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?

Fair enough. I'm quite lucky, I think, as after being the fussiest ever toddler, dd pretty much eats everything these days! Makes life easier!!

Mindful Vhef...oops @Bubblebubblebah .

I found Gousto meals quite bland. I wouldn’t use them again. I tried Mindful Chef and their food was lovely but so expensive. I do look on their website for inspiration but I don’t think using them makes life much easier. You still have to shop for breakfast lunch and the rest of your evening meals that week. Mindful Chef do frozen meals as well. Again, quite expensive, but I often buy gift vouchers for new parents as they are fab when you just don’t have the time or energy to cook.

As a single person who hates wasting food I find them useful. I order a kit for 2 and have the second portion as leftovers. I tend to order 2/3 meals a week and that can last me the week.

We get Hello Fresh about once a month. We always pick the vegetarian meals. We do this to expand our range of vegetarian cooking and to get away from just making quorn versions of meat dishes.

We then keep the recipe cards for dishes that we enjoy and then make them ourselves.

Been doing this for 4 years and never had a problem with ingredients or deliveries.

I tried Gusto a few times but didn't like the recipes.

We did it for a while and are thinking of doing it again. Main reasons are 1. We are bored of having to decide what to eat 2. We are really busy and basically buying food everyday which is costing a lot and 3. we waste too much food.

Never tried Gousto but hello fresh was nice enough if not require repetitive.

I've just tried the Gousto following another thread here (thank you, whoever gave the code). 4 meals for 4. Two of them were fish (Basa), two of them mince meals (one made into burgers). Husband and kids liked the mince, I preferred the fish recipes.

I did enjoy trying out the Gousto recipes, my bugbear was that there isn't a choice of white fish, it's just Basa which my husband has an aversion to. I would pay a premium for Hake or Cod, but it's not offered. I loved the small packets of everything and as PP has said - no waste.

I would say I’m a fairly good cook, and both my Partner and I love food and trying new dishes. However at 46 I was tired of coming up with new ideas, shopping for them etc., the whole mental load of it.

Handing it over to HF has been excellent. 🤷‍♀️ I click click click and chose what I fancy. It’s delivered to my door. Nice!

To answer some of your points, for two of us, I find it good value, especially as shopping for smaller amounts can be difficult, so less wastage. There’s the odd recipe that doesn’t seem quite worth it but they’re easy to spot. We don’t spend a fortune on new spices/sauces. The plastic is minimal.

I just checked and we’ve been using them over a year now. In that time I’ve had maybe 3 small issues of item missing/going off. One delivery was delayed (not dispatched) by a day and they credited £15.

We probably eat a few more vegetables than we would otherwise including vegetarian dishes.

We also had haddock in our box.

We get Hello Fresh about once a month. We always pick the vegetarian meals. We do this to expand our range of vegetarian cooking and to get away from just making quorn versions of meat dishes.

This is what we do, too. When my son became vegetarian, I signed up for Hello Fresh to get some ideas.

I did Hello Fresh a couple of times. Both on either end of a long holiday so I didn’t want/ have a lot of extra food in the house. We enjoyed the recipes but did find the sides a bit uninspiring, so many oven roasted potatoes! The meat was good quality and I liked the range of recipes.

I’m only interested in it during the offer phase. Otherwise it’s too expensive.

I generally find they are really good with giving credits when things are missing, bad quality or damaged (for me, rare, maybe 3 times in 3 years). No questions asked, just report it on the app and customer service usually offer a goodwill credit within 24 hours.

also the delivery is always bang on time.

saveforthat, did you? I noticed that some recipes were not available for the delivery date, perhaps one of those had haddock. Shame I missed it because I would have snapped it up. I'll have another look, thanks for the heads up.

I did HelloFresh for about six months when my husband and I were both crazy busy with work and I was having a hard time mentally. I genuinely just had absolutely no brain space for thinking about what to cook each evening or to do meal plans each week. I found it a godsend just having everything planned out and delivered for me, and all I had to do was scroll through an app in front of the TV and pick a few meals. The packaging was a concern of mine but actually I didn’t find it so bad, no more wasteful than buying a whole packet/jar of spices and then throwing it away half empty, months later.

Things eventually eased up a bit and we stopped it, but I kept all the recipe cards and use them all the time. It’s definitely helped me get out of a ‘rut’ with food and meal planning but it did start to get expensive and I find I can get a week’s worth of lunches and dinners now for the same price I was spending on HelloFresh. But there’s definitely a place for it if you’re needing a bit of help with meal planning or inspiration.

She probably means “normal” people like me who have ketchup salt pepper and fuck all else. I don’t think it’s some kind of racial or cultural slur. It does rather imply that Asian food is not "normal". But it any case, pretty much everything I got from Hello Fresh would come from any large supermarket.

I think the normal was supposed to be common as in commonly/most common/majority. Happens. I know many Brotish people with basically no asian, ME or pther "foreign" stuff at home.

I’ve found that I can get almost everything for a HelloFresh recipe from my nearest big supermarket but there are a few things I have had trouble finding since I stopped. Mostly the ‘spice blend’ type things they give you (‘Thai style spice blend’ or similar). I also had to order ‘truffle zest’ from Amazon. Other than that, there’s nothing particularly unusual about the ingredients or anything that you’d need to visit a specialist supermarket for.

I prefer the spice subscriptions like simply cook as it just gives us a bit of variety - we usually do 1-2 meals a week and often swap ingredients depending on what I find on the yellow stickers
for example I did a pasta based one a few days ago with smoked salmon instead of chicken - I’m gluten free so used pea flour pasta instead was lovely

Ha ha, you are joking? I meant normal people who aren’t the cook from scratch fully stocked larder wonder women of MN.

I found them useful cooking for 2 when the kids are at university, a lot less waste plus special offers meaning it saves me money

I tried Hello Fresh and didn’t get on with it - would often have to add vegetables.

I tried Mindful Chef when there was an offer on and never cancelled it. Just 3 meals a week for 2 of us (though most days I can pad it out for the kids too).

I like not having to think about what to cook or cooking the same things.
It’s very healthy - we eat more of a variety of vegetables that I wouldn’t have the brain space to think of in a recipe. This week for example - radishes and pea shoots are not something I would normally eat.

They always send too many veggies. So a whole punnet of tomatoes. A whole cucumber- so don’t need to buy them.

Packaging I get but they are starting to pack
more in paper.

My 13 year old now loves Tofu so good enough for me!

The spices are always really interesting and kind of make the dish. I never have them in the cupboard. Sometimes I’ve never heard of them.

I throw less food away. So less waste.

It is expensive but worth it for us.

I can cook but I have to think hard for my job and have fibro, so having to think about what I want to eat for the week and then plan and shop for it as well is just too much. As it's just me it's not that expensive, I only have to cook once every 2 days as I cook one day and heat it up the next day.
The individual tiny packs isn't great, I wish there was another way around that