If you have recently watched a few episodes of Chopped and you now want to dip your toes into cooking your own meals, or are looking for an easy way to cut Uber Eats and Doordash (raise your hand), a meal kit delivery service, like EveryPlate, can do the work.
I’ve tried my fair share of meal kit delivery services over the years (Green Chef, Blue Apron, Purple Carrot, Factor, to name a few). So when I heard about EveryPlate, I was excited to try it out. A new meal kit subscription that can help me reduce my orders? Sign me up, literally.
Now let me break down my experience with EveryPlate (and, spoiler, it was much easier, faster, and cheaper than getting it delivered).
How I tested
To do this review, I consulted SELF’s Meal Kit Buying Guide, which was developed with the help of dietitians. For the first week, I ordered enough meat and vegetable meals to cover seven days of lunches and dinners for two people. I made sure the meals were exciting but not complicated to put together. For the next two weeks, I narrowed my delivery plan down to just dinners, after realizing it was too ambitious to think I could cook full meals at lunchtime.
Here is a sample of my EveryPlate menuLemon Chickpea and Feta Chicken Bowls, Spicy Black Bean and Beef Enchiladas, Banh-Mi Style Chicken Bowls, Creamy Lemon Herb Chicken, and Tomato and Kale Chicken Sandwiches.
Personalization
Courtesy of the author
EveryPlate allows you to customize your order, which is great if you have dietary restrictions or are food specific. For example, I like to eat meals high in protein and vegetables, and I’m not a big fan of pork or shellfish. I chose veggie rich dishes and added cans of chicken breast and beef for a few extra bucks.
If you want to add premium recipes to your cart (they were the first to catch my eye), there is East an extra, sometimes up to $6 or more per serving. EveryPlate also offers add-ons, like Caesar salad kits, cinnamon apple crumble, and garlic bread, which I found nice.
A damper ? EveryPlate does not offer any pre-made or frozen meal options. As a big fan of meal kits with this deal (thanks to Factor), I was a bit disappointed. Plus, you have to do all the chopping yourself – nothing is pre-cut. Some ingredients, like rice and grated cheese, are proportioned, while others, like garlic, are not.
After some trial and error, I quickly realized that I couldn’t make time in the afternoon to whip up an EveryPlate recipe for lunch. Most recipes took around 30-40 minutes to put together, but it was too difficult to shift gears and take that long in the middle of the workday. Making an EveryPlate meal for lunch felt like I was racing against time, and the times I did, I found myself wishing I had chosen Sweetgreen to save time and energy. For this reason, after my first week, I saved my meals for dinner or prepared lunch the night before.
Affordability
The cost of each meal varies widely depending on how many you order, how many servings you get, and whether or not it’s a premium recipe. Typically, the cost for each serving starts at around $5. The total for my first box of food for a week was $47, as EveryPlate usually gives new customers a deep discount. I decided to go big and get the biggest meal and service option to make sure my partner and I were covered all the time (meal planning for a household can seem tricky because you can’t choose only two or four servings and three to six meals per week). If I had ordered without the discount, it would have cost $131, which is still quite economical for a meal delivery service. Discounts also applied to the next two deliveries, but the savings were not as great as with this first order.
