Adventures with Meal Kits

I recently got a surprise gift card to the meal kit service Sunbasket from work. Since I attended a benefits meeting and filled out a survey afterward, my name got entered in a raffle drawing for the gift card, and I won! (It makes me wonder how many other people filled out the survey, but I’m not complaining.)

I’m not generally into meal kit services, but as a free experiment, I was all for it. And as with most things, the experiment had some pros and cons.

Things that could have been better

I’ll get the less good things out of the way first. One complaint was packaging.

Now, I will say that Sunbasket did their best to use paper and cardboard as much as possible, but they shipped with a very large ice pack to keep things cold. The instructions were to let the ice pack thaw, then cut it open, drain it into a trash bag, and recycle the plastic. Personally, I’m not a fan of putting a bunch of liquid into my trash bag, and given how poor the results are for recycling plastic, I ended up just throwing out the whole thing. I wish they’d done what some other places do and used dry ice, which evaporates.

Another challenge was portion sizes. The meal kit services seem to assume that you’re cooking for at least two people, which may be true for many, but not for me. (I also realize that it may not be cost-effective for them to make meals for one person.) And the minimum for meals was three, which meant I ended up with three different meals, enough for two people each. That was more than I would have ideally liked, though it worked out.

Then I ran into a problem with some of the produce. One of the meals I’d ordered included a Mediterranean salad, so they sent spinach, a red onion, a cucumber, and two Roma tomatoes. Now, the spinach was in a plastic bag and looked good, and the red onion seemed fine, other than being very large. I’m not a fan of that much raw onion in a salad.

But as with many tomatoes purchased in the winter, the ones I got were pallid, watery, and not very flavorful, so I wasn’t too excited about them. It was a few days before I got to the organic cucumber, and by then, it was all wrinkled and soft and squishy. I ended up composting it. (Side note – I’m glad Sunbasket gets organic ingredients where possible, but it does mean the produce doesn’t last as long.)

The other produce issue I had was that I got what were supposed to be fully cooked cubes of sweet potato, but they were still rather hard. That was disappointing.

My final note is that things took longer to cook than the recipe said. A friend who’s also experimented with meal kits said that things always take longer, so if you decide to try a meal kit service, bear that in mind.

What I liked

All that being said, I certainly liked some parts of it.

One was simply trying new recipes. A lot of the time, I stick to things I already know how to make and don’t require a lot of effort. It can be good sometimes to get a nudge to try something different. I’d never made anything with pulled chicken before, or even ground chicken, so I appreciated getting some new options.

As noted above, I also like the fact that Sunbasket tries to get organic ingredients whenever possible, even if it backfired a bit in one case for me. And it was nice that the meals came in paper bags instead of plastic, with very few items in plastic at all. The parts that came in plastic containers were things that wouldn’t have done well in paper, like minced garlic and marsala sauce.

The meals were also easy to make, with decent instructions. Most of the steps were chopping or sautéing things, and in one case, rolling meatballs. Now, my results didn’t come out exactly like the pictures on the website, but they weren’t too bad.

Greek Meatballs

Mexican Pulled Chicken 

Salmon with Sweet Potatoes and Greens

And most importantly, everything tasted good. I always like salmon, so that was a given, but I wasn’t sure about the ground chicken Greek meatballs. They were great, though, even if they didn’t end up exactly round. My cat Fezzik enjoyed a few bites too.

As for the other dish, I don’t think I’ve ever had anything with pulled chicken before, but it was quite tasty. It helps that I’m generally a fan of some kind of protein mixed in a sauce with a bunch of vegetables.

A worthwhile experiment

All in all, it was an interesting experiment, and a worthwhile one. But I will say I’m glad I didn’t have to pay for it, since those three meal kits cost $98.

That being said, if you’re spending money on restaurants or takeout and want to cook more at home, but you’re not sure where to start, meal kits could be a good option. The main challenge would probably be deciding on which service to use since there are so many these days.