Continuing with our meal subscription theme, (you can check out the Hello Fresh review here), we moved on to Blue Apron.

I often see Hello Fresh and Blue Apron mentioned as similar meal plans. Price-wise they were in the same range.

Blue Apron has a $10 cashback on Rakuten on top of their introductory discounts. Blue Apron also advertised $90 off across the first three orders.

So I committed to three weeks of shipments with them.

The meals we went this for this test included:

• Garlic-Caper Chicken
• Lemon-Caper Tilapia
• Crispy Tilapia & Caper (are you sensing a trend) Mayo
• Creamy Mushroom & Chicken Pasta
• Honey Butter Chicken
• Togarashi Popcorn Chicken

There are multiple meal option types like Signature (which we choose) or Vegetarian.

Without the discount, the box is $47.95 per box or $11.99 per meal plus $7.99 for shipping

What I did like was that Blue Apron divided the discount across the three shipments equally. So instead of $55.94 (2 meals/4 servings and shipping) it was just $27.95 for each box.

That means each meal was $6.99, making Blue Apron definitely cheaper than Hello Fresh (which came in at $10.59 after the discounts).

And I’ll do the math for you, that means the $90 discount was actually $83.97. Much better than the lie that is Hello Fresh claiming a $90 discount and only giving you $57.36. Though, oddly, still not $90.

Blue Apron uses a little less packaging than Hello Fresh, which I liked, but it is still an excessive amount of packaging. The recipe cards are very easy to understand. Similar to Hello Fresh, Blue Apron has you use your own salt, pepper and oils, though it does send butter if the recipe calls for it. Any Hello Fresh meals that used butter assumed I had it already and didn’t send it with the other ingredients.

I will say that my dad and I both felt the recipes for Hello Fresh were much better. These were fine and I think if we’d started with this meal plan, we wouldn’t have had any complaints, but the Hello Fresh meals were definitely more varied.

I made a lot of pan sauces with these recipes and found I am not good at making pan sauces and tend to burn everything, so that could be part of my displeasure.

While I did file away a few Hello Fresh recipes, all of the Blue Apron ones went straight in the trash after dinner. The meals weren’t bad, they just weren’t anything I was so excited about I wanted to make again.

The website is super easy to use. Like Hello Fresh, it does do the obnoxious upcharge thing on several meals that angers me. So I didn’t select any upcharged options.

I felt Blue Apron has more fish options available at the base price than Hello Fresh did.

It was easy to switch meals. The website defaults to two meals, so if you forget to change your meals, you’ll still get two. You can easily pause or skip a week.

I found cancelling required a little more guesswork in the clicking to find the right spot to cancel, but it only took me an extra minute or two compared to Hello Fresh. Overall it was still very easy to cancel online.

So, is Blue Apron worth the splurge? If you’re looking for a more budget friendly way to try out a meal subscription, I would say Blue Apron is a good starting point.

If you’re looking for really good recipes, I think Hello Fresh is still the current winner.

Next month – Sunbasket.