EveryPlate Review: My Thoughts On This Budget-Friendly Meal Delivery Service

EveryPlate is a meal kit delivery service that offers easy-to-cook, affordable meals for busy families and couples. The company provides a variety of recipes to choose from each week and delivers the ingredients directly to your doorstep. EveryPlate's goal is to make cooking at home more accessible and convenient, offering many kits that take around 30 minutes to prepare. Pricing is very affordable compared to other meal kit services, with meals starting at just $4.99 per serving.

I recently decided to try out EveryPlate. As someone who loves to cook but whose busy family life often makes meal planning a bit stressful, I was curious to see if EveryPlate could help ease my weeknight dinner process. Over the course of a week, I tried out several of its recipes and put the service to the test. In this review, I'll share my honest thoughts on the quality of the ingredients, the ease of preparation, and the overall value of EveryPlate.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Relatively low cost
• Breakfast, lunch, and dinner dishes
• Good for beginners

Cons

• Limited dietary accommodation
• Some lackluster flavors

What Is EveryPlate?

HelloFresh created EveryPlate in 2018 as a lower-cost alternative to its popular flagship meal kit service. Like HelloFresh, EveryPlate specializes in family-friendly, crowd-pleasing dishes but at a more budget-friendly price point. The service is a flexible subscription, delivering its meal kits and a modest selection of add-ons on a weekly basis.

How Does It Work?

EveryPlate's menu features a rotating selection of 26 entrées and an assortment of roughly two dozen add-ons, many of which remain the same from week to week. You can browse three weeks' worth of menus without setting up an account. EveryPlate's culinary theme, you'll quickly see, is global comfort food, with dishes like chicken tacos, vegetable linguini, stir-fry bowls, loaded baked potatoes, burgers, ramen, and so on. Many of the kits allow you to swap your protein or pick your veggie side from two or three alternatives. Vegetarians will find enough choices to get by, but vegans and other more specialized dieters will have to look elsewhere for accommodation.

Should you decide to order, the process is quite simple. First, you'll choose your plan. EveryPlate has five plan options: Meat and Veggie, Veggie, Family Faves, Quick and Easy, and Nutrish and Delish. This setting determines the types of meals you'll receive automatically. You're not bound to these automated choices, however. All your orders, including your first one, are fully editable up to five days before delivery. You can always choose your own meals and change your plan settings at any time.

After selecting your plan preference, you'll choose a box size. Kits come in either two-serving or four-serving sizes, and you can receive between three and six kits per week (as well as up to 15 add-ons, regardless of your plan size.) After you choose a plan, you'll create an account, enter all your info (if you live in the continental United States, it's highly likely that EveryPlate will deliver to your address), pay, and then you'll be able to choose your meals or accept the system's automated choices. From there, deliveries will continue every week until you skip, pause, or cancel, all of which you can easily do from your account settings.

Pricing

Like many meal kit services, EveryPlate's per-serving price decreases as the size of your order increases, ranging from a high of $7.49 to a low of $4.99 per serving. Approximately one-quarter of the weekly options are premium kits that cost between roughly $1.50 and $7 more per serving. Although EveryPlate's FAQ says that shipping is $9.99, I was charged $10.99. Add-ons cost between approximately $3 and $22, with varying serving sizes. The five meals I ordered cost $68.89, including shipping, with a separate charge of $12.96 for my blackened shrimp salad, a premium recipe. The grand total came out to $81.85, effectively just over $8 per serving.

Meal Choices

I outlined the basic contours of EveryPlate's menu above, so let's now dig a little deeper into the details. Remember, each week brings 26 new meal kits, including roughly six premium recipes. There's good variety in the offerings, and, in retrospect, I wish I'd taken my taste buds on a bit more of a global tour. With EveryPlate's menu, it's possible to cook various Asian, European, Central American, and regional American dishes—including a couple of eggy breakfast meals—all in the same week. If anything is underrepresented, it's definitely seafood, but that's what you'd expect from a budget-friendly service. Nutritionally, EveryPlate's macro balance tilts toward the carb-heavy end of the spectrum, and meals range between roughly 600 and 1,200 calories.

What We Tasted

• Garlic Rosemary Chicken with Roasted Root Veggies
• Cheesy Steak and Caramelized Onion Sandos with Potato Wedges and Roasted Garlic Aioli
• Blackened Shrimp Salad with Creamy Cajun Dressing and Garlic Croutons
• White Bean Tomato Stew with Feta and Garlic Toasts
• Sweet Soy Broccoli and Pepper Stir-Fry with Garlic Ginger Rice and Sesame Cucumber Salad

Packaging

My ingredients arrived in a medium-sized cardboard box. Inside, large, glossy, full-color recipe cards lay on top of individually wrapped rolls, a naked carrot, a red bell pepper, and a large resealable bag filled with various sauce and pantry ingredient packets. Nearby were plastic-wrapped heads of broccoli and lettuce. Beneath all this were the thick-skinned fruits and veggies, cucumbers, onion, potatoes, garlic, and a Roma tomato, all resting with the greens and bread in an open-topped cardboard box. Under this assortment was a thick brown paper liner containing a large gel ice pack and plastic packages of chicken, beef, and shrimp (the only protein that was also wrapped in thick butcher paper in addition to the sealed plastic bag.) EveryPlate modifies its packaging seasonally. It was springtime in Seattle when I tested the service, so the climate was still quite cool. Summer in Texas, for example, would likely require more cooling and insulation.

The only ingredients not individually wrapped were the thick-skinned produce items mentioned above. Everything else was in some form of bag, box, or pouch, most of which may or may not be curbside recyclable, depending on the services available in your local area. I emptied the ice pack gel into the trash, per EveryPlate's instructions, and put all the cardboard into the curbside recycle bin.

The Cooking Process

As a skilled cook, I found EveryPlate's preparation process to be very straightforward. Basic knife work—chopping, slicing, and dicing the various veggies—made for the lion's share of the cooking effort. Some vegetables I oven-roasted, others I stir-fried, and some I prepped for raw consumption. All proteins called for pan-frying, and there was a bit of light sauce-making. Ultimately, I could plate all the dishes within five minutes or so of EveryPlate's suggested times.

You'll need to supply a few basics from your own pantry. My recipes required cooking oil, butter, kosher salt, pepper, flour, sugar, ketchup, and mayonnaise. Not counting a bit of broken homemade mayo, I was out of the latter two ingredients. While proper mayonnaise might have improved my steak sandwich slightly, the absence of ketchup didn't make much of a difference to me.

Taste

Unfortunately, taste was a sticking point for me. The soup was the main culprit. I think it was the packet of Italian seasoning that lent the poor white bean tomato stew the dull flavor of old dried herbs. My nephew sampled it as well, and we both agreed that a quality canned soup would have been much better, not to mention a fraction of the cost and effort. The chicken dish was a bit salty, partly because I seasoned the chicken without accounting for the saltiness of the bullion packet that went into the pan sauce. EveryPlate isn't solely to blame for that, but it's worth mentioning, nonetheless. The roll for the steak sandwich was also a bit disappointing (but I grew up outside of Philadelphia, so my standards might be a bit too high). The shrimp salad was fine but nothing special. The stir-fry was everyone's favorite dish, but, like everything else, I felt like the end result wasn't quite worth the time and effort.

Who Should Use EveryPlate?

EveryPlate is for busy couples and families who are on a budget and who have few dietary restrictions or special requirements. Singles who would appreciate affordable two-serving meal kits—either for larger portions or leftovers the next day—might also enjoy the service. Parents might also value EveryPlate as a way to get their children active in the kitchen while introducing them to global yet kid-friendly flavors.

Final Thoughts

For me, EveryPlate's value proposition just didn't quite connect. Maybe it was the particular meals I ordered or the fact that I was working away from my home kitchen (I did the testing while visiting my sister). Overall, the end result didn't feel worth the time, effort, and expense, particularly in light of my experiences with EveryPlate's closest competitor. I wouldn't dissuade anyone from trying the service, but based on my experience, I wasn't tempted to keep my subscription.