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Where HelloFresh tends to work best for me is eating three or four meals a week. This makes it a fun treat on dreary days when meal planning seems impossible. Spending $80 a week on three meals for two will prevent me from spending $60 on one desperate (average) DoorDash meal. And unlike DoorDash, when I finish cooking a Thai spiced green curry on the stove, I actually feel a sense of accomplishment.
The problem, in the past, was that meal kits often repeated menus, or looked fairly similar. In 2020, when I used the service to keep myself from getting too bored during the pandemic, HelloFresh was also a bit boring. But these days, HelloFresh isn’t boring unless you want it to be. Among the nearly 500 meal options are basic burgers, wraps and salads, along with many of the culinary wonders of the known world.
Photo: Matthew Corvage
Last week, I made Gambian peanut stew, Thai green curry shrimp, North African-influenced ras el hanout lamb, Tex-Mex chicken enchiladas, American-Chinese ginger-garlic-scallion stir-fry steak, and Lebanese-marinated white barramundi. No meal took more than 45 minutes to prepare and cook. And with the exception of enchiladas, I probably wouldn’t make any of them myself if I didn’t have these neat little bags of ingredients in my fridge.
That’s the promise of meal kits like HelloFresh. It’s a manageable vision of domesticity—one that involves preparing a well-designed meal without actually doing the work of envisioning it.
Options, options, options
HelloFresh is a global meal kit, available in 18 countries in the global north and west (plus Australia). While reviewing the meal kit last year, I wrote that what HelloFresh did best was the ability to produce a bright, versatile menu that resonates with modern palates: Latin rice bowls with very American steak, beef stir-fry with ponzu and prunes, Turkish chickpea bowls, and maybe some mango salsa over obscure Southwestern roast pork. “that it Alison Roman “The world. We all live in it,” she wrote.
With the latest update to HelloFresh, you can still find this version of HelloFresh if you want. But honestly, there are so many options, it’s possible that no two people will ever enter the same HelloFresh world. Vegetarian alternatives, including Impossible Beef and the ubiquitous tofu, are going wild. There are nearly 20 couscous dishes on the May 11 menu, ranging from “grass-fed salmon” to “pork chops.” If I wanted, I could order vegetarian black bean couscous and put 5 ounces of turkey or beef in each serving, for $2.