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WIREDA low-cost meal kit that skimps on neither portions nor flavor. Meals are hearty and mostly scratch-made. Proteins and produce are plentiful and high-quality at a budget price.TIREDSome recipes take longer than advertised to make. Box is haphazardly arranged. You might want to throw some rice in a cooker as an add-on.Dinnerly does not feel to me like a budget meal kit. Although, of course, it is in fact the budget option from Martha Stewart–endorsed meal delivery service Marley Spoon (7/10, WIRED Recommends). Each Dinnerly portion costs between $6 and $10 a portion, less than the top-end meal delivery services that tend to start at $12 and work their way up.
And yet here I am, eating a generous heaping of lemon-butter shrimp atop a bed of zesty, garlicky spinach and creamy mashed potatoes. I've even got a little lemon wedge on the side. It's a middle-class-fancy kind of life.
So why is Dinnerly cheaper, if it's not skimping on the shrimp? In part, by keeping the ingredient list a little shorter. Meal kits are, by their nature, complex engines of supply-chain logistics. When I tested my ability to make meal kit meals cheaper than what arrived in the box, it was always sauces and spices that launched my meal costs into the stratosphere.
Photograph: Matthew KorfhageAnd so Dinnerly saves on cost not by downgrading its proteins—it's mostly the same stuff that arrives in a Marley Spoon box—but in large part by keeping flavorings simple, just a spice mix or a single main herb and maybe a citrus fruit, with both zest and juice coming into play. This doubles as good cooking. Dinnerly also saves itself some money by relying on you to have your own garlic and butter in stock and not bulking up meals with quite as many carbs.
Last year when I tested Dinnerly, the effect was sometimes a little too simple. The meals I tried felt like they took a few too many shortcuts, leading in some cases to the occasional struggle meal. This year, I didn't have that feeling at all: I found more international and interesting flavors, and more fully developed meals, even with prep that mostly hovered around half an hour.
Photograph: Matthew KorfhageThis shift toward including a more diverse and interesting array of international meals is something I'd also noted over the past year in Marley Spoon's flagship meal kit as well. While Marley Spoon marketing director Carrie King attributed this in part to website design making options more visible, the raw numbers also bear out this shift.
A year ago at this time, about a third of the hundred or so meals on offer each week had non-European culinary roots. Now the number is more like half, with excursions to Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, whether baharat beef or lemongrass pork.
These are somewhat touristic jaunts, sure, with simplified recipes that make few stabs at authenticity. No one from Tunisia or Lebanon will mistake a harissa-spiced veggies and za’atar chicken recipe for his mother's, after a 30-minute easy-bake on a sheet pan. The “garlicky sour cream” you drizzle over the chicken is a bit of a poor cousin to a traditional Lebanese-style toum.
But the variety and the spice are welcome, whether a “chorizo-chili” spice mix on a basic but delicious pork tenderloin or the simple addition of paprika to the lemon-garlic shrimp that gave it a slight Andalusian tinge. There's a reason a bachelor’s fridge is often so full of sauces and condiments: It is a shortcut to a more interesting life.
That za'atar chicken recipe categorically cannot achieve its promised under-30-minute preparation when its instructions call for 30 minutes in the oven—at least, not without bending time and space. But the prep doesn't add much extra time. You'll probably be done chopping your veg, and tossing it in oil and spice, by the time the oven preheats.
Like other meal kits on the market, Dinnerly has also expanded options for those with special diets or eating restrictions. A third of meal options can be made vegetarian. Between 10 and 20 can be catered to GLP-1 diets. Items can be clearly filtered by allergens, whether dairy, fish, nut, egg, or gluten. (But note that for extreme allergies or celiac sufferers, Dinnerly does not claim to prepare such meals in a separate facility.)
Photograph: Matthew KorfhageIf anything, Dinnerly is starting to approach its more expensive cousin, Marley Spoon, not just in quality but in price. Meals can be ordered for between two and six people, with anywhere from two to six meals per week. The more you order, the less it costs.
For a couple, the $10 a portion you'll likely pay is not that much different from the $11 or $12 you might expect from Marley Spoon. HelloFresh bargain option EveryPlate is likewise cheaper at $7 a plate, at the compromise of a much smaller menu each week.
The real price break on Dinnerly tends to kick in when you're cooking for a family. A family of four can drop to $8 or $9 per portion, while six-person meal plans can go as low as $6. But otherwise, Dinnerly amounts to a sort of middle ground between budget meal kits and expensive ones.
Photograph: Matthew KorfhageNote that like Marley Spoon and a number of other meal kits, Dinnerly has added a “market” section, which offers some basic ingredients but also even more bare-bones “meal shortcuts.” For $15, I pulled in a “West African shakshouka” made mostly by softening chopped onions in a pan, then dumping in a packaged obe ata soup from New York boutique brand Egunsi and serving with cilantro and some pita bread. I provided my own eggs and added as many as I liked.
While I haven't always had the same luck with Marley/Dinnerly's market items, this one was a winner—and also didn't feel overpriced. I would have ended up paying as much for Egunsi's soup if I had just ordered from Egunsi directly.
Photograph: Matthew KorfhageThis said, Dinnerly does have a problem that most meal kits seem to have. Which is, it has a habit of proposing hilariously impossible cook times, with steps that add up to as much or more than the total cook time, even on paper.
As with the za’atar chicken, so too a “30-minute” caramelized onion beef and wine ravioli. Even according to the instructions on the recipe card, you'd need that time just to chop and fast-caramelize the onions, then simmer down the broth. That's without bringing ravioli into the equation or plucking your dill fronds. I don't know who at Dinnerly needs to hear this, but it's OK to say a meal will take 45 minutes.
Dinnerly, like Marley Spoon, also has a habit of jumbling all of its meals’ ingredients together in a box, with the meat on the bottom near the ice packs. This is fine if you're just ordering a few meals for a couple people, but the bigger the order, the more likely you'll be tasked with some organization of your own when the box arrives—lest you spend an extra 10 minutes before your meal hunting down a little packet of harissa seasoning with small, faint print.
Photograph: Matthew KorfhageAnd as mentioned, some meals can feel a little light without an added starch, especially because many meals come without it or skimp a bit on rice portions. Calorie count is usually around 600 to 700 a meal, making for a large lunch but a somewhat small dinner for most, without a little something on the side. This is not unusual for meal kits, but it is worth noting that you might want to add some bread or put some rice in the cooker.
But in all, it's a surprisingly sophisticated little meal kit at a slightly discounted price. For large families, the discounts are quite steep: Dinnerly rivals Home Chef as the best bargain for bigger families but offers three times the options. For couples and smaller families, the pricing instead places Dinnerly at an interesting middle ground between true bargain kits like EveryPlate and the flagship kits from Marley Spoon and HelloFresh.
Dinnerly is just a slight step back—the kind of small compromise you often make as a family, when both time and money are tight enough that an extra 20 minutes and $6 each day can feel lifesaving. At least during this round of testing, it didn't feel much like a compromise.
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