Hello Fresh Meal Kit Review (2026): Vast Options, Good Execution | WIRED

Overview

Last Summer, I took a Zoom call with meal delivery company Hello Fresh's now-global chief operating officer, Dan Seidel, to talk about the brand's tangled logistics and grand ambitions.

Hello Fresh already dominates the meal delivery world. Well over half the meal kits left on patios, doorsteps, and apartment lobbies by phalanxes of third-party last-mile carriers come from one of the German-founded meal company's expanding stable of brands: Green Chef, Every Plate, Factor, and of course Hello Fresh.

Details

“Logistics” is not a sexy or exciting word. A lot of what Seidel talked about with me were jargon-heavy concepts like expanding weekly SKUs, agile supply chain practices, reducing process lead times, and minimizing substitutions. These days, there's also a bit of AI hocus-pocus.

Why do I bring this up? Because compared to what was on offer last year, the results of these big plans have been nothing short of astounding. Last July, most of Hello Fresh's ambitions still felt theoretical. This year, they're quite real. My weekly menu from the Hello Fresh meal kit this April contained nearly 500 recipes to choose from. Seasonal produce. Global spices. Chicken, beef, and pork from multi-generation meat producers in Texas or New Jersey.

I can add chicken thigh to my Gambian peanut stew, or swap it out for pork in my enchiladas. There are eight different kinds of enchiladas. Twelve distinct takes on ramen. Possibly too many salads. And I can get a box filled with any of those meals within four days of ordering it.

In a matter of months, Hello Fresh has become the most expansive and flexible meal kit delivery service I've ever seen. And I've tested pretty much all of best meal kits there are. Logistics, it turns out, are actually pretty sexy. The new website interface has a couple problems here and there. The recipes still lie cheerfully about how long it takes to make each dish. But the breadth of recipes on offer each week would stun the Cheesecake Factory into silence.

Here's how the Hello Fresh meal kit operates these days, and how it tastes.

Hello Fresh meals cost $12 a portion if you're not on a trial discount, about average for a premium meal kit. (For trial Hello Fresh memberships, you'll often pay less than half price for your first week.) This is far less than you'd spend for comparable meals when ordering delivery. But it's also a lot more than you'd likely pay when cooking using staples from your pantry and fridge. (Though interestingly, meal kits are still cheaper than if you tried to make a recipe by buying all ingredients from scratch.)

meal kits are still cheaper than if you tried to make a recipe by buying all ingredients from scratch

Where Hello Fresh tends to work best for me is at the three or four meals a week mark. This leaves it as a fun treat on dreary days when doing my own meal planning seems impossible. Spending

The problem, in the past, was that meal kits too often repeated menus, or felt a little samey. In 2020, when I used the service to stop myself from being bored to tears during the pandemic, Hello Fresh was also a little boring. But these days, Hello Fresh is not boring unless you want it to be. Among the nearly 500 meal options are basic burgers, wraps, and salads, along with many culinary wonders of the known world.

Last week I made Gambian peanut stew, Thai green curry shrimp, North African-influenced ras el hanout beef, nostalgically Tex-Mex chicken enchiladas, American-Chinese ginger-garlic-scallion steak stir fry, and earthy Lebanese-spiced barramundi whitefish. No meal took more than 45 minutes to prep and cook. And except for the enchiladas, I probably would not have made any of them myself if I hadn't had these nifty little bags of ingredients in my fridge.

This is the promise of meal kits like Hello Fresh. It's a manageable vision of domesticity—one that involves you making a well-conceived meal without actually doing the work of, well, conceiving it.

Hello Fresh is a worldly meal kit, available in 18 countries across mostly the global North and West (plus Australia). While reviewing the meal kit last year, I wrote that what Hello Fresh had mastered best was the ability to produce a bright, lightly internationalized menu in tune with modern tastes: pan-Latin rice bowls with a very American fetish for steak, beef stir-fried with ponzu and plum, Turkish chickpea bowls, maybe some mango salsa atop a vaguely Southwest-y pork roast. “It's an Alison Roman world,” I wrote. “We're all just living in it.”

With Hello Fresh's newest update, you can still find this version of Hello Fresh if you want it. But honestly, there are so many options it's possible that no two people step into the same Hello Fresh universe. Vegan substitutions, including Impossible beef and tofu everywhere, run wild. There are roughly 20 couscous dishes on the May 11 menu, ranging from “herby salmon” to “trattoria pork chops.” If I want, I can order a vegan black bean couscous and put 5 ounces of turkey or beef in each serving, for a $2 premium.

Or I can shun cosmopolitanism and go straight-up Midwestern 1980s. I can order up (I kid you not) a “grilled cheese sandwich bar” for me and my hypothetical kids, plus the fixins for some chicken salad sandwiches (that's chicken salad with cranberries in it, just like what Becky brings to the cookout.) Tuna pasta salad is also here for you, and so is a good ol' lemony chicken Caesar.

Anyway, I liked my little tour of East and Southeast Asia and the Mediterranean and was surprised by the freshness of a loosely Thai green curry. The enchiladas tasted like ones from restaurants I used to frequent with my family when I was 12 years old, full of cumin and paprika and sweet-spicy tomato. The ras el hanout beef—its earthy-spiced meat and blistered cherry tomatoes and turmeric rice pocked with dried cranberries and fresh greens—was downright delicious. It's a recipe I will modify and keep. And perhaps order again.

The instructions on recipe cards were clearly written. For the most part, they follow rules of good cookery (though god help you if you don't have a wealth of mixing bowls on hand, because they will definitely ask you for them.)

But, one quibble: All of these recipe cards lied like crazy about how long each recipe will take. Often, they lied in ways that were blazingly obvious after a cursory reading of the instructions. If the recipe has prep, the oven needs heating, and the cooking time itself is 20 minutes, it's pretty unlikely that this is a 20-minute recipe. It is a 30-minute recipe. Probably 40 minutes. Why lie?

I know the reason behind these lies, of course, which are near-universal among recipe writers. It's that 40 minutes sounds like a long time to cook up some spicy fish and rice. Consider each recipe time on Hello Fresh a sort of aspirational time: It's how long the recipe is supposed to feel like it takes. As with half the internet's code these days, recipe times are written on vibes.

This menu is sort of a tiny sampler, and even this page isn't easy to stumble upon

But all in all, the new version of Hello Fresh is a salutary mix of vast options and solid execution. Unlike previous years, no recipes among the six I tested had any basic cooking errors. The most vexing annoyance was that I was asked to put a teaspoon of cinnamon in some rice. But the cinnamon packet I was given was measured in grams. Come on, guys.

In the end, though, I probably liked the meals I ate because among almost 500 possible meals, I was able to choose ones that I was pretty sure I would enjoy. Chances are, you'll do the same.

Key Takeaways

• Last Summer, I took a Zoom call with meal delivery company Hello Fresh's now-global chief operating officer, Dan Seidel, to talk about the brand's tangled logistics and grand ambitions
• Hello Fresh already dominates the meal delivery world
• “Logistics” is not a sexy or exciting word
• Why do I bring this up
• I can add chicken thigh to my Gambian peanut stew, or swap it out for pork in my enchiladas