A meal kit delivery service is a convenient way to improve your cooking skills at home. It helps you learn how to cook multiple recipes and provide you with the ingredients you need without leaving your home. Although they are relatively new to the market, you have plenty of services to choose from if you have money to spend on good food.
Home Chef is one of the popular meal kit delivery services. Like other services, Home Chef aims to make home cooking more entertaining and convenient with plenty of options. But is it worth your money like other more popular services in the market? Are the Home Chef reviews correct regarding the service’s quality? Let’s find out!
What Is Home Chef
Home Chef is a weekly meal kit delivery service created by Pat Vihtetic, CEO. Unlike conventional food delivery services like Grubhub, the goal of the company is to provide users everything they need to make more delicious meals and create beautiful memories during dinners. The service believes cooking and enjoying meals at home should be a simply delicious experience.
Home Chef focuses on simplicity. They make planning and preparing home-cooked meals simple, intuitive, and inspirational. Vihtetic partnered with a chef to design delightful, easy-to-follow recipes in 2013. Over the years, the team has grown and now works with several chefs, together with hundreds of employees.
The service offers recipes that cater to all skill levels and dietary preferences. Recipes rotate every week, giving you more options. You can customize your meals and the serving size to suit your lifestyle and taste. If you want to try out this service, continue reading this article to see if other Home Chef reviews are correct about its quality.
How to Download Home Chef for iOS and Android
The Home Chef app is an easy way to access the features of the service, including your account, subscription, and payment method, among others. Here’s how you can download the app to your mobile device according to its OS.
- Search for Home Chef on Google Play, App Store, your device’s app store.
- Tap on the “Install” or “Get” button and wait for its installation process to finish.
- You may have to enter your passcode or Touch/Face ID to proceed with the download.
- Open the app and sign up.
If you already have an account, tap on the “Log in” option and input your credentials. Otherwise, learn how to creat a Home Chef account in te next section.
How to Make a Home Chef Account
Like other meal kit delivery services, you need to create a Home Chef account to subscribe to its plans. It’s quick and simple. You can do it on its website or the mobile app.
Requirements
When creating an account, Home Chef will require you to provide an email address. For the payment method, the service accepts Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex, and Paypal. You have to enable your chosen payment method for automated subscription purchases.
Home Chef will also ask you to provide your zip code so the system can tell if they deliver in your area. The service currently delivers to 98% of the United States.
Step-by-Step Guide
If you check Home Chef reviews, you’ll know the sign-up process is easy, whether you’re using the browser or the mobile app. Here’s a comprehensive guide to help you get started.
- Go to the Home Chef website or open the app.
- Click on Sign Up or Get Started.
- Enter your email address and proceed to the next page.
- On the “Preferences” page, you have to choose a plan, select your diet (omnivore, carnivore, pescatarian, and vegetarian,) dietary preference, and types of food you want to avoid, such as pork, red meat, and shellfish, among others. Click on “Continue.”
- Select the number of people you’re cooking for and how many times a week you want to receive your package. Click on “Continue.”
- Input your delivery address, contact number, and your preferred first delivery date. Continue to the next page.
- Provide your payment method and check out.
- Finally, select the meals you want to be delivered to your home.
Home Chef Features
Home Chef reviews reveal that the app is a handy tool for users. It helps you access the things you need just with a few taps. The app is packed with features that make your time in the kitchen worthwhile.
Learn New Recipes and Cooking Tips Weekly
To stay true to its goal, Home Chef offers a wide range of recipes to help people improve their cooking skills. You can choose from 13 chef-designed recipes every week. Each recipe comes with easy-to-follow instructions so you won’t feel intimidated, especially if you’re a beginner.
Home Chef also provides cooking tips to further help improve your skills and apply them to the meals you will prepare in the future. Plating photos are available as well to inspire you to plate your finished product beautifully.
Manage Your Weekly Deliveries
The app makes it easier to keep track of your weekly deliveries. It allows you to customize your delivery information and set your preferred delivery schedules. You can also skip a week’s menu at any time.
Review your Meals
Home Chef lets you review the meals you’ve made through the app. Was the meal tasty or bland? Were the ingredients of good quality and portions? Your feedback will go directly to their chefs.
Refer Your Friends
Cooking delicious meals at home is one way to impress your family and friends. They’ll surely ask for the recipes. The Home Chef app allows you to share recipes with your friends and families easily and quickly.
This feature not only lets you share delightful meals with your loved ones. Sharing recipes and influencing your friends to sign up will give you the chance to earn $30 credits on Home Chef with every signup.
Home Chef Menu
What makes Home Chef stand out over the competition is that it offers more options to customers than the leading meal kit delivery services. It also offers more serving size options that are nearly double what you usually find in other services. The service also has a flexible subscription at competitive prices.
It is time for us to take a look and see Home Chef reviews about the service’s menu.
Cost
The price of Home Chef’s meals ranges from $7.49 to $9.94 per serving, depending on the meal. Most of them cost $8.99 per serving. The serving size, however, does not affect the price per serving, which is different from most meal kit delivery services. But Home Chef allows you to choose from two to eight servings. Many services only offer up to four serving sizes.
Home Chef lets you customize some of the meals. You can substitute your protein or upgrade to higher quality meat which may come with extra cost. For example, some meals allow you to switch from ground pork to ground turkey or upgrade a conventional ingredient into an organic option.
On top of the meal price, you also have to pay for a $13.99 shipping fee.
Variety
Compared to other popular meal kit delivery services, Home Chef has more variety on their menu. You can choose from different types of diet, such as Omnivore (you eat everything), Carnivore (you eat meat but not fish), Pescatarian (you eat fish but not meat), and Vegetarian (you don’t eat meat and fish). Other services only have meat and a few vegetarian options.
Home Chef also lets you indicate your dietary preferences, whether you’re calorie- or carb-conscious or both. In case there are types of food you want to avoid, like pork, soy, wheat, mushrooms, milk, red meat, shellfish, and nuts, you can also indicate that when signing up.
Home Chef leans toward American favorites, such as burgers, meatballs, and grilled chicken. The vegetarian options are also limited so it’s not ideal if you’re planning to fill up your box with only vegetarian meals.
The weekly meals include a preview card of every meal with a photo and cost per serving. Home Chef lists down the allergens at the bottom of the card for your reference. You can also see the estimated time for preparation and cooking together with an indication of whether the meal is “Calorie Conscious” or “Carb Conscious.” The card can also have color-coded tags that indicate if the meal is grill-ready, oven-ready, ready in 15, for a slow cooker, or heat and eat.
If you want to monitor your diet, you can use apps like Noom and Lose It!, to help you stay fit. These apps are specifically designed to calculate the nutrition you get from the food you eat.
How to Use Home Chef
Home Chef is easy to use and straightforward. On the main page of the app, you find the week’s recipes as a sliding carousel. You can add or change to fit your needs. If you want to access the recipes you have cooked or favorited, you can go to the “My Cookbook” tab. Meanwhile, the “My Account” tab is where you can change settings, contact customer service, and pause your account.
If this is your first time using the service, here’s a guide on how it works. Be sure you’ve already signed up so you can start exploring Home Chef.
Step 1: Pick Your Meals
Once you have an account, you can now select the meals you want. You can choose meals that fit your preferences and dietary restrictions from the weekly menu. Home Chef can give you suggestions, but you can choose your own.
Step 2: Personalize Your Plate
Home Chef has a Customize feature that allows you to alter your meals, like upgrading, swapping, or doubling your protein. This feature, however, only applies to select recipes.
Step 3: Wait for Your Meal Kit Delivery
After selecting your meals, Home Chef will deliver your kits to your home on your preferred delivery date. You will receive almost all the ingredients fresh and pre-portioned, together with the recipe cards that have the step-by-step instructions.
Home Chef packs the kits in a big cardboard box lined with recycled fiber insulation in a plastic bag. They also come with gel packs to keep the ingredients fresh. You can recycle the box and the insulation on the curbside, depending on where you live.
The ingredients, except the raw meats, come in zippered plastic bags with handles that you can easily fit in your fridge. Home Chef vacuum-seals the raw meats and places them in a large zippered bag. These plastic packages are reusable when you wash them. Using paper packing, however, would have been more environmentally friendly.
Step 4: Cook and Dig In
When cooking, the step-by-step recipe cards are easy to follow. But it would still depend on your cooking experience. Home Chef indicates the level of difficulty of each meal on the recipe card. Some recipes tagged as “Intermediate” are easy enough for beginners. The instructions are clear and not confusing so you can follow properly.
The meal kits usually don’t come with olive oil, salt, and pepper. But these ingredients are kitchen staples so you probably have them in your pantry already.
With this part finished, you may now have a clear idea of whether the Home Chef reviews are true. Continue reading to see more factors that can convince you to subscribe.
Pros and Cons of Subscribing to Home Chef
All meal kit delivery services have their own advantages and disadvantages. These factors will help you see how the service performs compared to other services in the market. Are Home Chef reviews correct? Here are the pros and cons of the Home Chef.
Pros
- Offers a flexible plan
- Serving size options for up to eight people
- Allows users to upgrade, swap, or double the protein
- Delicious and easy-to-follow recipes
- Reusable packaging
Cons
- Limited vegetarian options
- Lack of options for vegan, keto, and other restricted diets
- Extra cost for organic, antibiotic-free, wild-caught meats
- Use of plastics
Home Chef vs Competitors
You can find many meal kit delivery services in the market today. But what makes Home Chef stand out over its top competitors? Here are some meal delivery services that are often compared on Home Chef reviews.
Blue Apron
Blue Apron is one of the most popular meal kit delivery services in the US. It offers flexible plans and a wide variety of chef-designed recipes that come with easy-to-follow instructions. They provide sustainably sourced ingredients but not everything is organic.
The meals cost around $9.99 per serving, depending on the number of servings. Unlike Home Chef, Blue Apron only offers serving sizes for two and four people. The meals are divided between the Signature (includes meat, fish, Beyond Meat, diabetes-friendly, and recipes for health-conscious) and Vegetarian.
HelloFresh
HelloFresh is another popular meal kit delivery service like Home Chef. It also has flexible plans that allow you to cancel your subscription at any time. The service has a wide range of delicious and easy recipes. It provides 20 recipes to choose from every week, and each recipe contains nutritional information.
The meals cost $8.99 per serving, but the price goes down for bigger serving sizes. You can choose recipes for two or four people only. The serving also lets you choose up to four recipes per week. HelloFresh’s menu has five types of meals: Meat and Veggies, Veggie, Calorie Smart, Family Friendly, and Time Savers.
Plated
Plated is an ideal meal kit delivery service for individuals looking for something that caters to more dietary preferences. Their recipes feature meat, vegetables, and seafood. You can select meals that are gluten-free, under 600 calories, low-carbs, and short preparation time.
The meals cost from $9.95 to $11.95, depending on the serving size. You can choose up to four servings and four nights a week. Plated provides 20 recipes per week. The kits also come with recipe cards that you can keep and use again later.
Home Chef is an excellent choice for a meal kit delivery service regardless of your experience in the kitchen. It allows you to enjoy familiar yet flavorful recipes and gives you control over the meals. If you want organic, antibiotic-free meats, however, you need to pay extra per serving. This may cost you more than subscribing to other services that use such meats by default.
