Research & Data on Meal Kits – Our Original Analysis

Most meal kit sites just repeat the providers' own marketing. We don't. We do our own research – on nutrition, price, and the market – and rank based on it. This page collects the data behind our recommendations so you can check the numbers yourself. Want to know how we weigh it all? Read how we test.

Our flagship original dataset is a direct measurement of what providers actually publish: we collect the per-serving nutrition panel for every recipe on a provider's menu, across consecutive weeks, and aggregate it. No proprietary index, no estimates – the providers' own numbers, counted.

Our first completed dataset covers HelloFresh US: the per-serving nutrition panel for every one of the 206 recipes on its menu across three consecutive weeks. Headline findings – a median of 1,190 mg of sodium per serving (roughly half an adult's daily allowance in one dinner), 10.7% of recipes carrying a full day's sodium or more, and a median 810 kcal – sit alongside a genuine strength, with 80.6% of recipes delivering 30 g of protein or more. The full analysis, raw data and collector script are published in the HelloFresh nutrition study, and the ranked field is on healthy meal kits.

Meal kit prices are hard to compare because kits vary in portion size and shipping rules. That's why we normalize everything to the one number that matters: cost per serving. Measured that way, the field ranges from $5.99 (EveryPlate) to $10.99 (HelloFresh), compared with roughly $4–6 per serving for a home-cooked meal, by our own estimate based on typical grocery costs.

See the full calculations – including our supermarket baseline and a 'how we calculated this' box – in cost for a family, annual cost, and our in-depth price analysis.

To put meal kits in context, we look at industry market research: meal kits account for only around 2% of consumers' weeknight dinners, the average subscriber orders roughly 14–15 boxes a year (down from prior years), and price is by far the biggest barrier to continued use – roughly 8 in 10 people who cancel cite cost as the reason. These numbers shape how we judge 'is it worth trying': for most people, a meal kit is a convenience premium, not a savings.

We rely exclusively on documented, primary sources: providers' own websites (pricing, kit types), public business filings (ownership, financials), Trustpilot (customer satisfaction), our own nutrition benchmark research, and industry market research (market data). Behind every recommendation is a named, accountable editor – Mads Bukholt – and one fixed principle: we never publish a number we can't document. If you're a provider and believe a figure is incorrect, write to us with documentation via contact.