IT'S almost 15 years since the founders of Hello Fresh started delivering recipe boxes to the busy people of Berlin.
Thousands of recipes, millions of customers and billions in profits later, it's still the most famous recipe box around, despite facing more competition than ever.
We've reviewed Hello Fresh before at Sun Shopping — and I've subscribed to it myself in the past — but I've retested it and updated our Hello Fresh review to see if it still deserves its spot at the head of the table.
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When companies grow as quickly as Hello Fresh has, it's not unusual for quality to be sacrificed in the name of profits.
So it's no surprise that the brand is in the middle of a cost-cutting drive, with a stated aim to save €300m per year by 2026 while “significantly improving the customer proposition”.
In other words, it wants to save hundreds of millions of quid while making its meals tastier.
Is that possible? I've tried a trio of its meals to find out.
Pros:
- Tasty, well-balanced meals that include several components
- Really easy to make with minimal washing up required
- Great amount of choice with around 50 meal choices per week (although there are repeats)
- Well-priced, especially if you're a family ordering lots of meals per week
- Generous portion sizes (although there's a caveat – see below)
- Attractive offers for new customers
- Free dessert for life!!!
Cons
- While the portion sizes are decent, the amount of protein can be stingey
- One or two ingredients weren't super fresh
- Automatic renewal means you'll be charged and sent “default” meals if you forget to cancel or pause your subscription
- Premium, special or high-protein meals often have a markup making them ridiculously expensive
- Would be nice to have boxes available for one or five people
Rating: 9/10
How I tested Hello Fresh
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As Flying Eze's reviews manager, I have a wide remit when it comes to testing products, but my favourite things to review are food-related.
I've tested a variety of meal delivery services; my favourite is Mindful Chef, which I wrote about in my , but I've also tried others, including , and contributed to our roundup of the .
I've subscribed to HelloFresh a couple of times before and have been fairly impressed; the selection of recipes makes it hard to get bored, they're easy to throw together, and the end result, more often than not, is very tasty.
However, I hadn't used it in a year or two, so I cooked and ate three meals from one of its most recent menus.
The meals I tried were Chicken Korma Traybake with Spiced Potatoes and Mango Slaw; Serrano-Wrapped Chicken Breast on Tagliatelle with Pesto, Roasted Tomatoes and Garden Salad; and Greek Style Lamb Pastitsio Bake.
Hello Fresh review: Quickfire Q&A
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How much is Hello Fresh? It depends on how many meals you're ordering per week and how many mouths you're feeding, but box prices go from £27.99 (two meals for two people) to £64.99 (five meals for four people). However, introductory offers mean you should get at least 50% off your first box, plus free delivery.
Who's it best for?Anyone who wants to get fresh, home-cooked food on the table but doesn't have the time (or perhaps the inclination) to plan meals, go to the supermarket, and cook them all from scratch.
How do I cancel Hello Fresh? Thankfully, quite easily — simply go to Account Settings, then Plan Settings, scroll down to the bottom and hit the button saying “cancel my plan”. If you want to cancel after your discounted week, act quickly once your first box arrives, or else (annoyingly) you'll be charged for another one within a couple of days.
What we loved:The variety, ease and tastiness of the recipes, the comparative lack of washing up and the enticing signup offers. And free dessert always puts me in a good mood.
What we didn't:Some recipes are a tiny bit stingey with the protein — the chicken that donated the breasts and thighs for my meals definitely got bullied on the school playground.
Hello Fresh review: The Nitty Gritty
First impressions
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If you’re familiar with recipe boxes, you can probably skip this part, because Hello Fresh isn’t doing anything massively different from its competitors when it comes to delivery and packaging.
You can choose the day on which your box arrives, which is very handy if, like me, you have a hybrid work week; it makes it easy to ensure that someone will be home to receive the order and get all of the fresh ingredients into the fridge.
However, it’s no biggie if there isn’t anyone in to decant the fresh ingredients immediately — the box is packed with ice packs that will keep things chilly for a few hours.
All fresh ingredients that need to be refrigerated are put together, while the pantry ingredients for each recipe are grouped into a paper bag labelled with a recipe number.
You might want to refrigerate some of these ingredients based on your personal preferences — mine contained salad bits that I’d usually put in the fridge, like cucumber and rocket.
The most surprising thing in the box was the inclusion of two Gü chocolate mousses, which are part of Hello Fresh’s “free desserts for life”; benefit.
As a journalist of integrity, my favour can’t be bought with posh chocolate mousse, of course...
Does it deliver?
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As previously mentioned, I tested out three meals for this review:
- Chicken Korma Traybake with Spiced Potatoes and Mango Slaw
- Serrano-Wrapped Chicken Breast on Tagliatelle with Pesto, Roasted Tomatoes and Garden Salad
- Greek-Style Lamb Pastitsio Bake
I have no major complaints with the end results; every single meal was extremely tasty, and I liked that each one contained multiple elements, which kept things interesting, healthy and balanced.
This usually followed the good old “meat, carbs, veg”; formula, but HelloFresh has found ways of keeping things interesting: mango chutney mixed into a coleslaw, for example, or wrapping chicken in Serrano ham instead of just plonking it on top of pesto pasta.
To make meals like these without Hello Fresh, it’d require an intense amount of recipe research, planning and shopping, as well as an extensive, well-stocked pantry — and that simply isn’t realistic for many people in 2025.
And considering each dish contained so many elements, they were extremely easy to make.
There’s minimal chopping — a potato here, an onion there — and I never had to use more than a couple of pans, making cleanup super easy.
None of the meals I had took longer than 30 minutes to make, and washing up took no longer than five.
Previously, an issue I’ve had with some meal delivery services is size — I’m all for portion control, but I resent paying good money to go to bed hungry.
This isn’t an issue I had with Hello Fresh. Thanks to the number of elements in each meal — the tagliatelle dish I had included two types of meat, pasta, roasted veg and salad, for example — none of them felt meagre.
However, I would argue that Hello Fresh creates the impression of generosity by supplying bulky portions of cheap carbohydrates; the traybake recipe, for example, included a big potato each, which ensured we were full, but the two chicken thighs we had each were a little bit scrawny.
Get 60% your first box, 20% off your first month and free dessert for LIFE with code HFSUN60
The same went for the tagliatelle dish. Even though, as a “premium ingredient”; recipe, it cost an extra £3.99 per portion, the chicken breasts we received were pretty small — thankfully, there was a wealth of fresh veg and pasta to bulk the dish out.
On this evidence, though, I’ll probably be avoiding the marked-up meals in the future.
My only other (tiny) complaint is that an apple we received for a “garden salad”; had all the crunch of a wrung-out flannel, even though we ate the meal the day after our parcel arrived.
How much is Hello Fresh?
As with all recipe boxes, the amount Hello Fresh costs depends on how many people you're feeding and how many times per week you're feeding them.
Base prices start from £27.99 (two people, two meals) and go up to £64.99 (four people, five meals).
Around a fifth of Hello Fresh's weekly recipes are marked up — some include extra portions of protein, others contain premium ingredients like steak, and some are limited edition — which can add significantly more to this total.
You can also bulk out your order with a range of breakfast, lunch, and grocery items, from Pistachio, Apricot and Honey Cream Cheese Waffles (currently on offer for £2.74 per portion) to 14 pieces of fresh fruit (£5.99).
You'll almost always be able to get a discount code that will apply your first box, and often it'll apply to a few after that — currently, you can get 50% off your first box, 20% off the rest of your first month and free dessert for life.
The only other recipe box I can think of that can compete with these deals and prices is Gousto, which sells a box of two meals for two people at a slightly cheaper rate than Hello Fresh —£26.75 compared to £27.99.
Gousto's price for a bigger box is also slightly cheaper — five meals for four people is £61.75, compared to Hello Fresh's £64.99.
It's also worth noting that Gousto offers boxes for one person and five people, which Hello Fresh doesn't.
Finally, Gousto has a slightly better introductory offer: 50% off your first order, 40% off your second order and 20% off all other orders in your first two months.
Realistically, I think it's probably worth trialling both recipe boxes to take advantage of the cheap meals before choosing the one to continue with.
You can read our full thoughts on Gousto in our .
Hello Fresh alternatives
As you might have gathered by now, Hello Fresh's biggest competitor is probably Gousto, which provides a similarly affordable and varied alternative.
If you're looking for something more premium, I'd look into Mindful Chef, which, while a lot more expensive, is the highest-quality recipe box I've tried.
You can read more of my thoughts on it in my .
If you're looking for more Hello Fresh alternatives, I'd head over to our roundup.
