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(in Polish / po polsku: click here / kliknij tutaj)

We’re a family of four, with two kids (one of whom recently leveled up to adulthood) still in school. Both of us adults work at least seven and a half hours a day, with a mandatory lunch break. Sometimes, life feels like we're little hamsters spinning in wheels. Other times, it doesn't.

Either way, thanks to the relentless pace of modern living, we've let proper dinners slide over the past few years. It was usually something quick, or a Chinese takeaway/pizza situation. A Proper Dinner was reserved for weekends - and even that's hit or miss.

Some time ago, one of my wife's coworkers recommended meals-in-a-box. The local version is called HelloFresh, and the idea is simple: once a week, a courier drops off a sizable box of grub. Inside the box, there are six paper bags: one larger and five smaller. The big one goes straight into the fridge, while the smaller ones can go in too - but they don't have to.

The smaller bags contain various non-perishable (or rather: slow-to-perish) extras. The big one holds the meats, creams, and other bits that need to stay chilled.

Everything comes neatly labeled with colorful, numbered stickers. Alongside the bags, you get five sturdy A4 recipe cards - one for each day. Each card includes a list of ingredients, calorie counts, an estimated prep time, and step-by-step photos showing what the dish should look like at every stage of the process.

We provide our own utensils, dishes, basic seasonings (sugar, salt, pepper, oil, butter), and – naturally – the consumers. Otherwise, we'd have to chuck the whole lot in the bin, which seems a bit pointless.

We’ve been feeding ourselves this way for a month now. Lacking a better idea for today's post, I'll share a few pros and cons of this setup from the consumer's perspective. And not just any consumer, mind you – but one who's a complete kitchen imbecile, capable of ruining such culinary masterpieces as boiled kettle water or sliced apple 🙂

The pros

• Variety: Before, we'd often cook a giant pot of something that lasted two or three days, leading to dull, repetitive meals. With these boxes, every dinner is different. Over the past 30 days, we've had 30 different meals.
• Choice: The list of available dishes is impressive, and most can be customized (e.g., I'll have this dish, but swap the turkey for chicken, please).
• Ease of preparation: HelloFresh feels like IKEA for food. Clear instructions, perfectly timed steps - even for those done simultaneously (boiling here, roasting there, frying somewhere else - all at once). Some ingredients arrive pre-chopped, while others require slicing, but the recipes always specify how to cut them and how big the pieces should be.
• Taste: This should probably be first on the list. Over the month, maybe two meals were in the meh category; the rest were downright finger-licking good.
• Flexibility: You pick the day of the week for delivery, and you can change your order up to 48 hours before it arrives. Need more food for Friday guests? Fewer meals because one kid is at a sleepover on Tuesday? No problem.
• Fresh ingredients: When shopping at the store, there's always a risk that some veggies outstay their welcome in the fridge. Carrots and lettuce that looked fine suddenly become candidates for the bin. Here, the ingredients arrive super fresh and in quantities precisely measured for each meal.
• Minimal waste: Thanks to the exact portions, there's almost zero food waste. Nearly all packaging is recyclable, and every single ingredient gets used up.
• Cost: The more you order, the cheaper it gets per meal. For a full week of dinners for four people, it works out to about €5 per head. Sure, you could go to the store and buy slightly cheaper, but - and here's the rub - you'd have to plan everything, go shopping, and buy precise amounts. Not worth the hassle. HelloFresh (allegedly, though I can't verify this) sources ingredients directly from local farmers, cutting out the middlemen to save costs.
• Portion sizes: Almost every time, there's enough leftover from a four-person dinner for snacks the next day.

The cons

One-off mishaps:

• Wrong dish delivered: Once, the company sent us a completely different meal. The "downside" here is that you end up eating something you didn't order. Still, it's tasty, and you might accidentally expand your culinary horizons 🙂.
• Delayed delivery: On one occasion, the courier was swamped, and the box arrived after 10 PM. According to the spec, food shouldn't be in transit for more than 8 hours; this one was closer to 10. The side effect? Dinners shifted by a day.
• Undersized portion: One time, a meal for four people showed up in a two-person version (520g of chicken instead of 1040g).
• Recipe error: We caught a mistake in one of the recipes - an ingredient was listed and delivered but never used in the instructions.

General cons:

• Orders only for even numbers of people: If you're a family of three, you're out of luck - you can only order for two or four. Adding meals ad-hoc? Same rule: even numbers only. So, dinner guests must be accepted strictly in pairs or foursomes 🙂.

Final conclusion

Although HelloFresh occasionally trips up here and there, we're now eating tastier, healthier, and cheaper meals, spending less time in the kitchen, and enjoying a more varied diet. It might not be for everyone, but it works really well for us. Unless some major disaster happens, it looks like we'll be sticking with them for the long haul.

Oh, and one more thing:

HelloFresh didn't pay me for this "ad," and I'm not affiliated with them in any way (other than being a paying customer).

https://xpil.eu/hgQFG 📋