EveryPlate is simply the best low-cost meal kit I’ve tried

A real low-cost meal kit, with hearty and tasty meals. Simple meals can, however, offer a real sense of cooking. The portions of rice and starchy foods are much improved.

The options are far fewer than HelloFresh. The box arrives in disarray, with many individual packages. Some instructions are too simple. BYO eggs.

I’m going to keep this simple: EveryPlate is the cheapest meal delivery service I tested complete, balanced and tested hot meals (and I tried almost all of them). At $7 per serving, it’s also the only one that wouldn’t require any special adjustment in my grocery budget. And yet, this budget-friendly meal plan from HelloFresh is somehow able to come up with dinners that even your judged mother-in-law would recognize as a healthy dinner.

The pork chop meal I tried in May is the kind of meat-and-two supper that I probably took too much for granted as a kid. Pan-fried chops. Brussels sprouts with crispy leaves baked in the oven. Fresh mashed potatoes. But what took the meal from basic to weekday extravaganza was a shallot, garlic and cream sauce, cooked with fresh thyme in the juices from the pork I had just finished searing. The sauce was rich, complex, aromatic and just enough outside of my usual repertoire that I felt like I had learned a useful secret.

It was a work-weary Wednesday, a day when I’m more prone to regretful DoorDashes than compelling meal planning. Although the dish took 45 minutes to prepare, longer than most EveryPlate meals, the process was simple. Each ingredient was pre-portioned and cooking times were pre-tested so the sprouts, fresh mashed potatoes and chops all arrived together. Whether I would have preferred to steam the sprouts or pan-sear them was a quibble for another day.

Over the past year, with EveryPlate, I’ve made spring pea and zucchini risotto, Chinese-inspired dumpling soup, Tex-Mexy pork birria tacos, and turkey or beef bulgogi ponzu rice bowls. These were all dishes that I wouldn’t have had the energy to plan and buy during the week unless I was particularly inspired. Few of the meals were what I would call sophisticated. But most were healthier and much cheaper than any takeout meal I could have had instead.

That’s the biggest benefit of EveryPlate’s meal kit: a simple, hearty dinner that’s on budget, without requiring the difficult meal planning of a life that already seems overloaded. It doesn’t offer the complexity or variety of more expensive meal kits. And some staples, like eggs, are BYO. But EveryPlate fits easily into a busy life and seems more and more affordable as my grocery shopping squeezes me more and more each day. Here’s how it works.

Everything according to plan

EveryPlate works similarly to a number of home-cooked meal delivery services. Online registration involves choosing the number of meals and portions you want each week. Meals of two, four or six servings are offered. You can select three to five different meals per week, from a menu of approximately 35 options. Of these, about ten can be made vegetarian.

Most packages cost $7 per serving, with $11 shipping for each box. This makes EveryPlate significantly cheaper than other budget kits for cooking for two or four people, which fits most households. Note that competitors Dinner And Chef at home become competitively priced, or even cheaper, when you plan six-serving meals.

Expect most recipes to take 20 to 45 minutes to cook: as a general rule, take the cooking time printed on the recipe card and add 50 percent. Part of this is because all recipe creators underestimate times. Also because you are probably not a professional cook in a commissary kitchen.

When your EveryPlate box arrives, it will contain recipe cards and a paper bag containing most of the mixed ingredients. The meat is kept at the bottom, nestled against a bag of ice. Many premium meal delivery plans sort ingredients into individual recipe bags, but that’s a luxury you’ll often forgo when using budget plans. Either you will have to organize the ingredients each week as the box arrives, or expect to do a bit of digging, especially for the first recipe.

Economy begets economy

But even though EveryPlate’s costs are low, it usually doesn’t come at the expense of decent ingredients. EveryPlate uses the same protein suppliers as parent company HelloFresh’s premium plan. Shrimp is domestic, on EveryPlate as on HelloFresh. Beef, pork and chicken are sourced from multi-generational family suppliers in Texas, New Jersey and North Carolina. Unlike many meal plans, this supply is clearly stated on the package. The chicken thigh is well trimmed and ready to cook. The same goes for a pork chop or ranch steak.

The key to all of this is economics. This simplicity is, in fact, the secret to how EveryPlate keeps its costs low. Each of EveryPlate’s meals tends to get its flavors from its ingredients and perhaps a single sauce or blend of herbs or spices, or perhaps citrus fruits used cross-functionally as juice and zest.

Last year I conducted an experiment to see if I could prepare meal kit recipes from scratch for less money than ordering directly from meal kit companies. The answer was almost always no, and the reason was usually the spices and sauces. Anyone who has spent a lot of time trying to cook cookbooks has probably noticed this. It costs a lot of money to build and maintain a pantry of spices and herbs. So, one way EveryPlate can reduce costs is simply by reducing the number of ingredients that need to be coordinated for each dish.

For example, some “birria-style” pulled pork tacos use the same Tex-Mex spice paste to flavor the beef and dipping sauce, dividing an onion between the taco toppings and the broth. The result might taste less like birria and more like a Texas meat chili sauce. But it tastes good. The aforementioned pork chops get most of their flavor from thyme and shallots, and salt and pepper are liberally applied.

A bowl of ground turkey rice, meanwhile, relies on ginger, garlic, and a mixture of soy glaze and citric ponzu sauce. The recipe also relies on you to supply your own eggs: it’s another way EveryPlate saves money. Eggs are expensive these days, and you have to bring your own.

But compared to last year, EveryPlate’s plan is less likely to skimp on rice servings. The company announced this last year, after complaints from customers (and me). So, the jasmine rice accompanying this dish was three-quarters of a cup, enough to fill the meal heartily. The taco and rice bowl dishes, while far from sophisticated, are also easy to prepare, flavorful and filling without loading up on fat and salt: each contained more than 800 calories.

The usual warnings

Of course, not everything is perfect. As mentioned, the recipe deadlines are mostly ambitious. And while EveryPlate’s taste for experimentation is actually much appreciated, the experiments can sometimes feel a little improvised. Upcoming menus include wacky concoctions like masala risotto or curry pie — the kind of ad hoc experiments that happen when Dad gets bored and asks you to hold his beer.

This taste for experimentation can extend to brand partnerships. The meal I was least excited about while testing this season was actually the one I was most excited about to begin with. EveryPlate has experimented with a series of partnerships with food brands, including New York’s Chinese-inspired dumpling brand. Mimi Cheng. In this case, the flavors didn’t really gel and many of the dumplings arrived broken. In the meantime, EveryPlate has evolved and now prepares dishes using flavored chickpeas and artisan canned brand beans Apogee.

I’ve had a few mishaps with the ingredients, but it happens. A zucchini from my most recent order received moisture or stray water in its bag. By the time I got there, at the end of the week, it was the death of the zucchini. I had to use mine, which luckily was already in the crisper drawer.

I also had to make a special egg trip to fill this turkey ponzu rice bowl because I neglected to look at the recipe ahead of time. There aren’t many ingredients you need to make EveryPlate’s meals, but milk, eggs, and butter are sometimes among them. Anticipate when you order recipes or when you receive them.

Seams may appear more often on EveryPlate recipes than with high-end kits like HelloFresh or Marley Spoon. I find myself improvising slightly: adding additional flavors afterwards, using my meat juice as an accompaniment or reversing the order of operations. If I had my choice, I would have used my own favorite preparation on the Brussels sprouts rather than risk erasing any stray leaves in the oven.

But above all, what EveryPlate offers is a baseline to work from. It offers an escape from my own tired routines: thoughts put into my meals by someone who isn’t me. A $7 meal where I buy an egg is still an economical meal and much more filling than I would have had otherwise. EveryPlate remains the most economical meal kit that I would happily eat regularly, a remarkable achievement in these uncertain times.