An Honest Hello Fresh Review
This is not meant to be a comprehensive review. It is just an experience that I've had with meal subscription boxes that I have never seen mentioned in the glowing reviews you see for these services. Last summer, I tried Blue Apron for a month. This summer, I am giving Hello Fresh a try. Its been several weeks since I started, and I can honestly say that Hello Fresh falls into one of the same traps that Blue Apron does: The meals take too long to prepare.
Every Hello Fresh recipe card claims that the meal only takes 30 minutes to make, but I have yet to have one of these meals take less than an hour. For example, a few weeks ago I was preparing the serrano steak meal. The recipe card called for pealing a mango, slicing the fruit off the pit, and cutting it into matchstick sized pieces. That alone took me 30 minutes to do. And I was so preoccupied with the mango that I burned the rice. At the of it all, the meal was quite tasty, even without the rice, but after a long day of work, I'm usually too tired to put so much effort into food prep and too hungry to wait the 1-2 hours it typically takes me to fix these meals before eating. Plus, after you are done, there is a whole slew of dirty dishes that have to be cleaned up.
It can be really hard to cook for yourself when you live by alone. Preparing a normal recipe leaves you eating left overs for days until you are sick of eating what was once a favorite food. I've tried freezing leftovers, but there is only so much room in the freezer, and I'm so tired of the food that I avoid thawing it out to eat the remaining leftovers. That's why I like the idea of services like Hello Fresh and Blue Apron because it adds variety to my diet and helps me avoid falling into a meal rut. But in the end, some of the recipe's are just too complex and they all take longer than 30 minutes to prepare.
If you are good/experienced at cooking or you have someone to help, then maybe you can prepare these meals in the advertised time span, but for a single person who is not adept at slicing, dicing, mincing, zesting, pealing, and picking individual herb leaves off their stems, the prep for these meals can be rather tedious and time consuming.
Every Hello Fresh recipe card claims that the meal only takes 30 minutes to make, but I have yet to have one of these meals take less than an hour. For example, a few weeks ago I was preparing the serrano steak meal. The recipe card called for pealing a mango, slicing the fruit off the pit, and cutting it into matchstick sized pieces. That alone took me 30 minutes to do. And I was so preoccupied with the mango that I burned the rice. At the of it all, the meal was quite tasty, even without the rice, but after a long day of work, I'm usually too tired to put so much effort into food prep and too hungry to wait the 1-2 hours it typically takes me to fix these meals before eating. Plus, after you are done, there is a whole slew of dirty dishes that have to be cleaned up.
It can be really hard to cook for yourself when you live by alone. Preparing a normal recipe leaves you eating left overs for days until you are sick of eating what was once a favorite food. I've tried freezing leftovers, but there is only so much room in the freezer, and I'm so tired of the food that I avoid thawing it out to eat the remaining leftovers. That's why I like the idea of services like Hello Fresh and Blue Apron because it adds variety to my diet and helps me avoid falling into a meal rut. But in the end, some of the recipe's are just too complex and they all take longer than 30 minutes to prepare.
If you are good/experienced at cooking or you have someone to help, then maybe you can prepare these meals in the advertised time span, but for a single person who is not adept at slicing, dicing, mincing, zesting, pealing, and picking individual herb leaves off their stems, the prep for these meals can be rather tedious and time consuming.