Deciding whether a meal kit service is right for you? Let's whip up a pros and cons list!
You have probably seen the commercials, social media ads, and flyers for meal kit delivery subscriptions. All you have to do is pick out how many and which meals you want to eat each week and the service will prepare all of the ingredients and deliver a succinct meal kit to your door. When you are ready to start making dinner, you can pull it out of the fridge and follow the directions for cooking the pre-chopped, marinated, and thought-out meal.
You may be wondering, "Is a meal kit delivery subscription for me?"
The answer? Well, it depends. Below are a few pros and cons that can help you decide if a meal kit subscription is the right plan for furthering your goals of healthy meal planning.
You get home from work after a crazy day at work, fit your workout in just barely before picking up your child from a friend's house, and then have to get into the kitchen to prepare a dinner that you forgot to take out of the freezer to thaw. What will you most likely do? Eat out! If not that, then you might just gnaw at the frozen chicken desperately as your stomach growls and your kids demand dinner.
Having a meal kit already thawed and ready to go makes it so easy for you to feel like making dinner at home again and it will stop you from picking up your phone to Uber Eats something.
With a meal kit, you can stay in control of your dinner. No matter how crazy or unexpected your day was, you can rely on pulling out a kit with everything inside to make a delicious meal. Going to the grocery store can be overwhelming sometimes. If you don't have a list of exactly which ingredients you need for each meal, you will be bound to make more frequent stops at the store throughout the week, which eats into your time.
You can also tell the service how many people you want the kit to serve and the packages will come with plenty for the whole fam-bam. Many of the services allow you to personalize your meal plan to match your family's dietary restrictions as well, so you do not have to worry about receiving a meal that you will be allergic to or have temporarily nixed from your diet.
My family definitely gets into dinner ruts. We end up making the same handful of meals over and over because we know how to prepare them, we know what to buy at the store, and we don't usually have the creative capacity at the end of the day to try anything new. But it gets old.
A meal kit can save you from boring dinner ruts. You get to try your hand at a new flavor for your chicken, cuisine you've never tried, and mix of ingredients you've never thought of.
A meal kit delivery service is more expensive than going to the store to buy the specific ingredients for a meal. This makes sense. The service essentially does the grocery shopping and meal-prepping for you and then drops it off at your front door. You are paying a little extra to save you time in the day to fit in more time for your work, family, workout, etc.
If you have to juggle a job, kids, and home upkeep, dinner can feel like climbing Everest. But spending a little extra money to have some help in the dinner department can be totally worth it.
You do get to choose your meals. It depends on the meal kit delivery service, but many of them do not offer extremely healthy meals in their base-rate membership. You will get to choose between different versions of pizza, pasta, and quesadillas. And let's be honest, you can whip up a delicious quesadilla with the few ingredients you already have in your fridge. That's not why you want the meal kit, right? If you wanted a less-than-healthy meal, you could have just eaten out.
You want it to provide you and your family with a healthy meal. If you decide that a meal kit delivery service is for you, do your research on menu choices before purchasing it.
While this is a pro, it can also be a con. If you have meals coming for the week that you have paid for and will go bad if you don't cook them in a few days, you can't spontaneously leave for the weekend. You also have to make sure you can be there to receive your food when it is delivered as you don't want refrigerated items to warm on your front step. You can turn a future week of meals off if you know you are leaving town, but you can't do it last minute. So you just have to keep a more strategic pulse on your travel plans.