EveryPlate Review

Tuesday, September 17th

2024 Meal Delivery Company Reviews

EveryPlate

• Meal kit service
• 4 main meal plans: Meat & Veggie, Veggie, Family Friendly, Quick & Easy
• Meals typically priced at $4.99/serving but as low as $1.49 with discounts
• Premium options available for a $3.99 surcharge per serving
• $9.99 shipping
• Founded by parent company HelloFresh in 2018

If you're already familiar with HelloFresh as a meal delivery option, EveryPlate is going to ring a few bells. That's because EveryPlate was created by HelloFresh in 2018 as a lower-cost option within the meal delivery marketplace. How does this service accomplish that? By using much less packaging. That allows EveryPlate to provide meals at the lowest per-serving price in the industry: under $5. But, keep in mind that less packaging can often mean that your ingredients will arrive a little jumbled up in the box, so don't expect your tomatoes to be completely unbruised or to find everything neatly organized by recipe.

All dinners on the menu

There are four main meal plans available from EveryPlate (in other words, no breakfasts here). These dinner menus include:

• Meat & Veggie
• Veggie
• Family Friendly
• Quick & Easy

You can always choose any meal from any menu, but setting your preference will put those first in your list. You will choose your box size to feed two or four people, and from 3-5 meals per week. You'll also be able to select your preferred weekday for delivery, and your first shipment could come as soon as five days.

Preview each week's 18 menu choices

Because you have to enter your payment before selecting the meals you want, we encourage you to look at the weekly menu before you start the sign-up process. There are 18 meals to choose from each week, and we like that each one shows you right away how long it will take to prepare - from 20 minutes for something like Sweet Chili Pork Tacos to 40 minutes for the Chicken Sausage Orzotto. You can also choose 1-2 premium meals each week, which gets upgraded with higher-quality ingredients (particularly the protein component). It costs an extra $3.99 per serving and gives you an option for a special occasion meal to make at home. For any meal you choose, you can see the full nutritional information, ingredients list, and preparation instructions - including any pantry items you'll need to have on hand (like kosher salt, cooking oil, or pepper).

First box can be as low as $1.49/meal

You might get a "spin to win” pop-up as you browse the EveryPlate site. In our case (and maybe everyone's), we got an offer to buy our first box for $1.49/meal. That's pretty tempting. All we had to do was enter our email address and it was applied to our order. At the top of the screen, we found that the deal was even better: our first box would be at that price, and our second and third boxes would be priced at $3.99/serving. But, we didn't love the 30-minute timer at the top of the page letting us know when the offer would expire. Why the pressure, EveryPlate?

BBB received hundreds of complaints

As far as the Better Business Bureau goes, they list HelloFresh and EveryPlate as the same company and offer an "A” rating. Across both businesses, there were almost 900 complaints filed with the BBB in the last three years, 400+ of which came from the most recent one-year span. You can scroll through and sometimes see which customer service team responds (to separate the HelloFresh complaints from the EveryPlate ones), but at least they all get a reply.

More than 10,000 five-star reviews elsewhere

More reassuring were the 10,000+ five-star reviews left specifically for EveryPlate in other places. In fact, 80% of people who choose this meal delivery option would rate it as "great” or "excellent”. True, you still get a few people disappointed by late deliveries, problems with ingredients spilling or arriving spoiled, but wouldn't you rather be let down on a $5 meal than a $15 one from another company?

May experience quality issues with summer deliveries

The one area of complaint that seems consistent - and that you'll often find with other meal delivery services - is delays during warmer months leading to unsafe package temperatures. From what we've seen, EveryPlate will only offer a credit and not a refund in these cases - unless you go to the lengths of registering a complaint somewhere, and then you might get a more satisfactory resolution.

Super affordable

All complaints aside, we give EveryPlate one of our higher rankings among meal delivery services - because you're not going to find many that are more affordably priced than this one. Getting a meal kit that serves four people with five different recipes for under $40 - our price with the discount on the initial box - is astounding, and it absolutely beats trying to grocery shop for those same five meals. While you may or may not want to continue your subscription after the first box, you've got every reason to try EveryPlate at least once.