HelloFresh Family Meals: An Honest Review of the Vegetarian Family Box
*This article is sponsored by HelloFresh who also gifted us a Family Vegetarian Recipes Box. All opinions are 100% our own*
Most days I cook from scratch, with frozen meals and takeaways sprinkled in for good measure. However, I don’t always get a thumbs up from the kids as much as I love to cook. And, frankly, after having three kids at home for six months because of lockdown, I’m fed up with cooking the same pasta, rice, and stew dishes every single day.
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HelloFresh gifted us a Vegetarian Recipes Family Box in return for an honest review and I was very excited to get started with the meal box and create a new family meal plan because I love learning about new healthy recipes and building up my recipe arsenal. But, I don’t love searching for them on the internet and then traipsing into town to buy the ingredients.
So, if you’re interested in learning more about how to cook fresh wholesome meals from locally sourced ingredients that are delivered straight to your home at your convenience, please check out my full HelloFresh vegetarian meals recipes review below.
Watch the YouTube video unboxing, prep and cooking below:
What is HelloFresh?
HelloFresh is the leading global provider of delivering fresh food at home via subscription-style meal boxes, so young families can cook for their kids with no planning, shopping or hassle required.
Who should buy HelloFresh?
- If you have a young family and/or you are a working parent and you have less time to devote to meal preparation and grocery shopping, then HelloFresh takes away the hassle of planning and shopping for a recipe because it has everything you need in the meal box.
- The DIY HelloFresh recipes are designed to take around 30-40 minutes max and HelloFresh offers you step-by-step instructions via a recipe card, so it’s much easier to clean and keep on top of cooking, especially when you have kids around you.
- If you’re a cooking novice, then HelloFresh can also teach you a thing or two because you learn new cooking skills, recipes, and ingredients you can later use in other meals, thanks to those easy-to-follow recipe cards.
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Who should not buy HelloFresh?
- If you have a large family, then unless you have enough disposable income to afford the large Family Box (we will go into pricing later) then HelloFresh can set you back every week.
- Also, you must have some basic cooking knowledge to cook these meals.
How does HelloFresh work?
HelloFresh operates as a subscription-based meal planning service, either offering vegetarian food delivery, vegan meal delivery (check with HelloFresh about specific vegan alternatives), or meat-based weeknight meals. Each HelloFresh box contains the exact fresh ingredients required for specific recipes, which are carefully planned, locally sourced, and delivered to your door in a HelloFresh packaged box.
You simply sign up, pick which recipes or meal box you want in your HelloFresh family plan menu, and then HelloFresh sends out the ingredients and recipe cards for you to make the dishes.
Select your plan
HelloFresh meal kits, cost, details and features
HelloFresh offers a weekly non-vegetarian and vegetarian meal kit delivery service, so there is a wide variety of choices to suit your dietary needs and preferences.
- You can select the box you would like, along with the number of people (two to four) and the number of HelloFresh recipes (three to five) per week, and the price will change accordingly.
- Prices range from £3.40/meal (four people, five recipes per week) to £5.00/meal (two people, three recipes per week)
- You also get free daytime delivery. Just select your delivery day or weekend and you’re good to go
Family Box
- Fuss-free recipes from scratch
- Approved by kids of all ages so you can enjoy a kid-friendly meal multiple times a week
- Great recipes which double up as dinner ideas for kids
- Takes less than 30 minutes to prepare
- Only two pots needed for less washing up
Watch the YouTube video unboxing, prep and cooking below:
Classic Box
- Choose from 26 recipes every week
- Get a great variety of British and world cuisine
- Vegetarian and Balanced options are available
- If you have any dietary needs, i.e. low calorie or pork-free, you can set your preferences online
Rapid Box
- These boxes are great for when you’re in a rush
- Cook meals in less than 20 minutes, which are simple to prepare
- Choose from six rapid meals each week
- Swap in any of HelloFresh’s 20 Classic meals for evenings if you have more time to cook
Veggie Box
- Cook veggie meals which are balanced and packed full of nutritious ingredients
- Enjoy a great range of British and global cuisines
- Choose from speedy suppers to indulgent feasts according to when you have time to prepare and cook your meals
Sign up to HelloFresh
To continue with the process after you’ve selected your plan, you sign up, input your address on HelloFresh’s website, place your order, and then you can select the meals you’d like to include in your box.
Get 60% off your 1st box, 25% off the next 2 months & 3 free gifts!*
Here are some HelloFresh Family Friendly Meal examples that you could choose from:
Install the HelloFresh app either from the Google Play Store or from the App Store so you can sort your meals out on the go!
HelloFresh Vegetarian Recipes Family Box Review
My husband and I are trying to be healthy and where he is a full-on meat-eater, I eat mostly plant-based. So the first thing he wanted to know was:
“Does HelloFresh have vegetarian meals?”
Well, you’re in luck, dear hubby because we are reviewing a HelloFresh Vegetarian Recipes Family Box!
Watch the YouTube video unboxing, prep and cooking below:
HelloFresh Vegetarian Meals offered in our Family Box
Our vegetarian meal box delivery contained three different vegetarian recipes which, as mentioned earlier, doubled up as vegan meals too. You can find more information on these recipes below.
How to order a HelloFresh Vegetarian Recipes Box
Head over to the HelloFresh website here to order your box now.
Get 60% off your 1st box, 25% off the next 2 months & 3 free gifts!*
Our experience using HelloFresh
We weren’t aware of which box we were reviewing, just that we preferred vegetarian/vegan meals.
It was raining cats and dogs the day our HUGE HelloFresh box was dumped on our doorstep. Who knows how long it had been sitting there because the box was wet and crumpled. The recipe cards and packaged foods were also marred by the wet weather too, so everything was out of place.
The ingredients started to go off around three days after delivery, so I cooked all three meals in one go at my parent’s house because they had a bigger kitchen and there were six people we could feed rather than four.
We were provided three recipes; two Classic dishes and a Balanced recipe.
Indian Style Chickpea and Pistachio Burger with Turmeric Wedges
The Indian Style Chickpea and Pistachio Burger with Turmeric Wedges (labelled No. 5 on the recipe card) is a Veggie Classic recipe under HelloFresh’s selection and takes 40 minutes to complete. The recipe has a medium spice to it and makes up two of your five a day.
The recipe card tells you to prepare your fruit, veggies, and herbs by washing them before you start. It also tells you which cooking utensils you’ll need too – in this case, a baking tray, coarse grater, fine grater, mixing bowl, and a frying pan.
I noticed straight away that the ingredients were of great quality. The potatoes were large and firm so I was able to make a lot of wedges with them. The Turmeric sachet HelloFresh provided was generous so it covered the potatoes well.
The chickpea burgers were super easy to make – you prep the ingredients, make the burgers and fry them in the pan, finished off with a rocket salad, tomato, and mayonnaise sauce for the burger, which was all provided in the box.
Verdict
Absolutely delicious and the spice was perfect. The boys were apprehensive so they took a few bites, but still preferred their beef burgers. They don’t like change.
However, all the adults in the house gave this recipe, including the wedges, a massive thumbs up. I will definitely make this recipe again.
Get 60% off your 1st box, 25% off the next 2 months & 3 free gifts!*
Veggie Chilli Loaded Sweet Potato Fries with Limey Tomato and Avo Salsa
The Veggie Chilli Loaded Sweet Potato Fries with Limey Tomato and Avo Salsa is a classic veggie dish that takes only 30 minutes and makes up 3.5 of your 5 a day, which is amazing! The dish has little heat, so I took the spice out by not adding the Mexican Spice ingredient.
Verdict
The sweet potatoes were huge so we managed to squeeze a lot of sweet potato fries out of them. The Limey Tomato and Avo Salsa was absolutely delicious and went so well with the fries. My parents loved the salsa part while the boys only wanted the wedges. I loved the BBQ lentils and ate the dish by itself. But, to appreciate the full flavour, eat them all lovingly mixed together because the overall dish is yummy!
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Thai Style Veggie Curry with Jasmine Rice
This recipe is part of the Balanced meal selection on HelloFresh, which takes just 35 minutes to make and makes up 2.5 of your 5 a day. It’s also meant to be very hot, so I took the spice out like the other dish.
Verdict
And, frankly, we didn’t need the spice because this Thai Style Veggie Curry was my favourite of all three recipes. The Jasmine rice was so soft and fragrant and the spicy-less Thai curry didn’t need any heat or meat – it was perfect on its own
Overall verdict
I was so pleasantly surprised by how delicious the meals were and how much they all burst with flavour yet were all so different to each other. The boys learned to broaden their palettes and I learned how to make a different burger and an amazing plant-based curry. I’m keeping all of these recipe cards and making them again.
A well-deserved 5 out of 5!
Note – if you make any of the recipes in your HelloFresh box, you can share your creations on social media and use the hashtag #HelloFreshSnaps. Check out my InstaStories and Facebook posts for our finished creations too!
Pros and Cons of using HelloFresh Meal Kit Subscription Service
Pros
- HelloFresh is really all about convenience – you get decent-sized portions of great quality locally sourced ingredients that taste great!
- The meals contain sides too so you’re not just cooking up one pot but a full meal which keeps the biggest of stomachs feeling full after a hearty family-friendly dinner. No need to come up with dinner ideas every day!
- Each meal works out at around £3.40 each so not too bad in terms of price for the quality and quantity you get
- The recipe cards are really easy to work through and HelloFresh warn you if you need to prepare any of the ingredients first
- You get to enjoy a variety of cultural cuisines and learn a thing or two about cooking styles and flavours from around the world
- You don’t need to use many utensils – most recipes require two pots max
- Quantity amounts are clearly worded in easy to follow instructions.
Cons
- If you’re a large family then you could be paying quite a bit for convenience every week. It depends on whether you have enough disposable income to afford it every week
- Some of the ingredients either don’t have a very long shelf life or they weren’t fresh when they arrived in the box. I don’t know if this is true for all boxes, but in this case, we had to use up the items pretty quickly. If we waited until the end of the week, we may have not been able to use all items in the box
- The recipes don’t cater to one person
- I’d love to see kids meal boxes with kid-friendly recipes as an option on HelloFresh
- Some of the packaging used is un-recyclable, but judging from past HelloFresh reviews, this is getting better and HelloFresh are concentrating more on sustainable packaging now.
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Overall review rating of HelloFresh Vegetarian Recipes Review Box
| Ease of use | 4/5 | Recipe Selection | 5/5 |
| Price | 3/5 | Delivery | 3/5 |
| Ingredient quality | 4/5 | Convenience | 4/5 |
| Overall experience | 4/5 | Overall rating | 4/5 |
Below are some questions I was asked by friends and family when reviewing the HelloFresh Vegetarian Recipes Box
Does HelloFresh do vegetarian meals?
They do indeed. See above for some great Indian recipes. In fact, they are some of the best HelloFresh recipes I’ve ever tasted!
Are the HelloFresh Vegetarian Recipes box the same as the HelloFresh Vegan Box?
As our HelloFresh Vegetarian Recipes box was completely vegan, you can opt for vegan meals to be delivered to you too as the three recipes we received doubled up as vegan meal kits too.
Wouldn’t it be cheaper to buy from a supermarket?
Another question I was asked was, ‘Are meal kids e.g. HelloFresh and Blue Apron worth the money?’ and ‘Are HelloFresh meals cheaper than the grocery store prices?’
The simple answer is yes, it would generally be cheaper to shop at a supermarket. But, one of the main reasons why people subscribe to the HelloFresh food box is because of sheer convenience and to reduce food waste. You don’t have to go to the grocery store with kids in tow, you don’t have to meal prep or find the time to work out what to cook and you don’t have to work out how ingredients you need.
HelloFresh works out the exact ingredients for you, so you’re essentially saving money and reducing food waste because you’re not absent-mindedly buying large packets of food which inevitably end up going off because you’ve overbought again (is it just me who does that?)
Do you get decent portions?
As mentioned before, I took the recipes over to my mum and dad’s to use their kitchen and between the six of us, we polished off the meals nicely. So, as much as some people say the portions are on the small side, we did not see that at all. In fact, we had plenty of leftovers for the next day and found that three meals for a family of five were just the right amount for us, with no wastage afterwards.
Are the meals good quality? Do they taste nice?
As we have kids who don’t like spice, we just left the spice bit out of the recipes and we found the Indian dishes to be absolutely delicious. It was a unanimous thumbs up from all members of the family, even my then ten-month-old daughter who tucked into the fragrant Jasmine rice and the buns of the chickpea burgers. I really enjoyed the authentic Indian spice and the dishes had so much flavour in them. I have kept the recipe cards so I can make all the dishes again – they were that delicious and doubled up as perfect kid meals.
Why do people like meal prep delivery services like HelloFresh?
Meal prep boxes like HelloFresh take the guess work away from meal planning, portion sizing and buying the ingredients. It just takes all the work out and provides you with the ingredients to make quality meals for your family.
Get 60% off your 1st box, 25% off the next 2 months & 3 free gifts!*
How do meal kids like HelloFresh and Blue Apron affect your weight and digestive system?
Meal Kits actually might be healthier for you because they stop you from reaching into the cupboard and pulling out not-so-healthy snacks. They also contain a wide variety of fruit and veg, some of which you may never think to buy when you’re at the store. HelloFresh also limits you from eating processed food and encourages you to eat more vitamins and minerals since the food is organic and healthy.
How much time does it take to make meals for the week on the weekend?
Each meal takes you around 40 minutes to make so you’re probably looking at up to three of batch cooking at the weekend.
Can you cancel your subscription order easily?
HelloFresh makes it very easy to cancel your membership. You just log into your account, click on Account Settings, click the small edit box under Subscription Info and then click on ‘cancel my subscription at the bottom of the page. Then follow the steps to cancel.
Is the packaging any good?
Another question that was asked was, ‘Are food delivery companies like HelloFresh better for the environment?’
When we received our box, the heavens had opened and the box was soaked because the driver had left it outside our door without informing us. As a result, the packaging was soaked and the recipe cards were almost destroyed, along with the packaging for some of the food. The ingredients were still intact, though.
HelloFresh has made it a priority to use sustainable packaging by joining the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and there have recently been 453 tons of cardboard reductions made in Germany and the UK. HelloFresh has reduced the amount of plastic they use too by replacing certain plastic trays for fruit and veg with ‘skin packs’ that use fewer materials. This is great news and an initiative I back wholeheartedly.
What should I consider before joining a meal kit delivery service like HelloFresh?
Think about why you’re ordering the meal kit service. Are you stuck for ideas on what to make? Can you afford to outsource your meal prep and planning? Are you subscribing for convenience? Above all, make sure you can afford to subscribe and that you will intend to use HelloFresh too.
How have you fought quarantine cooking fatigue or boredom from a limited rotation of recipes?
Well, this is the thing! You don’t have to have a limited rotation of recipes or die of cooking fatigue because HelloFresh provide you with a different selection of food ingredients straight to your door every week. It’s a no brainer during lockdown.
Is vegetarian food good for your health?
I’m no expert but vegetarian food can definitely be one of the healthiest ways to eat because it incorporates a lot of fruit and veg and cuts out meat products, which can be high in cholesterol and fat. Some studies show that a vegetarian diet is associated with a lower risk of death from ischemic heart disease, but you do need to plan your meals to make sure you’re not deficient in any vitamins or minerals.
What are some recipes for easy healthy vegetarian Indian food?
There are loads of Indian Vegetarian Recipes that are super healthy. You can replace coconut milk with the lighter version for example and opt for more spice and less salt. Go for brown rice instead of white rice in curries and even replace the normal potato with sweet potato (but I don’t think anything is wrong with the normal potato at all!) Try to stick to whole foods and you can’t go wrong.
What are some healthy vegetarian recipes for dinner?
Check out my sister website, Five for a Fiver, where I publish mostly vegan 5-ingredient recipes for £5 or less. If we keep it to the Indian theme I’ve made my own Quick Chickpea Curry which has been a huge success in the family to date.
Which vegetarian foods are similar to non vegetarian foods?
I find meal prep for vegetarians easier because I don’t need to prep meat products, but some products can be quite similar when it comes to feeling satisfied. Soya Chaap, for example, is to vegetarians like chicken is to non-vegetarians. Jackfruit can also be used in place of sliced meat. Tofu is great in fried rice instead of chicken. Tempeh is another great meat substitute that could replace the taste and texture of meat steak.
Does HelloFresh offer a vegan meal subscription box?
HelloFresh offers vegetarian meal delivery services which can double up as a vegan meal delivery service as they offer a flexible plant-based meal plan delivery service.
What are some Keto friendly premade meals?
HelloFresh offers Low Carb Recipes as part of their meal plan service, which is easy to cook when you follow their step-by-step recipe cards. Choose from British and global recipes like Moroccan Style Lamb, Quick ‘n’ Sticky Beef, Sweet and Sour Vegetables, Crispy Cauliflower Nuggets, Sirloin Steak and Béarnaise Butter, and much more which are all Keto-friendly. Just check out their website here for more Low Carb Recipes.
For how long can cooked vegetarian food Indian dishes remain hygienic and healthy in the refrigerator so they can be consumed after microwave heating?
If you’re ordering a vegetarian delivery the HelloFresh vegetarian meal subscription box contains fresh ingredients which stay fresh long enough for you to enjoy them the week you receive the box, as long as you store the ingredients correctly. Some ingredients may need to be used up sooner rather than later so they should be prepared earlier in the week. HelloFresh adds a badge to the recipe card to alert you to those ingredients. Once cooked, they should remain consumable for up to five days, depending on the ingredients.
I get this question a lot. Is being vegetarian better or a non vegetarian?
Some research shows that being vegetarian makes you leaner. You may have a healthier BMI, controlled blood pressure, and lower cholesterol levels as animal products are quite high in cholesterol and fat. But, with everything, eating a varied healthy, whole food diet is the key to longevity so make sure if you’re going vegetarian that the alternative you choose is in fact healthy.
Would I recommend HelloFresh?
Collectively it’s a thumbs up from all five of us in the family (well, the baby can’t talk but she liked the bits of food I offered her from the recipes). The meals were hearty, delicious, and varied, with lots of flavour and spice.
We left some of the spicier ingredients out to suit the kids’ palette so I would prefer to see milder versions in the HelloFresh Family Box to suit younger kids’ tastes. Other than that, the family-friendly recipes had great portions which meant we had leftovers the next day, in turn, meaning I would only need to cook three meals that week.
You do need to use up the ingredients quite quickly as they’re fresh and will start to go off pretty soon after delivery.
You also need some cooking knowledge so you can’t be a total beginner. Having said that the recipe cards are very easy to follow and they even offer step by step instructions on the amount needed for two, three and four people so you don’t waste food. You can set aside some of that ingredient for another meal too and if you plan well, you can make the ingredients go a long way.
But, for a family of five, the box does set you back at around £67.99 per week (with the 35% discount for the first five boxes), so it can get costly. HelloFresh would be best suited for families with working parents who have the luxury of choosing convenience over cost when it comes to preparing fresh meals, but they would still like to offer their kids variety – as we all know that variety is the spice of life!
What about you? Do you want to cook, but you don’t have time to? What is the best food app/delivery service you’ve tried? Would you consider ordering HelloFresh to take the pain out of meal planning and prepping? What’s something you really resent paying for at the grocery store but wouldn’t mind having delivered to your home? Share with us in the comments below.
Watch the YouTube video unboxing, prep and cooking below:
For more information on HelloFresh, follow the link below and order your first box now.
Get 60% off your 1st box, 25% off the next 2 months & 3 free gifts!*
*Photos by Preston Perfect Photography
*The article contains affiliate links which means I may earn a small commission through qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you
*This post is sponsored by HelloFresh
