hello Fresh. Was shocked by the amount of packaging and cardboard waste. Literally every single spice was packaged separately. Recyclable I assume, but was still annoying.

Are there other recipe boxes with less packaging and with veggie options? We don't eat red meat.

Riverford do a range of recipe boxes now, not cheap, at all, but will be very good quality all organic and very high welfare (in the case of the meat/eggs/dairy) and they are incredibly hot on packaging, they use the minimum and everything is reuse/recyclable or compostable so about as good as you can get on the mainstream market environmentally/ethically speaking...

Thanks! I don't suppose any recipe boxes are good value. Just so very tired of the cooking mental load.

I'm plant based and use Gousto. Plenty of options for me to eat every week. I never think there is that much packaging and what there is, is generally cardboard/ paper or PET1 or 2 plastic which is widely recycled

@yorkshireteaspoonie

I'm plant based and use Gousto. Plenty of options for me to eat every week. I never think there is that much packaging and what there is, is generally cardboard/ paper or PET1 or 2 plastic which is widely recycled

I stopped using Gousto because of the amount of packaging. Plus very little plastic is actually recycled. Something like 20%. It is certainly recyclable, but that's not the same. I second Riverford. I get their veg box, which always comes with recipe suggestions, plus if you can't recycle their packaging (if you don't have a compost bin for example) they take it back. Their recipe boxes are pricey, but their stuff is sooooo gorgeous.

I was looking at Mindful Chef the other day. They seemed to have a decent veggie range.

I really like simply cook. They just send the spices/ stick and you buy the other ingredients in whatever form you normally would. We've had some amazing curries from them!

@Okki that's fine but the OP was looking for a recipe box to lighten the mental load of thinking about dinner every night. Not a veggie box with suggestions of what to do with it 🤷🏽‍♀️

Most of them have little plastic pots or sachets for the spices, I can't imagine how you'd pack them otherwise.

IIRC correctly Mindful Chef packs the vegetables loose, or in paper bags. So while there is plastic the aforementioned little pots of spices that's about the extent of it. And also the pots can be rinsed out and recycled.

But ultimately any of those recipe boxes are will have an impact one way or another -- not least because you've got hundreds of couriers in massive diesel vans hauling (mostly cardboard) boxes of stuff up and down the country to get them to people's homes. So there's a limit to how responsible any of them can be, I think.

We use Simply Cook too. A lot of the meals with meat can be adapted to veggie. It makes suggestions on the recipe cards, which can be viewed online. I like that I'm not on a time limit to use ingredients as they only send the sauces and spices, and we can adapt some of the ingredients to our taste.

@yorkshireteaspoonie yes I know, which is why I said the Riverford recipe boxes were gorgeous as well as their veg boxes.

Gousto is terrible. Every time l go past a skip there’s always a load of Gusto stuff in it!

I tried one of these for a week and stopped because of the incredible amount of packaging.