Please note: HelloFresh provided us with 4 of their fresh family boxes of food designed for families. It was a Hellofresh free trial to give us the genuine experience and report back. We are not being paid to write this review. The food was free but the opinions expressed in this article are our own and genuine.
Our family has the meal-time mantra ‘We eat a wide and varied diet of food from around the world‘. So when we were approached to trial the HelloFresh boxes over a 4 week period, we jumped at the chance to get some new recipe ideas. These were delivered to our door early on a Monday morning so they were waiting for us when we got up. Each Monday morning my son would race outside to bring the box in and help me unpack.
Our Hellofresh free trial
Here is our review of our Hellofresh free trial experience – our take on the HelloFresh meals & service.
HelloFresh Delivery
I chose the 1am to 7am Hellofresh delivery timeslot because we liked getting up to find the delivery already at our door. I didn’t want to have to wait in for a day time slot – not that you have to, but I like to be home when deliveries arrive. As I said above, my son loved rushing out to see what we received. HelloFresh’s delivery driver also sent me a photo of the box at my front door as proof of delivery.
Families Tip: If you choose the middle of the night delivery option put your phone on silent, lest you be woken up in the night by a text message!
Packaging of HelloFresh
I have heard some complaints about the amount of packaging used in the HelloFresh boxes. Yes, it is true, you will get a box. And it will be insulated with a pure wool (and 100% plant material and biodegradable) insulation wrap. There will also be an ice brick or two to keep food cool. These can be cut open and the water poured on to your garden and the plastic added to your recycle bin. We use the box for craft… and storage…
Families Tip: Facebook groups are a great place to recycle the boxes when people put a shout out for packing boxes when they move house!
What to do with Hellofresh insulation?
We use ours to line our chicken coop’s laying box, underneath the straw. As it is 100% biodegradable so you can put it in your compost bin or directly in the garden, like mulch. You can use it in picnic baskets to keep your food hot or cold as it breathes. You can take it to a local produce store or farmers markets to see if anyone there would like to use it on their farm. Lots of ideas for it!
What’s IN a Hellofresh Family Box?
They say a picture tells a thousand words, but we have gone one better… check out our video:
How long does Hellofresh stay good for?
As you can tell from the video, all the ingredients for the recipes were supplied in great condition. If there are any problems with quality or missing items (we’ve never encountered a problem, but it can happen), get in touch with them to arrange a resupply or credit. The length of time that they ‘stay’ fresh for, will depend on the ingredients. They helpfully mark the recipes ‘eat me early’ which indicates that it contains ingredients that dont have a long shelf life!
Are the Recipes Suitable for Children?
There were five recipes in our boxes each week. There was almost always something with chillies and/or spices in it. We just left the chillies/spices out or separated the portions to have some spicy and some not spicy. I do this anyway when cooking, so this was no real chore. There is a huge variety of recipes.
Families Tip: I keep the recipes that we love in a folder and separate them into: chicken, red meat, pork, seafood, pasta, rice, vegetarian and pizza/burgers/soups/miscellaneous – and you should too!
What Do the Kids Think of HelloFresh?
Here are our 3 top tips from Master 9 when cooking HelloFresh:
How much TIME do you spend planning and shopping for meals?
I genuinely do not like grocery shopping and do a fair bit to avoid it. I buy my bread and milk at the petrol station when I fill up… Here’s a handy infographic showing how much time some Australians spend grocery shopping…
So – IS HelloFresh Worth it for Families?
‘More than two in three Australians (68 percent) said they felt too busy to find meals that their whole family will enjoy and almost half (44 percent) admitted that deciding what to cook was the most common disagreement in their household.’ (HelloFresh survey.)
How do the numbers stack up? The week after we finished our HelloFresh trial, I downloaded the next 5 recipes for 4 people from their website and wrote a shopping list of the ingredients needed to work out the ‘affordability’ of the subscription boxes.
The five meals I shopped for were:
HelloFresh Family Box review
I bought all the ingredients from my usual grocery store – I did not buy the ‘pantry items’ as these are items that you would usually have in your pantry, so not really appropriate to add to this shop. For these meals I obviously needed lamb, chicken x 2, mince and steak. The good quality steak was the most expensive part of the meat purchase at $19.23. The ‘heart smart’ lamb was also pricey at $16.57. I also bought ‘heart smart’ mince – $7.20. HelloFresh provides good quality ingredients so I wanted to match quality in this ‘experiment’.
Total spent on my grocery shopping for these 5 HelloFresh meals was = $93.12
For full disclosure, I did not buy the chillies ($3) or any of the herbs, eg oregano ($3), coriander ($3), mint ($3), rosemary ($3) as I have these growing in my garden at home.
If you need to buy these ADD $15.
Time taken to shop – driving from my home to my nearest grocery store, shop for the items needed and return = 1 hour.
Petrol costs – ?
If you are on average QLD wage ADD $38.46 for your one hour of time.
So – to work out the true cost of buying your own ingredients for the 5 meals for 4 people you will need to take into consideration YOUR hourly rate and what you have growing in your garden and the quality of the ingredients you wish to purchase.
Using the figures above the total cost to purchase what you receive in a HelloFresh box of 5 meals for 4 people would have been = $146.58
How much does Hellofresh cost per month?
To buy a HelloFresh box of 5 recipes and ingredients for 4 people delivered to your door is $7.99 per serving or $159.80 per box.
They also have other sizes and conbinations of boxes available – smaller/different number of people starting at $69.95 (2 people x 3 meals)
How expensive is Hellofresh? Is it worth buying HelloFresh?
The additional $13.22 difference buys you ease, convenience, variety of recipes that you don’t have to think up and that hour of your life each week spent grocery shopping (and how long thinking up recipe ideas and writing the shopping list?)
Our experience of HelloFresh over the four weeks was excellent. It was fun to get the box each Monday morning and the recipes all worked well with our family tastes and interests; we only occasionally had to amend the recipes and sometimes put the sauces/spices ‘on the side’.
Hellofresh Discount Offer
We dont have a free trial for Hellofresh at the moment but if you are keen to give it a try, we DO have a FHelloFresh Discount Code to get $50 off your first box! If you buy the Classic Plan with 3 meals for 2 people (totally feeds 3 people) it works out to be $19.95 for your first box! (and you can cancel at ANY time!)
====> Click here to automatically apply a $50 discount to ANY box of Hello Fresh!
You can pause deliveries if you need to take a break, it’s a great, flexible service.
I highly recommend giving it a try!
Thanks for sharing amazing review
Very informative and great content! Love your experiment and agree that additional $13.22 is worth it… it’s important that people need to remember what they are buying is also the “time” and “convenience” for their busy lifestyle.
Please keep up the great review contents and thanks for sharing!