Hello fresh - why?

[Montymorency]

Just wanting to understand why people go to the expense of these food boxes when they could just choose a recipe and buy the ingredients themselves

We used them for the first time this summer. DS has had a long summer as he sat GCSEs so finished mid-June and he said he'd like to learn to cook over the summer so I felt the boxes would be convenient for that. I bought all the boxes on new customer discounts so they were good value. DS chose what he wanted to cook from the website and has cooked entirely unaided by us. He started off being a bit slow and dinner was late for the first week or so. Then his skills improved and he got faster. He's cooked 4 to 5 times a week all summer, it's been lovely to come home from work and not have to cook and I will really miss it when he goes back to school next week. I found it to be a really good way for teens to teach themselves to cook and we'll do the same thing with DD in a couple of years. The meals have been tasty and varied. He's learnt a lot and enjoyed doing it.

We used Gousto first and then Hello Fresh once we'd used up the Gousto discounts. For us, Gousto was better - there are 4 of us but DS is the kind of skinny, sporty teen with hollow legs who needs a lot of food so we liked being able to buy a 5 person box from Gousto. I also found the Gousto recipes had more side veg than the HF ones and for us the quality of the meat was better. With HF we bought a 4 person box which was generally a little small for our needs and then some meals had no veg so that was an extra thing to get and think about and i really disliked the quality of the minced beef. If I use HF again, I won't buy any meals involving minced beef. I liked that HF bag up each meal's ingredients in one bag rather than having to sort it all out and divide into meals like you do for Gousto, though that's not a big deal.

This week was our last box as school goes back next week and I've run out of Gousto discounts but I'm sure I'll use them again at some point with an offer. I liked them a lot more than I thought I would.

I dont like Hello Fresh, but I do like Gousto.
I initially set it up when I had to go away for a couple of weeks and left my 21 y ear old and 16 year old home alone, and needing to know they wouldnt starve.
We are all AuDHD. To be honest it has been a revelation for me. Ive struggled massively with shopping and meal planning, and had lots and lots of waste when I tried to do sensible things and get veg boxes. My shopping style in a supermarket is like the food equivilent of the middle Isle of Lidl, Lots of random things that looked fantastic, maybe were on offer, and possibly make one meal between the lot for a bill of £200, and alot disappearing into the freezer and bin.
Ive tried, I really have, I can cook, in fact I can cook really really well, but I cant organise a weekly shop to save my life.
Gousto has lifted alot of the hassle. The mental load of having to think wtf to cook. We dont have it every night, but midweek maybe 4 nights out of 5 which still allows space to do some other stuff. The kids will also come and choose some of the recipes each, and starting next month, will be each cooking a night a week each too,

Contains the right amount of ingredients, you don’t have to buy 4 if you only need 2 of whatever.

Cheap when they are 60 or 70% off. Makes a change try new recipes. Don’t need to buy full bottles of ingredients you won’t reuse. We’ve used on holiday in an apartment abroad was $18 for 6 meals via groupon.

Because it's easier for me. That's all

We always give these a try when they are on a really good offer and we buy them, on offer, for our kids when they start at uni. I've just signed up for a kid today. Five days of meals, each for 4 people for £22. Puddings/treats also included. We'll pick meals that can be frozen after they've been cooked. We'll cancel after the first week.

I actually spend less money using hello fresh, no putting stuff I don't need in the supermarket trolly.
So much less food waste too, it's so convenient and I bloody hate thinking of things to do for dinner so I love that you can pick meals in a couple of minutes and you are done . I always get the quick cook recipes so nothing takes more than 20 mins to cook. I've never had a bad meal even when I have forgot to choose my meals and they just send me what's on the menu that week.

When I get home from work I often don't have much time before I have to go out again and more often my brain feels like a wrung sponge. A store cupboard of ingredients will make me reach for a tin of baked beans

oh god.. this. So much this.

I just don’t have any brain left for choosing food when I get home. The slight uplift in cost compared to buying separately is negated by having a paper bag with that nights meal all ready to go.

Thinking along the lines of using Hello Fresh to help teach kids cooking….anyone tried The Spicery curry kits?

We got Hello Fresh for a few months, I liked that we tried different meals and that everything was pre-proportioned, it made it easy to cook but I think actually most of the meals are really salty and the meat is not high quality. We only got the "basic" meals though, I never paid more for the more expensive ones each week! I ended up thinking I could buy/ cook it myself and make it healthier!

I don't like cooking and Hello Fresh gives us variety, tasty meals, portion control. Never enough vegetables though I always add more. Most ingredients are included and measured out. Some recipes are far more complicated than others and I don't enjoy that, but usually it's home cooked, whole foods, with less effort. It's not all week - we get three meals from Hello Fresh.
Agree some vegetables go off very quickly and you have to go through the bags as some have veggies that definitely need to be refrigerated.

Hello Fresh is supposed to save waste - you only have the exact amount of all ingredients that you need. I'm not sure how that's wasteful, compared to say, buying a bottle of a particular ingredient that you use once, put in the fridge/cupboard and forget about and have to bin a few months later.

I should start my own thread for this, but I would like to know why posters start threads asking ‘why’ other people make certain choices when the reasons are perfectly obvious to anyone with more than 4 brain cells.

I’m terrible at meal planning and find it really stressful wandering round the supermarket, I found myself buying the same boring stuff every week. Meal boxes are fantastic for me, I get varied healthy meals and it takes away the stress of planning. I’ve tried loads of new meals that I would never normally have put together myself and found I’ve really enjoyed trying foods. Plus I love that I don’t waste any food and I like the portion control.

We’ve done it a few times - great for self catering holidays. Also it means you can try new things without going to the expense of buying a whole bottle/packet of something nobody likes.

A person I work with loves it. They are single, young, and have a very demanding job and a hectic social life. They also like to cook, hate to waste food, and don’t want to eat out all the time. In their case I think it’s a great option!

I wondered if I was the only one to have a fridge full of garlic 😁

I don’t use them anymore (I stopped after Covid) but I still use the recipe cards (mostly Gousto) on a regular basis.

During Covid lockdowns they were a godsend. I’m not sure we’d have eaten at the beginning of lockdown if we hadn’t already been on Gousto.

I personally wouldn't use it, but I quite enjoy choosing ingredients and spontaneously making something I crave. I could see if you worked and were really busy it would be quite good. I guess healthier and cheaper than a takeaway. It depends on the level of effort I guess. If it was loads of steps and stages and what not then it would put me off.

DD started restricting what foods she would eat (now recently diagnosed ASD and ADHD) so we chose some recipes together and cooked them together.

This has resulted in a wider range of go to meals for us as a family.

I do keep forgetting to cancel though and have actually enjoyed the last couple of random boxes we’ve received.

We tried both hello fresh and gusto. I was working 55+hours a week and we were eating too many takeaways. Neither of us wanted to spend the little time we had off meal planning, making a grocery list and then food shopping. So it seemed like a brilliant idea amd that it would be cheaper and healthier than takeaways.

But the reality for us was that both companies were useless. We would have wrong or missing items, sometimes the quality was poor and others we would have the meals go out of date before we could use them all. They would give you money off your next box when they messed up but we were doing it to save time and in the end we were having to buy bits from the corner shop most weeks.

As I said I might try a few boxes as a way to help my daughter learn to cook as suggested by a previous poster.

But as for me I love meal planning- I collect recipes to try, sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea making a plan of what I need on a Thursday evening - ready for my Friday shop were I go to the market and spend ages chatting with local farmers and producers. I love the look of a full fridge bursting with exciting ingredients 😀I probably need to get out more!

I can see how if you just want a quick no hassle meal, to reduce ordering in, they could be a god send though and it sounds like people don’t use them for every meal, so a good way to mix things up.

But they seemed so random in their portion sizes when I signed up (it was years ago. Maybe they have improved.) Some days there would be meat or fish, veg and carbs, other days no veg, other days no carbs. Some recipes were too huge, others were really puny.