Where HelloFresh tends to work best for me is at the three or four meals a week mark. This leaves it as a fun treat on dreary days when doing my own meal planning seems impossible. Spending $80 a week on three meals for two will stop me from blowing $60 on a single (mediocre) desperation DoorDash. And as opposed to DoorDash, when I’m done cooking a Thai-spiced green curry on my stovetop, I actually feel a sense of accomplishment.
The problem, in the past, was that meal kits too often repeated menus, or felt a little samey. In 2020, when I used the service to stop myself from being bored to tears during the pandemic, HelloFresh was also a little boring. But these days, HelloFresh is not boring unless you want it to be. Among the nearly 500 meal options are basic burgers, wraps, and salads, along with many culinary wonders of the known world.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Last week I made Gambian peanut stew, Thai green curry shrimp, North African-influenced ras el hanout beef, nostalgically Tex-Mex chicken enchiladas, American-Chinese ginger-garlic-scallion steak stir fry, and earthy Lebanese-spiced barramundi whitefish. No meal took more than 45 minutes to prep and cook. And except for the enchiladas, I probably would not have made any of them myself if I hadn’t had these nifty little bags of ingredients in my fridge.
This is the promise of meal kits like HelloFresh. It’s a manageable vision of domesticity—one that involves you making a well-conceived meal without actually doing the work of, well, conceiving it.
Options, Options, Options
HelloFresh is a worldly meal kit, available in 18 countries across mostly the global North and West (plus Australia). While reviewing the meal kit last year, I wrote that what HelloFresh had mastered best was the ability to produce a bright, lightly internationalized menu in tune with modern tastes: pan-Latin rice bowls with a very American fetish for steak, beef stir-fried with ponzu and plum, Turkish chickpea bowls, maybe some mango salsa atop a vaguely Southwest-y pork roast. “It’s an Alison Roman world,” I wrote. “We’re all just living in it.”
With HelloFresh’s newest update, you can still find this version of HelloFresh if you want it. But honestly, there are so many options it’s possible that no two people step into the same HelloFresh universe. Vegan substitutions, including Impossible beef and tofu everywhere, run wild. There are roughly 20 couscous dishes on the May 11 menu, ranging from “herby salmon” to “trattoria pork chops.” If I want, I can order a vegan black bean couscous and put 5 ounces of turkey or beef in each serving, for a $2 premium.
