To kick off, let me start with Home Chef is currently tied for first place in our household with Hello Fresh as the best meal kits. My dad thinks they come in first. I think they come in second.

So with that ringing endorsement, let’s look at some of the financials.

There was a $90 off introductory offer, and if you have Rakuten or CapitalOne Shopping installed, there’s an additional $10 you can receive in cash back.

It’s spread out over 4 weeks. The first two weeks are a $30 discount, the next two weeks are a $15 discount.

The minimum number of meals you can receive weekly here are 2 meals.

The meals we went with for this test included:

• Beef Kefta Lettuce Wraps
• Peach BBQ Chicken Breast
• One-Pot Southwest-Style Turkey Chili with Cheddar-Jack Cheese and Sour Cream
• Maple-Glazed Pork Tenderloin Medallions
• Salmon with Lemon Piccata Butter
• Chicken and Truffle Honey Butter with Parmesan Pecan Green Beans
• Pecan-Crusted Chicken
• Caesar Chicken with Parmesan Green Beans

There were a lot of diverse options to pick from each week. I regularly felt like I wanted to try more than just the two I was picking, and this was probably the first meal kit I really felt that way about.

I will say that Home Chef does the thing I don’t love where when you log in to pick your meals, there are also meals listed that change the base price – mostly with by costing you more. There’s the Culinary Collection, which does look great, but adds $5 a serving (or $10 per meal for 2) to the price. There are also a few that seem to have a lower per serving cost listed, but the meal comes with extra servings, so you will wind up paying more.

These are clearly marked so you can avoid them, but I hate the psychology of it all. And, of course, you usually find Culinary Collection listed first.

They do also have little icons in the corner of the pictures that indicate things like Fresh Start (healthier options), Greatest Hits (popular meals) and meals that can be more customized – though almost all meals will let you swap a protein.

I also appreciated that the meals come packaged clearly. Each meal gets its own bag of items. I really didn’t think I could care that much about that until I used Dinnerly and it didn’t happen. The contents as a whole were packaged very carefully and I didn’t have any issues with exploded or defrosted food (like some other companies we’ve used, cough, cough, Dinnerly again).

Now, let’s do some math.

Without any discount, two meals, with two servings each, cost $35.96 per box or $8.99 per meal and $13.99 for shipping.

With the discount, the meals are $13.46 per box or $6.73 a meal with $13.99 for shipping.

It’s also worth noting, that since you can cancel anytime, with the substantial discount for the first two orders, if you canceled before getting your third order, it would be $5.96 per box, $2.98 per meal and $1.49 per serving with an additional $13.99 for shipping, which, to me, makes this absolutely the best brand to try out meal plans with.

I will say that most of these meals are a protein and veggie and are light on the carbs. It’s funny that this was previously a complaint of my dad’s but after a recent visit to the doctor, he agrees this is actually a good thing and is happy I’ve been picking the healthier meals.

As someone who has been on a diet for three months now, I appreciate that each meal card comes with a calorie count and additional nutritional information that I feel overwhelmed trying to sort out myself right now if I make a homemade meal.

The one way Home Chef let me down was in the recipe card department. They send you a recipe card along with your ingredients, which I prefer, though using my phone or computer isn’t a deal breaker for me.

Because there had never been an issue before, I started cooking the One-Pot Southwest-Style Turkey Chili with Cheddar-Jack Cheese and Sour Cream without looking super closely at the title. It was talking about chorizo but had turkey under the list of possible sub proteins, so that was why I thought it wasn’t lining up perfectly. Anyway about 50% of the way through the recipe, I realized they had sent the wrong recipe card for a different Chili and my meal was still a hot mess.

Lucky for us, it was chili. I pretty much dumped everything in the pot and hoped for the best and it was edible. But it was a serious WTF moment for me. And it definitely wasn’t as good as if I’d done the proper recipe with the ingredients.

The very next week, both recipe cards they sent were wrong and didn’t match my order for the week. Fortunately they were wildly wrong rather than just a different chili, so I realized immediately. I had learned from my mistake and carefully double checked when I unpacked the box. The recipes are also available online, so I was able to cook the meals that way.

In retrospect, I should’ve reached out to customer service and let them know, especially so I could report that result to all of you, but I didn’t. The rest of the meals came with the correct recipe cards.

Cancelling was pretty easy, but it did take a few minutes for me to find the correct series of buttons because there is nothing clearly labeled “Cancel.”

To cancel your Home Chef subscription go to:

Account –> Account Settings –> Subscription –> Pause Subscription –> Answer Reason for Pausing –> Confirm Cancellation

You should then receive a cancellation confirmation in your email.

Definitely a little more tricky than other companies since you have to realize you need to go through the Pause Subscription first, which, to me, would be a different goal than trying to cancel.

Overall, the recipe thing was off-putting enough for me to drop them to my second place position but I quite like Home Chef and suspect that someday we will do another run with them. The diversity of menu options is really great and the packaging kept things cool and safe from being squashed.

Home Chef is definitely worth a splurge.

Our current high subjective meal kit rankings (based on a combo of good recipes that felt worth the price):

• #1: Hello Fresh
• #2: Home Chef
• #3: Sunbasket
• #4: Blue Apron
• #5: Dinnerly

Next up – Martha Stewart’s Marley Spoon