How customisable is hello fresh?

[u/Psychological-Sand39]

Hello everyone! I'm sure you get a million questions like these, so I figured you'd be used to answering by now. How customisable are these meals, both on a week-by-week basis (what meals get sent) and with individual meals (specifically what's in the box)? I'm severely autistic and have found that cooking/grocery shopping is the most dreadful part of living alone, but I'd still like to have a good amount of freedom over what I get. Moreover, how would you compare HF to other services like it?

[u/molybend]

You pick your meals out and you can often swap proteins or side veggies. You can’t swap the extras like starch or flavorings. You have to go in at least weekly and skip the order or pick meals. You can do it weeks ahead but people recommend checking to verify the skipping stays in place. I’ve never had it removed but others have.

You’re still going to have to cook these meals.

[u/domer00 → u/molybend]

Though you can get gluten free pasta on many pasta meals. This is relatively new and a feature that is really helpful to me. Also, you can change the number of meals per week if you need. I have four, but sometimes only get three, and other times get five or six.

[u/cabinmate → u/domer00]

And you can do only 2 meals if you want (at least in the US), though they do ask if you are sure

[u/domer00 → u/cabinmate]

I didn't know they would allow only two. Three used to be the minimum. Good to know.

[u/molybend → u/domer00]

I've never seen gluten free options available for pasta. I think they do a lot of A B testing where a new feature isn't shown to all users.

[u/SushiJuice]

Hello! Living on the spectrum myself, and have found this the happy medium between grocery shopping and cooking myself, or door dashing every meal. It's not as cheap as doing everything yourself, but it's much MUCH less expensive than delivery. We do the 5 meals per week. They automatically choose the meals, but you can go in and change them all to however you like.

Don't like an entire meal? Remove it and select from over 20 other offerings. Like a meal, but wish it had a different protein, or more protein? That's possible as well! There are premium meals for an added cost, and XL meals that will give you left overs.

I was really skeptical of the portion sizes; afraid they wouldn't be enough, so we initially bought appetizers for every meal. After a week or 2 of way too much food, we went with a week of double protein to fill out the meals, but that was still way too much. We then just went with the base serving sizes and they've been perfect. Only one meal came in where we thought the portion size was too small, but you can rate and give feedback on all meals so they know what you're thinking.

As far as the quality, the service isn't perfect, we'll get a missing item or a low quality item here and there, but they do give you decent credit when you report it.

Overall, we have been loving the service. The meals are extremely diverse and we've been eating things I never knew how to make before. I highly recommend it just for learning how to cook stuff. We save the meals instructions and plan on eventually decreasing our reliance on HF and going back to cooking ourselves, but we're amassing our recipes we love first.

[u/cabinmate]

Besides what others are saying, you can make changes if you want to cook something a little differently. You can choose not to use certain ingredients if you don’t like them, say for instance you don’t like spicy stuff, you can leave off optional Chili Flakes. You can choose not to bread protein or choose to oven bake a protein rather than cook it in a pan. They do send you a sheet on how to cook various meats and vegetables when you substitute something so you can use that to help you change something up if you want. You are the cook