Hello Fresh Review

Hello Fresh is a meal delivery service that currently delivers over 4 million ready-to-cook meals per month. Here’s our Hello Fresh review.

What is Hello Fresh?

Hello Fresh is a meal delivery service that offers both omnivore ($10.75 per meal) and vegetarian ($9.08 per meal) options. Free delivery is available with every order and you can customize how many meals you receive in a week.

The big difference between Hello Fresh and other food delivery services is that you don’t get pre-made food delivered to your door ready to eat. Instead, Hello Fresh puts together recipes and then gives you all of the ingredients needed to make those recipes.

Each dish’s ingredients arrive at your doorstep along with a recipe card featuring step-by-step cooking instructions.

If you’re looking to save time and avoid cooking at all, then Hello Fresh isn’t the food delivery service for you. If you enjoy cooking but don’t like the hassle of picking out recipes and buying all of the unique ingredients, then Hello Fresh might be perfect.

A weekly subscription for Hello Fresh includes three meals for either two or four people.

Hello Fresh is available across the entire continental United States – which is something that few other meal delivery competitors offer.

Hello Fresh is also international, and ships its products across the United States, UK, Netherlands, Austria, Australia, Germany, and Belgium.

As testament to Hello Fresh’s wide delivery area, it was reported that Hello Fresh was delivering 4 million meals per month as of May 2015. The company experienced huge growth over the past year, and the 4 million meals in that one month were more than the company sold in the entire first half of 2014 combined.

How Does Hello Fresh Work?

Hello Fresh uses the following four step process to cook its meals:

— Step 1) Hello Fresh creates “mouth-watering recipes that are delicious and nutritious”

— Step 2) You choose the recipe you like from a database of over 15,000

— Step 3) Those ingredients are delivered to your door for free

— Step 4) You cook a “fun, healthy and tasty meal in around 30 minutes”

Hello Fresh Features

With Hello Fresh, you get to pick from a weekly offering of meat and seafood or vegetarian meals.

All recipes are created by Hello Fresh’s in-house dietician. They include complete timing instructions, ingredient preparation instructions, and all the other nuances you want in a recipe.

Some of the sample dishes you’ll receive in an average week with Hello Fresh include things like:

— Smoky Adobo Chicken Tacos
— Seared Provencal Steak
— Charred Scallion
— Corn Flatbread

You can actually view the complete selection of Hello Fresh recipes here: HelloFresh.com

Recipes are categorized according to their preparation time and their cooking difficulty level.

There’s also a Hello Fresh recipe app available for the iPhone and iPad.

Hello Fresh delivers all of the major ingredients you need to put together each meal. The only things that aren’t delivered are things like salt, pepper, and cooking oil – so you’ll need to have at least these basics in your kitchen.

Aside from that, none of the recipes made with Hello Fresh require any complicated utensils or cutlery.

Some dishes require a little extra preparation or they may give you the opportunity to “customize” your meal with some style of your own. The steak recipe mentioned above comes with an additional recipe card about how to cook steak, for example, including a description of the different levels of rarity and why you should slice the meat against the grain.

All ingredients are delivered in a Styrofoam cooler box. That box also contains ice packs to keep food refrigerated, although the food certainly isn’t frozen.

To maintain freshness, more heat-sensitive ingredients like meat and fish are packed in vacuum-sealed bags.

Ingredients are also proportioned by group and by meal. For example, all of the vegetables required for one dish will be put inside a color-coded plastic bag and then put into that meal’s section of the container.

In case you’re worried about getting tired about meals, there are currently over 15,000 meals in the Hello Fresh database, with more recipes being added every week.

What Do Customers Have to Say?

One of the most detailed Hello Fresh reviews on the internet today comes from TheKitchn.com, where writer Kelli Foster had mostly positive things to say about Hello Fresh.

Foster summed up her review, for example, with the following:

“I enjoyed the variety of meals I received from HelloFresh. Each one had fresh ingredients, and produced well-flavored, ample-sized meals. I was most pleased with the quality and size of the meals. All three meals were really delicious. I felt full and satisfied after each of the meals, and didn't feel like I needed to add a salad or another side dish.”

Foster also praised the pricing policies, stating that the meals cost more than she would spend at the grocery store when shopping for herself, but less than she would have spent going out to eat.

On the other hand, Foster admitted that Hello Fresh suffers from one of the same problems of other food delivery services: there’s quite a bit of packaging waste that comes with every weekly delivery:

“As with other meal delivery services, the issue of waste, as it pertains to packaging, does arise. And the packaging used by HelloFresh is also similar to other services.”

That being said, Hello Fresh isn’t quite as problematic as other food delivery services that deliver multiple meals per week in separate packaging.

Other reviews online offered similar comments.

One weird thing that people complain about with Hello Fresh is that the meals are delivered ready to serve two people. That might not be ideal if you’re eating for one, but really – you can just throw the leftovers in the fridge and eat them the next day if that’s the case.

However, all pricing is given per person, so it can be confusing when you have to double each price if you’re eating for one.

Hello Fresh Pricing

Hello Fresh’s pricing breaks down like this:

Classic Box (For Omnivores)

— $9.90 per person per meal including shipping ($69 per week with 3 x 2-person meals)

— $129 (3 meals per week for 4 people)

— $84.90 (4 meals per week for 2 people)

— $99 (5 meals per week for 2 people)

Veggie Box (For Vegetarians)

— $9.08 per person per meal including shipping ($59 per week with 3 x 2-person meals)

— $109 (3 meals per week for 4 people)

Family Box (For Families)

— $8.75 per person per meal including shipping ($105 per week with 3 x 4-person meals)

Subscriptions are relatively flexible. You can pause or cancel your account from week-to-week. All you need to do is notify the company by email before Wednesday at 7pm for all pauses, order restarts, address, and box type changes. If you notify the company before then, these changes will be reflected in the next week’s delivery.

About Hello Fresh

Hello Fresh was launched in Berlin in 2011 by Jessica Nilsson, Thomas Griesel, and Dominik Richter. Its US operations are run by US CEO Seth Goldmen.

TechCrunch reported in May 2015 that the company had raised a total of $193.5 million in funding since launch.

The company’s US operations are based in New York at the following address:

You can contact the company’s customer service line by phone at (800) 733-2414.

Ultimately, if you enjoy certain aspects of cooking – like the preparation and eating parts and not the grocery shopping and recipe finding parts – then Hello Fresh might be perfect for you. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for a food delivery service that pre-makes everything for you, then you won’t find it with Hello Fresh.