We’ve tried HelloFresh and Sunbasket and now it’s time to talk Home Chef. Of all the meal kit services, Home Chef seems to be doing the largest marketing blitz, including having sample meals available for pickup at Kroger grocery stores here in the south. Which makes sense since Home Chef was purchased by Kroger a few years ago.
The summary? We didn’t like Home Chef compared to HelloFresh or Sunbasket.
So what didn’t I like about Home Chef? First and foremost, the amount of vegetables they included in each meal. You know the joke meme of spinach before cooking and after cooking where a huge pile of spinach cooks down to nearly nothing?
Imagine being given an amount of uncooked spinach that looks to be the amount of cooked spinach in that meme. Thankfully I had some additional spinach on hand but even then, it still wasn’t enough to count as a serving of vegetables. The vegetables were more like a garnish.
With the pretzel crusted tuna meal, it was supposed to be mashed potatoes, but given the three small potatoes that were provided and the large amount of sour cream provided to add to the mashed potatoes, I didn’t feel confident in the results. Thankfully again, I had some potatoes in the fridge, so I was able to supplement what Home Chef provided and I ended up roasting them.
For the environmental side of things, HelloFresh still feels better. Sunbasket has all those little containers that they use but those at least can be repurposed if you’re so inclined to. Home Chef is just a plastic bag wasteland.
The meals themselves tasted just OK. They definitely didn’t feel as heavy as some of our earlier HelloFresh meals did before I started choosing them based on calories, but they weren’t satisfying in the same way the other meal kit services were.
Can I say anything positive about Home Chef? I do think their instructions are better than Sunbasket’s and on-par with HelloFresh’s. Sunbasket definitely has this expectation that you feel really comfortable in the kitchen while Home Chef is more accommodating to people that are trying to cook at home more often for the first time. The other positive thing is that if you live near a Kroger, you can pick up a meal or two to cook at home and try out before going through the process of signing up and then trying to close your account.
There is a chance that we’ll give Home Chef another shot down the road is we see that they’ve changed some of their delivery practices. If they advertise something like “now with way more veggies” or “packaging with reduced environmental impact”, then yeah, we’d test it out again, but honestly, I don’t see that happening and there are other meal services we want to test and review. For now, I closed our account.
If you’re interested in trying a meal kit service, you can use our HelloFresh Referral Link for a free week of meals.
Thanks for the review on HomeChef. I'm not familiar with that one; maybe it's not available in Canada. That's ridiculous that you had to supplement the veggies. The whole point of a meal kit is that it's supposed to give you everything you need. The pic you posted of that wee package of spinach made me laugh. Is it any cheaper than the other meal kits you've tried?
ReplyDeleteHi Lola! The veggie portions are ridiculous. It is a little bit cheaper than HelloFresh and significantly cheaper than SunBasket. We are planning on trying other meal kits. Let me know if there's a meal kit you would like us to try. If it's available in both countries we'll make it happen.
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