Both Home Chef and HelloFresh have new recipes dropping each week. Home Chef has about 40 weekly meal options, while HelloFresh offers about 100 total recipes each week.
Because Home Chef doesn’t offer specific meal plans, you’ll have access to the entire menu each week. Meals are categorized by preparation speed, with a section for Easy Prep Meal Kits (meals that take 30 minutes or fewer to prepare) and regular meal kits (meals that take 30 minutes or more to make).
You can customize some Home Chef meals, and if swaps are possible, you’ll see a “Customize It” tag on the recipe. For example, if a meal includes pork, you can opt for chicken or shrimp instead. Just note, customizations may change the price.
The Home Chef menu can be filtered by a handful of preferences, such as calorie-conscious, carb-conscious, and vegetarian. Outside of these menu filters, Home Chef doesn’t cater much to dietary considerations.
HelloFresh allows you to mix and match recipes from all meal plans, even if you only signed up for one or two.
Like Home Chef, HelloFresh allows you to make some customizations—but there’s a limit. You can swap or upgrade 12 sides and proteins per week and request pork-free, beef-free, and seafood-free meals. There are also vegan and vegetarian meals.
Neither company caters to any specialized diets outside of vegan and vegetarian. But both companies use some organic ingredients and list major allergens on each recipe—but the facilities are not allergen-free, so there is always a possibility for cross contamination.
