Meal kit delivery is a mealtime lifesaver for many households. Whether it’s just you or an entire family around the table, knowing that dinner is taken care of at least a few nights a week is a load off your shoulders. HelloFresh is one meal kit delivery service with an excellent reputation and a devoted customer following.
But, what if you’ve tried HelloFresh and it just isn’t your cup of tea, or you want something a little different? Each meal kit service out there offers there own unique benefit, and sometimes it’s just a matter of finding the perfect fit for your lifestyle. We love Blue Apron as a HelloFresh competitor because of the variety and interesting flavors they offer.
We’ve looked at just about every meal delivery company to come up with a list of what we feel are the best food deliveries like Hello Fresh. Here are our favorites for the best meal kit box experience.
Blue Apron
Blue Apron and HelloFresh are two of the most famous names in the world of meal kit delivery. They both have strong brand recognition and are sometimes viewed as almost interchangeable with each other. When comparing the two, the one difference that stands out to us is that people with more adventurous palates will be more satisfied with Blue Apron’s recipe selection.
Blue Apron meals are a bit bolder and feature flavors that some of their competitors shy away from. Togarashi Duck with Spicy Soy Glaze is just one example of the type of meals we’re talking about. Caribbean Shrimp with Orzo or Jalapeno Burgers are a couple of others. Blue Apron aims to pack a flavor punch with each meal kit.
Now, let’s talk about ingredients. Blue Apron is committed to using non-GMO ingredients, and they opt for organic when possible, as long as doing so doesn’t compromise the quality of their meals. They’re also committed to supporting farmers who adhere to ethical and sustainable farming practices.
Blue Apron has a few different meal plans to choose from. They offer their Signature, Wellness, or Vegetarian meal plan for two people, with the choice of two, three, or four meals per week. Their Signature meal plan is also available with an option for four people, with two, three, or four recipes per week. Regardless of which meal plan you choose, you get to choose the meals that come in your box each week.
Where Blue Apron really helps out is by saving you time by not having to do the grocery shopping, search for recipes, or make sure you’re buying the right about of food. Blue Apron offers pre-portioned ingredients and a delicious plate of food, but they’re not the fastest meal kit delivery service on the market. Some of their meals take up to 45 minutes to prepare.
On average, Blue Apron offers about a dozen meals each week. Some meals are tagged as wellness, suitable for Weight Watchers, or vegetarian. Blue Apron doesn’t offer a ton of options for people with food allergies or those following special diets.
We like that Blue Apron puts their entire recipes on their site. You have the chance to look over all the ingredients and steps without needing to wait for recipe cards to arrive in your box.
Pricewise, Blue Apron is nearly identical to HelloFresh in cost per serving. Although Blue Apron does charge a $7.99 shipping fee, it’s not unusual for them to offer special promotions for free shipping on meals delivered to your door.
SunBasket
When it comes to Hello Fresh alternatives, SunBasket has almost everything you could want, starting with the highest quality, freshest ingredients. SunBasket works to provide healthy, fresh meal kits that support dietary and health goals.
SunBasket uses organic ingredients whenever possible in their meal boxes, and they cater to a wide range of dietary lifestyles. SunBasket offers meals that align with paleo, vegetarian, gluten-free, carb-conscious, diabetes-friendly, lean & clean, Mediterannean, and a selection of Chef’s Choice meals. If one of their tailored plans doesn’t meet your needs, you’re free to choose from their entire menu of meal kits.
SunBasket has about 20 meal kit recipes to choose from each week. Of course, there are fewer choices if you use the dietary preferences filters, but this is still a good selection and variety of meals. In addition to meal kits, SunBasket also offers oven-ready meals and a few a la carte selections. SunBasket is also one of the few meal delivery services with options for breakfast, lunch, and snacks in addition to dinner.
SunBasket meal kits include a good range of familiar comfort foods, like lemon chicken with a selection of fresh vegetables, to dinners that hover on the side of being more exotic and flavorful. Their blackened sole with pickled carrots would be a good example.
The ingredients are all pre-measured, and the easy-to-follow recipe cards are suitable for a range of cooking skills.
In comparison to HelloFresh, SunBasket is slightly more expensive but is still in the realm of average price for meal subscription companies. Expect to pay $11-$13 per serving with SunBasket.
Purple Carrot
Purple Carrot is a plant-based meal delivery company that’s a great, healthy alternative to Hello Fresh, even if you don’t usually make plants the focal point of your diet. Similar to Hello Fresh, they aim to provide their customers with tasty meal options that don’t cut into time spent with friends, family plans, or just enjoying some leisurely downtime.
If you’re someone who eats a primarily plant-based diet, or even if you’re just looking to add more vegan meals to your weekly recipe rotation, Purple Carrot is a great alternative to the standard recipes offered by HelloFresh. What makes them, besides their innovative recipes, is the quality of their food.
Purple Carrot works with a variety of vendors and farmers to source the very best for their delivery services. Many of the non-produce ingredients they use are organic. For produce, they search for the highest quality, even if that means they aren’t always choosing the organic option. They are always looking for ways to include more organic and non-GMO ingredients in their recipe kits.
Purple Carrot doesn’t have the largest menu of the HelloFresh competitors we’ve looked at, but to us, the fact that they offer breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks compensate for the smaller recipe selection. A few examples of their meals include Lentil Green Curry and Blond Puttanesca. The snack add ons like the Fat Badger Bakery Cookie Box are definitely a nice touch.
Purple Carrot is one of the few plant-based meal kit service companies out there, and they offer great quality and excellent food. Meals price is slightly more per serving than HelloFresh, but it’s definitely worth it with free shipping.
Green Chef
Green Chef appeals to customers who are looking for a meal solutions company that identifies and understands the needs of today’s dietary lifestyles. They offer three different plans to choose from, their Keto & Paleo plan, Balanced Living, or Plant-Powered. Green Chef is a great partner to have on your side if you’re focused on achieving healthy goals.
There are some similarities between Green Chef and HelloFresh. HelloFresh offers a good variety of mealtime options, as does Green Chef. They both do an excellent job of offering their customers a combination of comfort food-style dishes, as well as a few options with bolder, more exciting flavors.
Both are also good for people who like to cook but would rather not spend hours in the kitchen every day. The convenience of having meals delivered to your door, plus the quality of their products, makes them a strong competitor against HelloFresh.
A few examples of entrees from their Balanced living plan include Peruvian Chicken with Aji Verde, Creamy Truffle & Mushroom Linguine, and Coconut Shrimp Soup. Imagine all of this arriving in boxes at your door every week. If you are avoiding gluten or dairy, there are a handful of options in the mix for you too.
The price of Green Chef is a bit more than what you’ll pay with HelloFresh. On average, each portion costs $10.99-$11.99, which is a few dollars more than HelloFresh.
Martha & Marley Spoon
Martha & Marley Spoon is a great delivery service mealtime solution for people who enjoy simple, delicious recipes. As you search Martha & Marley Spoon’s recipes, you’ll find more than two dozen entree choices and have a hard time deciding which ones to add to your weekly box.
Some of Martha & Marley Spoon’s most popular dishes include chili-rubbed steak tacos with creamy slaw and sheet pan shrimp scampi. The meals are simple and delicious, with most needing six steps or less to take them from their packaging to the table.
You don’t have to wait for a recipe card if you want to know what goes into each of the meals or how simply they’re prepared. You can view the entire recipe, including which products or utensils you need, right on their website. This is a great tool if you want to do a little planning or you have young ones that want to help cook, so you’re always on the search for easy recipes.
Martha & Marley Spoon offers options for some special dietary needs like gluten-free, dairy-free, or vegetarian diets. There are also family-friendly meals which make them a good company when you have some picky eaters sitting around your table.
There are two main plans with Martha & Marley Spoon. You can choose a plan for two people or four, and from there, you decide how many meals you want per week. You can select as few as two or as many as six meals delivered per week with each option. The price per serving varies, depending on how many portions you choose, but you can expect to pay $6.99-$10.99 per serving.
Gobble
Meal kit delivery services like Hello Fresh simplify mealtime for their customers by saving them the hassle of trips to the grocery store, meal prep, and worrying about what’s for dinner. They do this by providing pre-measured ingredients, delicious recipe options, and easy recipe instructions delivered to their doorstep so they can enjoy a homecooked, healthy meal any night of the week.
Gobble is like HelloFresh in that they hit the mark for simple, quick meals that are practically fuss-free. Gobble does all the prep work, including the tedious chopping, peeling, seasoning, and marinating. Because of this, with Gobble, you can have a hot meal on the table in 15 minutes or less.
As far as food allergies and special diets are concerned, Gobble does have a few dairy-free meals, and they make it easy to spot meals you might want to avoid by tagging them as containing wheat, soy, milk, etc.
Gobble offers two meal plans. One plan is their Lean & Clean meals, and also their Classic meal plan. Dishes like pan-roasted pork tenderloin with cilantro rice make it hard to believe that each meal can be on the table in 15 minutes or less, but simplicity and taste are two things Gobble bases their reputation on.
We also like that Gobble uses completely recyclable ice packs to keep your food at the exact right temperature until it arrives at your doorstep. Sometimes meal delivery companies can be a little overzealous with packaging, but Gobble does a good job of keeping eco-friendliness in mind.
Gobble costs a bit more than the other companies like Hello Fresh, with the average kit costing $11.99-$13.99 per serving. Still, considering how much time Gobble saves you in the kitchen with meals delivered to your doorstep, and they make it easy to skip a week, pause your subscription, or change the type of meal kits you enjoy. This is one of the best meal kit services for busy people.
Dinnerly
Dinnerly and HelloFresh are similar in a lot of ways. The type of meal options they offer is similar. They both offer a good number of meals per week and offer recipes that even new cooks can easily navigate. The one main difference is that while HelloFresh is economical, Dinnerly’s prices are sometimes less than if you shopped and prepared everything from scratch.
Dinnerly keeps their costs low with simple cost-saving measures. They use digital recipe cards instead of paper. They use fewer ingredients in each kit without compromising the quality of food, they minimize the packaging used in their food delivery, and they aren’t big on costly marketing campaigns. All of this saves them money, which is handed down in savings to you.
Dinnerly’s menu features easy-to-make favorites, like Chicken Moo Sho Style Tacos, which require zero chopping or slicing, so it’s a great meal kit for families with kids who want to help out in the kitchen. Dinnerly also tags each of their recipes with allergen information.
With Dinnerly, meals are less than $5 per serving, but you are missing some of the bells and whistles. For example, you get pre-measured ingredients, but you do have to do a little more of the meal prep yourself. But, if you’re looking for an economical food delivery option or want to try a meal kit delivery service without laying down a chunk of change, Dinnerly could be a good option.
Home Chef
Home Chef operates off the belief that everyone deserves a delicious homecooked meal no matter how busy life is. This meal-delivery service provides everything you need to enjoy a made from scratch meal in a matter of minutes.
Home Chef is similar to HelloFresh in the types of meal kits they offer and the simplicity of their recipes. Overall, Home Chef has about twenty different meal options on their menu each week. You can choose meals from the entire menu or filter them by one of four categories – calorie-conscious, carb-conscious, vegetarian, and 30-minutes or less.
A nice benefit to Home Chef is the variety of types of meal kits. They offer recipes from their Culinary Collection, which features recipes that are a bit more complex for more advanced cooking skills. The Culinary Collection recipes are perfect for when the occasion calls for an elegant dinner, like Scallops with Lemon Fettucine Alfredo.
On the opposite end of the meal kit spectrum, they also offer options for 15-minute meals and a few oven-ready selections that require nothing more than popping in the oven for 30 minutes or so.
The one area where this meal kit delivery service falls short is in their accommodations for food allergies and special dietary needs. They do usually have 2-3 dairy-free meals on their meal rotation each week. Still, they cannot make any accommodations for food allergies or intolerances, and there aren’t any certified gluten-free meals offered either.
Home Chef can be an economical option, with some meal kits starting at $6.99. The average price of their meal kits is a bit more at about $9.99. Shipping is typically $8.99 per box, but they frequently offer free shipping promotions.
FAQs
Who are HelloFresh competitors?
The meal delivery service industry has boomed over the past few years, especially this past year with Covid. This has brought more HelloFresh competitors to the market, like Blue Apron, Gobble, Home Chef, Martha u0026amp; Marley Spoon, plus a slew of new companies entering the market.
Is there a cheaper version of Hello Fresh?
You can find more economical meal kit delivery services than HelloFresh, but you have to judge for yourself whether they’re worth it. Dinnerly and Every Plate are two examples of meal services that cost a few dollars less per serving than HelloFresh.
What is the best meal kit company?
There are so many great ones to choose from. It really depends on your individual tastes, level of comfort in the kitchen, and your budget. We enjoy HelloFresh, Blue Apron, and many other of the most popular meal delivery options.
Bottom Line
With so many great meal delivery businesses, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed with all the options. We love Blue Apron for their meal selection as an alternative to HelloFresh, but there are so many others on this list that will provide a delicious mealtime experience. Skip the mealtime hassle and enjoy the convenience of HelloFresh, Blue Apron, or our other top choices delivered to your home.