Hello Fresh Vs Blue Apron Reddit

Cooking three meals a day can be a job in itself. To save time in the kitchen, some busy people order takeout, some look to devices like slow cookers and pressure cookers, and others try home-delivery meal services.

If you decide on the home-delivery route, you have to then decide which meal service to go with. With so many options now available, factors like price, delivery schedules, dietary needs, and taste (of course) all come into play. To help give you a better understanding of what these meal-delivery services are all about, we compared two of the most popular options, Hello Fresh and Blue Apron.

Which meal service should you choose? The side-by-side comparison below provides an in-depth explanation of each service, including price comparisons, food and diet options, food quality, shipping, and taste.

Hello Fresh Vs. Blue Apron

Obviously, the biggest question when shopping for a meal kit is “Is the food any good?” Both of these services have tickled our tastebuds, but there are some nuanced differences between the recipes they feature week to week.

In our experience, Blue Apron recipes feel like they’d be right at home at a hip bistro. Think classic flavors with a gourmet twist. Blue Apron recipes often feature at least one unexpected ingredient or combination that we’ve never tried before. We’ve made bowls of classic Italian gnocchi topped with fresh roasted corn, baked chicken coated in harissa sauce, and stir-fry mixed with coin-shaped Korean rice cakes. The recipes are usually just as easy to whip up, but the unique flavors are a bit more tuned to adventurous palates.

With Hello Fresh, the feeling is a more healthful “cozy cafe” than “chic new restaurant”.

 You’ll still get new, exciting ingredients (like za’atar spices and hazelnut crumbles) and out-of-the-ordinary combinations (like yellow squash flatbreads and wonton pasta), but the resulting dishes strike us as slightly more playful and family-friendly compared to the culinary vibes we get from Blue Apron.

Blue Apron does do some cool partnerships, creating limited-edition recipes with celebrities like Chrissy Teigen, programs like Whole30, and even the show Bob’s Burgers!

Hello Fresh Vs Blue Apron Vs Plated

1. There are no single-person options.
2. Their pricing is basically the same.

The pricing is slightly higher with Blue Apron, but they also offer free shipping. HelloFresh has a “Veggie Plan,” but Blue Apron has “Vegetarian options available.” Both companies know their customer.

And knowing their customer, they don’t offer a solo meal—they know there is no money in it.

Our data from 4,219 current, former, or prospective customers of Blue Apron and HelloFresh shows that the median weekly willingness to pay for a single individual is just $29.86. The lowest price for a Blue Apron meal kit (two recipes for two people) is almost double that at $47.95. The lowest price they push new subscribers to, the $59.94 shown above, is double the solo willingness to pay.

CAC and overhead are high for home meal-delivery kits. As the market becomes crowded, Blue Apron, HelloFresh, and all the others have to spend more to acquire customers. The high expense also requires more motivation. These companies are increasing that motivation by pitching their services as entertainment rather than just a meal. You can get a meal anywhere, but great recipes and enjoyment through cooking can come only with Blue Apron or HelloFresh as far as these companies are concerned.

The overhead of food preparation, packaging, and shipping is also high.

CAC and overhead together mean that there is a high floor to the lowest price these companies can charge. Single people fall below that floor.

Additional data points support the idea that there is a highly specific ideal customer for companies offering home meal-delivery kits. Looking at the willingness to pay based on annual income, we can see that, relative to the median, this is much lower for those earning less than $75k per year.

Once into the $100k-plus brackets, willingness to pay shoots up. We can also see a pattern in the relative willingness to pay based on age, though an inverse correlation.

Older cohorts have a lower willingness to pay. We see this all the time in pricing-page teardowns. Rent the Runway and Spotify—older generations aren’t used to the concept of subscriptions for everything. They don’t see the benefits, so they have a lower willingness to pay.

From these three data points—family size, income, and age—you can see that the ideal customers for home meal-delivery kits are families and young couples with incomes over 100k. These are the types of people who (a) don’t necessarily have the time to shop and cook throughout the week and (b) have the money to continually subscribe to the kits. With these customers, Blue Apron and HelloFresh can recover CAC quickly and use higher pricing to offset overhead.

Blue Apron Vs Hello Fresh Reddit

Options for those with dietary limitations: There are vegetarian options, and three vegetarian recipe options are included in the classic plan each week, so you can order a vegetarian meal plan. You can find some meals that happen to be gluten-free or dairy-free (and are labeled accordingly), but Hello Fresh does not have plans that are specifically designed for customers with these dietary restrictions.

Food selection, variety, and quality:

Hello, Fresh has a team of chefs and dietitians who create new recipes each week. They also include “Hall of Fame” recipes that customers enjoyed from past weeks. The meals are generally healthy and nutritionally balanced, and you can easily access the nutrition information for any of the meals. But, Hello Fresh is not a diet plan like Nutrisystem, so the focus is more on good food than it is on weight loss or dieting. Customers do have the option to choose the calorie smart plan, which includes healthier meals that are typically around 650 calories.

Not all of their ingredients are organic, but there appears to be an emphasis on using quality ingredients.

Packaging and shipping: Hello Fresh assumes customers have salt, pepper, sugar, oil, and butter already on hand, so they don’t include those ingredients in the metal box. The company pre-portions and packs the ingredients for each meal in individual kits, and packs the refrigerated products with food-safe materials (insulating liners, gel packs, and cooling material) that keep the ingredients fresh. Each meal also includes a recipe card with very easy step-by-step instructions, nutritional information, and an ingredients list.

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Hello Fresh charges $7 for shipping, and on your delivery day, there’s a window between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. when your meals will arrive.

Taste and meal preparation: The recipes we tried — figgy balsamic pork and beef rice noodle bowls — were both very tasty and very easy to prepare. It took 38 minutes to prepare the pork recipe and 32 minutes to prepare the noodle bowls (including reading the recipe and getting the kitchen prepared with all of the necessary pans and utensils).

Based on reviews from Consumer Affairs and social media sites, the overall consensus from customers is that the meals taste very good and the preparation is pretty painless. However, there are different levels of meals, ranging from Level 1 to Level 3. Level 1 meals are easy to prepare and use familiar ingredients, while Level 3 meals use more advanced cooking techniques and ingredients.