Entrepreneurs are busy people, always moving from one meeting to another. Even when free, their minds are preoccupied with work-related ideas. Because of this, founders need a great deal of energy to go about their activities. And the major source of this is healthy and highly nutritious homemade food. Eating out is not healthy and cost-effective. Studies show restaurant food has more fats, cholesterol, calories, and calcium than homemade food.
However, time is a valuable currency for most entrepreneurs. If not all, most entrepreneurs don’t have the luxury of time for shopping and meal planning. In this post, we will be taking a comparative look at three of the best meal kit delivery services in the U.S. from the perspective of entrepreneurs’ needs. But before we delve fully into that, let’s take a quick look at how meal delivery services work and what they offer.
How Do Meal Kit Delivery Services Works?
Meal kits delivery services deliver your selected pre-measured ingredients and recipes to your doorstep in a temperature-controlled box with ice packs for temporary preservation. The box also contains detailed instructions that your need to follow to do the preparations and cooking.
This service saves you a lot of time you should have spent shopping and measuring ingredients. Some recipes require exotic spices, sauces, or vegetables that are hard to find. Meal kits delivery services provide these scarce ingredients as well as the measurements you need.
Though the price for these services may appear expensive when the time and energy serves you, you will know the price is not expensive.
What Do Meal Kit Delivery Services Offer?
These kit delivery services and others offer the following and more:
- Each meal box comes with moderate calories. Each box’s calories range from 500-700 calories.
- The estimated meal preparation time of meals offered is around 30 minutes.
- The services reviewed use refrigerated boxes that can last for hours on your doorstep, and most packaging is recyclable.
- The services reviewed offer a short-term subscription. You can decide to take some weeks off your subscription, and you can also cancel the service at any time.
Now, let’s take a detailed look at the pros and cons of the services offered by Home Chef, Meal Fresh and Blue Apron concerning entrepreneurs.
Home Chef
Home Chef is a great choice for founders who love homemade foods, but have no time to cook. You can select from any of several of their pre-prepared “Fresh and Easy” meal plans. The meal plans include oven-ready, slow cooker, and grill-ready meals.
Also, Home Chef offers the best weekly recipe rotation for entrepreneurs that are very picky about what they consume, irrespective of their culinary skills level and choice of diets. Home Chef allows you to choose from over ten meal choices every week. Dietary needs are duly considered when before offering each week’s meal options. There are vegetarian, gluten-free, soy-free, and low-calorie meal options.
Home Chef meal plans pricing is straightforward pricing. Despite the addition of shipping fees, it is still very affordable to most entrepreneurs. It has a nationwide delivery scope. Even when you relocate to another part of the country, you can still retain their services.
Home Chef Pros
- Opportunity to choose pre-made, “Fresh and Easy” meals that you can quickly and easily cook in the oven, on the grill or in the slow cooker.
- Offers weekly meal suggestions based on the dietary preference of your profile
- Zero shipping fee for orders above $45, saving you a $10 shipping fee
- It has a marketplace to buy relevant cooking tools
Home Chef Cons
- You might have issues following their directions for meals that you need to prepare
- Their meals come in smaller portion sizes compared to some others
Hello Fresh
Hello Fresh flexible plans offer the best variety of recipes and meals. Some of the distinct features that make Hello Fresh preferred by most people are its farm-fresh ingredients, acclaimed chefs, and exciting recipe cards that teach you how to cook as you go. These features are highly favored by entrepreneurs because it saves them a lot of time.
Among the three services in this post, Hello Fresh offers the best packaging. Most of its ingredients come pre-chopped or already combined, saving time. Hello Fresh is also a good option for vegetarians as you can choose between its Classic or Veggie boxes each week.
Hello Fresh Pros
- Hello Fresh’s account management is easy to use. It ensures the easy update of your preferred subscription or pause delivery for any week.
- Its meal plans have moderate pricing compared to others in the post
- It has a separate meal plan for vegetarians to choose from
- If you like your ingredients fresh and natural, you will like Hello Fresh. Their ingredients are sourced from local farmers, butchers and more.
Hello Fresh Cons
- The texts in Hello Fresh recipe cards are small and close together, making the steps hard to follow.
- Hello Fresh has fewer weekly meal choices compared to some other services. It offers 5 for classic and 3 for veggie
- Hello Fresh services include extra shipping cost
Blue Apron
Blue Apron offers the best value for the quality and variety of weekly meals you get compared to other services reviewed. Interestingly, this is offered at an affordable price.
Also, Blue Apron is unique for not repeating its recipes during the year and offering rare specialty products. They source their ingredients from family-run farms and businesses.
Blue Apron allows you to select your dietary preferences to ensure that you don’t receive anything you don’t eat or are allergic to, for instance, shellfish, red meat, and fish. Still, you’ll have less freedom over individual meals. In conjunction with Weight Watchers, Blue Apron will come up will awesome easy-to-cook recipes for a healthy lifestyle.
Blue Apron Pros
- Offers great value through its variety of creative recipes
- The services ingredients are sourced from are family-run farms and businesses
- Offers larger and generous portion sizes
- It provides meal plans that support healthy living
Blue Apron Cons
- It is on the low side in terms of meal choices. It only offers eight meal choices per week. However, it doesn’t repeat recipes for a whole year
- Has no vegetarian plan, meaning entrepreneurs who want veggie packages need to look elsewhere
- Most Blue Apron recipes are cooked in oil
- It charges an extra fee for shipping for some plans
Conclusively, the three reviewed meal kit services are highly recommendable for entrepreneurs and other busy business people. However, as you must have noted, each of the services have distinctive features that you may find impressive or otherwise. So, the onus to choose the best meal kits delivery services now lies on you. Choose wisely.
Do you prefer Home Chef, Hello Fresh, or Blue Apron? Let us know down in the comments.
This article originally published on GREY Journal.
