Green Chef is a meal kit that ships the ingredients and recipes for dishes to homes. Here’s what I thought about the service and the food.
Oh, meal kits. I love the idea of them, receiving the ingredients and recipes for dishes so all the meal planning is handled. It’s an ingenious service for busy people.
It’s also handy for livening things up when you eat three meals a day at home for months and months and months and just want someone else to handle … something.
Anyway, when an acquaintance offered a discount code for the Green Chef meal kit late last year, I jumped on it. It came highly recommended and I was so ready to have some extra variety in our meals.
Here’s what I knew before it came: Green Chef is a company with a commitment to organic food and good quality ingredients.
Here are my impressions of Green Chef meal kit after receiving several shipments.
What I loved
- Excellent flavors. The recipes I’ve chosen across three shipments have included fish tacos, a truffle pasta dish, falafel and a corn chowder. I’ve selected a mix of fish, beef and chicken dishes as well as plant-based dishes. All were delicious, though I did omit ingredients occasionally, such as finishing sauces my family wasn’t that into. The flavors in each of the dishes have been excellent. Green Chef meal kits are for folks who like creative, adventurous food. Generally, the recipes were good too — very detailed. Still, I disagreed with the instruction ordering in some cases.
- Easy to use website. It was simple to choose the week’s dishes, skip a week or make other adjustments. And Green Chef lets you switch between the three available plans — Balanced Living, Keto + Paleo and Plant-Powered. Although I signed up for the Balanced Living plan, we ordered from the Plant-Powered plan a few times.
- Commitment to sustainability. Unlike other meal services, Green Chef is committed to making sure their packaging doesn’t end up contributing to the waste stream. Much of the packaging can be reused or recycled.
What we didn’t love
- The recipes aren’t for beginners. Novice cooks might find the instructions difficult to follow because they assume you are comfortable multitasking while cooking. Also, I sometimes cooked in a different order than prescribed because it made more sense to me that way.
- Prep often takes longer than you think it will. With rare exception, these recipes required more prep work than expected — and that meant the time to serving was longer than anticipated as well.
- It’s pricey. When you get only two meals for four people or three meals for two people, you pay $10 and up per meal. This is fine if it’s a cost you can absorb. But there are less expensive options. I did, however, find that the meals for two could be stretched to feed three for lunch. This made the service a little more affordable.
Will I keep ordering?
Green Chef has been a good experience, overall. It’s been fun to try new dishes and share the cooking. But the cost is a deterrent. I wish this was slightly less expensive — especially for the plant-based menus.
I have a few more discounts on boxes available, and I intend to use them. I’ve found that ordering three meals for two works better for my family — we use them as lunches for three people or on the nights when there are only two of us home. But that doesn’t exactly make this cost-effective for us.
Green Chef is a for-fun thing for us so I suspect we will remain occasional subscribers. But it’s too pricey to be a regular thing for us.
Interested in trying it? Use this link to get $55 off your first box. Disclosure: I get a discount too if you receive more than one shipment.