The Real Cost of Meal Kits (and the Plain-Text Alternative)
Meal kits got popular for a good reason. You don't decide what to cook, you don't write a shopping list, and a box turns up with exactly what you need, pre-portioned, with a card telling you what to do. For a busy week, that's genuinely appealing — they sell relief from decision fatigue, and they deliver it.
But it's worth being honest about what that relief costs, and what it doesn't include.
What meal kits genuinely do well
Credit where it's due. HelloFresh, Gousto, Mindful Chef, Blue Apron, Home Chef — they all remove the two hardest parts of cooking for a lot of people: deciding what to make, and making sure you have the ingredients. The portions are measured, so there's no half-used jar of something rotting in the fridge. If the blank-page problem is what stops you cooking, a meal kit solves it.
If that's the trade you want, they're a fine product. The rest of this post is for people who do the maths and start to wonder.
The cost reality
Meal kits aren't groceries — they're groceries plus a convenience tax. Depending on the plan and box size, you're typically looking at around €9–12 per serving. A week of dinners for two lands somewhere in the €60–90 range, before you've covered a single other meal.
Buy the same ingredients yourself and you'd usually pay a fraction of that. You're paying the difference for portioning, packaging, and delivery — every week, indefinitely. There's no point at which you've "bought" the convenience; it's a subscription, and the premium renews with every box.
Dinner isn't the whole day
Here's the part the per-serving price hides: a meal kit covers dinner. That's it. Some offer a few add-on breakfasts or lunches at extra cost, but the core product is one evening meal.
So you're paying €10-ish a serving for a third of your eating, and you still have to plan, shop for, and make breakfast, lunch, and snacks yourself. The box solves decision fatigue for the one meal you were probably going to manage anyway, and leaves the rest to you.
The hidden costs
Two more things the sticker price doesn't show:
- You eat what's in the box. The menu rotates on the company's schedule, not yours. You can't easily flex a recipe to use up what's already in your fridge, cook for an extra guest, or swap an ingredient you don't like. The portions are fixed to their plan, not to how your household actually eats.
- You still waste food. Pre-portioned ingredients reduce some waste, but the packaging is significant, and "two servings" rarely matches real life — leftovers get binned, or you're hungry an hour later and order something anyway.
The alternative: keep the planning, drop the box
The thing you actually wanted from a meal kit was the planning — not the delivery van. Cook gives you that part and lets you do your own shopping.
Tell CookBot what you're in the mood for, what's in your fridge, and what your week looks like. It plans meals from your own recipe collection — balancing light and heavy days, reusing ingredients across meals so the same fresh greens turn up in more than one dish, and respecting your tastes, budget, and dietary needs. New to Cook and short on recipes? The Kickstart service seeds your collection with fifteen well-loved recipes to plan from.
And because Cook plans the whole day, a single week's plan can cover breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and even batch prep — all in one plain-text .menu file you own, with the recipes you already have. From that one file, Cook pulls a single shopping list: quantities combined across every meal, grouped by aisle, with anything already in your pantry left off. One list, for everything, that you take to whatever shop you like.
That's where the savings come from. You're buying groceries at grocery prices, reusing ingredients instead of getting them pre-portioned and shrink-wrapped, and covering every meal of the day from one plan instead of paying a premium for dinner alone.
The honest trade-off
A meal kit removes one step that Cook doesn't: it does your shopping for you, and hands you exactly what to make. If that step is the dealbreaker and the cost is worth it to you, stick with the box — no judgement.
But if what you wanted was the planning — a week of meals that makes sense, with a shopping list ready to go — you can have that for a lot less, cover every meal instead of just dinner, and keep full control over what you eat and where your data lives.
Next steps
Try CookBot to plan your week, use the Kickstart service if you need recipes to start from, and see pricing to get going. Then take the maths for a spin — plan a week, build the shopping list, and compare it to your last meal-kit bill. Coming from a specific box? Read the head-to-head: a HelloFresh alternative that plans your whole week.