With the hustle and bustle of everyday life, making fresh meals at home can be a hard task to accomplish. However, it’s made MUCH easier with a meal delivery service!
This month we are reviewing EveryPlate.
Based on our experience, we would give EveryPlate 4.5/5 stars. EP customer service has always been FANTASTIC, the price point is the lowest we have found without sacrificing quality, and we have accumulated a LOT of favorite “meal kit” recipes over the course of our subscription.
Over the last 5 months we have had 77 meals from EveryPlate and we tracked our feelings about them all! 57 of those meals we LOVED and would (and do) order them again. Only 20 of them we would not.
The meals we loved: tasted delicious, were filling, and had varying levels of difficulty to make. (Though none of the EveryPlate meal kits are very hard to make. Some are just more time consuming than others.)
The meals we didn’t: were mainly soups or bowls we just didn’t find filling or found the flavors to be something we didn’t want again. However, ZERO of those meals were “bad,” they just weren’t our vibe.
The good news is, you choose which meals you get from a select menu that varies every week.
PRO TIP: Keep track of the recipes you like and dislike so you know what to reorder and what to avoid when they appear in the rotation again.
Our can’t-go-wrong meal kit recommendation: ANY of the EveryPlate pasta dishes or flat breads! They have all been great!
How it works: Every week you get to choose at least 3 meals from a select menu that varies every week. We find this subscription extremely flexible. You can pause weeks, add more than three meals to your box or add on premium meals a la carte, and select meals for your future boxes up to three weeks in advance. We usually create our boxes for three weeks at a time – all at once on their easy-to-use website. They have meat-based and vegetarian options. 90% of the meals we choose are the vegetarian recipes. A basic box of 3 meals starts at around $50, and you can cancel anytime.
What you get: We find EveryPlate to be like a Farmer’s Market approach to meal delivery subscriptions. Everything is delivered weekly like clockwork, in a cute little box with all the large, easy-to-read recipe cards and meal ingredients mixed together inside. (Versus a subscription like Hello Fresh, where each meal comes individually bagged for easier storage and recipe deciphering.) Every week we open a happy little box to find a cardboard crate full of fresh veggies, spice packets, meats, and dry goods. Just imagine you rode down to the farmer’s market and filled your bike basket with all the fresh ingredients for your meals that week. It’s like that! Or at least, that’s how we like to imagine it!
PRO TIP: Consider dedicating a drawer in your fridge to your Every Plate (or other subscription) it makes things so much easier to find and nothing ever goes missing.
What’s not included: Salt, Pepper, Olive Oil, Butter, Milk, Egg. You’ll need the first four all the time, and the last two only occasionally. The 8.5″ x 11″ recipe cards will always tell you what you need on the front, including the items above and the directions are on the back.
PRO TIP: Get a large bottle of good olive oil and a pepper mill, you’ll use those for nearly every meal.
Is it healthy?: Ingredients are delivered FRESH and prepared by you in your kitchen. So right there you will be better than most any prepared, frozen, fast food, or restaurant-served meal. You can also adjust the “unhealthier” things yourself. For example, we now use half the butter, and are conservative with the oil and salt for most meals with minimal impact to flavor. They also offer a lot of vegetarian meal kits that make having a plant-based diet easier to accomplish without getting bored. There are many chicken-sausage, chicken breast, and pork meat options too.
Portion sizes: We would not consider ourselves to be “light eaters,” and have found the portion sizes to be perfect. Meaning, we are full at the end of the meal and there is never anything left over.
Who it’s great for: Couples or families of four. If you are a single who loves meal prepping with leftovers, or have a hungry trio, it might work for you too – just know you will be ordering meal quantities in even numbers.
PRO TIP: If you’re a couple or family, consider making one person the prep person to wash/cut/gather ingredients and another the “chef.” It’s fun to make the meals together and it feels so much easier than trying to do it all alone. (But the recipes can absolutely be made by one person alone too.)
What’s unique to Every Plate: The cost. As stated above, a basic box of 3 meals starts at around $50, and you can cancel anytime. This was the lowest cost meal service we found that didn’t sacrifice quality. EveryPlate is a sister company to Hello Fresh (which we will be reviewing in the near future!) Which means many of the vegetables, meats, and spices are the same quality at value pricing.
Cons: We find some of the soup and bowl offerings like the risotto to be more of a side than a main meal. There’s also not as many fun upgrades as Hello Fresh offers. For example, Hello Fresh had meal options for celebrating the Super Bowl “BIG GAME” last year – but we will talk about that in our Hello Fresh review! Another con would be always having to order portions in twos. Sometimes my husband would want to add on just one for himself, or our friend’s family of three wanted three portions instead of four, but there’s no ordering or adding portions in odd numbers.
We started EveryPlate as a way to feel like we were dining out during the pandemic. It’s fun to try something that was not in any of our natural cooking instincts, go-to, or everyday rotations. We’ve also become better cooks in the process because we’ve applied techniques we learned in the various EveryPlate recipes to make dishes of our own creation. If you’re looking to venture into a meal subscription, we think EveryPlate is a great service at a great value!
If you’d like to see one of the EveryPlate meal kits we made, it’s our Recipe of the Month! (Click the link to see the recipe Roasted Zucchini, Bell Pepper, and Tomato Penne by EveryPlate.)
*This is not a paid advertisement. We actually have an unsolicited EveryPlate subscription and this is our honest assessment of our personal experience with this service.*
DeAnna & company 