In this series, Newshub Lifestyle editor Sarah Templeton has compared some of the food delivery boxes on the New Zealand market. In this final instalment, it's HelloFresh.
- Balance of the Boxes: Newshub tries Woop Foodies
- Battle of the boxes: Newshub tries Woop Balance
- Battle of the boxes: Newshub tries My Food Bag 'Heat 2 Cook 2'
The final box in this series is one of the more popular ones you can get your hands on, and you've probably seen it pop up all over your Instagram feed. There are so many influencers offering discount codes for 30 percent off HelloFresh, it's hard to know who's actually buying them full price.
If you are, you're a bloody FOOL. Look at all these.
Unfortunately I'm neither a mummy nor an influencer, so I was forced to beg the lovely people at HF to hook me up. I have no discount codes for you. I am so sorry.
But I can see how cooking for kids might be made approximately 1000 percent easier with the HelloFresh box: in terms of convenience it's streets ahead of everyone else.
While ingredients aren't portioned and pre-chopped like Woop they are, instead, all packed up in handily packaged brown paper bags, closed with a coloured sticker. Each colour corresponds with a colour coded recipe. You choose your recipe, and grab the paper bag of ingredients. It's very, very easy.
TOP TIP: Do not assume that just because the chilled bag of meat and dairy goes in the fridge, the paper bags go in the pantry. When you assume you make an ass out of u and me. They go in the fridge, as is clearly stated in the booklet I threw to the side without reading. This is because they are filled with veges and seasonings and the like.
I had some pretty brown lettuce the next day. Ah well, win some lose some.
A win was that, with HelloFresh, we had NUMBERED STEPS in the instructions. This sounds fairly unexciting, but you would be surprised. It took me just as long to cook of course, due to my own ability, but still, I wasn't squinting at long paragraphs of chatty instructions as much as usual.
The meals are yum but a wee bit standard - the term 'rissoles' conjures dark memories of tough chewy mince balls of childhood so I would perhaps rebrand those to something else next time. While a tandoori chicken kumara bowl seemed exciting on paper, a plethora of raw chopped veges revealed it was in fact simply a salad, pretending to be something else.
Your kids may be fooled mummy influencers, but my 24-year-old boyfriend was less than impressed.
But this all might have been my luck of the draw in my week's meal selection, I've seen others that look bloody delish and burger-esque. I think I'm a fan, but perhaps another round is needed to seal the deal.
Newshub.
