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WIREDA genuinely low-priced meal kit, with hearty and tasty meals. Simple meals can nonetheless offer genuine cooking acumen. Rice and starch portions are much improved.TIREDOptions are far fewer than HelloFresh. Box arrives jumbled, with a lot of individual wrapping. Some instructions are too bare-bones. BYO eggs.I'll keep this simple: EveryPlate is the lowest-cost meal delivery service I've tested that offers full, balanced, hot meals (and I've tried nearly all of them). At $7 a serving, it's also the only one that wouldn't require any particular adjustment in my grocery budget. And yet, this budget meal plan from HelloFresh is somehow able to offer dinners that even your judgy mom-in-law would recognize as a balanced dinner.
The pork chop meal I tried this May is the sort of meat-and-two supper that I probably took too much for granted when I was a child. Pan-seared chops. Crispy-leafed brussels sprouts baked in the oven. Fresh mashed potatoes. But what elevated the meal from basic staple to weekday extravagance was a thoughtful shallot-garlic-cream pan sauce, cooked with fresh thyme in the juices from the pork I'd just finished searing. The sauce was rich, complex, aromatic, and just enough outside my usual repertoire that I felt like I'd learned a useful secret.
Photograph: Matthew KorfhageThis was a work-tired Wednesday, a day I'm more prone to regrettable DoorDashes than cogent meal planning. While the dish took 45 minutes to make—longer than most EveryPlate meals—the process was straightforward. Each ingredient was pre-portioned, and the cook times were pretested so that the sprouts and fresh mashed potatoes and chops all arrived together. If I would have rather steamed or pan-seared the sprouts, it was a quibble for a different day.
In the past year with EveryPlate, I have made spring pea and zucchini risotto, Chinese-inspired dumpling soup, Tex-Mexy pork “birria” tacos, and ponzu turkey or beef bulgogi rice bowls. All were dishes I wouldn't have had the energy to plan and shop for on a weekday unless particularly inspired. Few meals were what I'd call sophisticated. But most were more healthful and much cheaper than any takeout meal I might have gotten instead.
This is the biggest benefit of EveryPlate's meal kit: a simple, hearty dinner that still fits in the budget, without requiring difficult meal planning from a life that already feels overloaded. It does not offer the complexity or variety of higher-priced meal kits. And some staples, such as eggs, are BYO. But EveryPlate slots easily into a busy life and feels more and more affordable as my grocery store squeezes me harder by the day. Here's how it works.
EveryPlate works similarly to any number of home-prepared meal delivery services. Signing up online involves choosing the number of meals and portions you want each week. Two-, four- or six-portion meals are offered. You can select three to five different meals a week, from a menu of around 35 options. Among these, about 10 can be made vegetarian.
Photograph: Matthew KorfhageMost plans cost $7 a portion, with an $11 shipping charge for each box. This makes EveryPlate significantly cheaper than other budget kits when cooking for two or four people—which is most households. Note that competitors Dinnerly and Home Chef become competitively priced, or even cheaper, when planning for six-portion meals.
Expect most recipes to take 20 to 45 minutes to cook: As a rule of thumb, take whatever cooking time is printed on the recipe card and add 50 percent. In part, this is because all recipe makers underestimate times. Also because you are probably not a professional cook in a commissary kitchen.
When it arrives, your EveryPlate box will contain recipe cards and a paper bag with most ingredients jumbled together. Meat is kept on the bottom, nestled against an ice pack. Many premium meal delivery plans sort ingredients into individual recipe bags, but this is a luxury you'll often give up when using budget plans. Either you'll have to organize ingredients each week as the box arrives, or just expect to do a little rummaging around, especially for the first recipe.
But while EveryPlate's costs are low, this mostly does not come at the cost of decent ingredients. EveryPlate uses the same protein purveyors as parent company HelloFresh's premium plan. The shrimp is domestic, on EveryPlate as well as HelloFresh. The beef and pork and chicken come from multi-generation family purveyors in Texas, New Jersey, and North Carolina. Unlike many meal plans, this sourcing is clearly marked on the packaging. The chicken thigh is well-trimmed and ready to cook. So is a pork chop or a ranch steak.
The key to all of this is economy. This simplicity is, in fact, the secret to how EveryPlate keeps its costs low. Each of EveryPlate's meals tends to derive its flavors from its ingredients and maybe a single sauce or herb or spice mix, or perhaps some citrus cross-utilized as both juice and zest.
Last year, I conducted an experiment to see whether I could make meal kit recipes from scratch for less money than by ordering from meal kit companies directly. The answer was almost always no, and the reason was usually spices and sauces. Anyone who has spent a lot of time trying to prep from cookbooks has probably noticed this. It costs a lot to build and maintain a spice and herb larder. So one way for EveryPlate to cut costs is simply to cut down on the number of ingredients it needs to coordinate for each dish.
Photograph: Matthew KorfhageAnd so some “birria-style” pulled pork tacos use the same Tex-Mex spice paste to flavor the beef and the dipping sauce, splitting an onion between the taco fillings and the consommé. The result might taste less like birria than a saucy Texas meat chili. But it does taste good. The aforementioned pork chops derive most of their flavor from thyme and shallots, and salt and pepper is liberally applied.
A ground-turkey rice bowl, meanwhile, relies on ginger, garlic, and a mix of soy glaze and citric ponzu sauce. The recipe also relies on you to provide your own eggs: This is another way EveryPlate saves money. Eggs cost, these days, and you've got to bring your own.
Photograph: Matthew KorfhageBut compared to last year, EveryPlate's plan is less likely to skimp on rice portions. The company announced this last year, after complaints from customers (and from me). And so the jasmine rice with this dish was three-quarters of a cup, enough to fill out the meal heartily. The taco and rice bowl dishes, while far from sophisticated, are also easy to prepare, flavorful, and filling without loading up on fat and salt: Each was more than 800 calories.
Not everything's perfect, of course. As mentioned, recipe times are mostly aspirational. And while EveryPlate's yen for experimentation is actually much appreciated, sometimes the experiments can seem a little off the cuff. Upcoming menus include goofball mix-and-matches like masala risotto or curried cottage pie—the sort of ad hoc experiments that happen when Dad gets bored and asks you to hold his beer.
Photograph: Matthew KorfhageThis yen for experimentation can extend into brand partnerships. The meal I was least excited about in this season's testing was actually the one I was initially most excited about. EveryPlate has been experimenting with a series of partnerships with boutique food brands, including New York Chinese–inspired dumpling brand Mimi Cheng’s. In this case, the flavors didn't quite gel, and many of the dumplings arrived broken. In the meantime, EveryPlate has moved on and is now making dishes using flavored chickpeas and beans from craft canning brand Heyday.
I've had few mishaps with ingredients, but they do happen. A zucchini on my most recent order got some moisture or stray water in its bag. By the time I got to it, at the end of the week, this was death to the zucchini. I had to use my own, which luckily was already in the crisper.
I also had to make a special trip for eggs to fill out that turkey-ponzu rice bowl, because I'd neglected to look ahead at the recipe. There aren't too many ingredients you need to have on hand to make EveryPlate's dishes, but milk, eggs, and butter are sometimes among them. Look ahead when ordering recipes, or when receiving them.
Photograph: Matthew KorfhageThe seams can show more often on EveryPlate's recipes than with premium kits like HelloFresh or Marley Spoon. I find myself improvising slightly: adding extra flavors after the fact, using my meat drippings on a side course, or swapping the order of operations. If I had my druthers, I would have used my own preferred prep on brussels sprouts rather than risk obliterating stray leaves in the oven.
But mostly, what EveryPlate offers is a baseline to work from. It offers an escape from my own tired routines: thought put into my meals by someone who is not me. A $7 meal where I buy an egg is still an economical meal—and a much more filling one than I would have had otherwise. EveryPlate remains the most budget-friendly meal kit I'd happily eat on a regular basis, a signal achievement for uncertain times.
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