Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Blue Apron? Plated? Peach Dish, Just Add Cooking or Hello Fresh? And How About That Marley Spoon? And the Latest on Green Chef and Purple Carrot

Updated December 5, 2018 - If you don't want to read through this whole post (what follows is a lengthy discussion of my own experimentation with these services), we recommend Purple Carrot and Blue Apron wholeheartedly with Marley Spoon, Green Chef, and Hello Fresh as close seconds. We have tried at leat eight of the services available for delivery in New England, including Blue Apron. NEWS** SunBasket was out and we tried it May 22, 2016.  Not impressed. Think we need to stay away from any service with the word "paleo" in the choices.

RECYCLING NEWS** Blue Apron has postage -free recycling - print your label and schedule a USPS (US Postal Service pickup).  SunBasket has UPS free pickup and return of recycled boxes and fillers IF you don't have recycling in your area. The both accept clean, full, defrosted ice packs by return. It looks like Hello Fresh, Green Chef. Others, like Purple Carrot have all begun recycling efforts in the ensuing years since I wrote this article. 

Here's a link to an interesting article with some comments that resonate with others about the carbon footprint that results from these food services. In defense, I wasted a lot more food, actual food, when we weren't using these services. Let's face it, most of us don't buy three stalks of asparagus, 1/4 of a red cabbage, two tablespoons of demi-glace. One comment claims that a cookbook and a farmer's market will do the same for you for 1/5 the price. Au contraire, I say. We use the boxes over and over for storage, for transport, etc. Yes, we do throw some of the cardboard in recycling, but we throw a ton more away at my place of work than I do at home. The ice packs are used over and over when I bring food elsewhere. I think if you live life wisely (and perhaps raising your own food, slaughtering your own animals, and canning and preserving every morsel is the wisest but totally impractical for my family), this service can actually reduce the carbon footprint that others are complaining about.

We've recently been addicted to Purple Carrot. Go figure! We are carnivores but we love the three nights of vegan meals. The taste? Amazing. The ingredients? Very varied and experimental for us. The health? Go, Purple Carrot! One of my colleagues is vegan and she was so excited to try this because she spent so much money and time planning her weekly menus. I figured I'd give it a try to include more legumes and other foods that we didn't include in our diet. So far, after a few months? We are exclusively Purple Carrot three days a week. It's a bit more expensive, but delicious and healthy. It does have an Asian focus, but many of the food services do. You can choose between Chef's Choice, Hi-Protein or Quick and Easy. We choose Chef's Choice. They are all $12 per meal ($72 a week.) You also have the Tom Brady TB12 meals for $13 per meal (high-performance.) We are stickin' to Chef's Choice and we love them.

These are older updates:
For quality, price, taste, and wholesomeness, we do still feel loyal to Blue Apron for carnivores and pescivores.  For awhile, we mixed it up and ordered in a four-week pattern from one or the other. (Blue Apron one week, Marley Spoon the next week, Green Chef the third week, and Hello Fresh the fourth).

Note that they all have their strengths: Peach Dish has a terrific southern style, Just Add Cooking is local to Boston, Marley Spoon has some great ingredients, Hello Fresh lists allergens and removes most of them from their recipes (gluten and nuts, for instance), and Green Chef used all organic ingredients. Sun Basket offers paleo options. However, Blue Apron is consistently good, especially for the price, recipe cards, and packing.

At first, I was reluctant to sign up for Blue Apron, a home-cooked meal delivery service that a half-dozen of my colleagues had subscribed to last summer, 2014. I dug in my heels and said, "What? Why?" Gerry likes to shop daily, after all. We both love to cook.  Why did we need a service to choose our meals and send us food?

Well, one night in the fall of 2014, Gerry (who up until now has planned meals during the week; I planned weekend meals) was especially uninspired. He brought home a small jar of ordinary pasta sauce and a box of store-brand spaghetti from the grocery story. For dinner. That's it. No fresh herbs. No unusual spices. No greens. And certainly no fresh vegetables.


At this point, I thought, "Blue Apron might spice things up for us."

I asked my colleagues to send me an invitation from Blue Apron (a free week of meals.) The price? From their website: "Our 2-Person Plan consists of one delivery a week, with three inventive meals perfectly portioned for two. Each week our culinary team creates six new recipes for this plan, and you will be sent a curated menu of three of these recipes based on your dietary preferences. The price for this plan is $9.99 per serving, or $59.94 per six serving delivery. Shipping is always free."

From the first meal, we were hooked and Gerry and I have been singing the praises of Blue Apron ever since.

What do we like? We don't have to shop for ingredients for at least three nights of our weekly meals.  We know what is coming in advance and can plan the week. We love the delicious meals and different recipes using interesting, fresh ingredients, sauces, demiglaces, and herbs and spices. We haven't had a repeat in four + months. (*That's now over 20 months.) We like cooking with more vegetables than meat. We like that nothing is wasted.  We love that we can sometimes add more meat or starch (depending on the recipe) and share it with our grandson, Colin, when he is home for dinner. We reuse the plastic bags and bottles, the boxes, the ice packs and insulated liners, to transfer ingredients to our Marion house for the weekends or for our trips to Princeton to visit Beth and  Rob. I can prepare the ingredients for dinner in the morning and Gerry can cook and plate at night. What's not to love!

So, what's the great debate? Isn't it too expensive? Read here about Blue Apron's rationale that it is far cheaper to let them choose and deliver food that you would pay more for in the store. We wholeheartedly believe it.

We've often wished we had more than three nights of dinners. We signed Gerry up for an account for several weeks so that we had meals for four. (*Update, of course, is that Marley Spoon and Hello Fresh have options for more meals per week.)

We love the recipes. We've used the recipe for their Pappardelle Bolognese over and over for weeknight dinners. The only dinners we haven't been as excited about are those using bread - tortillas, subs, sliced bread.  I suggest making your Blue Apron bread meal the first of your week or buying fresh bread in advance and tossing theirs in the freezer for croutons or emergencies. (Although tortillas, baguettes and pita bread can be warmed in the oven and taste fresh.)

We've had several of our friends and family sign up and we are encouraging a few more. (By the summer of 2016, this is well over a dozen.)

So, we were simply sold on Blue Apron but do wonder if the competition will outrun them in the future with so many choices.

This is the disclaimer narrative for Blue Apron service that was frustrating for a short time: The Blizzard in February 2015.  Blue Apron's delivery service, LaserShip out of Woburn, MA, went down the tubes after it started to snow. We missed our delivery entirely the week of the Blizzard which was, of course, a no-brainer during the worst week of the year when the Governor asked us to stay off the roads. We understood it.  That week. But the next week, we sadly received our Blue Apron after 10 pm on Wednesday, the day we planned to cook. It actually was delivered sometime in the night; the tracking information was a bit sketchy. The next week, our Blue Apron wasn't delivered at all, that is until it showed up 5 days later, obviously left on some neighbor's porch by Laser Ship. The problem was that the neighbors left it in their house for days, warming up before they delivered it to our front porch. The fish stank; we couldn't trust the meat because everything had been unrefrigerated since the day it was supposed to be delivered - Wednesday. And this was Monday. Yikes. I don't think so.

And so, we let Blue Apron know. In praise of them, we didn't have to pay for the non-delivery or the late ones.  But we'd grown to rely on the box arriving by dinnertime. Update! They changed our delivery service to us to FedEx and we had no problems last week. Second week? Not so great. They delivered a day later than the Wednesday delivery I ordered. Next and subsequent weeks? Delivery in the middle of the day on Wednesday, on the side porch, with no fail! (We did have a blip in the hot month of August 2015 and we put deliveries on hold for a few weeks which worked out because I was off taking care of my granddaughters in August and September.)

However, in frustration during the winter of 2014, we decided to try PeachDish, out of Atlanta. I had to laugh the day it arrived (before the dinner hour) when I tracked the delivery and found out it would be delivered by none other than ... LaserShip out of Woburn. But it arrived by 7 pm the day it was supposed to.

PeachDish tries hard.  It is more expensive. From the PeachDish website: A standard PeachDish box includes two servings of two of our weekly meals for $50—that’s $12.50 per serving. Subscribers can add additional servings, up to eight servings per delivery. There's a price break for higher quantities; for example, two meals for four people is $90, or $11.25 per person. PeachDish will send you everything that you need to cook the meals that you have ordered. Subscribers always get free shipping!)

So, we tried PeachDish off and on for a few months. We found the food quality good, but nothing more special than the others, really. The vegetables actually don't stay as fresh for some reason. We ended up with waste. Several layers of a head of Radicchio ended up in the compost.  The recipe called for only 1/4 of the large onion. We found we needed to add more water than was called for. I ended up steaming the grated sweet potato because I just didn't like it raw. The recipe cards for PeachDish are substandard compared to Blue Apron's clear, concise, illustrated cards. In actuality, PeachDish photos are kinda unappetizing. The ingredients for each meal, however, come in a pretty tuile bag and the insulated box is pretty cool. I reused to tuile bags to give baby clothes as gifts!  The second week's menu was better than the first.  Catfish and mashed sweet potatoes seasoned with a very cool little jug of sorghum. The side dish was collard greens (a bit too many) and there was a sweet little jar of habanero pickles for garnish. The other recipe was a kielbasa, cabbage and potato soup which was good but a bit ordinary for me. (I raised my girls for twenty years on a soup just like it!) (We stopped using PeachDish last summer (2015) because their meals were arriving slow and not as cold as we would have liked.)

All, in all though, I think Blue Apron  has it on PeachDish but it is a close second for quality and taste.

We also tried Hello Fresh this winter. For months I was not impressed and stopped experimenting with them even though, sometimes it's nice to mix things up. They throw in packets of mustard, bouillon, etc. instead of the cool additives that Blue Apron  includes in their nifty bags of Knick-knacks. (BlueApron's attention to quality is excellent.) We've found HelloFresh food just good, not great, at best. It's just nothing special. They throw peeled garlic cloves in the bag, whereas Blue Apron includes a whole bulb (useful if you like more garlic, as we do.) The recipe cards for HelloFresh are different sizes which irritates me for some strange reason (I am a librarian and addicted to order and consistency.) The photos are okay - the cards are small and the directions are not very explicit. Gerry pointed out one such issue one night because it didn't tell him to remove the cooked vegetables from the pan but said "set aside." Those kinds of details are just much more detailed and explicit in BlueApron. *Update January 2016: Hello Fresh has really made some improvements and we are liking them better and better. For one thing, they list all allergens and are sometimes gluten-free. 

HelloFresh is more expensive than Blue Apron: from their website - 3 Classic Meal Box for 2 is $69, and a Vegetarian Box for 2 is $59. You have more choices (choose from about five or six entrees per week) and it's easy to choose meals for two or four, depending on your week. Hello Fresh is $84.90 for a 2-person, 4-meal box or $10.75 per meal.

Hello Fresh boxes the entire meal (except meat) in a nice, breathable, stackable box (this is new). So does PeachDish (they bag the meals individually in those cool tuile bags.)  Blue Apron just fills their boxes with the assorted ingredients. That said, I know that I get a lot of satisfaction unpacking all those ingredients and the knick-knack bags are separately labeled and sorted so they make it easy. HelloFresh delivers through UPS and the boxes come on time and on the day scheduled.

We have also tried Just Add Cooking, a Dorchester, MA company, but it's significantly more
expensive for only three meals (five meals is $99 which is equivalent in price to Blue Apron and the foods are local to the Boston area. One of the things that is annoying about their site is finding the pricing. It's $79 for three meals for 2, $89 for four meals for 2, $99 for five meals for 2.) They only deliver on Sundays between 12 and 6 and we need to be home Sunday night to bring the box in.  This might not always work.

We began subscribing to Marley Spoon in September of 2015 and we did love it for several months, ordering every fourth week or so.  They use tons of ingredients. The dinners come pre-bagged in paper (with meat, fish, poultry, and cheeses below the ice) and I like that feature because I can easily stack them in the frig. There are six choices per week and you can choose 3, 4, 5, or 6 meals. Marley Spoon is the a bit less expensive than Blue Apron.  A 2-person, 4 meal week is $76.00 (which is $9.50 per meal.) The recipe cards are clear and the ingredients are great. We still prefer Blue Apron but we sometime you might like to mix it up.  We like the 6 meal option per week, similar to Hello Fresh, should we choose to have meals planned every night.

We have liked Green Chef, especially because they use ALL organic ingredients. The meals are delicious, the menus great, and all in all - they are even-Steven with the rest. Check out their website for prices, though, because they are more expensive than the rest. We like the plastic jars that ingredients come in and things like salsa are already pre-cut and mixed.


I've looked into Plated but they only deliver to our area on Fridays. That won't work for us because we often leave Norwood at 5 pm and we don't want the box sitting on the porch for the weekend.

Watch for updates in this post. I have recently (July 2015) cancelled all other services. If you choose to mix them up and work with multiple compannies, the trick is making sure that your deliveries are all coordinated and shipping or skipping at the right time. For a librarian, this works with my OCD nature and my Google calendar. Go figure. But even I make mistakes!

There are a couple other regional services like HomeChef but Boston is not included in the service area yet. ChefDay from New York City is on hiatus.

Here are some great articles to read if you are considering signing up for one of these services although they've been around for awhile. I'm sure there are more reviews out there as the options become greater.

Forbes - The Swedish Meal Kit that Inispired ...
The Kitchn.com Review of Blue Apron
Money Under 30.com: Blue Apron vs Hello Fresh and Is It Worth the Cost
Inside Kitchen Testing Food Delivery Services
Healthy Home Cooking Reviews the Services
LearnVest.com: Is Subscription Food Delivery Worth the Money?
LifeHacker.com: the Best Meal Kit Services
Business Insider: Blue Apron StartUp Review
The Savory.com - Plated vs Blue Apron
Money Under 30 - Blue Apron vs Plated vs Hello Fresh