Hello Fresh review

A few weeks ago, we decided to try Hello Fresh. We had talked about trying a meal kit service many times, but there have always been 2 main barriers:

1. My husband can’t eat gluten, which meant the actual meals we could have from these services were limited. When we had looked before, it seemed like there would be some options, but not enough that sounded appealing enough to make it worthwhile.
2. It seemed like for most services, you needed to be home to receive the food delivery (or at least give them a door code/way to get in to the apartment building). When we were both working full time, in-person (pre-Covid), this just wasn’t feasible.

The last time we’d discussed this was a looong time ago – probably over a year ago. But we decided to check out Hello Fresh on a whim, after seeing that some friends were trying it. My husband has been working from home, so we knew that he could be home to receive the deliveries. And when we looked at the meal selection, there seemed to be enough GF options to choose from. So we went for it!

We ended up trying it for 2 weeks. We did the “classic” kit, 3 meals a week, for 2 people. Here’s a rundown of how it went for us!

Week 1

• Beef patty with feta, tomato salad, and mashed potatoes
• Korean-inspired striploin steak with oven-baked potatoes, bak choi, and sriracha mayo (premium meal)
• Chicken satay with wild rice and cilantro

This week was pretty hit-or-miss. The first meal we made was the beef patty (“hakkebøf”), which I expected to be a simple but still tasty meal. It was incredibly bland. The potatoes had no flavor, the pesto didn’t taste fresh, and the patty just didn’t turn out right. We were not impressed at all and it made me wonder if the whole week was going to be a waste.

Fortunately, the other two meals were better. The chicken satay was pretty tasty, and the Korean steak was actually really good. We even managed to make the chicken satay even though the recipe card was in Swedish 🙂 These two meals were redeeming enough that we decided to try another week.

Regarding gluten, the chicken satay had soy sauce in it, so we used gluten-free soy sauce that we already had instead. The Korean steak had hoisin sauce, and the chicken satay had satay sauce, both of which contain gluten. My husband decided to take the risk and we used the sauces anyway. (He is not Celiac so very small amounts are okay.)

Week 2

• Greek-inspired chicken with potatoes, tomato salad, and tzatziki
• Bibimbap with ground beef, bak choi, and mushrooms
• Striploin steak with creamy spinach sauce and potatoes (premium meal)

Week two was GOOD! We actually were impressed with all of the meals. Definitely keeping these recipe cards so we can re-create them! The bibimbap had soy sauce, so we substituted that with gluten-free soy sauce that we already had at home. Other than that, these were 3 really satisfying gluten-free meals.

After 2 weeks…

So, we actually were excited to keep going with Hello Fresh. Buuuut when we looked at the meal options for the following week, there weren’t enough gluten-free meals that sounded good to us. So we decided to skip the week. We have tried a couple more weeks since then and overall have been really happy with them!

Overall impressions

Pros:

• Ease and convenience, obviously! I don’t mind cooking in general, but I hate the process of having to decide what to cook. Choosing from a limited selection can actually be really nice sometimes. And of course, using this service meant we didn’t have to do our normal amount of grocery shopping.
• Portioned ingredients: I LOVED that they only give you exactly enough of each ingedient–including vegetables–for the recipe. I hate when I need, for example, one carrot for a recipe but have to buy a whole bag of them since they’re not sold individually here. Then I have to figure out how to use them up so they don’t go to waste. So I appreciated that I didn’t have any wasted produce like I usually do.
• Packaging: We liked that the ingredients came in separate paper bags for each recipe, so it was easy to tell what you needed for each one. The recipe cards were also very clear and easy to follow. The packaging was also mostly recyclable.
• We thought the price was reasonable, even including a couple “premium” meals.
• Flavor: Overall, the meals were pretty good, aside from the first one! They were also pretty healthy. This was a good way to make sure we were getting veggies with dinner.
• Time: With both of us cooking, most of the meals were ready in 20-30 minutes.
• Portion size: We got the 2-person meal size option, and the portions were still pretty generous! We didn’t have leftovers but we were definitely full and satisfied after each meal.
• I love that you can keep the recipe cards, so you can re-create the meals without the kit if you want.

Cons:

• The biggest issue for us was the gluten-free selection. Gluten-free meals are not clearly notated on the website, so you actually have to look at the ingredients when making a selection if you want to know about gluten or other allergens.
• Even though we were willing to make some swaps (ie: using our own gluten-free soy sauce instead of the regular soy sauce provided), there were not that many gluten free (or easily-made-gluten-free) meals that were appealing to us. Two of the meals that we ended up getting, the chicken satay and the Korean steak, still had small amounts of gluten in the ingredients (satay sauce and hoisin sauce), so if we had to be strictly 100% gluten-free, we would have had even fewer options.

As you can tell, there was a lot that we really liked about Hello Fresh!! The biggest challenge is clearly making it work from a gluten-free perspective. For now, we’re going to continue using Hello Fresh, but skip weeks if there are not enough GF options for us. But we’d love to know if there are any other meal kits out there that cater more to the gluten-intolerant!

Have you used Hello Fresh or another meal kit service? What did you think of it?