On the first Tuesday in September there was a box on our front porch when I got home at 4:35, sweating through its cardboard in 92-degree heat. Waylon had been guarding it through the front window for what I assume was several hours. Inside were three dinners, a stack of glossy recipe cards and more ice packs than I knew what to do with.
September is the busiest month of my school year. Open house, the first progress reports, Jack's eighth birthday on the 2nd, a canner full of chow-chow, and Friday football at Nora's new middle school. Every year I tell myself I'm spending too much brainpower on supper, so this year I tested that. From September 2 through the 29th we tried two meal kit services, two weeks each.
I'm not naming them. This isn't an ad, and their prices change every few months anyway. I'll call them the first service and the second service. Both had a four-person plan, and we ordered three dinners a week, which is twelve servings a box.
What it cost
- First service: $10.99 a serving, or $131.88 a box, plus $9.99 shipping. The intro discount took the first box down to about $66. Two boxes with shipping: $217.86.
- Second service: $12.49 a serving, or $149.88 a box, shipping included. The first box was $60 off. Two boxes: $239.76.
- All four weeks: 48 servings for $457.62, about $9.53 a serving with the discounts. At full price it would have been about $12.16.
For comparison, my spreadsheet says our usual weeknight supper runs about $2.25 to $3 a plate. And I still bought groceries for the other four nights, plus breakfasts and lunches, so the kits didn't replace a grocery trip. They added to it.
Time, boxes and leftovers
Every recipe card promised 30 to 35 minutes. I timed all twelve dinners from the moment the bag came out of the fridge to the moment food hit the table. The first service averaged 46 minutes. The second averaged 52, mostly because its recipes used more pans; one pork chop dinner took two skillets, a saucepan and a sheet pan.
That gap isn't anybody lying. A card's time assumes you've read the steps, you know where everything is and you've made the dish before. I see the same thing in cooking lab every year: a group's first time through a recipe takes nearly twice as long as their third, because the third time nobody is hunting for the measuring spoons.
The packaging was the part I didn't expect to mind. Every box came with an insulated liner, two or three gel packs and a pile of small plastic bags, some holding one tablespoon of something. By the end of the month we had eleven ice packs in the chest freezer and a recycling bin that wouldn't close two weeks in a row.
Portions were sized for grown-ups. Jack ate about half of his most nights, so I got a lunch out of most boxes. Ryan, who walks a big plant all day, was making himself a peanut butter sandwich at 8:30 on three different nights. Four servings at our house is really three and a half appetites, and one of them is hungry again by bedtime.
The kids liked it more than I did. Nora read every recipe card out loud like a game-show host and asked if she could plan the October menu. Jack ranked all twelve; nothing got above an 8 except the gnocchi.
Did we keep one?
No. The kits won on Tuesday nights, when not having to decide what to make was worth something real. They lost on cost by a lot, and they didn't save the time they promised. But we kept three recipes, copied onto index cards in my handwriting:
- Lime crema: sour cream, lime zest and juice, a pinch of garlic and salt. It's on every taco night now.
- Sheet-pan gnocchi: the shelf-stable kind, roasted at 425°F with smoked sausage and peppers until the gnocchi crisp on the bottom. Jack gave it a 9.
- Pork chops with a honey-Dijon pan sauce: two minutes in the same skillet after the chops come out. I've made it twice since.
Next up, I went the other direction: on Saturday I priced one 32-item grocery list at three stores in one morning. That one gets its own post later this week.
