Meal kits only, 7 September to 4 October 2026 · Published: 28 October 2026 · Last updated: 28 October 2026 · Reading time: ~9 minutes · The delivery boxes, the recipe cards and the photographs in this post are my own.
Over the last year I have written four experiments about cooking, and each one landed on the same thing from a different direction. The recipe experiment found that the recipes I keep are the ones with the fewest ingredients to buy. The waste experiment found that 83.6% of what I threw away was food with no meal attached. The freezer experiment found that a full freezer is a queue of unmade decisions. The timing experiment found that a 15-minute recipe is really a 30-minute recipe, because of sixteen minutes of overhead nobody counts.
Every one of those findings is a variation on the same problem. Home cooking is hard because of the planning, not the cooking.
So I spent a month cooking exclusively from meal kits, to see what happened when the planning was removed. It solved every one of those problems. And what it cost, in a way I could not see from the inside, was the reason those four experiments had findings in the first place.
What I actually did
Four weeks, one kit, three meals a week at two portions each. That is 24 dinner portions across a month, which is six dinners a week. The seventh night was at my sister's, which is where it has always been.
I should be honest about the calendar, because it is the one thing in this post I would do differently if I could re-run it. Those four weeks overlapped with two other experiments already running, the 5am fortnight and the fortnight off coffee. Three tests at once was too many, and the other two were about sleep and caffeine, which are the two things a month of strange dinners would least want in the background. I am leaving the dates as they are rather than quietly moving them, because the overlap is real and moving it would make a tidy post out of a messy month.
I added almost nothing from my own cupboard except oil and salt. I went to a shop once in four weeks, for a bag of onions, because a kit assumed I had one. The kit's assumptions about what was already in my kitchen turned out to be the only real friction in the food itself, and it was small friction.
I kept all the receipts, the recipe cards and the delivery boxes for a month, and I timed the cooking the same way I timed the eighteen recipes in the previous experiment: clock on when I started getting things out, clock off when the plate went down.
The four problems it solved, one by one
1. Ingredients to buy (post 3)
The recipe experiment found that the recipes I kept had an average of 2.25 ingredients I had to buy specifically for them, and the ones I retired averaged 7.3. The meal kit makes every recipe an average of zero, because the box arrives with everything in it, portioned.
That is not a small thing. It is the whole reason I stopped cooking from recipes in the first place, and the kit removes it entirely. I did not think about what to buy on the way home for a month, with one exception. The 7pm trip that killed most of my saved recipes simply did not happen.
2. Food waste (post 6)
The waste experiment found I was throwing away 11.7% of what I bought, and that 83.6% of the wasted food had no meal attached to it. Portioned ingredients eliminate both problems at once. There is nothing left over and nothing unattached, because the amount you need is the amount in the bag.
I threw away almost nothing in four weeks. The bag of onions was the only thing I bought outside the kit, and half of it went soft in the drawer. Which is, on reflection, exactly the failure the kit exists to prevent, and I managed it anyway with the one ingredient the kit did not supply.
3. The freezer queue (post 12)
The freezer experiment found 47 items in my freezer, 36 of which had no meal attached. Meal kits generate nothing for the freezer, because there are no leftovers large enough to freeze and no ingredients left over to store.
After four weeks my freezer was emptier than it had been in three years. Not because I was using it up. Because I was not putting anything in it.
4. The timing (post 17)
The timing experiment found that eighteen recipes had a stated time of 655 minutes and an actual of 828, a 26% overshoot, and that the short recipes were the worst offenders. The meal kits came in at almost exactly the stated time. My worst overshoot was nine minutes, and most came in within four.
The reason is the overhead from that experiment. Sixteen minutes per recipe, and about nine of those were getting things out, reading a step twice, and washing a board because I needed it again. The kit had already done the getting-out. There was nothing to find and nothing to read twice. The stated time was true because the prep had been done by someone else.
What it cost
£45 a week, for four weeks, is £180 for 24 dinner portions. That is £7.50 a portion.
My own cooking cost less, but the comparison is not the straightforward one it looks like. When I logged my cooking for six weeks, my dinner spend worked out at about £25 a week for six portions. The other £21 or so of the weekly total in that post was breakfast, lunch and everything else. So £4.17 a portion for the dinners. But 11.7% of that got thrown away, so of the £100 I would have spent, £88.30 of food actually reached a plate and £11.70 went in the bin.
That gives two different numbers and I want to be straight about which is which. In cash, the kit was £80 more across the month: £180 against £100. Counting the £11.70 of waste the kit eliminated, the premium for food that reaches a plate was £91.70. I am going to use the larger figure throughout, because it is the one that flatters the kit, and I would rather argue against the strongest version of the case than the weakest.
What did that £91.70 buy? About two hours a week of not doing things: the shopping trip (45 minutes), the planning and list (20 minutes), deciding what to cook (15 minutes), dealing with the queue of leftovers and freezer items (25 minutes), and putting the shopping away (15 minutes). That is eight hours across the month, which works out at £11.46 an hour for my own time, or £10.00 an hour if you use the cash figure.
Which is within a pound of what I got for reducing food waste in the earlier experiment, and close to what I got for repairing instead of replacing. I am starting to think this is the number that keeps coming back, and that it is less a coincidence than a fact about what my chores are worth when I price them.
What it did not solve
Three things, and they are the reason I did not keep the subscription.
The variety is somebody else's. Twelve recipes in four weeks, and I liked about seven of them. Three I would not cook again and two I actively disliked. In my own cooking, if I cook something I do not like, that is my mistake and I can adjust. Here, the mistake is in a box that arrives on Tuesday whether I want it to or not.
The food is designed for the widest possible palate. Everything was a variation on a traybake, a stir-fry, a pasta, or a curry. Everything was pleasant. Nothing was interesting. By week three I could predict what the meal would taste like from the recipe card, before opening the bag.
The packaging. This is the one I did not expect to care about, and it turned out to be the thing that made the decision for me. Every ingredient comes in its own plastic sachet. Four weeks produced a bin bag of plastic a week, plus the box, plus the ice packs. I solved my food waste and replaced it with a packaging problem, and the packaging problem is not countable in the same way the food waste was, so I cannot give you a number for it. But I noticed it every single week.
The thing I got wrong
I assumed a meal kit was for people who could not cook. It is not. It is for people who can cook and cannot face the decisions.
That distinction only became clear when I noticed what I actually missed. I did not miss the cooking, because I cooked every one of those 24 meals. I did not miss the eating, mostly. What I missed was deciding what to eat, and the kit had taken that away, and that turned out to be the thing I was paying £91.70 a month to avoid.
So the finding is not "meal kits are worth it" or "meal kits are overpriced." It is that they solve a specific problem, the decision problem, and that every one of my four previous cooking experiments was actually an experiment about that same problem without me noticing.
The recipe experiment was about deciding what to buy. The waste experiment was about deciding what to eat before it went off. The freezer was about deciding what to keep. The timing was about deciding when to start. None of them were about cooking. All of them were about the cognitive load of running a kitchen, and the meal kit is the first thing in a year that removed that load entirely.
So the rule I came out with is this. Before you decide whether a meal kit is worth it, work out what you are actually buying. If you are buying food, cook. It is cheaper and it tastes better and you decide what you eat. If you are buying the decisions, the kit might genuinely be worth £91.70 a month, but you have to be honest that that is the purchase, because the food is not the thing you are paying for.
And the corollary: if you are buying the decisions, you do not need a meal kit. You need a short list of ten meals you actually like, one shopping trip, and a rule that says you can only cook from the list. That is the same purchase, without the £45 a week, and I knew it was possible because I had already found the recipes that would have done it.
What I would do differently
I would have compared it against a list, not against my own undisciplined cooking. The £91.70 is only a fair comparison if the alternative is "shopping without a plan," which is what I was doing. If the alternative is ten recipes on a rotation, the kit is close to £90 a month more expensive for a result you could get from a piece of paper. You would still do some shopping and some deciding, but a fraction of it, and the plan costs nothing.
And I would have run it in a month that was not already carrying two other experiments. I chose a month that was ordinary in every way except the two tests running alongside it, which flattered my own cooking. A month with a deadline in it and nothing else would have been a fairer test, and I suspect the kit would have looked much better.
Should you do this?
A month, no. Two weeks is enough to see whether the food suits you, and the answer to that question is the only thing the month adds. The rest of the finding, the £11.46 an hour and the four problems solved, is visible inside a fortnight.
The accounting, yes, and it costs an evening. Write down what you spend on dinners in a normal week and how many hours you spend shopping, planning and deciding. Divide the money by the hours. If your own time is worth less than that number, cook. If it is worth more, the kit is a defensible purchase and you should stop feeling guilty about it.
And if you do not want to do the accounting, there is a shortcut. Ask yourself whether you would pay £45 a week to never think about dinner again. If the answer is yes, the kit is right for you. If the answer is no, or if you would pay it but cannot afford to, the answer is the ten-recipe list, and it is free.
Frequently asked questions
Which kit did you use?
One of the big national ones, chosen because it was the only one that delivered to my postcode on a day I was actually home. I am not naming it, for two reasons: I only tested one, and a review of one is not a comparison. If you want the comparison, the two I would test next are the cheapest per portion and the one with the most recipes a week, and I will write it up if I get to it.
Was the food good?
Pleasant. That is the honest word. Nothing was bad and nothing was memorable. The best thing I cooked was a chicken dish in week two that I would have been happy to have made myself. The worst was a noodle thing in week three that I ate half of. Across 24 meals, that is a fine average and not a reason to subscribe.
Did you lose or gain weight?
I did not weigh myself and I am not going to guess. The portions are controlled and were, if anything, slightly smaller than what I cook for myself. Whether that means anything about weight is not something I can tell you from one month.
Would you do it again?
For a specific month, yes. A move, a deadline, an illness, a period where the planning is the thing that falls apart: the kit is exactly the right tool for those weeks. For an ordinary month, no, because I already know the recipes and I would rather have the £45. What I have kept is the finding, not the subscription.
About this post
Written by Maha Alkumaish. I write about the routines and systems that survive a real working week, tested on myself before they get written about. The delivery receipts, recipe cards and photographs in this post are my own.
All photographs in this post are my own. I was not paid or sponsored by any brand mentioned, and there are no affiliate links in this post. More about me and how these experiments are run.
Related reading on this blog:
- The weeknight dinners I actually repeat, where 2.25 bought ingredients per recipe predicted which ones I kept, and the meal kit makes that number zero
- I logged everything I threw away for six weeks, where 11.7% of my groceries went in the bin, mostly because they were never attached to a meal
- I ate only from my freezer for a week, where 36 of 47 items had no plan, which is what the kit prevents by having no leftovers
- I timed every recipe I cooked for a month, where the sixteen-minute overhead was the whole gap, and the kit removes it
- More Food & Kitchen experiments
0 Comments