Saving Time with Hello Fresh

What’s Hello Fresh?

A sanity and time-saving food box delivery service that provides step-by-step recipes and fresh, pre-proportioned ingredients straight to your door.

They make cooking delicious, nutritious meals from scratch easier for you. Plus, Hello Fresh operates as a flexible subscription that takes meal planning and shopping for ingredients away from you.

How does it work?

Once you sign up as a customer, you can choose a plan to suit you and select recipes from a variety of quick and delicious options weekly.

You can place your order online or using the app. On it, you can redeem discounts, change addresses, payment and account details, and pause or reactivate a subscription.

What’s in a meal box?

In every box you order, you should find:

Recipe cards for every meal you ordered.
Pre-measured ingredients for each meal, separated into brown paper meal bags. Each has a coloured sticker that matches its recipe, so finding your meal and recipe card daily is easy.
Proteins, dairy, and condiments packed in an insulated pouch with ice packs to keep things cool until they hit your fridge.

What kind of meals can I choose from?

Weekly there are over 30 recipes to choose from. Most include chicken, beef, or lamb. Others offer salmon or vegetarian options.

The meals are pretty balanced and wholesome, often with lots of greens or salad.

You can customise some meals, choose from customer favourites or gourmet options, and pick between a range of proteins or cultural flavours.

The most popular recipes include dishes like Bolognese Risotto, Kung Pao Beef, and Spiced Honey Lamb.

There are also quick dinner ideas like Crumbed Chicken with Caesar Salad. You can also order breakfast, lunch, and dessert options.

What’s good about Hello Fresh?

In the past, we shopped for our own ingredients and meal planned independently, but working more lately has meant less time to allocate to deciding what to cook and actually making it. Plus, we got sick of the same menu we’d fallen into.

It was during a busy holiday season that we decided to try Hello Fresh. My husband liked the new variety it offered, the fact that anyone could follow the recipe and get a pretty good result, and that the meals were quite quick to create.

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Since then we’ve stuck with it during term times mostly, and we mostly love it! We have the occasional week off, but we feel too enamoured overall to let go at this point.

We’ve recently agreed to change our plan from 5 to 4 days, to now cover only the days we’re both working. This will save us a bit, and I find that even just getting 4 meals often stretches out over the week as social events or other meals slot in between.

Pros of Hello Fresh

You can select your plan to suit your needs and change it weekly as needed.
You can choose between 2 or 4 person meal options and order either 3, 4, or 5 recipes per week.
Includes step-by-step recipes that can be completed pretty quickly (from 20 minutes+).
Fresh, seasonal produce in pre-proportioned quantities to suit your plan (2 or 4 people etc.).
Nutritious, well-balanced meals that can be prepped in 6 steps.
You can select from a range of proteins, gluten-free, or vegetarian options within the menu. Vegetarian recipes include dishes like Creamy Pumpkin Curry, Spiced Paneer, and Roasted Vegetable & Red Pesto Pasta.
No minimum term for any of their subscriptions and no contract to sign.
Flexibility to pause, skip, or cancel at any time.
You can use the Hello Fresh app to select meals, skip a week, or change deliveries from wherever you are.
Delivered right to your door if you live in an area that Hello Fresh services.
Recipes include nutrition and allergen information.
Food boxes come with sensitive ingredients packaged in insulated pouches with ice packs to keep them cool.
Frequent buyers get bonuses like a brownie mix included at set ordering intervals.

Cons

A box once arrived quite beaten up when they switched delivery companies. It had been opened, with 3 of the meal bags inside torn open as well. On the upside, I reported this rare infraction and the company replaced the affected meals for us without issue.
Some dishes have surcharges on them if they include more expensive ingredients, e.g. salmon or lamb. Watch out for this, as it raises the overall price quite a lot if you select these options without noticing the extra cost.
If you miss the scheduled delivery cut-off for ordering, they’ll send you a standard selection for the week, which we find includes options that aren’t what we’d usually have chosen, e.g. pasta dishes.
You need to provide some basic items like salt, pepper, oil, vinegar, and rice wine yourself. If they’re not in your pantry when you cook a meal requiring one or more of those, tough.

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How green is Hello Fresh?

According to their website, ‘sustainability is part of everything (they) do. The way (they) source, pack and ship generates less waste than traditional food operations.’

They’re the first global carbon-neutral meal kit company – offsetting 100% of direct carbon emissions.

They only source free-range chicken.

Since they only buy and supply what you order, less should end up in landfill, so food waste is reduced by up to 21% with every Hello Fresh meal.

Hello Fresh works with local farmers and suppliers wherever they can to source fresh, seasonal produce and use as few imported ingredients as possible, thereby supporting locals more.

Also, supermarkets are circumvented in their supply chain, so ingredients can get to you fresher and faster.

They say they’re aiming to reduce packaging or replace some with more sustainable options.

In my boxes, soft plastic is used for wrapping meat, spices, herbs, salads, and sauce packets, plus the insulated pouch is large and essentially plastic bubble wrap.

The meal bags are made of brown paper, so they’re easily compostable or recyclable. The box itself is sturdy, so we’ve reused several over time.

You can read more about their environmental initiatives here.

Last thoughts

Hello Fresh costs us more than meal planning and buying all the ingredients myself would, but the whole point is not having to do those things.

It saves me the stress and time involved in thinking up new meal plans, physically shopping for the desired ingredients, finding recipes to use, and then still actually making the meals. I don’t love those former steps, so contracting those tasks out has been easy for me.

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In addition, my son and husband are now cooking one meal each per week, which is developing culinary skills in them and helping our family out too. Without Hello Fresh’s step-by-step instructions, this probably wouldn’t be happening.

They love the clear, easy-to-follow recipes and that everything comes together in a bag for each meal. They don’t so much love that most of our chosen recipes currently include baby spinach leaves. They’re getting a bit over them as time passes, but thankfully the meals seem to change seasonally.

Hello Fresh is giving me greater time freedom by providing meal convenience. I look forward to cooking and eating more.

In addition, I don’t regret trying several new recipes and flavours that I otherwise may not have. I’ve only disliked two recipes of the hundred-plus we’ve chosen, due to personal taste.

Would I do it again knowing what I know about it now? Yes. I look forward to delivery day every week.

Keen to give it a try?

If you’d like to try Hello Fresh out, using my code HS-C8ME82D5L will give you a delicious $90 discount. For every person who joins Hello Fresh using this offer, I earn $50 credit toward my future purchases, so we both win.

Good to know

The $90 discount deal above entitles new customers to a total of $90 off Hello Fresh orders: $50 off their first box + free shipping, $20 off the second, and $20 off the third. Delivery fees may apply for subsequent orders, and the discount is valid for new customers only.

Do you have any thoughts on Hello Fresh? If this post helped, feel free to pin it to share — thanks for stopping by!