Foober Review (2024) Cheap, Bland, Tasteless Meals

Competition within the Prepared Meals market in Australia is fierce, with hundreds of food delivery companies encouraging you to subscribe to their weekly meal deliveries. My mission is to help you work out which of these are actually worth paying for, so you get to experience only the best prepared meals.

Foober has been around since 2014, initially delivering fitness-focussed meals but has transitioned to a more general health-based (Keto & Low Calorie) delivery service in recent years. They get a solid 4.4 out of 5 rating on Product Review so I was excited to give their meals a try.

This Foober review shares my personal experience trying the Foober prepared meals experience.

In case you haven’t tried a ready-made food delivery service before, I pulled together some of the most common FAQ’s in my prepared meals guide.

Getting started with Foober

Foober present themselves as a specialist in ‘Keto’ and ‘Low Calorie’ meals and meal plans, designed to help people ensure they’re eating a balanced diet. For this goal, they offer the following plans:

• Keto
• 1200 Calorie
• 1500 Calorie
• 1800 Calorie
• Foober Fasting
• Vegan
• Paleo
• Muscle Builder

All of these meal plans are fairly similar until you get to the ‘Muscle Builder’ plan that seems entirely opposite to all of their other plans.

Selecting a plan allows you to choose 5 or 7 Days/Week with 2, 3 or 4 Meals/Day. This allows you to have a really strong amount of customisation around which meals you receive. You are also able to pull together a completely customised order from their full menu of meals.

These options are great for anyone trying to lose or maintain weight, however will not be enough to satisfy anyone who is looking to gain weight. They recommended an 1800 calorie meal plan for me despite the fact I really need 2,500 calories a day just to maintain my current weight.

I also found the website a little bit confusing and fiddly to use. The filters don’t update dynamically and snacks are shown on a different tab that’s easy to miss.

Meal variety and options

Foober’s meals are split between breakfast, mains, salad, dessert, drinks and snacks. There are a huge amount of breakfast and main meal options, although they are definitely lacking in areas like salads and desserts:

Meal Type	No. of Options
Breakfast	12
Mains	80
Dessert	1
Drinks	4
Snacks	11

There may be some slight tagging issues as I did see the ‘New York Cheesecake’ available when filtering for breakfast meals, which would seem to be an unusual breakfast choice! It’s been like that for at least 2 years though, so maybe that’s intentional.

There are definitely enough options available to keep your orders interesting for a few months, although Foober should definitely look to remove the filters where it displays a single option. A single dessert is very disappointing to find.

Each meal comes with the nutritional information clearly visible, with the full ingredients list available if you click in to that meal.

Unfortunately, there are some issues with menu items missing ingredients lists. For example, the ‘Egg and Vegetable Omelette’ below.

Special diets and food intolerance

Foober specialises in providing options for anyone on the Keto diet, with over 40 of their menu options being suitable. However, they seem to have removed this filtering option from the menu. You can still select a keto meal plan, but please check all the menu items are actually keto friendly.

There’s also a really strong range of Gluten Free options with 29 of their menu items available for anyone removing gluten from their diet.

They’re not quite as strong in other areas, with just 9 vegetarian options and no mention of the availability of vegan meals. I’d also like to see them be clearer about other common intolerances such as egg, seafood and nuts.

I could not find any information about whether meals are prepared in a controlled environment, so I would not recommend any Foober meals if you have a particularly strong intolerance to any foodstuff. If you’re able to find this information, please let me know.

Delivery options

There are two delivery options available with Foober:

• Weekly Delivery: $15 across all areas.
• Minimum 4-Week Commitment: Free Delivery.

$15 is around the same fee as you’ll see from most other prepared meals services, although being forced to have a 4-week commitment to get free delivery is not as generous as other services such as Lite n Easy and Chefgood.

Foober delivers to Melbourne, Newcastle, Brisbane Metro, Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast and Greater Sydney. This covers a majority of the east coast, although neglects to service anywhere west of Adelaide.

How much does Foober cost?

Foober meals are priced individually, with ‘mains’ costing either $9.95, $10.95, $11.95 or occasionally $12.95. There is a very good selection of meals available at the lower $9.95 price point, with fewer meals at higher prices.

Meal Type	Price
Breakfast	$9.95 – $10.95
Mains	$9.95 – $12.95
Salad	$9.95
Dessert	$9.95
Drinks	$4.95
Snacks	$1.50 – $4.95

We have analysed meal prices across the industry, so we can say that Foober is comfortably amongst the cheapest prepared meals service available. That’s especially true if you just purchase the $9.95 meals.

However, Foober don’t offer any discounts for larger orders, or for their meal packs, so other services can be found cheaper if you want to order more than 15+ meals at a time.

Check out our analysis of the cheapest prepared meals services for more information.

My Foober box

To give Foober a try, I ordered 9 meals along with two of the snacks. Within my order, I got a mix of breakfast and dinner meals including vegetarian options. There were no problems with the delivery, it arrived on time and was left exactly as I asked.

The box itself is similar to most other providers, with a large cardboard box and a foil bag inside to keep the meals cool. Whilst Foober do not give any guidance regarding how long a box can be left outside, you will generally find that food will be kept cool for 6-8 hours depending on the location & temperature.

As you can see from the picture below, one of my meals arrived with a blank sticker so there was no nutritional information available. The two snack pots didn’t have labels on them at all, so I had to go back to my order online to work out what they were! All of the stickers were applied quite haphazardly which immediately raised questions around quality control. Not a great first experience.

How’s the food?

I’m happy to forgive small issues with the packaging if the food is great. Unfortunately, that was not the case for Foober. Quite the opposite.

The first meal I wanted to try was “The Lot Burger” because I was intrigued by the concept of a microwaved healthy burger. It didn’t take long to realise that no other companies try this because it does not work. Check out what it looks like.

Trust me when I say it tastes exactly how it looks. It was barely even edible.

The next morning I opted for the “Super Breakfast” and expectations were already low. This was a meal of sausage, beans, egg and tomato. Whilst the beans were tasty (you can’t go too far wrong), the sausage meat was rubbery and bland. Unfortunately, the eggs were equally rubbery and made sure this was not a good start to my day.

Things improved slightly over the course of my Foober trial, where I enjoyed the “Big Brekky Frittata” and the “Sticky Sesame Chicken Wings” which were quite pleasant compared to the rest. Unfortunately, even the good meals were disappointing compared to other services I have tried.

Even the snacks, including their “popular” donut cakes, were disappointing. Dense and tasteless, I still have no idea what the ingredients were.

Foober falls regularly into the trap of using ingredients that just aren’t good for microwave meals, compounded by low-quality meats and trying to use “keto” ingredient replacements.

Altogether, it makes Foober quite an unpleasant experience and I was happy when my trial ended.

Cooking the prepared meals

Each meal is cooked in different ways, with some requiring 90 – 120 seconds in the microwave after poking holes in the plastic film. Others require you to partly peel the plastic layer off to get out an element that doesn’t need cooking.

Some meals are recommended to be reheated in a pan. I found that this helps massively with the texture of the food. If it’s possible, I would always recommend this method of reheating although it does take longer and creates more washing up.

I also had the “Mediterranean Vegan Wrap” which didn’t need to be cooked, although did need some additional prep by chopping up the cucumber, pepper and tomato.

Anything Else?

Cancelling my subscription with Foober was a bit challenging, although definitely possible to do online. Their subscription portal isn’t very user friendly so it’s occasionally quite hard to find what you want.

My Final Thoughts

I’m quite confused about how Foober have been able to achieve a 4.4/5 rating on ProductReview. My experience was far below expectations and they’re currently rated as the worst meal subscription service I have tried.

Services like YouFoodz aren’t much higher quality but compete at a much lower price point. If you spend a little more money, you can afford to get Lite n Easy or Chefgood meals that I recommend as much more enjoyable alternatives.

I’m still trying to get the taste of that burger out of my mouth, so it’s definitely a hard pass for me on the Foober experience.