Review: EveryPlate Meal Kit

"Cheap delivery meal kit” doesn’t always summon the best associations. Or, frankly, many associations at all.

HelloFresh’s budget plan, EveryPlate, is among the few meal kits I’ve tried whose cost looks anything like a plausible grocery budget. A single serving comes out to $6, not counting shipping charges of $11 for the full box of ingredients. Depending on how many you order in a week, you’re likely to come in closer to $7 a meal.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

For this modest price, one does not necessarily expect to find oneself hovering over the burner to cook down a lovely and creamy spring risotto, layered with shaved parmesan and dappled with still-crisp peas and lightly browned zucchini. Nor, for that matter, drizzling a buttery, herbal, caramelized pan sauce over thin-sliced pork loin with a Kunz spoon. (Spoon not included.)

But here we are. EveryPlate’s meals are not as technically accomplished as those from Martha Stewart–endorsed Marley Spoon (8/10, WIRED Recommends), nor does it offer meals as varied and interesting as HelloFresh's flagship (and more expensive) meal kit. But it's hard to imagine many other meal kits with a value proposition so fully realized. This is especially true when EveryPlate discounts and coupons can drop the price closer to $3 a serving on a first-week trial. Here are EveryPlate's faults, and charms, based on a week's experience.

How EveryPlate Works

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Most meal kits function pretty much the same way, in a model pioneered most famously by HelloFresh and Blue Apron. EveryPlate works this way, too. Sign up for a weekly plan with a set number of meals (each one is at least two portions), and pick out which individual meals you prefer from the weekly menu. And then, on the day of your choosing, you get a box in the mail.

Though it's a budget kit, EveryPlate uses similar meat suppliers to HelloFresh, meaning my 10 ounces of boneless pork chop came from Philly-founded, century-old, third-generation North Carolina meat purveyors Villari Foods. The beef is from Texas' Standard Meat, a fourth-generation meat family that specializes in butchering and portioning commodity meat. Both arrive with flavor and trimming above what I'd expect from your average mid-tier supermarket meat case. Which is to say, the “budget” does not appear to come out of the meat.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

It arrives, instead, as simplicity: EveryPlate sports about half as many weekly menu options as HelloFresh, though this still amounted to 36 options on the week I chose. This is still an excellent selection for those without eating restrictions. But vegetarians will find few offerings, gluten-free is a tough ask, and vegans should look elsewhere entirely than this resolutely cheese-loving meal kit.

The box also arrives more jumbled than HelloFresh, rather than arranged nicely and neatly into individual paper bags—with a little more packaging waste as well. Each squash comes individually wrapped. That's just how it is.

But especially, each plate tends to be a bit simpler. EveryPlate assumes you'll provide a certain number of kitchen staples that include salt, pepper, butter, cooking oil, eggs, and flour—a longer list than some more expensive meal kits. The recipe guidance is a bit more rudimentary, especially in terms of letting you know what kind of dishware or utensils you'll need to make the recipe.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

And the ingredients are trimmed to bare essentials. The aforementioned risotto is a nine-ingredient, one-pan, veggie-only recipe whose flavor accents are pared down to lemon and garlic. A pork chop dish one-ups this with just seven ingredients, none of which is a starch, with fresh rosemary and garlic doing the duty as an aromatic.

A "prep-ahead" meal of ponzu beef is designed so that you'll add other ingredients to make more than one meal with the same bavette-steak baseline—doubling the portions of pan-seared, ponzu-saucy beef but leaving out every other substantial ingredient except chopped onions.

When the recipe was mostly done, I looked down at my chopped steak and onion, lightly shimmering with sauce and oil, and got a flashback to my time in South Philly. All I needed was Cooper sharp and an Italian roll. I had pretty much slapped together a ginger-citrus-accented filling to a cheesesteak. That, or I'd need to whip up a batch of rice in my beloved, well-used Zojirushi 3-Cup to make it a meal, maybe throw a veggie into the bargain.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

I had no hitches with my cooking instructions, another bonus side effect of simplicity. There's less to screw up. And on one recipe, a garlic rosemary pork, I actually managed to finish the recipe within the 45 minutes they allotted: A rare moment of honesty utterly ruined by a 40-minute risotto that EveryPlate's recipe card told me would only require five “active” minutes at the stove.

Sorry, it's risotto. You're at the stove the whole time. That's how risotto works.

Some Assembly Required

The simplicity of the flavor accents is far from a problem. Often, it's a virtue. But in terms of base ingredients, some of EveryPlate's meals can feel almost incomplete. Calorie counts tend to be a little lower than HelloFresh. And it can also feel like one component is missing on each EveryPlate meal before it becomes quite balanced: meat and veggies without a starch, or a starch without much protein.

The risotto offers an option to pay extra to upgrade to chicken or salmon, of course—an upgrade that's not at all needed for flavor. By the time I'd gotten done tending to the rice, ladling the water over it again and again and cooking it back down, and adding cream sauce and more Parmesan and a healthy dollop of butter, the rice was rich, lovely, fragrant, and still just the slightest bit al dente. The peas, added late to the dish, still popped brightly with each bite. But still, it's not a protein-packed meal: It's carbs and dairy and veg.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Meanwhile, a garlic rosemary pork chop plate has protein in abundance. It's a lovely and classic pork preparation, pan-seared simply with a dusting of flour for bonus crispness. The actual flavor comes from a pan sauce made by deglazing the burny pork bits left on my cast iron with onions just short of caramelization, with a bit of stock and fragrantly fresh garlic and rosemary activated in the pan. Oh, and also a lot of butter—an addition EveryPlate seems to be fond of because it comes from your own larder and adds a lot of filling calories.

But that's the thing, it's Jack Sprat and his wife. One meal has an abundance of starch, the other has meat. You feel the urge to play matchmaker. And in the case of the ponzu beef and the risotto, that's what I ended up doing, making multiple meals out of the combo: East Asian-inflected beef, Mediterranean-ish rice. It's the somewhat dubious journeys of Marco Polo, all over again.

But mostly, EveryPlate's low price can make these improvisations feel worthwhile. The meal kit will healthily reward those with a rice cooker and the urge to use it: A $7 meal and a cup of rice is still an economical meal, and a much more filling one than you would have had otherwise. EveryPlate remains the most economical meal kit I'd happily eat on a regular basis, a signal achievement for uncertain times.