When we’re constantly on the go, one of the last things you want to focus on is planning a menu for the week. As work or hobbies begin to pile up, it can be difficult allotting time towards planning what you’re going to eat, shopping for the ingredients, and then tossing it all together and hoping it’s good. With a meal kit delivery service, you know what you’re eating, and you know what you need without having to go out and purchase it.

HelloFresh is one of the best meal kit services in Canada and continues to receive raving reviews from customers. We wanted to look at the #1 meal kit delivery service to see how they operate and how their quality stacks up against the competition. We checked out how the service operates and how their process works. Once we understood what it meant to have a HelloFresh subscription, we thoroughly reviewed and critiqued the service.

How Does HelloFresh Work?

It all starts on your phone or computer. Once you’ve subscribed to HelloFresh and purchased a plan, you can open up the app or website and begin searching through the hundreds of delicious and easy-to-follow recipes. Scroll through the recipes and find ones that appeal to you, select them for your weekly menu, and then move on to the next day. Once you’ve chosen your entree of choice, you can scroll through and find the perfect sides for your lifestyle.

The extras you can choose from are your typical side-dish fair, from types of bread to cheeses and even soups or salads. You can mix and match the sides that sound good to you and pair them with the perfect meal on your weekly menu. You can decide what fits your style and what sides will be common options on your menu. This customization is rather useful, though there seems to be a pairing recommendation featured on other meal kit apps.

Ingredients

After completing your menu, the company looks through the required ingredients and organizes a personal box of their fresh foods for delivery. Every ingredient required to make your requested meals is then shipped to you in an organized and clear manner to know what ingredients go with what meal. This is a nice addition that some meal kit services ignore: if your ingredients are thrown about, it can be not very clearly trying to separate the day’s ingredients.

Once your HelloFresh box arrives, open it up, pull out your first recipe and start cooking. When it comes to meal kit services, the recipe cook times at HelloFresh are relatively short, which is great for anyone who doesn’t have time to spend on a full cooking process. After you’ve finished up with a week of meals, start the process over again, and HelloFresh will send you another box with the next week’s recipes ready to go.

Our Review of Their Process

After going through and partaking in their weekly process, we were quite impressed at how simple, and straightforward everything was. Many meal plans that you’ll encounter with a kit service are complex and intricate. They offer you many different choices and customization options, but they can often be overwhelming. HelloFresh keeps it simple whilst continuing to offer you the customization options found in other services.

The app is easy to use and helps you every step of the way, which keeps you from getting lost while building your week of menus. As for the recipes offered, HelloFresh has some of the best-looking and healthiest recipes available. We tried a few of them and were never disappointed. Their ingredients are fresh and clean, so you don’t have to worry about any dead vegetables or dried leaves on your plate. Some bruising occurred, but that’s to be expected with a meal kit delivery.

Their recipes were quick and easy to follow, which is exactly what we were looking for out of a meal kit delivery service. It would help if you had a lot more time prepping, like dicing vegetables or thawing the meats, as these are not included in the expected cook times. Overall, the process is user-friendly, and the meals are delicious and easy to make. HelloFresh is definitely one of the best meal kit services we’ve tried and seem to be number one for a reason.

A Customizable Weekly Plan

One of the best features of HelloFresh that separates them from the rest of the meal delivery services across Canada is their wide range of weekly options. Every week, you can select the dishes you’d like to have sent to you and every week, you might find something different. HelloFresh is constantly updating its menus with new recipes and sides so that users never run out of choices for their dinner.

We were pleasantly surprised to find that HelloFresh even offers a subscription hold option for when you want to pause the weekly meals. If there’s ever a week where you don’t need or can’t receive the HelloFresh box, you can request a week off from the service. If you need a longer break from their service, you can cancel at any time. HelloFresh, unlike many other top meal kit services, works on a week-by-week basis, so you aren’t tied to their services for months at a time.

Customizing your weekly meal plan has also never been easier than with HelloFresh. After looking through and testing out many of Canada’s best services, we found that HelloFresh has one of the most extensive menus of recipes available.

Many Menus to Choose From

For starters, you have your basic weekly menu to choose from, which offers plenty of recipes tailored to your preferences. You can scroll through and find the best recipes for you and easily select them for your weekly plan. After you’ve chosen from their large menu, you can choose the side dish that you think fits your needs best. This new feature is still growing, so the options are rather limited, but it’s still an impressive feature.

If you plan on having guests over, you won’t have to work to plan an extra day on your own. HelloFresh even offers a flexible plan size per week. This means you can adjust it according to who’s coming over that week. We found this advanced customization option quite useful as it’s not always going to be the same number of guests every day. If a friend is coming over or someone isn’t going to be home one night, then you can plan for these changes when selecting your weekly plan.

This next feature is rather common for meal kit services, but HelloFresh seems to have perfected it. Special meals are available for special occasions so that you don’t have to plan that big turkey dinner for everyone. Something big happens in your life that needs celebrating? Treat yourself and your friends or family to a delicious gourmet dinner you wouldn’t find anywhere other than a fancy restaurant. These meals are quite impressive and are made with quality ingredients.

The Best Value Meal Kit Service

HelloFresh quickly impressed us by testing out their services with their quality foods, fast recipes, and customization options. We’ve tested many meal kit services, but HelloFresh was one of the best. They consider you when creating their recipes and packing your shipment. Every ingredient is fresh and as clean as possible when delivering a meal kit. The following were three of the biggest deciding factors that made HelloFresh one of our favourite services.

Affordable

Many meal kit delivery services claim to be affordable but will charge you more money per week than what you’d spend on groceries normally. HelloFresh keeps its prices low, and its quality high. They offer quite a few different packages that customers can choose from, which allows them to bend the total price closer to their budget. HelloFresh understands that people are looking for an affordable meal kit to allow them to live on the go.

HelloFresh works closely with its ingredient providers to help cut out the middleman. Without someone receiving the fresh ingredients and redistributing them, HelloFresh can easily keep their prices low and their food fresh. Our experience showed HelloFresh to be as close to farm-to-table as a meal kit delivery service could get. Few other companies had priced this low for even their most expensive plans. If your money changes and your plans need to, you can easily go in and alter what service option you have selected every week.

Quick and Easy

The main goal of every meal kit service should be to allow busy people the chance to cook a fresh and delicious dinner in no time at all. We went into this review looking for that type of service, and HelloFresh didn’t disappoint. Most of the menus they offer can be completed from cooking to table in 20 minutes or less. This does not account for preparing any ingredients. However, most of the ingredients are already organized by necessity.

They keep their box organized and their ingredients properly separated to make the cooking process easier for you. You won’t have to spend time getting your ingredients in order or selecting the right amount of a certain spice. No more time spent shopping for groceries or checking to make sure you have everything you need. Open the box, cut up any vegetables, fruits, or meats necessary, and get to cooking. This service excels at keeping time costs low.

Environmentally Safe

The process of developing these kits, running the company, and shipping everything out can be rather taxing on the environment. Most companies turn a blind eye to these issues and ignore their impact on the world around them. HelloFresh works to cut their emissions and pay back any pollution they might be responsible for. They claim to be – and in fact, are – the first-ever carbon-neutral meal kit company.

They realize their service’s impact on the environment from start to finish. HelloFresh supports hundreds of global and local environmentally-friendly projects recommended by customers. It’s always refreshing to see a company with a separate mission unrelated to their service as it gives them something to strive for. You can expect higher-quality service from a company looking to better the environment, especially one that relies on it.

Pick Your HelloFresh Plan

HelloFresh offers a completely customizable plan that can be altered whenever you need it to. People change, and so do preferences, and HelloFresh takes that into account with their service plans. They offer quality service options for any number of party sizes. If you’re looking to supply only yourself or two people with their meal plan, then you can select their smallest plan option. Three or four people eating at a time? They have a plan that covers that as well.

Once you have your plan size selected, you can choose how many meals you’d like to receive per week. The options are rather limited, and you can only choose to have three or four meals sent at a time, but it is nice to see further customization options present. HelloFresh also takes food preferences into account. This enables you to choose vegetarian preferences or meat and veggie options. You can also select family-friendly for any family with young children.

Pros

• Many plan customization options
• Affordable and time-saving
• Eco-friendly
• Vegetarian option available
• One of the best meal kit providers in Canada

Cons

• Only offers three to four recipes per week
• Few vegan options

It’s time to make meals like lunch and dinner more accessible to those on the go. After looking through everything that HelloFresh offers and what they need to improve, it’s clear to see that this is one of the best meal kit services in Canada. If you’re looking for a quality meal that can be made in less than 20 minutes and eliminates the need for shopping, then HelloFresh is a fantastic service to look into. Get started with HelloFresh today at hellofresh.ca.