Thank you, HelloFresh, in conjunction with Mosaic Reviews, for providing our box!

HelloFresh is a unique type of subscription service.  Think of it as a cross between a grocery delivery service and the “try-it-out” subscription boxes that are so popular right now.  Boxes ship once a week and contain all of the ingredients (apart from a few basic staples, like oil and sugar) to make three dinners.

There are a lot of things I love about this concept.

1. It’s largely fresh food ingredients.  (There are some condiment-y things, like soy sauce.  But not “cream of” soups, and the like.)
2. It comes to me.  With four young children, it is nice to be able to take fewer trips to the grocery store!
3. They’ll tell me what to cook!  How many times have you thought that you wouldn’t mind cooking dinner; you just don’t have the brain power to come up with dinner?  (Or is that just me?)
4. It encourages adventurous eating.  If they’re sending three new recipes every week, that’s three times a week I’m encouraged to try something I haven’t made before.

I had the opportunity to order a complimentary box to try out the service so I could share with you, and I found the process to be very simple.  The first step was to enter my zip code to make sure they ship to me.  Not being in a big city, I was nervous that they might not.  None of the grocery delivery services do.  But they ship through FedEx, so I think they actually ship to anywhere FedEx can get the box in a reasonable amount of time.  (The food does have to stay cold the whole time!)

So, yes, they ship to me.  The rest of the process was pretty easy.  I entered all of the information you’d expect when placing any online order, and chose my box.  It comes in 2-serving or 4-serving options, classic or vegetarian.  There are not gluten-free options at this time, so we had to get a little creative with our food.  🙂  (More on that in a minute.)

After you sign up, you can sign back in and view the menu for the coming week.  There are five meal options.  Three are preselected, but you can swap for either one of the other two, depending on your preferences, dietary needs, etc.  We don’t eat shrimp, so I swapped out this week’s shrimp dish.  I swapped another dish, as well.

On the down side, these options are relatively limited.  We don’t eat pork or shellfish, and I can’t eat wheat.  There weren’t three recipes that met these criteria so, as I said, we had to get a little bit creative.  On the plus side, you can always find out ahead of time what’s on the menu and skip a week if you need to.  (Also, don’t forget to pause your subscription if you’re going to be out of town or something!)

The box arrived exactly on schedule.  (They always come on Wednesdays.)  It was well-insulated and had ice packs included to keep everything cold.  Here you can see the “paperwork” – some information about Hello Fresh and the recipe cards for the week.  And a little surprise bonus.  (A little birdie told me that these little surprises happen on occasion.  You never know what you might find!)

The recipe cards are quite large, printed in beautiful full color, and very easy to follow.  The front depicts the ingredients, which are also listed at the bottom.  Items not included in your box (like oil) are noted clearly with asterisks and a footnote.  The reverse side of the card contains the instructions – also with pictures.

The contents in the box were divided up roughly into nine groups: three per recipe.  The meat for each recipe was, of course, included.  A bag for each recipe contains the other perishable ingredients – mostly veggies.  A second bag for each recipe consolidates non-perishable ingredients, like canned tomatoes.

Each bag is clearly marked with the name of the recipe on a label.

When Dinner Doesn’t Work

Due to our (my) gluten sensitivity and the fact that we were provided with a 2-person box but have a family of 6, I decided to skip the included recipes and just take advantage of the ingredients that so conveniently shipped to my door.  I’d had a recipe for buffalo chicken meatballs in my files to adapt for a while and since there was ground chicken in the box, I thought this would be a great time to try it out.

My adaptation didn’t work so well, though.  It was way too wet and the meatballs wouldn’t hold their shape.  If you’re gluten-free, you can’t just dump in bread crumbs to absorb all that liquid.  I tried adding some chopped red pepper (from my box) to the mix, but it didn’t help.  So I gave up trying.  Instead, I just spread it all across the baking sheet and cooked it flat.

This is what you do when your plans don’t work:

(I hadn’t even greased the pan, because I didn’t plan to cook them this way, so they stuck a bit.  But we ate!)

Since we bloggers always share the stuff that worked – maybe not ’til the 17th try – beautifully staged and photographed, I thought you might like to see what life really looks like in some of our houses most days.  We have those “Wow; this will be amazing for Pinterest” moments, but we also have those nights when dinner just flopped.  (This is not my biggest flop.  At least this one was edible.)

Who Can Use HelloFresh?

I’m not gonna lie to you; I think this is a bit expensive.  Not unreasonable, just…probably more than my budget could handle.  Especially when you consider that we would actually need two boxes a week to feed us all.  (The one we got, that feeds 2 people, is $69.)  But that doesn’t change the fact that I love the idea of it, and if you can afford it, this is a great way to pay for convenience without paying for junk.  It’s not all whole foods (regular bread crumbs and white pasta were both in my box), but it’s all ingredients, not boxed-up stuff.  And yet you don’t have to go out anywhere to get it.

And the recipe cards seem super-easy to use (and reuse – they’re very high-quality).  I think this would be amazing for a new wife just learning to cook.  Two servings would be the perfect size, and there would be three opportunities each week to try something new.  The something new would come with all the ingredients already divvied up, and with step-by-step instructions for what to do.  If you’re not the newlywed, maybe you know a newlywed who would appreciate this as a gift.

Also keep in mind that you can skip weeks at any time.  So if you have extra-busy times of year, you could order boxes just for these occasions, even if you can’t afford to have them delivered every week.

So what do you think?  Would you use a service like this?  Have another idea of someone it would be perfect for?  Leave a comment!