Food is important to most people — whether we eat to live or live to eat and whether we travel or stay home — and it can be purchased in a variety of ways. This article focuses on meal subscription boxes — both vegan and non-vegan — but which ones offer the best value in the United States and the United Kingdom?
Which Meal Subscription Boxes Offer the Best Value in the United States and the United Kingdom?
All the recipes available online for each meal subscription box were collected to find the ingredients and portions. Boxes were standardized by taking the price charged for four meals for two people — or eight portions. The prices of those ingredients were then cross-referenced against a popular local supermarket chain in each country. Using this information, the difference between the average cost of ingredients and the amount charged for the subscription box was calculated. The results were then ranked by the difference in price; and then by the cost of the ingredients.
The data was collected in August of 2021 and September of 2021.
I have been given express written permission to use the images and the verbatim text from this article pertaining to which meal subscription boxes have the best value in the United States and the United Kingdom — which was written by Mikaela Sullivan for Top Dollar — by using graphics to compare the prices and by imparting interesting statistics. While Top Dollar has endeavored to ensure the information provided is accurate and current, it cannot guarantee it. Neither Top Dollar nor The Gate accept liability for the information which is presented in this article.
Frugal Foodie: Which Meal Subscription Boxes Have the Best Value?
Cooking is one of life’s simple pleasures.
Deciding what to eat, hauling groceries from the store, and figuring out how to smush them together into something edible (let alone delicious)? Those aspects are not such a pleasure. Not after a hard day’s work, anyway…
Luckily, we live in the future now. A meal subscription box is like a 3D printer for restaurant-style home food. You just tap your preferences into your computer, pay your fees, and wait for a weekly recipe box to arrive with precise ingredients for you to piece together calmly.
But some recipes burn a hole in your wallet more than others. That’s why Top Dollar opened up the box to see what really comes with your subscription, assessing the US and UK meal boxes that cost the least and those that offer the most value compared to buying the ingredients separately.
The Cheapest and Best Value Meal Boxes in the US
We collected all the recipes available online for each meal box company and added up the cost of the ingredients if bought at a popular local supermarket chain. Then we averaged out the price and cost for each subscription company. Each figure is equal to 4 meals for 2 people (i.e. 8 portions) as standard.
EveryPlate prides itself on being “affordable for everyone.” And its box is not just the cheapest in our study, it also provides the best value. With an EveryPlate meal, you’re paying an average of just $12.76 on top of the cost price. At the other end of the scale, the separate ingredients in a Sunbasket vegan meal box cost just $3 more than EveryPlate’s – but the box itself costs more than twice as much (Sunbasket $95.92 vs. EveryPlate $39.92).
However, these two companies are playing to different markets, as the recipe names suggest. Compare, for example, chicken sausage penne with pink sauce plus zucchini and melty mozzarella (EveryPlate) to mushroom tostadas with pinto beans and cabbage slaw (Sunbasket).
EveryPlate reputedly delivers simple, satisfying after-school dinners, while Sunbasket offers chic, healthy, organic meals with a wide range of dietary options. You’re also paying a slight exclusivity premium with Sunbasket – the price tag itself lends a feeling of luxury.
Dinnerly is price-positioned as an alternative to EveryPlate, but nearly half of what you pay for Dinnerly disappears before you even get to the first ingredient. Green Chef and Purple Carrot offer vegan boxes to rival Sunbasket’s price, and you get a few extra bucks’ worth of food for your outlay.
Mindful Chef and Riverford Battle for UK’s Top Premium Recipe Box
Meal box firms are prospering in the UK, despite recent Brexit/Covid-led stock availability challenges. Lockdown boredom drove Brits into the kitchen, their consciences eased by studies showing that meal boxes can have a lighter impact on the environment than store-bought groceries. (The supply chain of the food itself offsets the additional packaging that some subscriptions include.)
HelloFresh, the owner of US company EveryPlate, offers both the best value and the lowest prices in our UK study. However, Gousto is second-placed for both cost and value, and there is just £3 price difference between the companies, and just over £4 difference in value. Gousto’s biryani is “a comforting b*****d, and ready in an astonishing 35 minutes,” according to the Guardian.
At the deluxe end of the UK recipe box market, FeastBox charges £60 for ingredients that cost less than HelloFresh. With that in mind, it’s worth paying three or four pounds extra to get around 30% more ingredients from Mindful Chef or Riverford.
Mindful Chef’s unique selling point is a focus on nutritional planning, social responsibility, and “recycled denim insulation.” Yum! (No, really, though – it’s also “delicious and unusual.”) Riverford, meanwhile, is an employee-owned, farming-oriented cooperative that initially emerged to deliver simple veggie and grocery boxes, before later diversifying into meal subscriptions. Riverford also offers the best-value vegan recipe box.
Boxing Clever
There are undoubted pleasures in the meal subscription box: the unboxing, the presentation, the ease of preparation, and – if you follow the instructions! – the restaurateur levels of achievement unlocked with that delicious first bite.
But the costs are significantly higher than shopping for the ingredients alone. And if it’s sometimes nice to “buy off” the time you’d need to spend trawling grocers for bits and pieces, remember once in a while to ask yourself: what are you really spending your hard-earned cash to buy off? Isn’t the pleasure sometimes in the hunt?
Well, sometimes.
If you’re interested in a quick informative snack, why not browse the table below to see if you discover something appetizing?
Final Boarding Call
I have never ordered a subscription for boxes of meals; so I am personally not knowledgeable about this topic. I prefer my meals to be cooked fresh — using ingredients selected by me — or to simply patronize a local restaurant or delicatessen.
Have you ever ordered a subscription for boxes of meals? If so, please impart your experience in the Comments section below. Thank you in advance.
Photograph ©2017 by Brian Cohen.
