Review: Hello Fresh recipe delivery service

A little voucher arrived with our latest Amazon delivery offering us £25 of our first Hello Fresh fresh recipe meal box. The box costs £39 a week so it was a bit of a no brainer to give it a try for the severely reduced price of £14.

The concept is pretty simple. You are delivered a selection of fresh recipe ingredients with easy step my step instruction sheets. You follow the recipe to create home cooked meals from scratch without having to do the shopping, measuring or weighing.

Several box options are available and opted for the three meal for two persons box which is a standard cost of £39 including delivery (approx £13 per meal for two). You can choose to have your box delivered on Tuesday or Thursday and if you don't like the sound of a particular recipe then this box option allows you to meal swap up to two of the dishes for alternatives.

The box arrived as expected on Thursday by courier and it was very sturdy looking.

Upon opening the contents were separated with the fresh veg and cupboard items on one side and a cool pack on the other containing meat and fish items.

The food all seemed high quality with fresh, crisp veg and lovely fresh herbs. The meat also looked good with long use by dates on so we could spread the meals throughout the week.

All the little bits and bobs like stock cubes, sauces and nuts etc were collated together in a little bag. This was the only down point as the pot of sweet chilli sauce had leaked and seeped through the bag making most of the veggies and packets near it sticky. So there was a fair bit of clean up to do after the unpacking and we lost this ingredient but hopefully this is an unusual incident and we'll forgive them this time.

Each meal comes with a double sided recipe card which it is very detailed and includea pictures just in case you aren't sure what a chopped onion looks like. They are quite glossy and high quality, almost like large format postcards and I am not sure you need them to be this luxurious. Colour prints on plain paper would be fine I think if it dropped the cost of the box a little. I guess you could keep the recipes you like best to recreate yourself but I imagine most don't get filed further than the recycling box. Speaking of recycling my first reaction was what a lot of packaging! Single tiny plastic bottles of rice vinegar, individual portions of soy sauce but the little 'how to' guide clearly states that every piece of packaging is recyclable and you can even send it back to Hello Fresh for them to recycle of you don't want to do it yourself (they encourage you to save up three weeks worth of recycling before you send it back). The carbon footprint of doing that seems a bit silly to me as we have good home recycling service so I will break the box down and recycle all the little containers myself.

Each recipe seems to take around 30-40mins which is a good time frame for after work cooking. I have passed the responsibility of cooking the first meal, Chicken Yakitori, over to Husband to test just how easy the recipe is to follow so I will report back tomorrow on how he got on and the all important taste test.