meal kits It’s billed as a faster, easier, and less demanding way to prepare dinner. Having made over 75 recipes while testing all major meal kit brands, I can attest to the claims.

The tradeoff for this convenience has always been paying more to have recipe ingredients measured, packaged, and shipped to your steps to be turned into meals in minutes. With grocery prices still high due to post-pandemic price gouging and supply chain issues, we wondered if this was still an expensive splurge.

If you’re considering trying EveryPlate, Blue Apron or HelloFresh You may be wondering if it will come to your bank account to save time. To find out, I did the math to see how much buying food from the average supermarket chain meal kits would actually cost in 2024.

Looks like it’s not just dinnerware Affordable in 2024but some recipes turned out to be the same or even cheaper grocery shoppingdepending on the service you registered with.

Here’s a breakdown and how I got these numbers.

How did I do the math?

To see how much Blue Apron, HelloFresh, and EveryPlate meals cost to make, I priced the ingredients for two actual recipes included with the standard subscription.

When choosing food, I used the cheapest version of the same or similar ingredient I could find at my local budget-friendly grocery store, Shop-Rite. Because meal kit recipes include only the amount of ingredients needed, I prorate the cost based on how much you’ll actually use for a recipe, not the full price of the bottle, jar, box, or bag.

I chose basic, non-organic items unless stated otherwise in the meal kit recipe card or website.

How did I choose the recipes?

If you are looking for dinner sets value propositionYou’ll need to be smart about which recipes you choose. Steak, chicken, and fish are more expensive to cook at home than plant-based meals, so I specifically chose recipes that included these proteins. (I also recommend taking advantage of these if you’re signing up for a service).

Not all services include steak recipes at no additional cost, but HelloFresh and Blue Apron do. Blue Apron typically offers at least one very high-end cut of beef. sirloin steak at no additional charge.

HelloFresh offers one or two beef recipes a week, but that’s usually cheaper cut like chuck steak. Seafood options are limited to a basic HelloFresh, but I found one. barramundi recipe Also on this week’s menu: Ranch steak with Caesar salad.

Budget-friendly services, including EveryPlate, generally don’t offer steak or seafood, which is how they keep consumer prices low. For my EveryPlate analysis, I chose: Beef meatballs with cherries And pork chop recipe.

Blue Apron offers the best value

Blue Apron It has the most top-tier recipes out of the three I chose to analyze. I chose a recipe that included sirloin steak and another that included fresh steelhead trout fillets.

When I priced the foods to make these meals, I came up with $11.26 and $8.23 respectively, for an average price of $9.75 per serving. Both dishes turned out to be more expensive to buy at the supermarket than the $8 per serving cost of the largest (cheapest) Blue Apron plan.

As cheesy as it sounds, Blue Apron’s ultimate plan is to create five meal kits per week with four servings each, which is probably practical for most people. If you choose a more reasonably sized plan (let’s say three recipes for four servings each), the price per serving increases to $9.50. That’s still cheaper than the cost of groceries, but only slightly.

Add in the $11 weekly shipping cost and Blue Apron slightly exceeds the cost of purchasing groceries, but only slightly. Considering the convenience of a meal kit, it’s hard to argue that Blue Apron isn’t a good value in 2024.

HelloFresh had the worst value of the three

HelloFresh It may have been the most popular meal kit service, but it was also the worst value of the three. I chose a barramundi recipe and chuck steak meal kit to compare with local grocery store prices.

According to my calculations, HelloFresh meal kits cost just $6.55 per serving to purchase the food and cook it yourself. That’s about $3.50 cheaper than HelloFresh’s cheapest meal plan at $10 per serving, and that’s all before you factor in your $11 weekly delivery cost. If you spread this shipping cost over two or three meal sets, the actual cost per serving is between $11 and $12.

HelloFresh may have one of the largest weekly meal kit menus and user-friendly ordering interface, but it seems the popular service doesn’t offer as good a value as some other meal kit companies in 2024.

EveryPlate is a good deal, almost the same as buying food

Each Plate two dinnerware sets cost $4.98 and $5.82 when purchased a la carte at the grocery store; this is average $5.40. That’s just 60 cents less than the per-serving price of EveryPlate’s meal kits; It costs $6 per serving no matter which plan you choose.

When you add in the shipping cost of $10 per box, the cost of the meal kit goes up a bit, but it’s still around the same price as buying all the food yourself.

EveryPlate’s meal kit menus don’t feature much in the way of steak or seafood; so you can expect more budget-friendly proteins like chicken, ground beef, and pork chops. EveryPlate meals are also easy to make and satisfying; making it our best cheap meal kit service of 2024.

Check out my guide to get the most out of your food delivery Hacking food delivery subscription in 2024.