Review: HelloFresh Meal Kit (2025)

The first meal I ever cooked for myself was ramen. The next 12 were all, also, ramen. So were a sizable percentage of the next hundred. By age 11, as a latchkey kid, I had mastered the art of the Maruchan egg drop, the sliced green onion, the chili and soy sauce and mushroom additions. I learned, early, my love of cumin and coriander. Any ingredient, actually, seemed fair game.

And so when I say I still felt a little swell of pride last month after composing a handsome ramen bowl from a HelloFresh delivery meal kit, I speak as a man of great experience.

I kid somewhat, but it's true: Packaged home ramen has long been the food of the weary, not the proud. And this was a rainy Tuesday, after hours at work. But by the time I got done drizzling chili oil over a pork-chicken shoyu ramen bowl topped with a lightly seared breast of sesame-grilled chicken, heavy laden also with freshly sautéed mushroom and wilted spinach, I felt like I'd accomplished something noteworthy. Not only did dinner look delicious, I did a thing. On a Tuesday. Without trying too hard.

This is the promise of meal kits like HelloFresh—the reason people pay more than groceries, but less than any decent delivered meal, to receive them. It is the promise of a better, but still manageable vision of domesticity—one that involves you making a well-conceived meal without actually doing the work of, well, conceiving it.

Light, Bright, Maybe Even Cosmopolitan

HelloFresh—which, like a lot of popular delivery meal kits, began in Germany—is arguably the most successful popularizer of the form. A box of ingredients arrives each week, individually portioned and bagged for meals whose recipes are printed on accessible one-sheets, with plucky little graphics. All you need is pots, pans, a stove, and some basic oil- and salt- and butter-type staples.

HelloFresh is now in dozens of countries (though not Japan!) and has spun off myriad variants. With shipping, expect $10 to $12 a portion—although chasing and rotating deals and discounts on HelloFresh boxes has turned into a millennial sport, and the trial week tends to come at a steep discount. At full price, three dinners for two people rings up at $76 including shipping. First-timer discounts often mean you'll pay less than $40 for those six meals instead. I'd tried the flagship service long ago, on a gift trial, and found it pretty limited. But the menus have since been expanded and updated considerably.

HelloFresh may in fact have evolved into the most cosmopolitan of the meal kits I've tried: a light and lightly internationalized menu in tune with modern tastes. This means 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, we're all just living in it.

The ramen, a premium offering that costs $5 more if you get it with chicken breasts and spinach as part of the meal (a more basic mushroom shoyu option is basic-priced), would not be confused with fresh restaurant-quality ramen that's been cooked down from bones. But it's also as well as I've done at home, its broth simmered with minced garlic and ginger from a mix of pork and chicken stock concentrates and a healthy dollop of soy.

But the sell was less the broth than the fixings: the spinach and mushrooms, the pan-browned breast. Each, salted individually to my own taste as per instructions, added up to a little too much salt when combined with the shoyu of the broth—something I'd curb when making the same dish again. And when I say “make again,” I likely mean without the help of HelloFresh: The most helpful thing about the meal is that I now have an easy road map to making this dish again in less than an hour, without the need for a box in the mail.

Some Caveats

Overall, I came away impressed with HelloFresh’s upgrades over the years, in terms of the freshness of the produce, the quality of the meats, and especially the reduced individual packaging that once inspired guilt when opening a box.

The meats were kept separate, in the coldest part of the box. Other meal ingredients arrived organized into a paper bag, but without individually wrapping each lemon or bulb of ginger. This is all much appreciated.

But this isn't to say there were no hitches or quibbles. There's the usual, of course: Total cook times ranged from “lies” to “damn lies,” though I do appreciate that HelloFresh’s recipe authors tend to front-load the prep and mise-en-place, rather than hide extra chopping on step 3 of a recipe. As usual among meal kits, a stated cook time of 30 minutes means at least 45 minutes. Neither is grueling, but I've never finished as fast as the speed racers who make the cards.

But sometimes, there are also odd cooking decisions and failed proportions. On a perfectly tasty, simple steak-and-rice bowl with onions and peppers, the recipe asked me to wipe the browned steak bits from a pan before cooking onions and peppers in it, rather than simply deglazing a little and keeping the meaty fond. I declined, in honor of delicious beefy bits. The rice portion was also half of what would generally be called for: a mere quarter-cup of uncooked rice per serving. It was all tasty, especially a simple little crema-style drizzle, but I found myself eyeing the tortillas in my cabinet.

Meanwhile, on a salmon couscous, the instructions called for preheating a “preferably nonstick pan” on medium-high with oil—a bit of advice out of step with Teflon-maker Chemours’ own safety and durability instructions for nonstick, which ask that you not heat up pans to high heats without adding food. I had to follow my heart on that one too—and rolled instead with Bon Appetit food director Chris Morocco's advice to get crispy skin by heating from a cold nonstick pan.

But was the resulting lemon-Dijon salmon delicious, and more buttery than an Irish farm? Was it a lovely salmon filet, neatly trimmed? Did I like my toasty couscous? My crema-drizzled cilantro steak? The ramen I'll upgrade later, next time? Yes, yes, yes, etc. It's easy to act superior to a recipe and find its faults, and a lovely luxury to change said recipe according to my own tastes.

But fact is, if I didn't get all those ingredients in the green HelloFresh-branded box with a recipe card, I would have ended up foraging random ingredients like a squirrel in winter, or walking to the taqueria down the street.

Where HelloFresh works best is as an option two or three nights a week, the nights you're uninspired but not actually dead. Nights when a grocery trip for two missing ingredients seems impossible. On those evenings, a meal kit becomes genuinely economical: You've saved yourself a $60 desperation DoorDash. Instead, you find yourself at 7 pm taking pictures of your ramen bowl, with pride that should embarrass you.