Quick Intro to Home Chef
Home Chef is definitely one of our most loved meal kit services! At the heart of Home Chef is the enjoyment of eating well at home. The company’s mantra is all about making home cooking simple and bringing people together around the dinner table. They achieve this mission by delivering Simple and approachable recipes that put a twist on class favorites.
By using Home Chef you can be assured that you will reduce food waste since all the ingredients are pre-portioned., save valuable time, and provide great-tasting meals to everyone. Home Chef delivers quality farm-fresh ingredients in each meal kit. It does this by partnering with many local and worldwide farms.
The company was established in 2013, and today, Home Chef boasts an incredible coverage with over 10 million meals delivered in 2016 alone. Home Chef was voted #1 by Market Force Information in customer satisfaction among the leading meal kit companies in the US Grocery Benchmark Study conducted in 2017-2018.
Who is Home Chef for:
Home Chef is most suitable for singles, couples, and families who are pressed for time but would still love to enjoy super delicious meals that are home-cooked and take no longer than 30 minutes to prepare!
Home Chef main benefits
- Easy and affordable meals to cook at home
- Delicious meals! Familiar but always include an interesting twist
- Great selection of 18 meals per week plus
- High-quality ingredients
- Flexibility – diverse menu with multiple Skill Level Choices, option to customize your meals, option to skip weeks, no cancelation fees
- Add-on options enhance your week even more
- Cater to low-carb and low-calorie diets
Home Chef plans
With Home Chef, you can enjoy a great deal of flexibility. They offer delivery for two, four or six people, with a minimum selection requirement of two dishes per week. With Home Chef there is no maximum limit! They also offer a nice selection of add ons – smoothies, changing snacks and different protein packs.
Special features in the Home Chef menu
Other than the fact that the meals on the Home Chef menu are delicious, there are also many other features on the menu as follows:
- “Customize It” – Home Chef offers a one of a kind “Customize It” feature with many of their weekly meals. Any meals with this option are clearly marked with a “Customize It” logo. This feature gives you the option to swap, double or even upgrade the protein in those selected meals.
- Low-calorie meals – meals with around 600 calories or less per serving. The Home Chef calorie-conscious meals are lighter in calories but still high in delicious flavor!
- Low-carb meals – Home Chef designs low-carb meals by swapping the carbohydrates for protein and healthier vegetable alternatives.
- Fresh and easy – this new plan from Home Chef provides meal kit options for those who have little spare time. Meals in this plan are either express meals that are designed to be cooked in 15 minutes or less, oven-ready meals that are fully prepared and just need to be heated in the oven, or entree salads that are designed to be ready in 5 minutes.
- Culinary Collection – elevated meals with premium ingredients and advanced technique.
Home Chef Add ons
- Protein packs – each week the menu features 3 protein packs, with high-quality meats, poultry, and seafood, that you can add to your order .
- Healthy Smoothies.
- Snappy Snacks – snacks that can come together in a snap, to make your afternoon nosh or late evening treat a much better alternative to a bag of chips.
Getting Started with Home Chef Is a Breeze!
Getting started with Home Chef is super easy! All you need to do is to sign up for the service via their website or app. Then you simply choose which meals you would like to eat out of the 12 incredible weekly changing recipes. Once you have made your selections, you’ll receive all your meal kits in a securely insulated box. Next you unpack the ingredients, use the easy to follow recipes and that’s it! All you need to do then, is to simply enjoy your yummy home cooked meal!
With Home Chef you also get the flexibility to skip weeks whenever you need, and you can change your recipe selections as often as you wish prior to delivery. You can cancel the subscription at any time. You can order what you want, when you want it – there are no daunting commitments with Home Chef.
Home Chef popular meals
When looking at the huge Home Chef menu, you can see that there is something to appeal to everybody. Following are a selection of Home Chef’s most popular meals:
- Chinese pork lettuce wraps with water chestnuts and sesame dipping sauce
- Teriyaki chicken thigh tacos with pineapple-pepper salsa
- Pecan-crusted chicken with BBQ-spiced carrots
- Italian sausage & peppers rigatoni with spinach and parmesan
- Crispy goat cheese and arugula salad with candied pecans and honey vinaigrette
Home Chef meal variety and style
With Home Chef, you will find dishes that are both classic and reassuringly familiar. To keep things interesting, most of these dishes incorporate new flavors or include delicious twists of some description. Home Chef offers 18 different dishes every week. Those include oven-ready no-prep meals, express meals designed to be ready in 15 minutes with pre-chopped ingredients, 5-minute salad lunches, vegetarian, pescatarians, omnivore, low-calorie, and low carb meals.
Home Chef makes an extra effort to keep their menu diverse and interesting for their subscribers, with new recipes offered every week to fit your schedule and needs- from Classic 30 minute meal kits to 5-minute lunches.
You can find recipes that range from classic Italian pasta or risotto to Asian style bowls or stir-fries, to Mexican style tacos and of course American classics like burgers. The common ground with all their meals is that they are delicious and include generous portions of vegetables and other healthy ingredients.
Moreover, Home Chef is focused on providing a complete food experience, with a few other add-ons to enhance your delivery. This includes items like protein packs, snappy snacks, and smoothies.
We tried Home Chef Fig Pecan Chicken With Bacon Green Beans
This Chicken breast meal is an oven-ready meal kit – unique offerings from Home Chef that were made with ease of use in mind. We just needed to follow the quick instructions on the recipe card , put it all in the provided oven-safe tray and pop it in the oven for about 20 minutes. It is really as easy as it gets when cooking fresh meals at home.
It was quite a classic dish, but with the nice twist of not usually chicken crust, made out of cheese spread combined with a sweet fig jam and crushed pecans. A great combination of sweet and earthy tastes.
This meal is part of the calorie-conscious meal collection and contains only 480 calories per serving. So it’s both delicious and healthy!
Are Home Chef meals really tasty?
Our team at the Meal Kit Review makes sure to order, cook and try meals from every meal kit service that we review and that includes Home Chef. Over the last few years, we have tasted many Home Chef meals, and we can honestly say that our experiences have been amazing! Everything about Home Chef, starting from the diversity of their menu to the quality of ingredients, and most importantly the taste has always been satisfying and enjoyable. Some of the meal selections we have tasted and loved are Jerk Chicken Thigh stuffed Poblanos, Parmesan-crusted Salmon or Mediterranean Lentil Salad with Burrata cheese.
Nutrition values in Home Chef meals
When exploring the Home Chef menu, it is obvious that the recipes are full of nutritious ingredients. With every meal, you can find ingredients such as fresh vegetables and fruits, nuts, high-quality meats, seafood and more. It is great to see that most meals seem to be well balanced in terms of the portions of carbs, vegetables, and proteins. The overall meal portions are generous enough to keep you feeling satisfied without overeating and consuming too many calories
Home Chef also offers low-calorie count meals with around 450-550 calories per serving. This is as opposed to the more calorie-rich meals with around 700-800 calories or higher per serving.
Home Chef also offers some great entree salad options that are very low on the calorie count, with around 250 calories per serving! The company clearly displays the full details of calorie count and other nutritional information on their online menu. It is always very easy to be able to find the nutrition values of each meal. You will find this information both online and on the recipe card that is included with your meal kit.
Home Chef Box
What’s great about the Home Chef delivery is that all the contents are beautifully labeled and organized. You will always know which ingredients go with each dish, because Home Chef organize the delivered ingredients by recipe, making life just a little bit easier. The proteins that require refrigeration are placed at the bottom of the box with an appropriate amount of ice packs. This means that the boxes can stay outside for a few hours without requiring refrigeration.
Home Chef is committed to reducing its packaging waste to a minimum while ensuring that the ingredients are safely delivered. Most of the packaging used by Home Chef is recyclable or reusable. To get the full details and tips for recycling the Home Chef packaging, you can visit this page on their website.
Home Chef Quality of ingredients
Every time we got a box from Home Chef, we are always impressed by the quality of ingredients that were supplied. When we investigated it, we understood why the quality is so good. Home Chef have partnered with many farms to deliver a high-quality supply of ingredients. Some of these include Paysan Breton Butter, Worldwide Farms for farm fresh herbs and vegetables and Sea to Table for sustainably sourced seafood.
Home Chef Website & App
Home Chef has a well-organized and very easy to use website and app. Everything you need to manage your account can be done online. Starting from registering, selecting your plan and weekly meals, specifying your eating preferences, changing your payment method and updating other personal information.
Our team made some changes to their order with Home Chef’s app and it was very easy to do. You can also find all the information regarding each dish on both the website and app. This includes information such as a list of ingredients, nutritional facts, cooking processes, cooking times and wonderful pictures as well!
Home Chef Delivery area and shipment
Home Chef currently delivers to most places in the US (about 98%), so chances are they deliver to your address. To confirm that you are in their delivery area, you can enter your zip code during the signup process, and the system will let you know either way.
Home Chef Customer Support
From our experience, the Home Chef customer support team is very responsive and eager to help with any questions regarding your subscription. You can reach out in one of the following means:
- FAQ area on the Home Chef website: https://support.homechef.com/hc/en-us
- Contact form: https://support.homechef.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
- Phone number: 872-225-2433, Monday to Friday between 9am-6pm CST and Saturday between 10am-2pm CST
The Bottom Line of Our Home Chef Review
We love Home Chef! Their food is great. It is delicious classic cooking with an edge, and it is not too complicated to cook. So, whether you are a newbie in the kitchen and want to learn some new cooking tricks without getting lost in the process, or if you love cooking but got bored from the same meals you cook over and over again – Home Chef is the right choice for you!
