HelloFresh Review (2024) – Australia’s Best Meal Kit?

HelloFresh is Australia’s most popular meal kit service, offering Aussies the ability to order weekly pre-portioned ingredients and recipes. That means no more shopping for ingredients on a daily basis, or getting stuck cooking the same boring meals every week.

There are plans suitable for everyone, including large families, vegetarian lifestyles, or people looking for lower-calorie options.

Over the last decade, meal kits have surged in popularity here in Australia, especially with the increased cost of groceries and people wanting to reduce visits to packed grocery stores.

That’s meant the expansion of services like Marley Spoon, Dinnerly and EveryPlate to compete with HelloFresh. With all the different meal delivery options out there these days it can be hard to know which one is right for you.

Let’s take a look at HelloFresh and find out if this meal kit service is a good alternative to your weekly grocery shops.

   Get up to $200 off HelloFresh across your first 6 boxesDiscount valid for new & past customers with this exclusive link! *

If you’re not familiar with HelloFresh, it’s a simple concept. Subscribe to HelloFresh and you’ll receive fresh ingredients delivered to your door each week, pre-portioned to cook your selected recipes. Unsurprisingly, called a meal delivery service.

Each set of ingredients comes with recipe cards that allow you to cook homemade meals with ease, making meal planning incredibly simple. I’ve pulled together a detailed meal kit guide if you’d like to learn a little more.

HelloFresh is availble for delivery to a significant amount of Australia, including (but not limited to):

• Adelaide
• Brisbane
• Canberra
• Gold Coast
• Melbourne
• Newcastle
• Perth
• Sydney

For a full list of places they deliver, check the HelloFresh website.

Getting Started with HelloFresh

HelloFresh has an incredibly simple and intuitive website where you can view which recipes will be available even before you sign up for their subscription service.

When signing up, you can choose to receive a box for 2, 4, or 6 people, with each box including either 2, 3, 4 or 5 meals each week. Once subscribed, you can also move this down to just 2 recipes per week.

This provides plenty of variety to meet everyone’s needs.

Alongside selecting how many meals you want per week, you can set your menu preferences to curate your menu to your needs, including:

• Classic – The full choice of recipes every week, sorted by popularity.
• Vegetarian – Displays only the meals suitable for vegetarians each week.
• Family-Friendly – For 4-6 portion meals only, this includes simpler recipes with ingredients that are preferred by kids and perfect for families.
• Calorie Smart – All meals that are less than 650 calories per serving, perfect for anyone on a calorie-controlled diet.
• Quick & Easy – Meals that all take 30 minutes or less to cook.
• Carb Smart – Access all HelloFresh meals with a maximum of 30g of carbs.
• Flexitarian – A combination of vegetarian, fish, and meat recipes.
• Protein Rich – Meals with over 20g of protein.

I’ve always selected the ‘Classic’ preference so I can see all the possible meal options each week. However, curating your menu is a great way to avoid seeing meals you don’t want to see.

Even if you select one of the curated meal plans, you’ll always have access to the full menu every week if you wanted to order a meal that doesn’t meet the criteria for your plan.

Meal Options Available

The variety of recipes available each week gives you around 38 different unique meals to choose from, including at least 4 vegetarian and 4 plant-based meals.

Over the past few years, they’ve really improved the number of options available each week so there’s no doubt you’ll be able to find 3-5 dishes that you like the sound of.

In fact, the problem is usually cutting down your selection to just 5 dishes! They also change most of the recipes each week, so you don’t end up re-ordering the same meals all of the time. I’ve found that HelloFresh has one of the best meal rotations of all the meal kits, so it’s not too often you’ll see options repeated.

I actually feel this is both a blessing and a curse for HelloFresh. There have been times I’ve cooked an amazing meal and wanted to order it again… but most meals are only available once every few months!

Since I first reviewed HelloFresh back in 2020, they have made improvements to the labeling of their meals on their menu. You can now easily see which meals are plant-based, over 30g protein, or under 650 calories.

The only limitation is that the filtering of meals is quite lacking in comparison to other meal kit menus, in that you can’t filter recipes by specific ingredients and/or dietary restrictions. The workaround is to use the menu ‘preferences’ to hide certain meals but this might not be granular enough for some people.

Each recipe also comes with detailed nutritional details, and you can even view the recipe without subscribing. That makes HelloFresh an awesome recipe list even if you don’t pay then a cent.

You can check out the upcoming menus on their site to see if there are options you’d like to explore. When you first see the menu, it will seem like there’s nearly 100 different recipe options, but this is a little misleading. The menu includes many duplicates where ‘customisations’ display as a separate meal.

See the HelloFresh menu

What’s On The HelloFresh Menu

Here are a few options I’ve ordered in the past to give you a taste of the types of meals you can cook with HelloFresh:

• Thai-Style Sweet Chilli Chicken
• Korean Beef Bibimbap
• Sichuan-Glazed Salmon with Sesame Slaw & Rice
• Malaysian Tofu & Sweet Chilli Pumpkin Salad

HelloFresh split their menu with at least 18 meals at the base subscription price, plus a few meals across different categories that incur an additional charge. For example:

• Gourmet dishes with premium ingredients for +$5.99 – $7.99 per portion.
• Fast & Fancy dishes that are partially pre-prepared (so they can be cooked in 15 minutes) for +$4.99/portion.
• Taste Tours from different cities/countries for +$4.99 – $5.49/portion.

(Pricing and options available at the time of updating this review! HelloFresh do change their offering regularly, so it’s always worth referring to their menu directly. You’ll need to have an account to see pricing)

I like the concept of these extras as it means they can keep the weekly subscription price reasonably affordable, and you can choose to add on more expensive meals if it fits your budget. However, it’s important to be conscious of the price as these extra costs can add up very quickly.

Customising Your Meals

HelloFresh provide the ability to customise meals by adding new/extra ingredients to some dishes.

For example, you might want to add meat to a vegetarian meal or add an extra portion of cheese to your enchiladas (like I did!). This is a fantastic feature as it allows HelloFresh to offer more vegetarian options and allows you to personalise your delivery.

Even if you don’t want to add the ingredient to your order, it’s great inspiration for options you might want to add yourself.

The only disappointing aspect is that customisation is only available for certain ingredients on certain meals.

I’m hoping that the HelloFresh team leans into this customisation more and allows you to swap/remove certain ingredients if you don’t want them. Personally, I’m not a big fan of nuts and it seems such a shame whenever I receive a packet in my delivery as they always go to waste.

With each delivery, you can also add extra Sides, Fruit Boxes, Soups and Snacks. The amount of additional options with HelloFresh is quite impressive, which really adds to the convenience of weekly HelloFresh deliveries.

Ready Prepared Meals

If you’re still thinking there’s not enough choice/variety (which seems unlikely), HelloFresh has started experimenting with ‘Ready meals’ that come fully prepared and just need to be cooked in a Microwave or Oven. At the moment, there are 5 options available each week and they aren’t usually vegetarian.

These are made in partnership with YouFoodz, which is now owned by HelloFresh. You’ll find them on the menu under “Quick Fix Meals”

I’m really glad that HelloFresh has started offering these as I’m often not able to cook a full meal every day of the week, so I regularly have a ‘ready meal’ at least one night of the week to save me some cooking time.

Delivery Options

As is common across the industry, HelloFresh deliver their kits in a cooled cardboard box that will keep your ingredients from going off for at least 8 hours after delivery. Thanks to this, you can order your delivery to arrive whilst you’re at work and pick it up when you get home.

Deliveries are made on specific days of the week, depending on where you live. If you’ve not used a meal delivery service before, it’s important to be aware that your final meal selections need to be confirmed up to a week before your delivery (depending on your state and delivery day).

With HelloFresh there a few good options where your cut-off day is just 4 days before your delivery.

HelloFresh made this handy guide to their delivery days, although these could change at any moment so please double check on their website for the latest details.

It’s important to recognise that delivery costs $9.99, which is marginally the most expensive out of all Meal Kits available in Australia. Some postcodes even have an extra delivery surcharge up to an extra $10 if they aren’t near a HelloFresh warehouse which is disappointing.

How much does HelloFresh Cost?

HelloFresh comes mid-range in its pricing, as can be seen in our cost comparison of meal kits. Pricing for each box depends on the number of people and meals you order, with the classic “meat & veggies” box costing (per week):

People	Meals	Cost
2	3	$70.00
2	4	$90.00
2	5	$105.00
4	3	$125.00
4	4	$150.00
4	5	$165.00
6	2	$160.00
6	4	$195.00
6	6	$220.00

On top of these costs, you need to pay the aforementioned $9.99 delivery plus the cost of any additional special meals, sides, ready meals or snacks that you’ve ordered.

This means that a family of 4 looking for meals every weeknight are going to be paying $174.99 per week (including delivery, without any add-ons).

We investigated whether this could be cheaper than a supermarket and found that purchasing the exact same ingredients would be around 30% cheaper at Coles or Woollies. That’s a good baseline to understand the ‘convenience’ cost of HelloFresh.

Alternatively, you could look at cheaper meal kits such as Dinnerly or EveryPlate that are priced around 30% less than HelloFresh and therefore roughly the same as doing your own grocery shopping.

Get up to $200 off HelloFresh across your first 6 boxesDiscount valid for new & past customers with this exclusive link! *

Nutritional analysis of HelloFresh meals

Researchers at the University of Sydney have analysed the nutritional qualities of the biggest Australian meal kit subscription services, with the summarised results published below with permission from the original authors.

All values are ‘per each recommended individual serving’.

	Dinnerly	HelloFresh	Marley Spoon	Pepper Leaf
Food Groups (no. of serves)
Vegetables	2.6	3.1	2.8	2.6
Grains	2.4	1.8	2.5	2.8
Meat	1.4	1.3	1.7	1.3
Macronutrients
Energy (kcal)	704	880	690	707
Protein (g)	34.4	38.9	41.9	35.0
Total fat (g)	34.8	53.4	30.3	32.2
Carbohydrate (g)	58.2	56.0	56.8	63.6
Sugars (g)	14.9	17.0	10.9	10.7
Sodium (mg)	853	1426	779	866

HelloFresh provide the highest amount of vegetables per serving, which is fantastic for helping get your ‘5 a day’. However, they also provide the highest calorie meals averaging at 880 calories per serving. This appears to be driven by a higher fat content than their competitors, so the research recommends using a smaller amount of oil in recipes and trimming visible fat from meat.

Thanks to Dr Alice Gibson and Dr Stephanie R Partridge of the University of Sydney for their research. If you want to read their paper, it can be found on the Nutrients journal.

My HelloFresh Review Boxes

My boxes have always arrived on time and in one piece, which is always a good start! The fresh ingredients are packaged really nicely with each meal coming in separate paper bags, colour-coded to match the recipe cards. Whilst this is less environmentally friendly, it does make the process of storing and selecting your ingredients incredibly easy.

These paper bags can just go straight into the fridge alongside the meats/dairy products that come in a separate cool bag.

If you need your HelloFresh box to last for a week or more, I wrote a detailed blog post on how to keep your meal kit ingredients fresher for longer.

Ingredient Disaster!

All the ingredients I have received have been in good condition and reasonably portioned, so I haven’t had any problems with ingredient quality. However, I did face a bit of a disaster on one of my boxes – they didn’t send the Salmon fillets! This was a pretty critical component of one of the dishes, so to prevent the other ingredients from going to waste I had to rush out and buy some new Salmon fillets.

I contacted support at HelloFresh late on a Sunday evening through their live chat feature. The agent I spoke to was very apologetic and understanding about the issues created by missing a major ingredient. I was quickly provided with an $8.20 credit against my next HelloFresh order, which just about covered the cost of the replacement Salmon.

However, I’m a little disappointed that they only reimburse for the cost of the additional ingredient, ignoring the additional time/effort required to fix their mistake. For transparency, I’ve decided not to build this factor into my review rating because I suspect this is a rare, unfortunate mistake. It’s not happened to me again at least.

How’s The Food?

The dishes I’ve received have all been very impressive, without exception.

Using some quite simple cooking techniques, I have been able to cook many fantastic meals that I would have been happy to eat at a restaurant. They were all very easy to prepare and all of them have taken less than 60 minutes to make, meaning it’s easy to cook HelloFresh meals on a weekday evening.

I find the recipe cards to be well-thought through, clear and simple to follow. This is helped by having quite large recipe cards that allow HelloFresh plenty of space to give additional helpful instructions. At no point in any of my meals was I stuck or confused by what the recipe was asking me to do.

Plus, these recipe cards are perfect for storing and using again in the future.

Portion sizes are also quite large, leaving me full after each dinner. If you’re a light eater, this would be perfect for you to save some for lunch the day after.

Ready Meals – The Taste Test

Trying out the ‘ready meals’ was quite an exciting experience because I picked some of my favourite meals – an Angus Beef Lasagna, and a Chicken Fettucine Carbonara. Both dishes delivered against the promise of being ‘ready to eat’ as they cooked quickly with just a few minutes in the microwave.

From a taste perspective, I was quite impressed but not blown away. Both dishes tasted pretty much exactly like I would expect if I cooked them myself. I always find carbonara to be quite a heavy dish and this one was no exception.

The main drawback was the disappointing lack of veggies in both dishes. I think I caught a few carrot slices in the Lasagna but that was about it. This is really falling down the trap of traditional ready meals and I would still prefer to order mine from a service like My Muscle Chef.

What isn’t included in your kit?

As is standard with all meal kit delivery services, HelloFresh asks that you provide some standard ‘pantry’ ingredients alongside their provided kits. These are the ingredients that they might ask you to have:

I always recommend checking your recipes before your box arrives so you can make sure you have all your staple ingredients available.

A Qualified Nutritionist’s HelloFresh Review

On average, HelloFresh meals contain 3.1 serves of vegetables. As a Nutritionist, I love this! Australians do not eat enough vegetables and don’t meet the recommended 5 serves per day. So, with a HelloFresh meal giving you 3 serves, it definitely makes it easier to hit that target!

The energy content (calories) of HelloFresh meals are above what an average Australian adult needs per meal, 880kcal vs ~500kcal. Although, if you’re someone that splits the meals into three serves, or if you are a very active person these meals could be a size great for you! 

The average sodium content is incredibly high. The recommendations for Australian adults are to consume 2000mg of sodium per day, in one HelloFresh meal there is 1426mg =  ¾ of your daily sodium limit! With high sodium intake being linked to increased risk of blood pressure and other chronic diseases, this is a huge negative aspect of the nutritional quality of HelloFresh.

The average saturated fat content is also very high. Ideally, a main meal should contain less than 6g of saturated fat. However, HelloFresh meals contain 16.7g on average. This is almost three times the recommended amount!

To make Hello Fresh a bit healthier I would recommend splitting the meals from 2 serves into 3, and adding more vegetables. You could have some frozen vegetables on hand to make this easier. Additionally, try to use less salt when cooking and opt for salt-reduced pantry items like salt-reduced soy sauce.

Get up to $200 off HelloFresh across your first 6 boxesDiscount valid for new & past customers with this exclusive link! *

HelloFresh Mobile App

HelloFresh, like Dinnerly and Marley Spoon, provide a mobile app where you can look at all your recipes. Through the app, you can modify your plan/deliveries as well as provide recipe feedback. I found the recipes easy to read and follow on the app, so in my opinion this is the best meal kit mobile app available at the moment.

One fantastic feature is the ability to look through all HelloFresh recipes, perfect if you’re ever looking for inspiration.

Food Box Mate Survey Awards 2023

In 2023, HelloFresh narrowly missed out on the major prize in the only independent consumer survey of meal kit users in Australia for the second year running. After winning the award for best meal kit in Australia between 2020 and 2021, HelloFresh didn’t even win in any of the categories.

HelloFresh were repeatedly pipped by Marley Spoon in every category, who ended up taking home 5 of the 7 awards. They’re worth considering as a HelloFresh alternative.

Is HelloFresh Worth It?

HelloFresh are one of the largest, most experienced operators of meal delivery services anywhere in the world. As a result, they manage to deliver a polished, consistent, and engaging meal kit that brings together quality ingredients and fantastic recipes.

For me, it’s the recipes that were truly the star of the show, producing meals that wouldn’t look out of place in a restaurant despite my distinctly average culinary skills. I found them very easy to prepare and I’m sure that most people would be very pleased with the output of all HelloFresh recipes. I personally believe this justifies the premium price point.

Whilst I think the recipes are family friendly, they’re a little bit more technical than services like Dinnerly and EveryPlate who offer simpler meals using fewer ingredients.

I’m sure they can do more to combat missing ingredients. However, this isn’t a problem unique to HelloFresh and their response was satisfactory. Despite this small issue, I haven’t hesitated to continue ordering further boxes.

Get up to $200 off HelloFresh across your first 6 boxesDiscount valid for new & past customers with this exclusive link! *

Competitor comparison

We’ve tested all the major meal kit services in Australia. Here’s how we rated each service across our 6 key categories. Click a service name to check out our in-depth review.

Competitor Discounts

I’d love to hear about other people’s experiences with HelloFresh – were they similar to mine? Did you find our HelloFresh review useful? Let me know in the comments section below!

HelloFresh FAQ