Six Of The Best Meal Recipe Box Services For Home Delivery

Recipe subscription services offering fresh ingredients, individually portioned up for cooking meals at home and delivered straight to your door, have boomed in recent years. They are certainly a convenient way to make evening meals without the hassle of planning recipes and visiting the supermarket. With a recipe box service, you receive the precise amount of each ingredient needed for each recipe so there is no wastage, plus precise cooking instructions. With the COVID-19 outbreak making these home delivery food companies more popular than ever, here are six of the best recipe box services currently delivering across the UK.

Pasta Evangelists is the simplest recipe box here as the home preparation and cooking takes minutes. The service offers a weekly changing menu of ten fresh pastas, sauces and garnishes, available for delivery across the UK. Each box contains everything you need for a homemade pasta meal: fresh pasta, sauce, garnishes and simple step-by-step instructions. Giles Coren, food critic for The Times, former Masterchef judge William Sitwell, and Prue Leith, star of Great British Bake Off are among their co-founders of Pasta Evangelists. The fresh pasta is made with top doppio zero flour from Italy, combined with egg, water and a sprinkling of salt. The aim of Pasta Evangelists is to allow customers to prepare a restaurant-quality pasta dish at home. Recipes change weekly allowing for plenty of variety with recent choices including pumpkin ravioli with sage butter, pappardelle with Tuscan wild boar ragù and crab and prawn ravioloni.

A one-person portion from Pasta Evangelists starts at £6.75.

The Cookaway, run by three female chefs, is a new, chef-led, no-subscription recipe box service that launched in 2019. It offers three categories of recipes: Italian, Indian and Healthy and they’re planning to add Spanish and Japanese cuisines soon. While they have a “healthy” category of recipes, in fact, all are healthy with their Head Nutritionist ensuring that all the recipes include fresh vegetables and a good balance of protein and slow-release carbohydrates. Recent Italian recipes have included: vegetable frittata and chicken cacciatora. Indian recipes include Lobia Masala and Tandoori chicken while almond crusted sea bream and soy and ginger chicken are in the Healthy category. They have also tweaked their product range in response to the COVID-19 crisis and have introduced a brand new “Larder Essentials Box” for £39.99 which provides premium quality ingredients and recipes to produce seven meals for four people. 

A box with one meal for two people from The Cookaway is from £16.00.

London-based company Mindful Chef was launched in 2015 by three friends, Giles, Myles and Rob, on a mission to make healthy eating easy. They advise reducing your intake of gluten and to avoid refined sugars and refined carbohydrates. None of their recipe boxes ever include pasta, bread or white rice and all of their recipes are 100% organic, gluten and dairy free, plus they have six vegan options/week. Both the recipe selection of fourteen weekly recipes and the ease of preparation is impressive. Easy step-by-step cooking instructions are included, along with the precise quantities for zero food waste. The ingredients are high quality and include meat like grass-fed Yorkshire beef, fresh fish and organic vegetables. Two recent recipes included pesto crusted cod with aubergine and lentils and jackfruit burger with avocado. The weekly subscription is flexible and it’s simple to skip, pause or schedule one-off deliveries at any time. And even better, for every meal purchased, one meal is donated to a child in poverty.

Mindful Chef’s recipe box for two people with two recipes is from £24.00.

Established in 2011 in Berlin by Dominik Richter and Thomas Griesel, Hello Fresh now operates in 13 countries including the UK and the United States and is one of the best-known and most successful recipe box delivery service worldwide. Some of the recipes were created by superstar chef Jamie Oliver, all are simple and tasty and the typical prep and cooking time is around 30-40 minutes. They offer three categories of boxes: family box, classic box or rapid box, although the latter for time-poor home cooks isn’t really an issue in the current climate. There’s an excellent choice of twenty recipes to choose from each week with recent choices including spiced pork ragu and sweet chilli beef.

A classic box with three meals for two people from Hello Fresh costs £29.99.

Feast Box was launched in 2018 by Jyoti Patel, the founder of Red Rickshaw, the largest online Asian grocery store in the UK. As well as delivering specialist ingredients to consumers, Red Rickshaw delivers to top London restaurants like Gymkhana, Trishna and Kutir. The focus of the Feast Box recipe box was initially Asian cooking but the recipes on offer now include a wide selection from Africa, Latin America, China, India, the Middle East, the Caribbean, South East Asia, Japan, Korea and Eastern Europe. Some of the recipes are unusual (dubu jorim is crispy pan-fried tofu braised in a Korean chilli sauce) but each recipe is easy to follow with simple step-by-step instructions. Feast Box offers twelve weekly changing recipes to choose from, including vegetarian and vegan options and a commitment-free subscription.

A weekly Feast Box with two meals for two people is from £30.00. Feast Box is currently offering 25% off for all NHS staff.

Unlike the other recipe box kits, SimplyCook provides the recipes and the key ingredients like spices and stock for a meal and the customer buys four-six additional ingredients from the supermarket. Each week subscribers receive a slim box, that fits through the letterbox, containing four recipe kits and step-by-step recipe cards. The ingredients they include in each kit have been created by professional chefs and it shows. For example, beef massaman curry comes with pots of massaman paste, ginger chicken stock and tamarind. Your shopping list for this includes potatoes, steak, onion, coconut milk and green beans. The recipe takes about twenty minutes and tastes as good as the same dish you’d eat at your favorite Thai restaurant. Other recent recipes have included Malaysian laksa, chipotle glazed pork and Korean bokkeumbap.

SimplyCook provides recipe kits for 2-4 people that fit through your letterbox. Trials start at £3, full-price kits are £9.99. NHS workers receive 50% off their first five kits.