Do you remember when I talked about trying a food/recipe delivery service called Hello Fresh? It is a service where you pay a fee to have three recipes worth of food delivered straight to your house. We love it because the recipes are easy to follow, they are something different for me to add to my dinner rotation and it is a fun way to try something new without the commitment of wandering through the grocery store looking for ingredients I’ve never used before.
There are a few options, but we get the “classic” service which provides three meals for two people. I’ve found that this is plenty of food for the three of us and sometimes we even have leftovers. We pay $69, which includes shipping… however I have an awesome promo code at the end of the post that will save you some major moola if you decide you want to try them. You can check out my initial review here. Hello Fresh also offers a larger classic service for four people and a couple different veggie options as well.
Since we have been using Hello Fresh a couple times a month since December, I thought I’d share some tips for getting the most out of the service.
Tip #1: Set a Weekly Reminder
Use your phone or your calendar to set an alert to go off each Thursday. This way, you can take a few minutes to click into your Hello Fresh account and check out the upcoming meal list. Here are my choices from April 2nd (which will be delivered April 12 – 18th) – the first three are automatically checked unless I’d prefer one of the alternates. I like this because I can click on each meal to see what ingredients are included in each recipe.
Tip #2: Skip Deliveries
It is really easy to skip deliveries whenever you want for whatever reason you’d like. For us, maybe I don’t like three meals on a particular week. Or, perhaps I’ll be working a bunch of late nights and know that I can’t commit to cooking three times. Well, all you have to do is click on “My Subscriptions” and decide which days you’d like to pause. Most of the time we only get one or two deliveries a month, so I go in and pause on Thursdays after I check the meal choice options.
Tip #3: Move your Delivery Date Around
When I first signed up for Hello Fresh, our orders were scheduled to arrive on Thursdays. After a few weeks of this, I realized that it would work best for our family if we could have the food come on Monday instead. I typically don’t cook a lot on weekends, so by changing our delivery to Monday I could ensure that the ingredients would be as fresh as possible for meals that week. I also tend to work from home most Mondays, so when the delivery is dropped off I can transfer it right into the refrigerator.
Tip #4: If You’re Unhappy, Tell Them
Over the past five months of using Hello Fresh, we have had a couple issues. For one order, the recipe was incomplete and after chopping up the garlic I wasn’t really sure where to put it. For another, an ingredient was left out of the box. While both of these are kind of annoying, they weren’t HUGE deals. However, I emailed Hello Fresh both times to let them know and their customer service department was really great in giving me a small discount to make up for the inconvenience.
Would you like to try Hello Fresh for yourself?
They have a referral program where if you use my special code on your first box you will be able to get $40 off. That brings your total to $29 for three meals which will serve 2 people. Pretty great, right?! When you get your checkout, just use this promo code: ETXYKD.
If you do decide to try Hello Fresh, please let me know what you think. A little tip though, when you sign up for your first delivery go in and immediately “pause” your second delivery date. That way you can try out a box and decide whether you want to keep the subscription before having to pay for a second box. Then, if you don’t like it just hit “cancel” and you won’t get any more boxes or be charged more than the initial payment of $29.
Have you ever used a food delivery service like Hello Fresh? Tell me about it in the comments!
{Disclosure: This was not a sponsored review. I pay for my Hello Fresh subscription with my own money. All thoughts and opinions in this review are my own. If you choose to use my special referral promo code, I will receive a credit towards my future Hello Fresh orders. For anyone who does decide to use the code… my tummy thanks you!}
We’ve used Hello Fresh twice in the last year. The first time it was free and the second time I forgot to skip the delivery. It was okay both times, but I didn’t love it. I’m not a big recipe follower, and I found that a lot of these recipes say, “40 minutes” and take way longer, which doesn’t work for us on weeknights. There was one recipe in which I was literally eating the dumplings as I was taking them off the pan because I was so hungry and the recipe was closer to 2 hours than 40 minutes.
Ugh, 2 hours is CRAZY for a normal dinner. I’ve only had one meal that took longer than the 30 – 40 minutes, and of course I ended up not even liking it anyways! I’m jealous that you’re not a recipe follower, I HAVE to use recipes or I’m pretty much lost. =)
When I was prepping one of the dinners, and getting super frustrated (The recipe following actually irritates me LOL), Brian was like, “you know…this is probably really awesome for people who follow recipes.”
Hi Joules! Thanks for your awesome tips! We could learn a thing or two from you 😉
Thank YOU for stopping by! =)