If you want a freshly cooked meal that fits your exact requirements but doesn’t always have time to shop and prep everything you need, this service might be what you’re looking for.
Order at Home Chef and be delighted by the variety of recipes, meal kits, and the fun ideas you get for preparing your food quickly and efficiently.
In this Home Chef Review, I’ll go over all you need to know about this company before making your order. You’ll find out:
- Details about the company
- How Home Chef works
- Shipping and packaging
- Home Chef cost
- Managing your subscription
- Customer service
- Home Chef reviews and testimonials
- Alternatives
- Conclusion
Company Overview
To start, let’s explore what sort of company Home Chef is.
Home Chef is a meal kit and food delivery company. It was founded in Chicago, Illinois, in June 2013. Home Chef delivers pre-portioned ingredients along with recipes to its subscribers every week. It serves customers in 48 states in the US.
What about the Home Chef cost? The meals cost between $7.49 and $9.94 per serving.
According to Home Chef reviews online, customers’ favorite Home Chef recipes are Black Bean Enchiladas, Teriyaki Ginger-Glazed Salmon, Brussels, and Brown Butter Risotto, among others.
How Home Chef Works
The Home Chef meals sound appealing, but how do you get started? Here’s what you need to do:
- Since it is a subscription service, you first need to sign-up
- You choose one of the plans, depending on how many meals you want in a week
- You also choose how many people you need a meal for
- Either you or Home Chef chooses for you from the weekly selection
Plans
As for the plans, you can choose one of three options:
- Home Chef
- Fresh and Easy
- Fresh Start
The first one is the standard package. If you choose the Home Chef Fresh and Easy option, the company sends you meals prepared by a chef with all the ingredients washed, packaged, portioned. Everything arrives at your doorstep in heatable pans or grilling bags, which is awesome if you’re busy and want to cook your meal quickly and efficiently.
The Fresh Start plan is for people on a more strict dietary regimen and includes options to tailor orders based on specific requirements.
What is even more interesting is that Home Chef has a “Customize it” feature. With this option, you can choose specific types of proteins you’d like to include in your meal. For instance, you can change one kind of meat (let’s say pork) with another that fits the dish (turkey). But keep in mind that these options are limited since pork doesn’t have the same qualities as fish, for example.
You can use this option on having a “Customize It” menu under the Home Chef meals pictures for the recipes.
How many and what sort of items are in the box?
You can choose from about ten different items that come boxed to your door. The Home Chef menu changes every week. You can pre-schedule your meals up to five weeks before they’re shipped.
Does the box contain the food only?
The answer is no. To preserve the food and include recipes, Home Chef offers:
- produce bags
- ice packs
- plastic containers
- fruit basket wraps and recipe cards (all of them are recyclable and reusable)
Shipping and Packaging
When does Home Chef deliver?
Unless you change the subscription, Home Chef sends you meals Monday through Friday. Even better, you can choose which day your food arrives, although the options vary depending on where you live.
More than one Home Chef Delivery review online attests that this service is a wonderful choice for anyone entering the world of meal delivery subscriptions.
What about the packaging?
We’re all aware that we should care for our environment, and Home Chef operates with that in mind. That’s why the company pays special attention to its packaging.
Let’s check out what sort of containers they deliver your food in:
- Box and Divider—Since Home Chef cares for the environment, it makes its boxes and dividers from recyclable cardboard.
- Produce Bags—Still, some of the food arrives in plastic containers: the produce bags. Not to worry, they are still recyclable.
- Insulated Liner—The PET liners are recyclable too. They’re made of cotton and denim.
- Ice Packs—The good thing about these is that they are reusable; you just have to wash them. They contain 99% water and 1% sodium salt.
- Fruit basket wrap— The fruit baskets are covered in recyclable paper that can be recycled at the curb.
- Recipe Cards—The Recipe Cards can, of course, be reused, but if you don’t need them, they too are recyclable.
Home Chef Cost
Is this service affordable? Let’s check out some Home Chef prices and reviews:
It depends on what kind of meals you choose, but they usually cost between $7.49 and $9.94 per serving.
Surprisingly, the pricing doesn’t vary if you order more servings per kit.
Is it worth it, though?
If you want to save money, Home Chef is not the wisest choice, because you can go to the supermarket and buy all the needed ingredients at a lower price.
But what you save is time and effort.
The food has to be safely delivered, so there’s a lot of packaging. Fortunately, it’s all recyclable, and Home Chef even sends you recycling tips.
Although the menu is meat-heavy, there are vegetarian options, too. Not only that, but the service offers recipes that fit with vegan, paleo, or keto plans as well.
What about the shipping costs?
The shipping fee depends on the cost of your meals:
- If your plan is above $40 per week, you’ll have free shipping.
- If it’s below $40, you’ll pay $10 for shipping.
Home Chef accepts Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, and PayPal.
Furthermore, using a Home Chef promo code, you can get discounts, and with the Home Chef coupons, you get $100 off your first four meals.
Managing Your Subscription
There are a few aspects of your subscription you should be aware of.
Refund Policy
You can get a refund at Home Chef, but not in the traditional way. If you’re not happy with a product, you can get a Home Chef redeemable. This means that you can order a product of the same value in the future, and you won’t have to pay for it. You can do this by sending them an email at [email protected].
If something is wrong with the product (if it’s defective), Home Chef will choose whether:
- You get a refund in the amount equal to the value of the defective part
- Or you get a full refund of the whole delivery
Orders above $100 are not eligible for a full refund, and the company reserves the right to refuse fraudulent requests.
One very handy feature is that you can skip a delivery. This is how you do it:
- Go to your account
- Go to “Upcoming Orders”
- Scroll to the week you want to be removed from the schedule
- Choose “Skip Week”
You can also skip a specific delivery order by going to “Edit Meals” and then choosing “Skip this delivery.”
Canceling Subscription
What if you want to cancel your subscription? Here are the steps:
- In the top right corner of the screen, select “My Account”
- From the dropdown menu, choose “Account Information”
- Scroll down to the “Delivery Details” section and click on the link labeled “Pause your account”
Like every other subscription service, Home Chef wants to keep its users happy and onboard, so it will offer you some additional options before finally pausing your account.
Customer Service
What’s the best way to reach Home Chef?
You can call the company on the phone from 9 AM to 6 PM, Monday to Friday, and from 10 AM to 2 PM on Saturday. Its phone number is 872-225-2433.
You can send Home Chef an email at [email protected] or [email protected].
Or before doing any of that, you can check out the service’s FAQ page.
According to many Home Chef reviews from 2020, people are happy with the client support. More on customers’ evaluation in the following section.
Home Chef Reviews and Testimonials
If you read almost any Home Chef customer review online, you’ll see that many clients are satisfied with the service.
Here are some things that people like:
- There aren’t any delivery problems
- The customer service is excellent
- Meals are easy and fun to prepare
- There’s a large variety of Home Chef recipes
- The website and app are easy to navigate
- Delicious meals for all ages
- Home Chef’s proprietary algorithm adapts to your preferences based on past ` selections
- You can pause your account effortlessly
- There’s a wide variety of meal kit types
But let’s explore customers’ experiences firsthand. Here are a couple of reviews from Yelp and Trustpilot.
But some people don’t like Home Chef services. They usually cite the following reasons:
- Delivery issues such as crushed boxes or delays
- Missing certain nutritional facts
- Premium pricing
- No option for single-person orders
- No space to list allergies
Here are a couple of examples of negative customer reviews:
Despite some unhappy customers, which is expected when a company is large and has so many different users, Home Chef has excellent ratings:
- It has a 4.4 out of 5 ratings on Trustpilot by 2,647 reviews
- Consumer Affairs gave Home Chef a 3-star rating
- And it has a 5-star rating on Money Under 30
What about customer’s views on Home Chef’s vegetarian offering—is it as good as the other categories? Most users who have left a Home Chef vegetarian review say it’s not.
According to one review site, if you are a vegan or a vegetarian, this service might not be the best option for you. The Home Chef menu is mainly meat-based. In terms of “extras,” you can choose mostly different types of meat. This would make sense if there were more vegetarian meals, to begin with, but there aren’t many.
Home Chef also offers an Oven Ready option (up to two meals per weekly menu). These meals came packaged much like their standard counterparts, with all the ingredients organized into meal-specific plastic bags and even a disposable oven tray. More than one Home Chef Oven Ready review praises the convenience of this option.
Home Chef states that it doesn’t offer meals for a specific diet plan like Keto or Paleo, but certain meals may still work for these diets. The company has a “carb conscious” emblem on some offerings. They may work for people on a Keto or Paleo diet. One Home Chef Paleo review notes that some meals comply with these regimens, but it’s up to users to make sure that’s the case.
Home Chef Alternatives
Home Chef is not the only company “on the menu.” Some alternatives might suit your needs better. Below is a Home Chef comparison to a couple of its competitors.
Home Chef vs Plated
With Plated, you have a choice of three plans depending on the number of servings you want to get per meal—either two, three, or four. This might help you save if you order for a bigger household as plans for more people end up being cheaper per portion. This is not the case with Home Chef, where the number of servings doesn’t affect the price per person.
Home Chef vs Blue Apron
Both Home Chef and Blue Apron offer eight meals a week; plus, their recipes are very similar. Unlike Blue Apron, Home Chef meals are for bigger families (up to eight people). Both services offer the option to customize your weekly meal plans. Blue Apron’s meals are more expensive than Home Chef’s, though.
Conclusion
If you want a freshly cooked meal on your table every day of the week, Home Chef might be the right service for you. All you need to do is subscribe and start making orders.
The meals are fun and easy to prepare, the portion sizes are reasonable, and the food comes in convenient packaging. You get free shipping on orders over $40. The service allows you to customize your meals by choosing the protein source, for instance.
We hope you found everything you wanted to know in our Home Chef Review to determine if it’s the best choice for you.