This meal-delivery service brings convenience to your doorstep

By: Sabrina Benet

Steakhouse Porkchops are made tender, coated with spices and pan seared into a creamy shallot sauce. Credit: Sabrina Benet

As a full-time student, it sometimes becomes difficult to plan meals and seek out recipes to try new food. HelloFresh is a meal delivery service that ships fresh ingredients and recipes to your doorstep. I had stumbled upon the service from multiple advertisements on my social media apps and became eager to try it for myself. 

Having a food delivery service allows you to make homemade meals without the hassle of prepping, avoiding all nerve-racking trips to the supermarket and time spent looking for the perfect recipe.

Signing up for the delivery service is rather easy; the company is currently offering $80 off to new customers with some boxes of three meals being as low as $22 with shipping. Along with the huge discounts, HelloFresh has perks such as weekly discounted boxes and they even allow you to send four free boxes to your friends and family.

 I, of course, took advantage of this. 

Upon registering for the service you have to choose a meal kit option: Veggie, Meat & Veggie, Family Friendly, or Low Calorie. Since I find myself eating meat often, I chose the Meat & Veggie box where the meal plan is known to have an extremely wide variety of meat, fish, and in-season items. 

I put my own twist on the ‘Pulled Pork Fiesta Bowls’ by pan searing my own ‘Everything but Elote’ and garlic butter shrimp to accompany it. Credit: Sabrina Benet

Weekly, you have the ability to pick and choose from any meals you would like with a minimum of three and a maximum of six. My favorites so far have been the Hoison Sriacha Pork Stir-Fry, Steakhouse Pork chops, Gouda Vibes Burgers, and Creamy Dill Chicken. Each meal’s ingredients comes in its own separate labeled recyclable bags. 

There are definitely pros to HelloFresh, such as learning how to cook. As a college student who is always on the run, I never found the time to teach myself how to make things other than the basics. HelloFresh has helped me figure out that I am more capable of making a home-cooked meal than I give myself credit for. 

With each bag of ingredients, they provide direction cards for your meals of choice. The bags and online recipes are labeled for possible allergens such as: wheat, soy, eggs, tree nuts, peanuts, fish, and shellfish. 

Each card has a picture of the meal plated for reference, lists all ingredients you need, including ones they do not include in the bag (mainly oil, salt, pepper, butter), and directions on how to execute this meal properly. The directions are extremely helpful and necessary especially when the extent of your past cooking experience is with frozen or boxed foods.

The ‘Hoisin Siracha Pork’ recipe has become a family favorite and an easy replacement for takeout. Credit: Sabrina Benet

My overall experience with the HelloFresh service has been a positive one. The meals are delicious and high quality. The creative recipes put a new spin on spicing up the average college student’s daily meals, showing me how to amp up the flavor in virtually anything they gave me. 

The portions are completely reasonable, though there are barely any leftovers. I do find myself enjoying this aspect because I am guilty of throwing them out at the end of the week; however, some of these meals are so tasty that I would not mind going back for more during the week.

I order the meal plan for two so my boyfriend and I can cook them together. I really love that these boxes are so straight-forward and make for a really fun date night for an affordable price. 

For me, this experience was overall about having well-made, home-cooked meals and spending more quality time with someone I love. It has turned out to be so much more than that is now a staple of my week!