The Best Meal Kit Services: Blue Apron vs. Hello Fresh vs. Plated

Meal subscription services like Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, and Plated deliver fresh ingredients to your door each week, saving you the time and hassle of meal planning and grocery shopping. But are they worth it? Here's a look at how these services work and compare to each other.

What Are Meal Subscription Services?

These services (sometimes called "meal kit delivery" services) have you choose from a selection of meals each week and then they deliver the recipes and pre-portioned ingredients on the weekday you choose so you can easily make chef-quality meals at home. They're like a mix of meal planning, grocery shopping, and recipe discovery apps all rolled into one.

The services cost more than just doing your own meal planning and grocery shopping, naturally, and it's more work than just ordering take in, but these services combine convenience with, at times, cooking education. Plus, the meals are all portion-controlled (so you don't waste food and can watch your waist).

If you enjoy cooking and trying new foods but often don't have the time to plan and prep all your dinners, one of these meal subscription services might be for you. I've been using Blue Apron on and off for over two years and Hello Fresh for about a year, while ordering from Plated several times over the last year as well. Let's compare.

Cost

This is probably the first question on people's minds when it comes to these services. The pricing is similar across the board, ranging from about $9 per person per meal to about $12 (including shipping).

Blue Apron has two plans: a 2-person and a 4-person subscription, both with 3 meals per week. The 2-person plan is $59.94 per week ($9.99 per person) while the family plan is $139.84 per week ($8.74 per person).

Hello Fresh costs a bit more, again with 2-person and 4-person subscription options and 3 meals per week. The 2-person plan is $69 per week ($11.50 per person) and the family plan is $129 per week ($10.75 per person).

Plated prices are based on the number of plates you order, with a minimum of 4 plates per order/week. Most of them are about $12 each, though, so just for comparison, a 2-person 3-meal order would come out to $72 per week. You can, though, order the minimum two plates for two people and the total would be $48. Plated also offers some specialty dishes (e.g., filet mignon or seared scallops) that can go as high as $30 per dish.

By now, depending on your food spending habits, you could be thinking either "Holy scallops, that's expensive" or "I spend that much on takeout anyway." I was in the holy scallops camp, but one thing to consider is the ingredients are locally sourced and organic whenever possible, and those products also cost more at the grocery store.

Depending on where you live as well, if you consider grocery delivery fees are often around $7-10 per delivery and meal planning services cost around $6-8 a month, the $10 per person price isn't really that bad. (A Big Mac meal at McDonald's costs $7.45 in my neck of the woods, and these meals are significantly tastier and better for you.)

Winner: Blue Apron. On a per person basis, Blue Apron costs the least per meal.

Meal Options and Flexibility

Part of the fun of using these services is discovering new recipes and ingredients, but it's also good to have a choice of meals, especially if your household has picky eaters, food allergies, or special diets (these services offer both vegetarian and omnivore meals). All three let you select meals and see the recipes beforehand, but some are more flexible than others.

Blue Apron, for example, picks the default meals for you based on your saved preferences (vegetarian or not, or avoiding specific proteins). Instead of the three meals they choose for you, you can swap out dishes from the other menu (vegetarian vs. meat and fish). Oddly, though, not all combinations may be available. For example, if you want the chicken thighs and pork chops but not the salmon, your only other option out of the six dishes is soba noodles (two of the other vegetable dishes are grayed out). So choice is limited here. Example dishes:

• Center-Cut Pork Chops with beet, heirloom carrot, and hazelnut salad


• Crispy Chicken Thighs with Kumquat relish and freekeh salad


• Butternut squash and kale minestrone

Hello Fresh is similar. You choose from three out of five available meal choices. However, there are no combination limitations. Example dishes:

• Roasted Hake with potatoes, spinach, and lemon-mayo dipping sauce


• Tuscan Meatballs over spaghetti


• Mediterranean Vegetable Tostadas

Of the three services, Plated offers the most choice, with nine meals to choose from and the ability to order as many meals as you want (in 2, 4, or 6 plates quantities). You get a much wider range of foods, including "no added gluten" and low calorie options. Example dishes:

• Thai Peanut Chicken Curry with Sticky Rice


• Meatloaf with Parmesan Roasted Broccoli


• Cheesy Italian-Style Farro and Red Rice with Roasted Kale

For all services, you can skip a week (or more) in advance if you're not keen on the menu, but you have to remember to do that a week in advance (or you'll end up with a fridge full of food to cook that you're not that interested in). The good thing about Plated is you can see meal options three weeks in advance, but, on the downside, if you go to choose your meals too late, some dishes can be sold out (unlike with Blue Apron and Hello Fresh). You can also change your Plated subscription options to deliveries every other week.

Winner: Plated, for more meal options and the ability to add more meals to your order.

Recipes and Cooking Skills

All of these services come with beautiful recipe cards explaining a bit about what you're cooking, in addition to the ingredients you need, time to cook the dish, and number of calories per serving.

Blue Apron has better food photos on its larger recipe cards, which really helps when you're trying to figure out how crisp that gnocchi should actually be. The descriptions of the foods are also more edifying than the other services'. The description of the Chicken Charlemagne, for example, explains the star of the dish, the demi-glace, and how it was created, while the gnocchi recipe explains why the combination of Brussels sprouts works with Meyer lemons. It makes cooking feel like more of a learning experience, and there were more than a few times I picked up a new trick from the recipe cards, like using breadcrumbs to add texture to a pasta dish. Blue Apron's online recipes also incorporate feedback from other members, so you'll get tips on cooking or adjusting that recipe from other members.

Hello Fresh had the most factual information, including a kitchen tools list and estimated nutrition (not just calories, but carbs, fat, protein, and fiber). Instead of saying things like "season with the chili to your spice tolerance" (as the other services do), Hello Fresh gives concrete recommendations ("we used 1/2 teaspoon"). For the most part, Hello Fresh's recipe cards are simple and easy to follow. I don't think I learned any new techniques from using Hello Fresh, though, after making about twenty meals.

Plated's recipe cards were okay, covering the basics. I found the cooking tips and glossary to be obvious ("When it's done cooking, chicken skin should look charred, but not completely burned" and "be sure to read the entire recipe") or, at times, downright wrong ("Rinse chicken and pat dry with paper towel."). Please don't wash your raw chicken. Online, though, the site offers a little more information, such as cooking difficulty and, sometimes, suggested wine pairings. Because of its variety of meals, Plated also showcases some unusual ways to use ingredients, such as grilling red leaf lettuce to accompany grilled meats. I also appreciate that, unlike most recipes, Plated's steps sometimes save you time by having you prepare the ingredients while other things were cooking (rather than prepping/chopping all of them at the start).

Winner: Blue Apron. Little details like bolding the ingredients in the recipes and occasional cooking tips make the recipe cards more useful and user friendly.

Food Quality and Variety

Finally, let's talk about the most important thing: The food itself. There's no point in paying a premium for meal planning, prep, and food delivery services if you don't enjoy or appreciate the dishes. This one's very subjective, but I enjoyed most of the meals from these delivery services—some more than others.

Hello Fresh's recipes were all fairly basic and unsurprising—lots of pastas for the vegetarian options, for example, or a roasted fish or a stir-fry for the others, although there were some less common recipes, like Lebanese meatballs and forbidden rice salad. (You can see their recipes archive here.) The point is, though, that Hello Fresh curates the menu for you (usually on a theme, like unusual grains or items that are in season), and that the ingredients are all super-fresh. They all tasted and felt like healthy meals—albeit straight out of a Cooking Light magazine—but they give you a very decent serving size.

Blue Apron's recipes seem to elevate recipes a bit more, with dishes like Lemongrass Turkey Burgers, Kale and Butternut Squash Lasagna, and Shrimp and Pineapple Fried Rice. (You can check out their cookbook here.) There are more mainstream dishes too, like roast beef or white pizza, but often there's an unusual ingredient thrown in or the recipes highlight an ingredient or technique to make you look at it in a new way. As my friend, fellow food-eater Anne wrote:

Blue Apron taught me a lot about shallots. Seriously I use them all the time now and never did before. Also, putting together a quick easy salad dressing, which I now do all the time. And just wiping out a frying pan and reusing it. So obvious yet it never occurred to me. Oh quick potato salad. I have a strong love of potato salad, but never made it because it took too long. Now I'll whip one up for dinner.

Plated's dishes seemed the most consistently flavorful to me. Rather than more experimental recipes (like Blue Apron), Plated's meals seemed more authentic or traditional. The Thai Massaman curry, for example, made me feel like my mouth was on fire—the spiciness definitely wasn't tempered for those new to Thai foods. Other dishes were pretty simple, but the combination of ingredients worked well (pine nuts make a great garnish over spaghetti squash and kale!). Their vegetarian options seem also more exciting than the other services (e.g., maple-soy portobello burgers with tahini salad as opposed to pasta dishes or salads), and you can specify in your taste profile that you want to avoid things like nuts, spicy foods, shellfish, dairy, and other ingrdients.

Winner: Tie between Blue Apron and Plated. It's hard to pick this one. Blue Apron's meals are usually interesting and the quality of the ingredients is excellent (I like learning where the foods came from). Because of the variety of meals offered on Plated, the dishes are usually more satisfying because I got to choose exactly what I felt like eating.

So Are They Worth It?

I'd recommend these services to anyone who loves to cook and doesn't mind paying a premium for the convenience of having the planning and shopping done for them—and who value seasonal, locally grown, and sustainable ingredients. The meals often take more than half an hour to cook, though, so it's not really saving you a ton of time in the kitchen. (With the gnocchi dish, Blue Apron had me picking the leaves off of several tiny Brussels sprouts, which was insane, but in the end worth it.) Whether these services are worth it to you or not may also depend on how much you hate the "What's for dinner?" question.

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