I want to help you find the best meal delivery service for your family, but first I’m going to bore you with a persona anecdote / context for 300 words. I want to make sure you understand where I’m coming from before you accept or completely dismiss my advice. Here we go!
“What do you want to cook for dinner this evening?” used to be a question that you might actually ask your spouse. You’d ruminate, google and come to some wonderful consensus at which point grocery shopping would take place and you’d enjoy an hour in the kitchen with the person you love, cooking, conversating and strengthening the bonds of marriage. With young children and two working parents, this memory grows more distant by the day and makes you question whether you’re gaslighting yourself.
On a weeknight, when your kids are screaming for their nuggets, you’re unlikely to regain your recreate that stress-free culinary tableau, but that also doesn’t mean you need to completely give up and go all “dueling Hungry Man’s” with your spouse.
There’s an in-between that allows you to eat healthy, reasonable portions, all within the time-frame that your children allow before they go completely ape-shit. Enter the meal delivery service. But which one should you choose? I’ve tried many such services and I can tell you they are not created equal, in time to prepare, ingredient quality and portion size. In fact, as I am an old man and now love to shoot my complaints into the internet, I will tell you that I have a particular dislike for a couple of the services below. The good news, dear reader, is that you can learn from my mistakes.
To be clear, I’m making these recommendations from the point of view of a working dad, with a working spouse, with two kids under 5. This means I wake up, drop my kids off at daycare/school from 7:30-8, work pretty much non-stop from 8-5, as does my spouse, and at 450, I pick up both of my children and in the next 2.5 hours post-pickup, both need to be fed, bathed and put to bed. If you’re tracking, that means I don’t have a ton of free time during the day or after work to make a meal. If, as a meal delivery service, you’re not making my eating life SIGNIFICANTLY easier, I’m probably not going to be a fan. And with that, the reviews:
What you see below is an example of the delivered ingredients for a single Hello Fresh meal. There are vegetables to be sliced, meat to be cooked, spaghetti to be boiled, bread to be warmed and sauce to be sauced. That’s a lot of cooking and a lot of potential pans and pots to clean. At this point, I ask myself how Hello Fresh is actually saving me time. I come to two conclusions:
- I don’t have to grocery shop
- You’ve chosen a recipe, so I don’t have to figure out the ingredients that I need to shop for
Those are not insignificant, but they are not my biggest problems. My biggest problem is time, between the hours of 5 and 7:30pm. Hello Fresh doesn’t save me much time in that window, so it’s not a great meal service for me. If I were willing eat my dinner after my kids went to bed and could take 30-45 to prep and cook a meal, Hello Fresh would be great. But I’m hungry guys and I don’t want to wait.
Dad Tip Verdict: If you’ve got an extra 30-60 minutes each night to cook, this is a great meal delivery service with fun meals. I don’t, so I don’t use Hello Fresh
A Taste of Home – Check out their review of Hello Fresh for a more nuanced take.
While the meals are delicious (after 60 minutes of prep, cooking and making mistakes because I didn’t read all of the steps), Blue Apron is a slightly more intense version of Hello Fresh
I don’t deserve a Blue Apron, give me one of the lower level aprons. Is it like karate? Is there a Black Apron, at which I would fail even more spectacularly?
Dad Tip Verdict: I’m sure you’re wonderful people but I don’t have time to cook your food. Like Hello Fresh, I’m not quite sure how this is saving me time, if I have the ability to buy groceries on the weekend, but not the time to cook complicated meals during the week.
This person disagrees and they seem smart, so what do I know.
Home Chef – Same as above. Lovely product that I’m sure is great for some families, but and as Thumper said:
DadTips Verdict: No. I’m sorry, but again, no.
(Not Quite Meal Delivery) – Athletic Greens
If you’re looking to inject a little healthfulness into your life, Athletic Green can ensure that at least one glass you drink each day will be making you healthier. And then you can pile on the glasses of alcohol because your liver will be well taken care of.
Athletic Greens is a vitamin, mineral and probiotic powder that you can mix into a glass of water. I love the idea of drinking essential vitamins and minerals because I’m not the biggest fan of fruits or vegetables and my consumption of those items leaves a lot (of vitamins and minerals) to be desired.
AND NOW FOR THE SERVICES I ACTUALLY LIKE…
These services deliver fresh (not-frozen) fully-prepared meals that are good in the refrigerator for ~7 days. They save me the shopping time, the meal idea / arguing with my wife about the meal idea time, and they save cooking time. In 2 minutes in the microwave or 15 minutes in the oven, my dinner is ready. The dinners are actually delicious, with much less chance of me screwing anything up than with Hello Fresh, Blue Apron or Home Chef.
For those of us watching our carbs, most Factor75 meals are keto-approved.
Factor75:
Cook Unity
DadTips Verdict: These are the best meal delivery services for me and my family and would highly recommended if your work/children schedule is anything like mine. I know it’s sad to say “I don’t have time to cook,” but it would be sadder if these healthy options weren’t available and my lack of time led to nightly burger feasts. Actually that would be great, but I’d also be dead and not writing, which depending on what you think of my writing, would be good or bad.
What’s the best meal delivery service you’ve tried? Let me know in the comments!
Chris Jordan