Pros:
- Easy and affordable meal kits with oven-ready and microwaveable options
- Delicious familiar meals with an exciting twist
- A great rotating selection of over 35 meals per week
- High-quality seasonal ingredients
- Customization and add-on options enhance your week even more
- Cater to different diets like keto, vegetarian, paleo, and low-calorie or low-carb
Cons:
- Not as many menu options per week compared to other services
- Some of the plastic packaging could be reduced
Who is Home Chef for?
Home Chef was designed for busy singles, couples, and families who are pressed for time but would still love to enjoy super delicious home-cooked meals that take no longer than 30 minutes to prepare!
The chef-designed meals are meant to make cooking easy and simple and remove the hassle of picking out recipes, grocery shopping, and portioning ingredients. The menus are familiar and approachable, with great options for meal kits, oven-ready meals, and fast and fresh microwaveable meals to fit into any schedule.
The add-ons make breakfast and lunch a breeze. Choose from soups, salads, microwaveable lunches, quick breakfast items, smoothies, and plenty of snack and dessert choices. Additional protein packs and veggies mean fewer trips to the grocery store.
Meal Plans and Diet Support
With Home Chef, you can enjoy a great deal of flexibility. They offer two unique menus: the standard and family plan. Choose between two to six dishes per week for two, four, or six people. You can always add additional meals and choose from a nice selection of add-ons—smoothies, breakfasts, lunches, snacks, desserts, and different protein packs.
Home Chef also recently created a new brand called Tempo under the Home Chef name. This service offers single-serving microwaveable meals with less than 600 calories and 30+ grams of protein ready in under 4 minutes. Tempo is available in your plan settings. You can switch back and forth between menus weekly.
Home Chef offers many different diet plans to customize your meals. Additional diet plans are available, such as checking the nutritional labels and utilizing their customization features to swap out proteins.
- Low-calorie meals – with fewer than 625 calories 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 with less than 35g of carbs per serving by swapping the carbohydrates for protein and healthier vegetable alternatives.
- Fresh Start meals – are calorie and carb-conscious meals that are also protein-packed! Each serving contains over 30g of protein per serving.
- Keto-Friedly meals – these have less than 15g of net carbs per serving, making them ideal for those looking for macro-balanced options.
- Paleo-Friendly Meals – are designed with quality lean proteins, fresh produce, and healthy fats. You won’t find any high fructose corn syrup, dairy, refined sugar, or canola oil in these meals.
- Vegetarian – At least six vegetarian options are available each week, and each meal can be customized to swap out proteins with impossible meat.
Special Features and Menu Add-Ons
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 unique “Customize It” feature with many of its weekly meals. Meals with this option are clearly marked with a “Customize It” logo. This feature allows you to swap, double, or even upgrade the protein in those selected meals.
- Fresh and easy – This plan from Home Chef provides meal kit options for those with little spare time. Meals in this plan are either express meals 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 designed to be ready in 5 minutes.
- Tempo – A new brand by Home Fresh that offers single-serving microwaveable meals with less than 600 calories and 30+ grams of protein that are ready in under 4 minutes. You can swap between Tempo and other menus each week in your settings.
- Culinary Collection – These recipes feature premium ingredients, more adventurous flavors, and advanced cooking techniques for those who want a challenge.
- Beverages – Each week, the menu features rotating smoothies and coffee beverages, such as lattes, mocha coffee, and fruit smoothies, that you can add to your delivery.
- Lunches and Breakfasts – From waffles to ready-to-heat frittatas, salads, and soups, several rotating options for breakfast and lunch add-ons each week are available. Plus, there is a selection of microwaveable lunches to choose from.
- A La Carte Add-Ons – The a–la–carte section offers Everything from snacks to desserts, quality protein packs like chicken breasts, shrimp, beef filets, pizza, pasta, and bread. Pantry items and extra veggie portions are also available to make your week a snap.
Home Chef Variety & Style of Meals Kits
With Home Chef, you will find classic and reassuringly familiar dishes. To keep things interesting, most of these dishes incorporate new flavors or include delicious twists of some description. Home Chef offers over 35 rotating dishes every week. Those include oven-ready meals, 15-minute express meals, microwaveable meals, 5-minute salad lunches, vegetarian dishes, options for pescatarians and omnivores, and low-calorie and low-carb meals.
You can find recipes ranging from classic Italian pasta or risotto to Asian-style or stir-fries, Mexican-style, and 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 focuses on providing a complete food experience, with many other add-ons to enhance your delivery. This includes protein packs, breakfasts, snacks, smoothies, lunches, and more.
Quality Of Ingredients
Every time we get a box from Home Chef, we are impressed by the quality of the ingredients supplied. When we investigated, we understood why the quality was so good. Home Chef has partnered with many farms to deliver a high-quality supply of ingredients.
Home Chef offers seasonal quality produce and organic options wherever possible. For example, you can swap out proteins for organic chicken when available. They also committed to ensuring their meat is sourced from humane suppliers.
Are Home Chef Meals Really Tasty? Our Experience With Home Chef:
Our team at the Meal Kit Review orders, cooks, and tries meals from every meal kit service we review, including Home Chef. Our testers have extensive experience with this service over the past seven years.
We re-tested the meal kit delivery service for two weeks in 2024 to update our review on our hands-on experience and the new features available. We have tasted many Home Chef meals, and we can honestly say that our experiences have been amazing!
Everything about Home Chef, from the diversity of their menu to the quality of ingredients and, most importantly, the taste, has always been satisfying and enjoyable. Some meal selections we have tasted and loved are Jerk Chicken Thigh stuffed Poblanos, Parmesan-crusted Salmon, or Mediterranean Lentil Salad with Burrata cheese.
We tried Home Chef Fig Pecan Chicken With Bacon Green Beans
This Chicken breast meal is an oven-ready meal kit—one of the many unique offerings from Home Chef made with ease of use in mind. We just needed to follow the quick instructions on the recipe card, put everything in the provided oven-safe tray, and pop it in the oven for about 20 minutes. It is 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 having a chicken crust; it was made out of cheese spread combined with 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!
We tried Home Chef Coconut Rice and Plantain Bowl with Black Beans and Corn Pico de Gallo
This vegetarian meal kit was a breeze to make and full of unique, authentic flavor combinations. Our testers appreciated the easy-to-reference binder that contains all the recipe cards with the easy-to-follow instructions. And all the ingredients required very little prep.
The rice was simmered in a delicious coconut milk sauce and served with smoky black beans, fried plantains, and a spicy pico de gallo. The pico was well seasoned and balanced the sweetness of the plantains and rice so well.
The portions were very generous, and each serving had over 20 grams of protein. It was both delicious and a filling vegetarian option that doubles as a vegan choice.
Other Recommended Home Chef Meals To Try
When looking at the huge Home Chef menu, you can see that there is something to appeal to everybody. Here are a few of Home Chef’s most popular meals:
- Broccoli Cheddar-Stuffed Chicken with Roasted Garlic Carrots and Zucchini
- Salmon Cakes with Dill Hollandaise and Greek-style Potatoes
- Corn and Steak Strip Risotto with Fresh Tomatoes
- Bacon Carbonara Chicken with Parmesan and Sun-Dried Tomato Green Beans
- Tuscan Herb Buttered Steak with Glazed Carrots and Garlic Bread
- Cilantro Lime Mahi-Mahi with Corn and Peppers
Nutritional Values in Home Chef Meals
When exploring the Home Chef menu, it is obvious that the recipes are full of nutritious ingredients. You can find fresh vegetables and fruits, nuts, high-quality meats, seafood, and more with every meal. It is great to see that most meals seem well-balanced in terms of carbs, vegetables, and proteins. The meal portions are generous enough to satisfy you 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. You can customize and swap out proteins to add more protein or change the calories in the meal.
Home Chef also offers some great entree salad options that are very low in calories, with around 250 calories per serving! The company clearly displays the full details of calorie count, allergens, and other nutritional information on its online menu. It is always very easy to find the nutritional value of each meal. You will find this information both online and on the recipe card that is included with your meal kit.
Is It Easy To Use?
The focus of Home Chef is to make mealtime simple and easy. Whether you make one of the delicious meal kits, an oven-ready meal, or a prepared microwave option, the meal kit comes with easy-to-follow recipes and simple, step-by-step instructions.
Most meals are designed to be ready in half an hour or less, making dinner a breeze. The menu also offers shorter prep times of 15 minutes, oven-ready and pre-made meals requiring no prep or cleanup, and fast lunch options like soups and salads.
The Delivery 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 the Home Chef organizes the ingredients delivered by recipe, making life 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 the boxes can stay outside for a few hours without refrigeration.
Home Chef is committed to reducing its packaging waste to a minimum while ensuring the ingredients are safely delivered. Most of the packaging used by Home Chef is recyclable or reusable.
Is The Home Chef Packaging Materials Eco-friendly?
Everything in each delivery was designed with eco-friendly principles in mind. The bottles, jars, and portion cups are reusable for other spices, leftovers, or condiments. They are also all recyclable materials.
The delivery box is recyclable, and the ice packs that come with it can be reused, emptied, and recycled. All the bags that the meals come in and the portioned ingredient plastic bags can be recycled.
They can be recycled if you don’t want to keep the recipe cards to recreate the recipes at home. This goes for all the plastic trays and aluminum tins used in oven-ready and microwaveable meals.
The Home Chef Website & Ordering Process
Getting started with Home Chef is super easy! All you need to do is sign up for the service via their website or app. Then, you simply choose which meals you would like to eat from the 35 plus 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 enjoy your yummy home-cooked meal!
With Home Chef, you also have the flexibility to skip weeks whenever you need, change your recipe selections as often as you wish prior to delivery, cancel the subscription at any time, and order what you want when you want it—there are no daunting commitments with Home Chef.
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 with 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. You can also find all the information regarding each dish on both the website and app. This includes a list of ingredients, nutritional facts, cooking processes, cooking times, and wonderful pictures as well!
The app also has a great grocery list feature, which allows you to add ingredients from a favorite recipe to a grocery list so you can recreate it again and again!
What Do Customers Think Of Home Chef?
Subscribers love Home Chef for its simple and easy-to-make recipes, affordability, and quality ingredients. One subscriber shared, “Every meal is restaurant quality (and I would argue, often better). I really like that they have different categories, such as Oven Ready (which is really cool for a quick prep) and more elaborate meals. The recipes state how many days each should be prepared so you can prioritize. They also have an interesting selection of meal types and flavors.”
Others appreciate the cost savings meal kits offer over typical grocery shopping. One customer wrote on Reddit, “I’m spending a little less (like $50-75) but less wasted food, and I don’t have to figure out what’s for dinner and make sure I have all the ingredients.”
The different meal choices work well for some for meal prep or planning extra lunches. As one user shared, “Of course you could order more meals if it suits your schedule, but 3 was a good number for me. I tried to make sure I selected meals that would keep well for leftovers.”
We also noticed that the Home Chef app has a high rating of 4.8 out of 5 and more than 20k reviews. The majority of the reviews are very positive and suggest high satisfaction with the Home Chef service, as you can see below.
Customer Support
From our experience, the Home Chef customer support team is very responsive and eager to help with any questions regarding your subscription. They consistently rank higher than others in customer service. You can reach out in one of the following means:
- FAQ area on the Home Chef website
- Contact form at the customer support area on the website
- Phone number: 872-225-2433, Monday to Friday between 9 am-6 pm CST and Saturday between 10 am-2 pm CST
Delivery Areas
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. You can also customize delivery days that work with your schedule or pause anytime if you are going to be out of town.
The Bottom Line – We love Home Chef!
Their food is great and simple to prepare. It is delicious classic cooking with an edge and 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 get bored with the same meals you cook over and over again – Home Chef is the right choice for you!
Why Trust Us?
Our mission at The Meal Kit Review is to help you make informed decisions about various meal kit companies without purchasing each kit individually. We surveyed each meal kit service on the marketplace to find the best ones for singles, couples, families, and specific diets.
We give an honest review based on purchasing and testing meal kits from popular meal kit companies and provide information on flavor, sustainability, pricing, and more. Read more about our review process and why you should trust us here.
