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Home Chef Review: Low Calorie, Gluten Free & More
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In my pursuit of the next best meal ingredient delivery service, I decided to do a Home Chef review (not to be confused with Green Chef).
Signing up (with $30 off my first box) I was pleased with the ordering options.
Meal Selections
You pick how many meals per week, how many people per week, and even dietary preferences like gluten, dairy, even mushrooms. The recipes seem nicely varied and include international options to expand my cooking repetoire.
And Home Chef is one of the first meal delivery services I saw that offered low calorie and low carb options. You could even choose smoothies or fruit baskets for breakfast.
This was one of my favorite account layouts — super easy to view options and edit orders with one click.
Cost
At $9.95 per meal, Home Chef is on par with the others, coming in at ~$60 a week for 3 meals for 2 people.
Packaging
The packaging is good. A more eco-friendly insulation than others’ styrofoam coolers and they avoid the “grocery shopping in your fridge” issue by bundling most of recipie’s ingredients together.
Like Green Chef, they also prepare many of the more complicated sauces for you and pre-chop/slice things. Big plus!
They also include a three-ring binder with your first order which is a nice touch.
I’ve had a stack of recipe cards from other deliveries haphazardly hanging out in my kitchen. I’m now hole-punching the recipes I liked from other meal delivery services to keep them all in one place. 🙂
Ingredients & Recipes
As I mentioned above, they have a wide variety of recipes, though the week I was trying it out was a bit boring. Recipe cards are fairly easy to follow, as long as you follow their highlight instructions first (learned that the hard way).
The ingredients were a little disappointing. While I loved the advisories of how soon to cook — 2 of the 3 meals said 5 days — I found that the max time was definitely pushing it.
My chicken for one of the meals was past it’s prime at the 5 day mark and I had to supply my own. Same for some of the produce which was definitely on it’s way out by day 5.
Mozzarella and Red Pepper Stuffed Tenderloin with Crispy Sprouts
The actual recipes were both tasty and memorable! The mashed potato-style cauliflower is something I’ve used a couple of times since. ,
Final Thoughts
Home Chef is a great concept — love the recipe/allergy options, love the menu card storage, like the actual meals, they just need to work on their ingredient quality. Will definitely try them again but will have to plan for a time when I’ll be cooking all the meals within a few days of arriving.
If you’re interested, sign up via my link and we’ll both get $30 credit towards our next order.
Full Disclosure: I may receive affiliate credit from links in this post or on this site which will help fund my travels. Thank you for your support!
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Me
May 26, 2016 at 11:27 pm
DO NOT USE HOME CHEF. I had cancelled my account and they continued to charge my bank account post cancel. Management was rude, refused to refund my money. SCAM SCAM SCAM
angry
September 18, 2016 at 1:08 am
Just FYI for anyone considering this CRAP MEAL DELIVERY SERVICE…I received my first order on a Wednesday at approximately 5 pm. I didn’t have time to cook that evening or the next. They charged my debit card for the next shipment FRIDAY AT NOON CENTRAL TIME. I hadn’t even had a chance to try anything at that point and had received it less than 48 hours prior.
They didn’t exactly make this clear and they never even sent me a receipt or notification that I had been charged and would be receiving anything at all. I assumed I would have until at least Saturday morning to cancel. I don’t think it was unreasonable to expect I’d have an opportunity to try the food before being billed for more. The only reason I caught it is because I saw the transaction on my bank’s website. I emailed them immediately and they didn’t bother to respond until – conveniently – they said the order had been processed. Then they treated me like an idiot who doesn’t know how subscription services work.
You’ve been warned. Oh, and the food from the first order was nothing great. If I’d paid $20 for that for two at a café, I would have been disappointed. Let alone $20 to make it and clean up myself. The morons also sent me flat leaf parsley instead of cilantro.