We Tried Sunbasket for Two Months - Our Honest, Unsponsored Review!

 

Hi everyone! This post is written by my husband. When friends of ours heard about us doing HelloFresh, we were advised to give Sunbasket a shot.

Upon first glance, while the meals come in at a higher price point than HelloFresh, Sunbasket offers more fish and vegetarian options than HelloFresh as well as gluten free friendly options. Additionally, Sunbasket gives you a little bit more control over the pricing. Whereas HelloFresh originally (more on why I’m using that term later) offered X amount of meals at a relatively fixed price point, Sunbasket charges different amounts based on the meal. For example, a meal based around chicken costs less than a meal that focuses on fish. One week, you can slightly splurge but then the next week, if the menu permits, you can scale back and save some money. It gives the customer a more varied sense of control rather than a flat price. Now the reason I added “originally” in describing HelloFresh’s pricing structure is that HelloFresh has adapted a pricing structure more in line with Sunbasket’s, but also changed things where substitutions are add-on costs (originally most substitutions were at no extra charge). HelloFresh has also recently added charges for meals that were semi-prepared. Not sure how I feel about those changes, but we’ll see.

Sunbasket meals feel more higher-end and as such, if you’re new to the meal kit game or don’t have much culinary experience, I’m not sure I’d recommend Sunbasket over HelloFresh. HelloFresh is definitely more friendly to the family that has limited cooking abilities and wants to cook more at home. If Leslie were to take over cooking, hands down, we’d go with HelloFresh for a while until her she gets more culinary skills. Sunbasket’s instructions are no where near as user friendly as HelloFresh’s, in so much as they don’t even offer step-by-step photos. 

Leslie made the comment that she felt less full on Sunbasket meals and I’d agree with that statement. The meals were satisfying without making us feel weighted down. However, I think that was more because of the meals I chose between the two services rather than solely being a byproduct of Sunbasket’s offerings. If anything, I’ve become more aware of the meals I choose from HelloFresh and opt for lower calorie offerings now.

However, after a few weeks of Sunbasket, I found myself getting increasingly frustrated with the service. Sure, the fish and vegetarian options are a big bonus, but we were running into many different delivery issues.

The first one is that I wasn’t really happy with the quality of the produce. Too often would I open the box and look at things like the green beans and just feel like the quality wasn’t there. If I was doing the shopping, the quality of the produce isn’t what I’d pick out for us. And if there was cilantro for that week’s meals? I’d have to go to the supermarket and get a fresh bunch because far too often the cilantro we’d receive from Sunbasket would already be turning black and would be limp. 

The next issue is that Sunbasket positions itself as using more organic ingredients than other meal kit services with the caveat saying that if an organic item isn’t available, they would substitute it out. Nearly every week, we’d get little fliers in our boxes saying that X organic ingredient wasn’t available and was substituted out with a non-organic ingredient. Maybe it’s just me, but if one of the reasons your service costs more is because of organic ingredients, then I’d hope for some form of credit whenever non-organic ingredients were subbed in. Again, this type of substitution happened quite often.

In my HelloFresh review, I spoke about the environmental impact of a meal kit service. Sunbasket kind of fails here. Let’s say there is a romulade or a chimichurri sauce that’s part of a dish, HelloFresh will give you the ingredients to make that sauce. Sunbasket on the other hand will make the sauce themselves and put it in a container for you. So it’s nice that they save you a step by making the sauce themselves, but by the end of a week, you’re left with a lot of plastic containers that just feel wasteful. What’s worse is these Sunbasket-made ingredients in generic containers would leak, a lot. It’s like their kitchen staff didn’t take the the time to ensure that the containers were completely closed before throwing them into the bags. 

Conclusion

I should note that our experience with Sunbasket is vastly different than a friend of mine had. For her, Sunbasket was better than HelloFresh as she felt the produce and ingredients with her HelloFresh orders weren’t up to snuff. One of the things that can contribute to that is our locations. We’re in Atlanta and she’s in New Jersey and what’s interesting is that HelloFresh has a facility not too far from our home where our orders come from, but our Sunbasket orders are packaged and shipped from New Jersey. So my guess is that proximity to processing centers plays a huge part in the “your mileage may vary” game. So I would recommend seeing if you can find out where the meals will be shipped from with any meal service plan.

If our Sunbasket meals didn’t have the issues we experienced, I’d probably alternate more between HelloFresh and Sunbasket equally. When the quality is there, Sunbasket’s meals feel more balanced and nutritious but they’re also more time consuming to prepare, so HelloFresh would be sprinkled here and there for the weeks where I’m a little tired of cooking or don’t have as much time to spend in the kitchen.

That's it for today! Hope you enjoyed Jared's review. Have a great start to a new week!

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