Blue Apron is a meal kit service offering premium meals at home. Learn about its pros, cons, and features in this full Blue Apron review.Blue Apron is a meal kit service offering premium meals at home. Learn about its pros, cons, and features in this full Blue Apron review.
The post Blue Apron Review: My Experience Using the Original Meal Kit Service appeared first on Money Under 30.
“Hey,” Kim said one day last week as she was leaving for work. “There’s a package coming today from one of the doctors I work with. To thank all of his hygienists, he’s sending us a trial of HelloFresh.”
“What’s HelloFresh?” I asked.
“It’s a meal delivery service,” Kim said. “Anyhow, it’d be great if you could bring in the package and put the food in the fridge. And it’d be even greater if you made one of the meals for dinner!”
I kissed her good-bye, then promptly forgot what she had told me. (This is par for the course.)
That afternoon when I returned from walking the dog, a package from HelloFresh was waiting on the porch. I took it inside to open it. The box contained three brown paper sacks, each with a different meal from HelloFresh.
“Oh yeah,” I thought. “I’m supposed to make dinner from one of these. I wonder what they are.”
I opened the bag labeled Pineapple Poblano Beef Tacos. Inside was an illustrated recipe card and a set of pre-measured ingredients. “Seems simple enough,” I said to the dog. Tahleuqah just looked at me as if I were supposed to feed her. That dog is always ready for food.
When Kim got home from work, I made the tacos. They were amazing. I’m not joking. They were delicious. (The dog agrees.) “You know, I should have taken photos along the way,” I told Kim. “I should write about this at Get Rich Slowly.
“Well, you could always make dinner for us again tomorrow night,” she said. So I did. And this time, I did take pictures.
For round two, the dog and I prepared Sweet-as-Honey Chicken. Here’s the bag and recipe card:
Here are the ingredients from inside the bag and the other side of the recipe card (with actual instructions):
Here’s some of my meal prep:
And here’s the final product:
“You know what my favorite part of this is?” Kim asked as I served her dinner. “It’s that you can use the paper sack to dispose of your trash while you prep the meal.” (I’m kind of messy in the kitchen.) The dog looked hurt. She’s always happy to help us dispose of kitchen trash.
While not quite as delicious as the tacos, the chicken was still very good. And simple. (The HelloFresh recipe cards estimate 20-30 minutes of prep time; for me, that was more like 30-45 minutes. But then I’m always slow in the kitchen.)
“How much did this cost?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “The doctor paid for it. But I think it’s something like $20 per meal. So, since he sent us three meals, that’s about $60 for the week.”
“That seems expensive,” I said. “I should research the numbers.” So, like a good money nerd, that’s exactly what I did.
When I published my first HelloFresh review last June, I liked the popular meal-delivery service. Kim’s employer had given us a one-week free trial. The three recipes we received were fun and tasty. In the end, we chose not to sign up with HelloFresh but resolved to remember it for the future.
At the end of 2018, as I was evaluating my spending patterns, I was shocked by how much I was spending on food. It’s embarrassing to show the following numbers, but facts are facts and truth is truth. I was spending over $1100 per month on food.
“Something needs to change,” I told Kim. “Maybe we should try HelloFresh again to see if it can help us cut costs.”
“Do you think so?” Kim siad. “Isn’t HelloFresh kind of expensive?”
“It’s not that bad,” I said. “Besides, if having meals delivered can keep us from dining out so often, and if it can keep me from splurging at the grocery store, it might actually save us money.”
I signed us up.
For two months — January and February — we received three HelloFresh recipes each week. Based on our experience, here’s a new, revised review of HelloFresh.
When people talk about saving money, DIY is one of the first things that comes to mind.
Do all of this (and more) and you could save hundreds of dollars a year.
And thatâs great. I know lots of folks that enjoy growing a lush garden resulting in delicious produce (that can be canned or frozen) in due season. There are people in my life that find doing laundry calming, and others that will happily take on any domestic project that comes their way. Personally, I enjoy doing the dishes.
While Iâm happy spending time on the things that I like, there are certain things that I hate doing â and that I will happily outsource to others.
Am I perfectly capable of cleaning my home and mowing the lawn? Sure. But why should I spend the time doing these things when I can pay someone else to do them? Here are some reasons I spend money to outsource parts of my life.
The number-one reasons I outsource tasks I could do myself is that by doing so, I make more money. Wait, what?
When I talk about spending $200 a month on lawn care or $20 an hour on house cleaning services, many people are surprised to find that I make money by outsourcing these mundane chores.
Iâm a freelance writer, so any time I free up can be used to write an article, interview a source, or work on edits. Rather than spending two hours cleaning the house, I can pay someone $40 to do it instead â and make $500. Thatâs a net gain of $460 each week, or about $1,840 per month.
There have been times that I take my laptop with me to get the oil changed. Jiffy Lube takes care of it for $65 and I can do work amounting to about $200 in the time Iâm sitting there. Thatâs a net gain of $135.
In the past, Iâve used services like Blue Apron and HelloFresh to plan my meals and deliver the ingredients. That saves me the time and hassle of meal planning and grocery shopping, and allowed me to focus on other things. However, with my travel schedule, these types of services havenât been meeting my needs.
Instead, with Instacart now available in my area, Iâve switched to getting someone else to do the shopping, while I use a service like $5 Meal Plan to plan my meals and provide me with an ingredient list.
No matter how I do it, though, the cost of these services is much less than what I can make doing a little extra work. Whether you want more time to work on a side gig, or take action to grow your business, the investment you make in outsourcing can yield dividends later.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much food I consume (and waste). I’m not happy with how I shop and eat, and it’s not just because I’m fat right now. I don’t like what I’m eating and I don’t like how much food I’m throwing out.
Food waste is a huge problem in the United States. Most studies find that Americans waste about one-third of all food that enters the supply chain. This is insane. And when you consider that food spending is the third-largest component of the average American budget, this is a great place for most folks to boost their budget.
According to the 2017 Consumer Expenditure Report, the average household spends $7,729 per year ($644.08 per month) on food. If, as the USDA reports, 31% of the average family’s food goes to waste, that’s the equivalent of burning $2395.99 per year ($199.67 per month).
For most families, $200 per month is a big deal. That can be the difference between deficit spending and earning a “profit”. That $200 per month could be enough to purchase a new car or to afford better health insurance.
Today, I want to think out loud about food consumption and food waste in my own life.
This article is unusual in that I’m not going to try to offer any solutions. Instead, I’m simply going to share some observations, and I’m going to divide these observations into bite-sized chunks.
If you have solutions to food waste, however, I’d love to hear them.
Dinnerly promises ready-to-prep meals delivered to your doorstep for $5 a plate. Is this the cheapest meal kit delivery service around?
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
Weâre living in an age of convenience. Groceries can be delivered, clothes can be picked out for you and just about every TV show and movie ever made can be beamed straight into your living room. If I had the money, I could get pretty much everything I need without ever leaving my house. But
The post Are All the Food Delivery and Subscription Services Worth It? appeared first on MintLife Blog.
Weâre living in an age of convenience. Groceries can be delivered, clothes can be picked out for you and just about every TV show and movie ever made can be beamed straight into your living room. If I had the money, I could get pretty much everything I need without ever leaving my house. But
The post Are All the Food Delivery and Subscription Services Worth It? appeared first on MintLife Blog.
Weâre living in an age of convenience. Groceries can be delivered, clothes can be picked out for you and just about every TV show and movie ever made can be beamed straight into your living room. If I had the money, I could get pretty much everything I need without ever leaving my house. But
The post Are All the Food Delivery and Subscription Services Worth It? appeared first on MintLife Blog.