Here’s What We Recommend After Testing

Meal delivery services can be a great way to get you out of your cooking comfort zone, reduce food waste, save money, cut down on last-minute grocery store runs, and take most of the planning out of cooking dinner for the family. Tons of meal delivery services now offer a host of options to choose from, but two that remain incredibly popular are Blue Apron and HelloFresh.

While both offer various plan options with rotating recipes each week, only one can claim the top spot. We decided to compare Blue Apron and HelloFresh to see which one deserves space in your fridge. 

What We Love About Blue Apron

Blue Apron helps you to make delicious home-cooked meals with its easy-to-follow recipes. The service offers various meal options to satisfy your family’s needs, whether that’s Chef Favorites, Fast & Easy, or nutritionist-approved Wellness dishes. 

We appreciate the flexible delivery options — pausing, skipping, canceling, and even changing the delivery date is a breeze. Though all of these can be done without customer support, we found Blue Apron’s team to be helpful and kind. Each week, our order arrived nicely portioned in recyclable packaging, which made disposing of the box easy. As for affordability and value, Blue Apron was slightly less expensive per meal than HelloFresh.

Though we found Blue Apron’s ingredients to be fresher than HelloFresh’s, some of the meal choices and seasonings felt repetitive week after week, leaving us wanting more creative options to enjoy. We did, however, appreciate that the meals still felt hearty, balanced, and well-curated, especially the vegetarian options.

What We Love About HelloFresh

Sorting through the various plans and recipes that HelloFresh offers each week is straightforward. Its plans include the popular Meat & Veggies, Family Friendly, Quick & Easy, and Veggie. But you can also swap and upgrade sides and proteins with the company’s custom offerings. Whether you have dietary restrictions or are just looking to switch up your usual recipe routine, HelloFresh has plenty of options to leave you feeling satisfied.

The website was also easy to navigate — not just when selecting meals but also if and when you need to pause, skip, or cancel. Going out of town for the week but still want your meals? You can adjust the delivery address of your order week-to-week as needed.

We were impressed by the wide variety of dishes HelloFresh offers, including Sheet Pan Dijon Onion Crunch Chicken, Lemony Chickpea & Arugula Grain Salad, and Peppercorn-Crusted Beef Tenderloin. All of them were easy to prepare, fresh, and high-quality. That said, some sauces came pre-packaged — such as a mango salsa and guacamole — but we would have preferred to make them fresh alongside the rest of the meal. The meals required  an average amount of prep work, on par with the typical length of time we might spend cooking without the help of a meal delivery service. 

Who Has the Better Meal Delivery Service?

You can’t go wrong with either of these meal delivery services. Both Blue Apron and Hello Fresh offer a variety of delicious meals. While both HelloFresh and Blue Apron offer apps, we stuck with their websites for the full user experience. With both companies, we had no issues pausing orders, canceling, or making other account changes without having to contact customer support.

When we considered all of our testing data, however, we felt that HelloFresh deserved the number-one spot. We not only appreciated its diversity of meal options, we also found the recipes easy to prepare. When it came to the food itself, HelloFresh offered a wider variety of meals on a week-to-week basis and featured more diverse flavors and cuisines than Blue Apron. We didn’t find many seasonal dishes available with Blue Apron, and the flavors and prep methods felt more repetitive over time. HelloFresh and Blue Apron were equally matched in ease of cooking, thanks to their well-packaged ingredients and clear instructions. As for affordability and value, Blue Apron is only a dollar or so cheaper per portion in comparison to HelloFresh. 

With all of these considerations in mind, HelloFresh came out on top.

The Verdict: Which Brand Is Better?

Both of these meal delivery services are longtime favorites for good reason, and it was a very close competition, but HelloFresh came out as our overall pick. The diversity and variety of meals offered by HelloFresh were unmatched. Blue Apron and HelloFresh were equally straightforward and easy to order from, and even the recipes that were slightly more involved were not overly complicated for meal delivery service novices.

Blue Apron was the slightly more affordable option, but HelloFresh still offered a higher overall value with better-quality meals. Still, with first-time customer discounts available from both Blue Apron and HelloFresh, it may be worth it to give both a try.

How We Tested Meal Delivery Services

To determine which of these tested meal delivery services was better, we kept numerous factors in mind during our tests. We considered the overall ease of ordering, including how seamless it was to skip, pause, or cancel orders. We also made note of how it felt to navigate the website and contact customer support.

Once the orders from each service arrived, we assessed the meal quality, including ingredient quality and freshness, portion size, and recipe complexity. From there, we evaluated the ease of cooking, paying close attention to the accuracy of the recipes, amount of cooking tools and counter space needed to prepare each meal, and recycling options for packaging. We also considered the overall value and pricing structure of each meal delivery service in comparison to other kits and standard meal planning.

Key Specs

• More Affordable Meals: Blue Apron
• Most Family Friendly: HelloFresh
• Better Meal Quality: HelloFresh
• Easiest to Cook: HelloFresh
• Freshest Ingredients: Blue Apron
• Best Customer Support: Blue Apron
• More Meal Variety: HelloFresh
• Our Overall Pick: HelloFresh

Our Expertise

Jacqueline Weiss is a professional food writer with over seven years of experience and a lifelong lover of working in the kitchen. Her writing has appeared in Eat This Not That, EatingWell, AllRecipes, Simply Recipes, and more. To write this piece, she poured over lengthy testing feedback from Food & Wine editors.