And so again, we came out pretty close to a dead heat on price. About half the cost of the meal came from buying paprika (a spice I always keep in abundance at home), cream cheese, and a jar of Dijon mustard. Also, fresh chicken is unusually expensive per pound, in these days of avian flu.
But for the most part, we’re close enough to consider Marley Spoon and the grocery store pretty much tied on price. The difference is, I had to go to the grocery store.
Lessons Learned
The lesson to be drawn here is not, of course, that meal kits are cheaper than home cooking. They clearly aren’t, when I cook the way most people cook at home.
On a regular grocery week, I might buy a few items with a specific recipe in mind. But what I more often do is get attracted by the ingredients themselves, pulled along also by the dull undertow of routine. Again and again, here I am with this same old chicken breast, those perennial noodles, the onions and cabbage and carrots and peppers. The spark, or fun, each week usually comes from whatever seasonal thing the farmers market has on offer. Mealtime is an all-too-familiar improvisation, based on whatever’s in the fridge. The game is to use all of it.
What a meal kit offers, especially when ordered just a few meals a week, is an easy break from my own tired rituals without resorting to more expensive, often less satisfying takeout or a more time-consuming cookbook recipe. And as everyone with a fancy cookbook knows, a complicated recipe—with ingredients and spices and sauces not otherwise in your larder—can sometimes cost as much as a night out on the town.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
The main takeaway from this meal kit grocery comparison, I guess, is that meal kits are better than expected at keeping costs down—whether through economies of scale or carefully managed logistics. Most of the large meal kit companies seem able to portion out a two-person meal for the same price, or even significantly less, than you’d pay trying to DIY a new recipe at the grocery store.
This is a surprising, maybe even impressive result—though it doesn’t take into account all the leftovers I had from my grocery excursions, and the new cornucopia of condiments now in my fridge and shelves after buying too much cream cheese or chili crisp. (As if too much chili crisp were ever possible.)
But if you want to get your money’s worth from a meal kit, the lesson goes, order the meals you’re least likely to make for yourself. What a meal kit offers is the ability to try out a new recipe, a new set of spices, a new set of ingredients, at the same price or sometimes less than it would have cost to experiment in the aisles of a Trader Joe’s.
The more complex or spice-filled the recipe, and the more sauce packets they send—really, the more ingredients on the list overall—the more likely it is you’re actually saving money versus your own hypothetical attempts. Adventure, it turns out, is cheap at twice the price.
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