Hungryroot Is the Healthy Meal Kit Service for People Who Never Have Time to Cook

What Types of Meals Do You Get?

There’s a solid variety to choose from, all with a healthy spin, including plenty of grain bowls, pasta dishes, sandwiches, soups, stews and burgers. And based on what you noted in your quiz, the meals are filtered to focus on your time constraints and dietary restrictions (whether you’re gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian or need to avoid certain ingredients, like shellfish or nuts).

What I Received:

• Ingredients for three complete dinners for two people, all using five ingredients or less: Polenta with Plant-Based Chorizo with Fajita Veggies, Spicy Grilled Chicken with Crispy Brussels Bowl, Southwestern Chicken and Black Bean Bowl
• One lunch for two: a sweet kale salad kit and chicken tamale (the salad was enough for two; the tamale, I guess we were supposed to split?)
• Three snacks: a raspberry kefir drink, a Cara Cara orange and Buffalo chicken jerky

What Was the Cooking Process Like?

The recipes are essentially semi-homemade meals, with plenty of shortcuts to reduce your time in the kitchen, so you spend more time enjoying dinner than preparing it. The Southwestern Chicken and Black Bean Bowl, for example, was largely just assembling four premade ingredients: warming precooked rice, searing grilled chicken breasts to warm them up, then slicing them and mixing everything with the premade cucumber corn black bean salad and avocado crema.

It took less than 10 minutes to whip up, and since every ingredient was precooked or prepped in some way, my husband had to ask: Does this even count as cooking? We were more assemblists than chefs, but on a busy weeknight when we were already starving, those shortcuts came in handy.

How's the Food?

Meals that call for premade ingredients are often bland, but thankfully, that wasn’t the case here. The vegetables were fresh and crisp, the crema and dressings were tangy and zesty without being overly salty (a common problem with the store-bought stuff) and the proteins were solid. We found ourselves raving about the meals without feeling bogged down afterward, like we do when we cook entirely from scratch. Which leads me to my next point…

I found myself mostly satisfied with the portion sizes, though the protein seemed a bit meager for two people. (Then again, that could be because I’m used to restaurant portions and not the deck-of-cards size the USDA suggests.) That portion control was probably useful, given my propensity to cook oversized meals on my own, but still, I often found myself wanting just a few bites more.

The Bottom Line:

At $90 for the three dinners, lunch and snacks I received, it was more affordable than the $60 I typically shell out for two meals a week from Hello Fresh. You can set how frequently you’d like deliveries, so I could see myself using the service once or twice a month to pepper in quick meals for busy nights. It’s just as fast as hitting up the drive thru, only I feel ten times better afterward.