Families With Grace

Helping Christian moms create homes filled with grace, love & faith

Tag: meal kit

Meal kit review: EMeals

Posted on by Stacey A. Shannon

A series of unsponsored meal kit reviews and comparisons

A few months ago, my daughter made a case for us to try meal kits. I wasn’t so sure at first. Whenever I had checked into them previously, they seemed expensive and didn’t have a lot of recipes we would actually like. I have two particular eaters in my household, and we’re pretty plain eating folks. But, I decided to check into it again and found there were many more options, so I decided we’d give meal kits a try. I started with one company, but I was anxious to do a meal kit comparison and see what we’d like most.

So after about five meal kit boxes from one provider, I paused my account and changed to another. I just wanted to see the difference. At the same time, there was a third one I was curious about as well. I figured all this trying would end up being a great meal kit comparison to share!

Before ordering, I tried looking at meal kit comparisons, but most of them seemed to include affiliate links or sponsorships with the companies. I am not affiliated with or sponsored by any of these meal kit companies. When I started writing this meal kit comparison, in fact, I had no idea which service I’d end up liking the most — if any of them. I didn’t even intend to make it a blog post!

Then, once I decided to make it a blog post, I thought it’d be just one post. Pretty quickly, I realized that I needed more than one post to include all the information to make a helpful comparison. Over a few weeks, I’m posting our experiences with Dinnerly, Hello Fresh, Home Chef, Every Plate and EMeals.

EMeals

From the beginning of this journey, I was most intrigued by EMeals. It is much cheaper because you’re only paying for the meal plans and buying the groceries yourself. They partner will various grocery stores to help make shopping easier. I do like that. As a rather DIY person, I figured EMeals would be the best fit for us.

Signing up for EMeals was pretty painless. I signed up online but then had to download the app to do much else. You can see your account and payment information online, but finding recipes and creating shopping lists has to be done through the app. I’m not anti-apps by any means, but I often have my laptop and like having the option to use it as well. Plans that have both make me happiest!

Menu choices

Since EMeals doesn’t have to source the food for its recipes like other meal kits do, they have many more menu options. There are a few that are family friendly options, and I started with those. Of all the meal kits we have tried, this one definitely had the most options that worked for my entire family. Quite a few of the meals were similar to things in our regular rotation, but there were lots of new options as well. My concern was whether I’d push outside of our comfort zone as much as I have with other meal kits!

EMeals also goes with some premade items on many recipes to make cooking time quicker. That’s a nice bonus for this mama on busy weeknights!

I’d love to have a search feature in EMeals to look for meals that utilize specific ingredients. For example, the first week using EMeals, I bought a half gallon of buttermilk for a blueberry muffin recipe. That’s not something I usually use, so I wanted to find other recipes to make use of the buttermilk.

While you do select a specific plan you’d like to go with (like family friendly, low calorie or budget), you can easily access and pick from recipes in all of the plans. I really like that!

Cost

EMeals offers 14 days for free, but you have to put in your payment information for them to start charging at the end of 14 days. Instead of being a monthly or weekly charge, EMeals charges either every three months at $9.99 a month or once a year at $4.99 a month. I opted for the three-month option when signing up, because I didn’t know how much we’d like it. Honestly, I’d prefer a monthly option at least to start with.

For additional fees, you can also add on a breakfast plan and a lunch plan (each costs additional). Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anywhere to view these plans ahead of time and they aren’t included in the free trial, so I didn’t go for them.

Shipping

Shipping wasn’t relevant to EMeals for me. I order my groceries online and pick them up. EMeals partners with a variety of retailers to help you make your list. So, I worked with Walmart, which is my go-to for grocery pick-up anyway.

Once you pick however many recipes you want for the week, then you can click and see your ingredient list in the EMeals app. It will pull up every single ingredient needed to make everything you have saved for the week. One negative to me is that it often automatically adds alcohol to pair with meals to the shopping list. We don’t drink alcohol, so I removed it from the list, but it sort of irritated me I even had to do that. However, it wasn’t difficult to remove. Each item has a box next to it to check whether you need it. It starts out with everything checked. And the list also tells you how much of an ingredient you need and what recipe you need it for. (I like that!)

Before even connecting to Walmart, I was able to remove items from the list that I had on hand. Once that was finished, then I clicked a button and it took me ingredient by ingredient through the Walmart app to add whatever choices I wanted. It pulled up a selection of items and I picked from them. It was easy!

I also was able to add on additional items as well. The items I added to my Walmart cart through the EMeals app also were in my Walmart cart in the Walmart app. For the rest of my shopping, I just switched to the Walmart app itself because that’s what I’m most familiar with.

If you really love having the groceries delivered to your house, then opt for your grocery store’s delivery service.

Ingredients

Again, this is a bit different from the others in that the ingredients being fresh or not didn’t depend on EMeals. I liked the way I made selections of ingredients in the app. However, I also wondered how difficult it would be to find and purchase the ingredients needed for recipes. With previous meal kits, we used multiple ingredients that were a bit more specialty. I wasn’t confident my local Walmart would carry some of them.

However, EMeals recipes are more simplified and use some convenience foods as well, like refrigerated mashed potatoes or mac & cheese. I had no problem finding any of the ingredients I needed.

Cooking the meals

Of all the meal kit meals I’ve made, EMeals were the very easiest. The recipes are more like recipes I usually make for my family on a weeknight. While I love making things from scratch sometimes, a lot of weeknights, I just need to get food on the table and move on. I never felt out of my depth with anything I made from EMeals. They weren’t as challenging as the other meal kits, which is both a positive and a negative. Though they were easier to make, they didn’t push me out of my comfort zone.

I don’t like using my phone to read recipes, which I thought was going to be an issue with EMeal. The recipes are only on the app. But, I discovered that if I share the recipe via email to myself, then it takes me to the recipe on the website and has a print button right there for easy printing. I loved that!

The estimated cook times seemed accurate and sometimes it took me a little less time than estimated, which was great!

Portion sizes

The portion sizes vary on the recipes you make. All of them are clearly marked. Since you purchase your own ingredients, you can adjust the portion sizes as needed. For example, my family isn’t big on eating meat. The first week, I halved our ground beef purchase for the recipes. So we got fewer portions as a result. But feeding a family four with the family plan was super easy. Many of the recipes feed up to six people. The portion sizes seemed spot on for the recipes we tried.

Overall rating

I’d give EMeals a 5 out of 5 stars. It is certainly a different type of service, but for the price, I liked it. I debated back and forth about whether it was any easier than just doing meal planning on my own using recipes I find on the internet. (Check back next week for a post about meal planning without a service.) I definitely could, but having everything narrowed down in one place is helpful. So, EMeals is definitely one of my top picks.

Other posts from this series:

Meal kit review: Every Plate

Posted on by Stacey A. Shannon

A series of unsponsored meal kit reviews and comparisons

A few months ago, my daughter made a case for us to try meal kits. I wasn’t so sure at first. Whenever I had checked into them previously, they seemed expensive and didn’t have a lot of recipes we would actually like. I have two particular eaters in my household, and we’re pretty plain eating folks. But, I decided to check into it again and found there were many more options, so I decided we’d give meal kits a try. I started with one company, but I was anxious to do a meal kit comparison and see what we’d like most.

So after about five meal kit boxes from one provider, I paused my account and changed to another. I just wanted to see the difference. At the same time, there was a third one I was curious about as well. I figured all this trying would end up being a great meal kit comparison to share!

Before ordering, I tried looking at meal kit comparisons, but most of them seemed to include affiliate links or sponsorships with the companies. I am not affiliated with or sponsored by any of these meal kit companies. When I started writing this meal kit comparison, in fact, I had no idea which service I’d end up liking the most — if any of them. I didn’t even intend to make it a blog post!

Then, once I decided to make it a blog post, I thought it’d be just one post. Pretty quickly, I realized that I needed more than one post to include all the information to make a helpful comparison. Over a few weeks, I’m posting our experiences with Dinnerly, Hello Fresh, Home Chef, Every Plate and EMeals.

Every Plate

The next meal kit delivery service we used was Every Plate. It was like Home Chef and Dinnerly in offering three meals a week as the lowest option. While Every Plate focuses on its lower prices, those prices are in part because there are many premium offerings cost extra per serving. Other meal kits did this, too, but Every Plate seemed to do so even more.

Menu choices

The menu choices for Every Plate were a bit so-so to me. They don’t seem to have quite as much selection as some of the others — at least of food that my family will eat. I have a couple of picky eaters, but getting three meals a week minimum in four portions made it more noticeable to me this time around. With the other meal kit services, I was able to find two meals per week my entire family would like and then maybe have one other meal my daughter and I would eat alone. That was a challenge for us with Every Plate.

Cost

I selected the minimum amount of meals per week, which was three. I went with four portions. Unlike Home Chef, you couldn’t modify portion sizes. The cost for three basic meals for four servings was $59.88 plus $9.99 delivery. Each serving is $4.99. In order to get the premium selections, add $3.99 more per each serving for a total of $8.98 per serving. So if you get all premium recipes for four people for one week with three meals, which would bring the cost to $107.76 plus $9.99 delivery. Premium recipes included things like hamburgers, steak and salmon.

Shipping

My Every Plate boxes arrived via UPS in a large cardboard box lined with foam and with two big ice packs included. I like that the boxes arrived UPS because they get to me in the middle of the day. I didn’t especially like the ingredients were all thrown into the box and had to be sorted out by me. However, the large box also include a smaller open box with handles that my non-perishable ingredients fit nicely into once I pulled everything out. That box was easy to store on a shelf in my pantry.

Ingredients

The ingredients were fresh and not frozen. They were individually packaged. A couple were branded as Home Chef, which was interesting. It really does seem that most of these meal kits get their food from the same vendors because they are very alike.

Just like with Dinnerly, Every Plate needed a few extra ingredients from my kitchen to go with meals like ketchup, flour and butter that weren’t included in the box. The produce was mediocre on freshness, but I also live in the Midwest and it was March when I received Every Plate meals, so I’m not sure how much I can dock them for that.

One of the things we noticed is that the recipe cards for Every Plate did not include the nutrition information. All the other meal cards we tried previously did so.

Cooking the meals

The recipes were similar in writing style to Dinnerly and Hello Fresh. While they didn’t take lots of extra time like some of the others, this meal kit delivery service did take slightly longer for some recipes than the time estimated. But, overall, the estimated time was how long it took. It really depends on how much produce you’re using in the recipe and how long it takes you to prep it!

Portion sizes

The portion sizes were good on this one. They were good-sized portions without seeming way too much or too little. I guess like Goldilocks says, they were just right. We only tended to have leftovers when I made four portions but one or more of my family members either didn’t eat a portion or ate only a small portion.

Overall rating

I’d give Every Plate a 3.5 out of 5 stars. I don’t feel like their selection was as great. It just wasn’t a good fit selection-wise for my family. I also didn’t like that the smallest number of meals you could do a week was three. Two really does work best for my family. But, that’s certainly not the case for everyone! I also didn’t like that the nutrition information wasn’t included. While I didn’t pick a low-calorie meal option, I still like to have the nutrition information to keep track and make sure I plan accordingly for the calories needed for the meal.

Other posts from this series:

Meal kit review: Home Chef

Posted on by Stacey A. Shannon

A series of unsponsored meal kit reviews and comparisons

A few months ago, my daughter made a case for us to try meal kits. I wasn’t so sure at first. Whenever I had checked into them previously, they seemed expensive and didn’t have a lot of recipes we would actually like. I have two particular eaters in my household, and we’re pretty plain eating folks. But, I decided to check into it again and found there were many more options, so I decided we’d give meal kits a try. I started with one company, but I was anxious to do a meal kit comparison and see what we’d like most.

So after about five meal kit boxes from one provider, I paused my account and changed to another. I just wanted to see the difference. At the same time, there was a third one I was curious about as well. I figured all this trying would end up being a great meal kit comparison to share!

Before ordering, I tried looking at meal kit comparisons, but most of them seemed to include affiliate links or sponsorships with the companies. I am not affiliated with or sponsored by any of these meal kit companies. When I started writing this meal kit comparison, in fact, I had no idea which service I’d end up liking the most — if any of them. I didn’t even intend to make it a blog post!

Then, once I decided to make it a blog post, I thought it’d be just one post. Pretty quickly, I realized that I needed more than one post to include all the information to make a helpful comparison. Over a few weeks, I’m posting our experiences with Dinnerly, Hello Fresh, Home Chef, Every Plate and EMeals.

Home Chef

Next I chose Home Chef. Its ads kept showing up everywhere, so I figured it was a good one to try! One thing I noticed in the ads was some ready-to-heat meals. That piqued my interest for sure. The menu looked like it had enough options for my family, so I was in.

Menu choices

From the beginning of picking meals with Home Chef, I was pleased. Home Chef had a variety of options that worked even for my particular eaters. The Home Chef menu was different from the others in that you can customize the number of servings for each meal selected for the week. I picked a two-meal-a-week plan.

My plan was to pick one meal my whole family would like and then another that my daughter and I would eat without our particular eaters. I loved that Home Chef had the option for me to pick just two servings for those meals. It saved me money and made food prep easier as well. I also like picking serving sizes for times we have company so then I could opt for more servings.

And, as I mentioned, some menu choices were marked as oven-ready.

Cost

Home Chef listed the price per serving clearly on each of the menu choices. The majority are $8.99 per serving, but some were lower at $6.99 per serving. The highest price I saw was $14.99 per serving for some more gourmet dishes. As I selected meals and servings, Home Chef updated my overall price at the top of the page, which is great if you are trying to stick within a certain budget. It also doesn’t result in an unexpected higher price in the end.

The price without discounts for one 2-serving meal and one 4-serving meal a week was $53.94 plus $8.99 shipping for a total of $62.93. If I had done two 4-serving meals, the food cost would have been more around $71.92 for $8.99 meals, which is what I usually got.

Shipping

I received my Home Chef meals via FedEx, which worked really well. Just like UPS, FedEx usually delivers in my neighborhood around lunchtime.

Ingredients

Ingredients for each meal came packaged together in a large, resealable zip-top bag. I could easily pull out all the ingredients I’d need for prepping a meal. I liked the bag being clear so I could see what was inside. The only thing that shipped outside of the bag was meat. For oven-ready meals, the pan was even included in the bag for easy prep.

Just like with the others, the ingredients were all pre-portioned. I needed very few things from my own pantry with Home Chef meals, usually just olive oil, salt and pepper. For recipes that needed butter, Home Chef even included pats of butter. One thing I especially appreciated is that fresh veggies came prepped and ready. Green beans, for example, were already trimmed. I just rinsed them and got to cooking. For recipes that used garlic cloves, the cloves were packed in sealed bags and were already peeled. They were ready to go, which I greatly appreciated. It saved prep time!

One of the other things Home Chef did differently was include some plastic containers with some of the ingredients. One of the Mexican dishes, for example, had a plastic jar with a twist-on lid full of enchilada sauce. I saved the containers, because they work well for leftovers or other home projects. Plus there is less waste that way!

The only drawback for some people is that the meat arrived frozen. My husband isn’t usually a fan of frozen meat. But we couldn’t tell a flavor or texture difference, so I think it was frozen just before shipping. I liked that better, actually, because I felt like the meat was likely to not spoil as easily during shipping and it would stay fresh a day or two longer than non-frozen meat.

Cooking the meals

Hands-down cooking the Home Chef meals was the easiest of all the meal kit services I’d previously tried. While the meals from Dinnerly and Hello Fresh both took longer to make than the recipe said, Home Chef meals took either the same amount of estimated time or less!

Each box arrived with 8.5×11-inch glossy recipe cards. The recipe cards were hole-punched to easily store in a three-ring binder if desired. All of the recipes are also available in your account if you prefer to cook with the recipe digitally on your phone or tablet. I’m a fan of recipe cards myself!

The directions were easy to follow. Home Chef had some prep required for things. Even the oven-ready meals needed a bit of prep, but it wasn’t nearly as much as the other meal kits. For example, with Hello Fresh I made a pasta with tomato sauce and started with whole tomatoes I had to puree and cook. With Home Chef, a similar recipe came with tomato sauce that I added seasonings and tomato paste to for easier and quicker prep. As a result, we also used less pots and pans with Home Chef recipes, which made for easier clean-up.

My 12-year-old daughter could easily make the Home Chef meals on her own. I appreciate fresh ingredients and doing things completely from scratch, but for weeknight meals, I loved that much of the ingredient prep was done for me. It saved me time on cooking dinner, which is always a bonus.

The only drawback is that since some of the items were prepared for us (like a marinara sauce and pesto that one pasta recipe used), it could be difficult recreating those dishes with just the recipe card later. For us, that wasn’t such a drawback, but I can see where it might be for some people.

Portion sizes

The portion sizes were good. For the meals I got two servings of, my daughter and I usually ate them without leftovers. For the servings of four, we tended to have some leftovers. But that is in part because my son is hesitant about eating much of new recipes.

Overall rating

I’d give Home Chef 5 out of 5 stars. We got good home-cooked meals with less work that gave me more time to enjoy my family!

Other posts from this series:

Meal kit review: Hello Fresh

Posted on by Stacey A. Shannon

A series of unsponsored meal kit reviews and comparisons

A few months ago, my daughter made a case for us to try meal kits. I wasn’t so sure at first. Whenever I had checked into them previously, they seemed expensive and didn’t have a lot of recipes we would actually like. I have two particular eaters in my household, and we’re pretty plain eating folks. But, I decided to check into it again and found there were many more options, so I decided we’d give meal kits a try. I started with one company, but I was anxious to do a meal kit comparison and see what we’d like most.

So after about five meal kit boxes from one provider, I paused my account and changed to another. I just wanted to see the difference. At the same time, there was a third one I was curious about as well. I figured all this trying would end up being a great meal kit comparison to share!

Before ordering, I tried looking at meal kit comparisons, but most of them seemed to include affiliate links or sponsorships with the companies. I am not affiliated with or sponsored by any of these meal kit companies. When I started writing this meal kit comparison, in fact, I had no idea which service I’d end up liking the most — if any of them. I didn’t even intend to make it a blog post!

Then, once I decided to make it a blog post, I thought it’d be just one post. Pretty quickly, I realized that I needed more than one post to include all the information to make a helpful comparison. Over a few weeks, I’m posting our experiences with Dinnerly, Hello Fresh, Home Chef, Every Plate and EMeals.

Hello Fresh

Of all the meal kit services, I had heard most about Hello Fresh. It seemed to pop up everywhere. When the new year started and it offered a variety of deals, I decided to give it a try. It was our second meal kit service. My daughter was excited for it the most, because she also had heard the most about it.

Menu choices

Hello Fresh had a good amount of menu choices that worked for our family. Our second box, for example, included a barbeque flatbread pizza recipe that I could easily customize portions of for my particular eaters. Hello Fresh had a decent selection for both meat eaters and non-meat eaters. And some recipes I could customize to use less meat. For example, one box was a ground beef flauta recipe. I used half the amount of ground beef the recipe called for to fit my family’s tastes. The meat came in two separate packages, so it was easy to pop the unused package in the freezer to use later.

One of my complaints for the Hello Fresh menu is that the gourmet meals are mixed in with all the other menu choices. Since the gourmet meals cost extra per serving (usually around $8.99 per serving per meal), I’d like them to be separated so I know they’re gourmet without having to be sure and check.

That said Hello Fresh has way more non-gourmet meals than gourmet. It isn’t a big issue and when you click or tap to confirm your selections, it is clear that you are paying more. You can go back and make changes if you don’t want to.

Cost

Hello Fresh isn’t inexpensive. I opted for two meals a week for four people. Other meal kit services have three meals as the lowest option, so I liked that I could do two with Hello Fresh. Two meals a week for four people is $75.92 plus $9.99 shipping. New sign-ups usually get discounts and such. I had some discounts for Hello Fresh that offset the cost.

Discounts are applied over multiple weeks, so you get a smaller amount off of a few orders rather than a larger amount of one order. Hello Fresh also has a rewards program you are automatically entered in to. Every four boxes you get a reward. In only doing four boxes for each service for this post, I got one reward of a free random dessert in my fourth box.

My only gripe about the free random dessert is that it was two individual cheesecakes. Since I was ordering with a four-person plan that didn’t make much sense to me. Unbeknownst to Hello Fresh, though, only two of my family members really love cheesecake. So it worked out anyway.

Shipping

Hello Fresh shipped to me through UPS, which was awesome. UPS delivers regularly to my house and neighborhood. Usually our deliveries come around lunchtime, so I received the meals early enough in the day that I could plan them for dinner that night if I wanted. I like that!

Ingredients

While the ingredients arrived pre-portioned, they also arrived brown-bagged based on which recipe they went with. So all the ingredients for one recipe were in one bag I could pull out of my fridge when I was ready to cook. Meat was separated but everything else was in the bag.

Everything was pre-portioned and even included things like packets of flour. The ingredients were all branded “Hello Fresh.” All of the ingredients were fresh. Veggies needed to be washed. I had to supplement my own ingredients much less. Usually olive oil, salt and pepper were all I needed from my own pantry. Once I needed butter.

We did encounter a couple of missing ingredients and once a missing add-on. The flauta recipe was supposed to come with Mexican seasoning, but it didn’t. I always have taco seasoning on hand, so it worked out OK. The third box, I had a reward of $10 for add-ons with referring a friend. I chose a combo of creamy tomato soup and garlic bread. My out-of-pocket cost ended up being around $3. The garlic bread arrived, but the soup didn’t. I used the automated chat for customer service and my account was credited for the missing item. However, I was only credited my $3, so I lost the $10 reward and chose not to try ordering the soup again.

Cooking the meals

Each box came with recipe cards for what the box held. They were printed on thick, glossy 8.5×11 pages. The recipe cards listed the ingredients, description of the recipe and detailed instructions. I did download the app for Hello Fresh, but since it sends recipe cards, I didn’t need to have the app.

The first meal I made, which was a corn chowder, took longer than the estimated 40 minutes on the recipe card. It took more like 60-70 minutes. Other meals were usually around the time listed on the card, but never quite as quick as the estimated times. I think again that the times are estimated by professional chefs. I found that overall, the meals did take longer to make than was estimated on the card, so I learned to plan for that.

The directions were pretty straightforward and easy. It included the directions for a 2-person plan and 4-person plan in one. I didn’t need any special kitchen gadgets for any of the recipes. I did use a grater on a couple.

Portion sizes

The portion sizes were large and good. There was easily enough for my family of four. We almost always had leftovers as well (due in part to my particular eaters). But, even meals that everyone ate, we still had at least enough leftovers for one person to have for lunch.

Overall rating

Overall, I’d go with 4 out of 5 stars. I’m only dinging Hello Fresh for price, being off on estimated cook times and missing ingredients.

Other posts from this series:

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