Saying bye bye to HelloFresh

You may have seen advertisements and promotions for HelloFresh throughout the internet and were tempted to try it out. The premise behind HelloFresh and similar services is that you can choose what meals you want to cook at home every week and the company sends you the pre-measured ingredients in a box. Touted as easy, affordable, and fresh, it's no surprise that this is an easily marketable and attractive option to many people looking for convenience and trying to limit food waste. But the model doesn’t always work for everyone.

Growing up, my thrifty parents only got what was most affordable and fresh so that it could keep for a long time, not whatever we fancied. Even when we eventually started getting more financially comfortable, their habits never changed, and we always ate what was cheapest at the farmers market. We never planned what we ate because our appetites varied from day to day. We just cooked what we could eat from the list of general ingredients we had. My family also never measured seasonings when it came to cooking, just seasoning based on taste. Many people’s preferences could vary from the tastes of the chefs that tested the recipes beyond just salt and pepper, so there would be waste from excess anyhow.

While HelloFresh may offer the benefit of not having to go grocery shopping, as someone who really likes to snack on food, I would be returning to a grocery or convenience store to purchase snacks or extra meals halfway through the week anyway. If you were going to use another food delivery service for other items instead of going out, you would also have to consider delivery fees or monthly subscriptions as a cost factor, in which case you could just buy all your groceries on that one app as opposed to paying for so many separate services. For some people, that could be too expensive, when they could just buy groceries normally after work because most people have to drive anyway. In that case, HelloFresh may be fine to use when you are at a vacation home and can not keep groceries lying around in the fridge, but probably not as a weekly thing. I think this service is meant for certain types of people but should not be viewed as something that works for everyone nor necessarily sustainable (delivery to your door and packaging when many people drive already). While some people can be organized and plan out exactly what they want to cook for the next week, it is simply not economical or logical for everyone to use HelloFresh.