Does Home Chef Deserve the Hype? Editors Dish On Its Cost, Taste, and Convenience

Meal kit delivery services are undeniably convenient: No trips to the grocery store, no wasted ingredients, a streamlined recipe selection process that won’t leave you drained from decision fatigue, and affordable home-cooked meals that are probably way tastier than anything you’d normally eat on a weeknight.

If you’ve been curious to give meal kits a try, you probably know that there are tons of services to choose from. Two of SELF’s editors tested Home Chef, and below you can read all the details about their experience with it.

Home Chef review

For their reviews, they followed SELF’s meal-kit buying guide, which was created using dietitian recommendations. Below, you can learn how Home Chef works and find out our testers’ thoughts on the service’s customizability, affordability, order and delivery process, ease of use, nutrition profile, and taste.

After you sign up for the service, you’ll have a few factors to consider to complete your profile (also accessible by the Home Chef app):

Check out the meal kit recipe examples below to get a sense of the ingredients and instructions included with each meal:

• Steak with garlic-herb butter, crispy shrimp rice bowl and sriracha aioli
• Spinach and feta salad with Italian-avocado dressing and crispy chickpeas
• Salmon with brown-butter tomato relish
• Crispy teriyaki tofu tacos
• Crispy bell pepper chicken with roasted garlic potatoes and peas
• Brussels sprouts and brown butter risotto
• Chicken breast with garlic demi-glace and parmesan asparagus

“I enjoyed the breakdown within each meal item [on the menu]; I could see its level of difficulty, time it would take to prepare, level of spice, how long the ingredients would stay fresh, and nutrition profile, as well as a biography of the chef who designed the meal,” says Malia Griggs, a former commerce editor at SELF who tested Home Chef for two weeks. “I could customize each recipe with what meat (or lack thereof) I wanted. I could also order raw protein packs to my order, which I’m sure is useful if you’re cooking for a family.”

You have until Friday of each week to pick the following week’s meals. You also have the ability to skip meals week to week and to pause your account (or easily unskip/unpause, should circumstances change). “I was anxious that I’d get sent a backlog of meal kits, but these two features made it easy to vary my weeks,” Griggs says. “And if I forgot to order meals for a week, Home Chef would automatically send me three meals based on my taste profile.”

Meals start at $10 per serving. The weekly order minimum is $51 for a standard Home Chef plan (one to three meals, with two servings per meal) and $83 for a Family Plan (at least 10 meals, with four servings per meal). Shipping is included. This makes Home Chef relatively affordable compared to many of the best meal delivery services out there. For reference, HelloFresh, Blue Apron, and Green Chef cost $12 per serving, while EveryPlate costs roughly $6 per serving.

Griggs found that she saved quite a bit of money using Home Chef. She ordered three meals with two servings each per week (she would save a serving for the next day’s lunch). For her, each Home Chef serving cost roughly $10 to $14, so meals were $20 to $28. Ultimately, each week’s subtotal was $61—so, for two weeks, $122. Because Griggs was able to get both dinner and lunch out of each “meal,” she was able to cover the cost of a dozen meals for that sum.

“On a normal, non–Home Chef week, I spend (cringe) around $80 to $100 on takeout for three orders with two dishes in each—which would be somewhere around $160 to $200 for two weeks,” Griggs, who lives in Brooklyn, says. “If I shop at a supermarket for a week, that cost is more along the lines of $50 to $75—or $100 to $150 over the course of two weeks.”

Getting 12 meals for $122 with Home Chef was worth it, Griggs says. “For my situation, I felt like Home Chef was a good deal. I reasoned that, left to my own devices, I’d get stuck buying an entire pineapple when all I wanted was six small chunks to make fresh pineapple salsa. I’d wind up with a bottle of teriyaki sauce when a quarter cup was what I really needed,” she says. “In the long run, I save on the special ingredients, and on shelf space too. Plus, I didn’t have to actually shop or measure out all the finicky little ingredients—a huge saver for my precious time and energy.”

SELF editorial assistant Grace McCarty, who also lives in New York City, saved using Home Chef too. “I drop more than $50 just restocking random staples and buying stuff for lunches on any given grocery trip. I’m not a huge cook, but when I actually buy ingredients to make a real dinner, I end up spending so much that I wish I had just gotten takeout or dropped $15 at a Naya/Cava/Chipotle,” she says. “If you’re willing to commit to cooking adult meals, this feels absolutely worth it to me.”

Also, Home Chef offers 18 free meals (across multiple boxes) and free shipping on your first box when you subscribe.

Home Chef ships nationwide, and you’ll get notifications via email to confirm your order and shipping with a tracking code.

Kits arrive in a box stuffed with recyclable insulation and long-lasting cooling packs (instead of ice packs) to keep raw ingredients from spoiling. The packs can be reused or you can drain them of their non-toxic, biodegradable gel and recycle the liners. The ingredients are packaged in plastic that can be recycled along with the cardboard box, according to Home Chef’s recommendations for disposal.

“I struggled with feeling guilty about paper waste, especially as many recipes required the use of paper towels,” Griggs says. “Ultimately, though, I knew that I’d have wasted, regardless, as I’d get stuck with full-size ingredients I’d never use, and I appreciated the company’s nods to sustainability.”

Home Chef meals come with a little binder to clip in recipe cards, so you can easily make Home Chef recipes again even if you stop using the service. Inside the binder, you can see what essentials and tools you’ll need to have on hand to make most meals (pots, pans, olive oil, meat thermometer, etc.). “I have a very basic kitchen and I had everything I needed,” McCarty says. Everything else you’ll need for your recipes, including the preportioned ingredients, is packaged and labeled in the meal kit.

“I found Home Chef meals painless (a pleasure, really) to follow,” Griggs says. “The recipes were cleanly designed, noting what was in my kit, what I’d additionally need, how long it would take to prepare, what temperature the proteins needed to be cooked to, how quickly they needed to be cooked, and clear step-by-step directions with photos.”

Griggs found some discrepancies between the recipes’ predicted cooking time and how long it actually took her to make her food, however. “It usually took me around 20 more minutes to prep and cook each meal from what the recipe predicted,” she says. “The steak with garlic-herb butter said it would take 35 to 45 minutes but actually took me an hour. While the recipe for crispy shrimp claimed it would take two to three minutes to sear the shrimp per side, cooking them took over 15 minutes.”

For McCarty, none of the meals took more than 45 mins to put together. “As a very rookie chef, it opened my eyes to some efficient kitchen techniques I simply hadn’t thought of before,” she says “The recipes are super easy to follow but still involved enough that the results have a nice presentation and flavor combo.”

If you’re looking to cook on a tight time frame—or if you have no interest in slicing and dicing—the oven-ready meals might be the best option for you.

As dietitian Nazima Qureshi, RD, MPH, noted in our buying guide, “One of the biggest issues I have seen with meal kits is that at the surface level they may seem healthy because they have healthy ingredients, but the recipes are put together with the priority to taste good.” She recommends looking at macros and calories to see if meals are nutritionally balanced.

Home Chef displays the basic nutrition facts (calories, protein, sodium, etc.) and lets you toggle between carb-light, calorie-light, and veggie-only options to see how the numbers change. Griggs notes that when she tested the service, the meals’ sodium content stuck out to her. “Per serving, save the salad, all of the dishes I ordered were upwards of 1,200 milligrams of sodium per serving (1,740, in the case of the crispy shrimp rice bowl),” she says. “The FDA recommends limiting sodium intake to less than 2,300 milligrams per day (i.e., one teaspoon of salt), which would be tough if you combined a serving of a Home Chef meal with two more meals.

Griggs found the meals filling and satisfying. “What I ordered was undeniably yummy,” she says. “The crispy tofu tacos were made deliciously tangy with the pineapple salsa, and the brussels sprout risotto was rich and crunchy with its touches of goat cheese and roasted pecans. Given my customary diet of Seamless, where I’m clueless about nutrition and ingredients, these meals were a welcome change. Even the creamier dishes added variety and veggies to my diet.”

McCarty was impressed by the variety and was especially fond of the vegetarian options, even though she doesn’t follow a plant-based diet. “The vegetarian meals I sampled were great and I would select them on my own,” she says. “I thought the food was delicious and I was impressed with how high quality the protein was!”

McCarty and Griggs were both big fans of Home Chef. “I went from a diet of peanut butter and penne (not together) to a professional menu,” Griggs says. “I tried techniques I’d never normally approach, such as pickling, and made my own brown-butter tomato relish and aioli. To my delight, every meal tasted wonderful. Really, all of them.”

McCarty found that with Home Chef, she made much better dinners than she would have made (or come up with) otherwise. “The ingredients were very fresh for the most part, conveniently packaged, and I loved that they were preportioned to make the cooking process breezy.”

Cooking felt less like a chore with this service, Griggs says. “It was comforting to turn on music and get lost in a recipe that would’ve previously intimidated me—or never crossed my mind to make,” she says. “I don’t have to do the grocery shopping, ingredients are precisely measured so that I can toss them in without fuss, and when I'm done, a magazine-worthy meal is left on my plate, in its sweet, savory glory.”

With reporting from Malia Griggs and Grace McCarty

Related:

• Everything You Need to Meal Prep (and Stick With It) in 2025
• 24 Tasty, High-Protein Snacks to Keep Your Energy Up
• 10 Clever Fridge Organizers That Will Change Your Life a Little Bit

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