Germany-based company Hello Fresh, on the other hand, puts its emphasis on quality ingredients and nutrition. It also looks a little more upscale in presentation and offers a couple of choices each week with a “market price” upcharge, allowing them to offer premium items like steak and shellfish. Plated is a little more customizable, allowing up to 7 different meals per week and offering dessert for $4 a serving. (After that it was easy.) Plated and Hello Fresh can be canceled straight from your account on the website, but with Hello Fresh it’s slightly more complicated to skip a week.Įach service has a slightly different focus. Some are easier to cancel or skip weeks than others I was annoyed that I couldn’t just cancel Blue Apron from the website, but had to send an email to the company to get the cancellation link. All the services include shipping in the price. (If any of my readers have promotional offers to share, please pass them along!) Blue Apron’s cost is about $10 per plate Plated and Hello Fresh are slightly more expensive at around $12 per plate. I hope to check out some of the other available services to see how they compare.

But while busy people may be able to carve out time to cook and eat together, what about the menu planning? The grocery shopping? “Provisioning,” as we call it at my house, is a time-consuming task. By outsourcing the meal planning and shopping, even very busy families can have the satisfaction of home-cooked, varied meals.īut how good are those meals? How much do they cost? And are there other factors to consider?įrom my admittedly very small sample size, I would say that Blue Apron meals range from fair to very good. Celebrity food writers like Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman tell us that being in touch with our food is important to our health. American families are so busy, yet we increasingly crave home-cooked meals and the family time spent eating them together. It seems clear why this model is getting popular. But there is a huge number of up-and-comers. I consider these two, along with Plated, to be the big hitters in the meal-kit delivery business. In May of last year, Blue Apron was valued at $2 billion, and Hello Fresh claimed to be selling 4 million meals each month – more than it sold in the entire first half of 2013. Meal-kit delivery is a big business, and there’s every reason to think it will continue to grow.

Blue apron prices per meal