I don't get Gousto

[OhYouBadBadKitten]

Confession: I jumped on the bandwagon and nabbed one of the free boxes. I looked forward to the free food, some interesting recipes and an easy life for a few days.

It was free. That's good! But the rest of it? I don't get it.

About a million tiny plastic sachets in a bag that needed sorting out. Lots more work than I'd anticipated in preparing the food. Something as simple as chicken burger with fries and slaw took a military approach of organising things before I could start cooking.

Sugar being required in recipes that I'd never add sugar to, including a beef dish that we had, that turned out very oddly and the slaw for this evening. It might be the recipes I chose without thinking, other than 'that sounds nice', but our box is all so sweet.

It might just be me, maybe my expectations were wrong but the quality of ingredients did not justify what would be the normal cost of the box. I'd be able to go all 'posh farm shop' for the price.

Just so much plastic and packaging. I guess we live and learn!

Im prepared to be swamped with opposite viewpoints to me as it does seem to be really popular.

We don’t live in the uk now but I do miss my Gousto boxes and deliveries of COOK meals.

DC2 was "influenced" (urgh) by some crappy youtuber or other to ask if we could do Hello Fresh, so when DH got a great whacking discount code we said yes. With the code it cost me the same as my usual weekly shopping bill, so would cost quite a bit more normally.

We did 5 days of recipes and would only cook 2/5 again. The packing was horrific. I have a weekly online shop, which doesn't take me long to work through adding everything on a menu plan, so it wasn't much more convenient. And I still needed that online shop for breakfast, lunch, the other 2x dinners and household stuff.

As an experienced cook I could also see quite a few problems with the recipes - parts where you had too much to prep while something was in the oven, knowing that something else would almost definitely take a fair bit more or less cooking time than suggested. I was quite surprised that I spent as much time in the kitchen as I normally do.

I thought that perhaps the best thing would be reduction of the mental load - no racking my brains for interesting, varied and nutritious meals for the week. However with DC with different likes and dislikes I ended up poring over the recipes online, vetoing them for various different no-go ingredients, so again no real advantage.

@Graphista yes, a timely reminder. You really do need to think about the things these boxes add to your life, and the cost of them. I think on balance i am out; I could actually cook cheap tasty meals for less than these boxes. What I am paying for is the structure, slightly false perception of 'ease', and convenience. It isn't that much more complicated to order a shopping delivery from one of the big 4.

If someone could design an integrated shopping/ recipe tool which worked with sainsbos/Morrisons/Asda/Tesco's then I would willingly pay a very small weekly sub for that.

As long as I could add on bog roll, fairy, and mini rolls for packed lunches....

I think they’re for people who struggle to meal plan and basically can’t cook any meals from scratch.

I agree. I was hoping for it to be good that was quicker to prepare, so stuff already chopped up.
Im quite happy to meal plan and shop (online), it’s the cooking part I want to shortcut, without using jars or ready meals.

We’ve tried Hello Fresh and Gousto this year, had 2 or 3 boxes from each on the discounts. I found it very easy to cancel Hello Fresh using the chat bot, I have managed to stop Gousto by the good fortune of my credit card expiring last month so it is paused until I choose to put a new card on.

The reasons we tried them were firstly the discounts, but also tired of the repetition of menu planning, I have been a subscriber to BBC Good Food ever since it started and always used their recipes but there are times when I just CAB to think and plan around fussy family members who go out a lot on the evenings. Finally and perhaps most important for us was to try and help dyspraxic DS improve cooking skills before heading off to uni this summer. This latter has worked REALLY well, he is cooking far more complex stuff than he did before because they are so streamlined and no weighing and measuring.

I’d say downsides are cost, storage (its all quite bulky and we do already have all the spices, sauces etc and usually plenty of onions, garlic, peppers etc), shelflife (has to be used on consecutive nights after delivery to stay fresh and can’t be spread over a week) and all the packaging waste. We must have enough garlic to last us about a year now as they send a whole bulb every time you need a few cloves for a recipe.

We really like it, I try meals I probably wouldn’t have cooked or chosen myself and it saves me meal planning which I’m rubbish at! We find it saves us money too, I spend a lot more on weeks we don’t get it than when we do.

I love it
had my free box this week and have ordered a discount box for next week
DH doesn’t cook , and I’m sick to death of planning , buying and cooking , saves time , all there ready for me to use , no waste
just the 2 of us at home , we just need to add some extra green veg
we probably won’t use it every week , but so far , so good

I would only use it with a discount, same with Hello Fresh. Tend to pick the more unusual dishes that we wouldn’t have the ingredients in stock for. Referrals in case anyone is interested

Hello Fresh

Gousto

I find getting a box for during the week so helpful, pick the 10 min meals or preped in 5. When I'm super busy its so useful.

I love it - we use Gousto or mindful chef

im not a confident cook so it enables me to learn to cook a variety of meals for my family quickly - without needing to plan or look up recipes which I don’t have the energy for with my job and family right now

We can’t go out that often due to DD so this is a treat for us

we do 3 meals a week

My choice of meals was quite limited as I’m coeliac. I got very sick of smoked paprika and sweet potato wedges in the end.

I quite enjoy it for the variety of meals we end up eating, where we otherwise seem to fall into a pattern of eating the same things in a roughly two week cycle.

At roughly £50/week for 5 meals I also find it to be good value for money overall, even if some of the individual meals don’t necessarily justify the cost of the ingredients. Our local farm
shop is incredibly pricey and therefore more of a treat for the weekends, but Gousto has been great for our mid week meals.

It's very predictable- lots of the dishes fall into one of a few moulds: rice n prawns w spice; noodles with fish (always cheap tilapia); 'burger' in bun. Recipes are all quite rich too, you don't want them again in a hurry. And the packaging is ludicrous. It didn't even help teach my kid, as the instructions are super fiddly with lots of simultaneous steps.

I honestly think people could get better meal planning ideas from Mumsnet. It does not take a lot of time or money to build up some store cupboard ingredients like herbs and spices and bottles of soy sauce, stock cubes etc which you then have for a year or so in glass jars or cardboard which can be recycled rather than silly tiny plastic containers.

I did a free trial a few years ago, and it was definitely not for us, but my work colleagues rave about it.

I recall lots of faffing with the recipe, addition of lots of sachets of sugar, ketchup, syrup and soy sauce, way more than I would normally use, so it was far too sweet and salty for everyone.

I hated the plastic waste, but also I shop and cook in a completely different way, and hardly ever follow recipes to the letter, so it felt very restrictive to me - if I don’t have (say) rice wine vinegar, or black sesame seeds, I just omit it or substitute something else.
If I buy a big packet of something, and just need a small amount for that meal, I’ll plan a different meal using that ingredient later in the week (or just freeze it).

If I wanted true convenience, I’d rather all the ingredients were pre-chopped, that would be genuinely labour saving. But otherwise just ordering a supermarket delivery and choosing at random from a cookery book would produce the same result for me.

That reminds me, I need to cancel mine. I agree about the unsorted ingredients. I was also extremely disappointed by the quality of some of them, and not very keen on the instructions. There was far too much getting to the next step and it starting with “meanwhile.”

I preferred Hello Fresh. Higher quality, nicer meals, better organised and just nicer overall.

I too had a free box. Cooked two out of 4 so far. Ingredients were nice and fresh. I found it irritating having 2 x half cucumbers in plastic and also cellophane. Did not like all the little packets in terms of packaging waste.

The recipes were ok but as mentioned above, sugar and salt used in both meals whereas I never use these things normally. Also a lot more oil than I would normally cook with.

It came with little packs of white rice which I won't use as I use wholegrain or quinoa etc for blood sugar reasons. Would be nice to have been offered a choice of grains.

It's been interesting but as the veggie menu is quite limited as I won't order pasta dishes, I most likely won't order again. It did arrive as planned however and was well packed. Great idea to put the frozen bag things in the bed. Will do that tonight

DD found them useful at university, the small packets were good for her as they hardly have any storage space to build up a decent store cupboard or batch cook and freeze.

Can anyone tell me how to close / disable my account on the App?? I’ve paused it but none of the online options to shut the bloomin act work 🙄

There are only 2 of us and I tried it and found the issue was my H simply 'didn't fancy' whatever of the meals I had planned that night- and preferred a M&S ready meal!! I ended up wasting things- I also like cooking, but I also like food shopping so it was not for me

Arrh just scrolled down the right page in the App and deleted it yah! It wasn’t for us way too much packaging and faff.

We did a half price box then the 2 or 3 reduced boxes either, then I paused the subscription.

Tried a hello fresh free box referred from a friend. That was fine but I far preferred Gousto.

Left it a while then when they did the free boxes we made an account in DH’s name and got the free one. It sounds daft but the change was quite noticeable. I was on another Gousto thread singing the praises after the first few boxes, but the free one was noticeably worse. Ingredients not as good quality, badly packed, they’ve gone from having an individual bag with ‘bits and bobs for recipe number xxx’ on so it has everything you need in one place to all in a big bag you have to sort through, herbs already past their best and shorter dates in the fish.

The recipes always take longer than they say, they seem to assume that you can just deseed and chop a load of veg simultaneously with stirring sauce and making stock and keeping an eye on the part in the oven etc etc. I’ve found them largely straightforward though, although a very few have seemed like far too much faff for the actual results. The Mediterranean vegetable pasta bake recently was the only one that tasted downright unpleasant though, an awful lot of faff for something I normally make a much nicer version of in half the time. On the other hand, there’s been one or two things that were absolutely stunning - annoyingly the two that stand out most have not been repeated as an option.

I’d definitely not bother with the full price box, we’re giving it one more go as we got some referral money but then think we will leave it on pause after that.

We’re both reasonably confident cooks and usually have well stocked cupboards anyway, but somehow had got into a real rut with food and I was absolutely sick of trying to think of meals and this definitely helped with that. We got the box for 4 people - it would do us and toddler DD and then at least one portion for lunch the next day, usually more. DD has not hit the super fussy phase yet and bloody loves her grub so she was pretty happy with most dishes, some I would adapt slightly eg leave the chilli till the end or cook her protein separately and add a bit of extra veg.

I just started Mindful Chef. The packaging is wasteful, it's pretty expensive but I'm going to do it for 2-3 months to get me out of a food rut and while it's busy at work.

The food itself is really nice. I'm going to keep track of the recipes I like most and just integrate them into my normal shopping when I inevitably stop the Mindful chef.

I’ve kept my Hello Fresh menu cards, and will definitely use them again.

One big problem with all of these schemes is that what I fancy when ordering is often very different to when it comes to eat them. The box has five meals in, which at best have a seven-day life, so really I have to have one nearly every night after they arrive or to risk iffy meats and wilted leaves. I don’t want a “proper” meal five nights out of six. At least two of those I’d prefer a bowl of soup or some toast.