To not get gousto, hello fresh, etc?

[MayThe4th]

I know that a lot of people swear by them, but I just don’t get it.

I do see that they have all the ingredients to make a recipe, but they A, seem so expensive, B, have a million teeny tiny packets so presumably a lot of single use plastic etc, and are far more faff than just cooking the same recipe (which can be found on their website) from scratch, which is essentially what you’re doing anyway.

Plus I’ve heard horror stories of ingredients either having gone off or being missing entirely.

What am I missing?

We had one of them for a while, mindful chef I think. It was good when we were going through a rut, we're moving soon and renovating so I may get one again for a little while just to give me one less thing to think about 🤷‍♀️ but certainly not 3 a week which is what we had before, too many and we found we didn't use it half as much as we needed to get through the packs.

I have had the free boxes from both companies and my assessment is:
-if you already cook proper meals in the week and are used to cooking then the food doesn’t feel special. If you are usually a jacket potato and beans in the evening person it’s probably quite fun
-the portions are small - a box for 2 people is 1 1/2 at best. This week in the gousto box there were 5 prawns and half a ciabatta roll allocated per person
-you only get 4 meals which makes me think they are really targeted at a young professional who wants dinner at home Mon-Thursday, out Friday and Saturday night and back home to mum and dad on a Sunday for a roast
-some of the recipes are quite nice and I have saved some of the cards to cook again but will just get the ingredients from sainsburys/my pantry

Tried gusto and just couldn't get on with it.

Maybe if you can't cook it would help but I don't see how it is time savings days the waste must be massive, from the packaging but also the food. Chopping down 20g ginger or whatever it was for everyone has to leave waste. I didn't rate the meat either.

I got a weeks worth of Hello Fresh and it was such a bloody faff. Never again!

I like it because I don't like meal planning & food shopping but want to eat different stuff each night.

How on EARTH do you have leftovers from a Gousto box? The portions are tiny!!

I have been getting Gousto quite regularly. The reason why I started using it was because I was stuck in a rut of making the same meals over and over again. I wanted to try out new recipes and improve my cooking skills. I find getting the boxes useful as there's no food waste, and if you want to make the recipe again, they give you a recipe card. All you have to do is get the ingredients from the supermarket, and if you already have the spices and seasonings, it usually comes out slightly cheaper. It's also easier for me to meal prep with Gousto, so I am not cooking everyday. I have two folders full of recipes that I can easily make or get inspiration from. I am a lot more confident at cooking now than I was before.

DH has PDA and I am the main earner. He cannot take advice/instructions from anyone. But weirdly when the meals arrive all boxed I've gusto he sees it as a task like building an IKEA flat pack and does a great job. I choose the meals as he's no idea what we all like. This is why we do gusto

How on EARTH do you have leftovers from a Gousto box? The portions are tiny!

we've had leftovers from a box for 4 but my dc are under 10

We use them 3 days a week-The days we both work really long hours. I actually only find it marginally more expensive like a few pounds a week as there is very little waste, which I'm happy to pay to eat well on our busy days. We have been using hello fresh for a year and have had one missed delivery and zero other issues. For us it's worth it. Our family food spend including boxes and supermarket shop for a family of 4 is still under £90 a week and that includes lunches, treats,alcohol so I don't feel its a massive extravagance.

@Welshrarebitontoast love SimplyCook. My whole family use SimplyCook now. All the meals are so simple and quick but bloody lovely. Really gets me out of the boring what's for dinner rut.

We use Gousto for three meals a week. Prior to this my husband hated cooking and would always do the same spag bol or chilli when it was his turn to cook. He loves making these meals! He does most of the cooking now which is a massive bonus for me! 😁 It also means we don't eat the same old food week in week out which is what we used to do.

Mindful Chef is brilliant. It forces me to eat a shit load of vegetables with each meal, to eat carb free sometimes whereas if I'm planning myself I'd probably add potatoes.

The dishes are really creative and it makes us try new things, eg beetroot or carrot 'chips', various things with tofu etc.

The gusto four box feeds five adults, I was really impressed with the portion size but then I don't choose individual things such as prawns or burgers I chose things that are made in one dish (hot pot, Korean mince etc) and found the portions excellent.

I really like them! Gousto (I wish people would stop spelling it Gusto - sounds like anti flatulence tablets 🤣) seem a very generous company. I get them every so often. I ask my DCs to choose what they want for dinner & they sometimes make it, too. It replaces a takeaway, is healthier, and just less faff. I always get leftovers from a box for 4 and those get frozen. I don’t think there are too many sachets these days & we recycle every other bit to the box. I always use a code & they work out good value.

I think it depends on your lifestyle & how you chose/shop/arrange/cook those meals.

I use them because in lazy and cba meal planning and shopping. Basically.

And without them I spend way more because I'm a foodie who buys whatever looks nice at the shop.

We have a Gousto box once a month. I tend to get into a rut with cooking and it's a good way of trying new recipes without buying large quantities of cupboard ingredients only to decide you don't want to make a particular meal again. Favourite recipes go in a folder.

Personally I am really discouraged from trying these because they only have the ingredients you need and no more. Great, what if I mess something up or spill it in the sink or something?

I have a hellofresh subscription. I'm someone who almost never in my adult life regularly cooked, until six months ago. If I didn't have the subscription, I'd probably have struggled to think of seven different things I could cook that were both healthy and didn't contain to many calories. My subscription means I've cooked about 130 different recipes in the past six months, in other words, I've almost never had precisely the same thing twice. (Although lots of recipes are very similar to each other without being identical.)

All the recipes contain far more greens than I would otherwise have cooked, and I've eaten more salads in the past few weeks than I've eaten in the previous 20 years. Even the white carbohydrates are infinitely more varied, instead of just rice, potatoes, pasta or bread I'm regularly also eating sweet potato, lentils, Bulgar wheat and one or two other more obscure things I can't remember right now. (Cauliflower fulfilled the role, once.)

Initially they were completely reliable, but I have had some problems recently with missing ingredients. I report them every single time, and get a discount off my next order as a result.

Yes there is lots of single-use packaging, that is a downside. On the other hand, it is very satisfying that there is absolutely zero food waste, not one eatable gram of food gets thrown away, ever. (Well actually garlic gets oversupplied, the majority of recipes have garlic as an ingredient, they supply garlic separately to the individual bags, and what they give is more than enough. They can't give exactly the right amount unless they split garlic heads into cloves for you.)

I don't think it would be easy to cook the recipes from scratch. It would be a lot more trouble to source all the ingredients, you would have to value your time at nothing to think them supplying exactly the right amounts for each meal wasn't a big benefit. Even when you had the ingredients, you would have to measure them in use, and store the surplus for other recipes, and coordinate all your recipes to use up all the ingredients. For example, my mince, diced chicken and crème fraiche comes in quantities I doubt you get in shops. I now know that you can't buy "red wine jus" in Waitrose, after that was left out of a recent order. (I had too google alternative ingredients before going shopping.) (On the other hand, if you don't worry about your weight, I suppose you may not care how much of these you use.)

If you think they are just a grocery delivery service, then yes they will look expensive, for the groceries you get. The meal planning and the precise ingredient portions sizes are a huge benefit for me. I've no intention of every trying to cook their recipes from scratch, that would involve a huge amount of extra work, planning and shopping.

I don't think it's that expensive.

Costs us £50 a week and does lunch and dinner for around 6 days for the two of us. Not too bad when all we need is milk and fruit otherwise.

I hate cooking and thinking of what to cook but found Hello Fresh just too plastic heavy ( even if better than Gousto) and somewhat faffy. But I do have a well stocked pantry.

In six months, the only thing I remember going wrong is when I used up the plum tomatoes intended for a different recipe instead of cutting up a single large tomato. I replaced them in time for the next meal. (To keep them fresh, I store all vegetables in the fridge together, rather than leaving them in the individual meal bags they came in.)

I'm a fairly competent, confident cook, but I regularly use Mindful Chef for around 4 meals per week. Mainly because I want to eat healthily and enjoy a varied range of dishes without having to waste my precious mental energy on meal planning, shopping etc. Life is just too short and I don't find meal planning very interesting.

It is a bit more expensive than planning it and going to the supermarket to buy the stuff, I guess, but I eat much less junk this way and I waste much less food. Plus I find the quality of the ingredients is really good.

I think it depends on how much time and headspace you have tbh. I have an extremely full-on, demanding job but am responsible for nearly all of the cooking as dh spends long periods overseas. I really can't be arsed to think about what I'm going to eat at the end of a busy day, but I get really bored if I endlessly cycle around the same old dishes. Using Mindful Chef means that I can switch things up a bit without the hassle of having to source random ingredients that I may never use again. It works for me!!

And yes, I do have to spend a few mins selecting what I want in each box, but I can do it a few weeks in advance and I just filter on veggie options and pick the ones with the quickest cooking times!

for me it’s just taking away the hassle of having to think of what to cook on a week night. I enjoy cooking but don’t enjoy having to think of what to make each day. Great to have weeknight cooking taken off the mental load, we’ll do two nights recipe boxes, two nights something easy like chicken breast and vege or salmon and vege tray bake - then eat out or pizza etc on weekends - or I’ll get creative and do something involved one weekend eve.

I would add that there is some plastic packaging with Mindful Chef, but not really any more than you would get with a typical supermarket shop. A lot of the stuff is packed in paper or cardboard. They claim that the boxes are carbon neutral... who knows?