Is Hello Fresh Worth the Money Amidst the Cost of Living Crisis as of November 2022?

As everything is getting more and more expensive, I have been asking myself whether meal kits are worth the money. Most meal kit companies try to lure people in with some kind of introductory offer, be it free shipping, discounts or even making the first box completely free. Some people even cancel their subscription once their offers expire, waiting for the meal kit company to send through new and shiny ones. This is something that the likes of Hello Fresh or Gousto usually happily do and you can get another deal on your meal kits as a result.

To determine whether meal kits are worth it both at a normal price and using their introductory offers, I’ve decided to compare the cost per meal against the cost of getting the ingredients individually from Tesco, a UK supermarket. The first meal kit service I’ve decided to try for my experiment was one of the most popular ones - Hello Fresh. Their introductory offer seemed pretty good - I got the first week for 50% off the price plus free shipping, making it £23.22 for 10 portions in total or 5 meals for two people. My intro offer also included another 7 weeks of deliveries with a 30% discount, which works out at £31.31 per delivery.

So let’s see how Hello Fresh compares to buying the ingredients individually at Tesco. I picked four meals, two vegetarian and two meaty to offer a representative picture. They also happen to be the best Hello Fresh meals I’ve tried, just in case you are also looking for inspiration for your first order!

I have created a table, which you can view below that summarises my findings. So, purely based on cost, the intro offer of 50% off plus free shipping makes the cost equivalent to what you’d pay for individual ingredients at Tesco, which is a pretty sweet deal. At 30% off, a Hello Fresh meal is on average £1 more expensive than what you’d pay at Tesco. At the full price, you are looking at paying on average £2.4 more per Hello Fresh meal. The issue is, of course, that you won't be able to buy all the ingredients you need in perfectly sized portions, like those delivered to your doorstep by Hello Fresh. This means that the ‘true’ cost of the bulk of the ingredients you need to buy is much higher because it is rarely the case that you can buy 150g of rice but rather an entire kilo of it. For some ingredients, that’s totally fine and you can use them later on, such as spices. For others, however, it’s more of an issue and that is where the problem of food waste arises. I regularly throw away onions as we often don’t manage to use the entire package before they go off but they are often cheaper to buy in bulk than individually. To reflect this aspect, I also calculated the total or ‘true’ cost of ingredients for each meal bought at Tesco.

So the final verdict? Surprise, surprise, it depends! For some, and especially during a time when your energy bill regularly makes you want to cry, paying a £2.4 premium per meal is not quite what you want to do. However, Hello Fresh saves you a ton of time planning your meals for the week, putting together a shopping list and going to the supermarket. It is also a great way of ensuring you eat meals of decent quality and it eases your way into cooking, which is especially important for inexperienced cooks.