Will this recipe box deliver?
Convenient, tasty and recipes designed by chefs who are also nutritionists. But how much extra are you paying for healthy convenience? We analyse the Green Chef subscription to discover if you’re getting value for money.
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How does Green Chef work?
Just like its counterparts, HelloFresh and Gousto, Green Chef is a subscription recipe box company – but their recipes are approved by nutritionists.
You pay a set cost for between two and five healthy meals a week, for two to four people. Select the recipes you like and a recipe box containing all the ingredients, pre-portioned and packaged, bar a few cupboard staples, is delivered to your door.
The recipe comes printed in the box so you simply follow the instructions to cook a healthy meal in very little time. There’s no waste apart from the packaging, of which some is plastic, but they do state that the majority of their packaging is recyclable, reusable or compostable.
How much does Green Chef cost?
The following table shows the cost per portion (including shipping costs which vary depending on your location) and is correct as of July 2024.
| Recipes per week | Number of people | |
| 2 | 4 | |
| 2 | £37.99 | Not available |
| 3 | £43.49 | £72.99 |
| 4 | £53.49 | £92.99 |
| 5 | £63.49 | Not available |
As I said above, the shipping cost varies by location. For just outside London, delivery costs a standard £4.99 plus an additional £2.99 based on my location.
Where it differs from the likes of Hello Fresh and Gousto, is the lack of choice when it comes to ordering for more than two people. You can’t order for three people for example and if you order for four people, you can only order three or four recipes a week and not two or five! It’s very random and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
But in short, the cheapest option for two people is five meals a week which works out at £6.35 per person per meal and for four people, it’s the four meal plan which works out at £5.81 per person per meal. That’s a lot more expensive than Hello Fresh (who actually own Green Chef), so is Green Chef worth the extra money?
Green Chef discount
Green Chef offers lots of enticing discounts to encourage you to sign up to their subscription service, the main one being 40% off your first and second orders, then 20% off your third and fourth.
But if you go through a cashback site like Quidco or TopCashback, there’s nearly always cashback on top of the discounts they offer. In fact, when I signed up to a Green Chef subscription through Quidco, there was £15 cashback plus a healthy eating bonus cashback of £20. With the 40% Green Chef discount as well as these cashback offers (which did track and pay by the way), two meals for two people actually made me money!
- Recipe boxes £33
- Welcome discount -£13.20
- Shipping £7.98
- £35 cashback from Quidco
- Grand total of -£7.72
So keep an eye out for offers and cashback and when combined you could end up trying Green Chef for a knock down price. And yes I made £7.72 from the welcome offers, but although I could take advantage of further bounce back offers, I’ll never get it for that price again!
Green Chef costs vs the supermarket
To assess whether or not the Green Chef subscription service offers value for money, I compared the ingredients in a standard recipe to those from Tesco. The results are in the table below.
| Green Chef cost per portion (4 meals for 4 people – cheapest option) | Tesco cost per portion (4 people) | Hello Fresh cost per portion (2 meals for 2 people – most expensive option) | Tesco cost per portion (2 people) | |
| Spiced chicken tray bake | £5.81 | £3.89 (£1.92 difference) | £6.35 | £5.69 (66p difference) |
This was a simple recipe, with ingredients that are readily available, but if you bought them from the supermarket, there were leftover ingredients which you could use again including nduja paste, tomatoes, yogurt, almonds and rocket. Plus the chicken portion from the supermarket is larger so you’re getting more meat in the supermarket version of the recipe.
All in all, and although this is just a snapshot, Green Chef is, as expected, far more pricier than sourcing the ingredients from the supermarket.
But the convenience Green Chef offers may be worth the extra money you’re paying, and also, to know that whatever recipes you pick from Green Chef, you know you’re eating healthily.
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Green Chef vs takeaways and convenience meals
You might be using Green Chef as an alternative to ordering a takeaway, since as well as it being healthier than most takeaway options, you will be saving money – but you do have to cook it. But since the recipes are quite straightforward and quick, you could do this in the time it takes to wait for a delivery!
But if we compare Green Chef recipes against some healthier ready meals such as the Gym Kitchen meals from Tesco, at £3.75 each, they work out cheaper, even when bought individually for larger families.
If you’re a couple, then it’s cheaper again. And it’s not just the Gym Kitchen that beats Green Chef on price and convenience, Thrive from Waitrose, the Health Menu by Asda and Nourish from Morrisons, all come up as cheaper than Green Chef and with similar health claims.
Does Green Chef deliver when it comes to cost?
Green Chef costs between £6.35 and £5.81 per person per meal and that is not cheap. But you are getting healthy, quality ingredients to cook and the convenience of it being delivered to your door.
Compare that to other recipe subscriptions services and it is one of the higher priced offerings. HelloFresh for example costs as little as £3.40 per portion and Gousto from £2.99.
There are, however, some ways to get better value from your Green Chef subscription.
Tips to get the best value from your Green Chef recipe box
Pick recipes with meat and fish
Meat, fish and other proteins are usually the most expensive components of a meal, so pick recipes with meat or fish to get better value from your recipe box subscription. This is easy to find on Green Chef by selecting the high protein recipes.
You’ll find plenty of high protein recipes to choose from, in fact at the time of writing this, there were twenty high protein recipes for the following week. Be careful not to order the ‘signature’ meat and fish dishes as you’ll pay an extra premium for ingredients such as steak.
And also be aware, if you’re not a fan of mince meat like myself, a lot of the beef and pork dishes use mince. This is a cheaper option for Green Chef, but won’t actually save you any money.
Order more
The subscription plans work out cheaper, the more meals you order. The cost if you order four meals a week for two people is £6.69 per meal per head, whilst if you order the same for 4 people it is £5.81. You could order for more people than you need and freeze the leftovers for another time. Ordering for one isn’t even an option so you would have to do this anyway.
Use discounts and referral codes
Don’t forget to use a discount code when you join up. And use a cashback site for additional offers and cashback.
Green Chef also offers student, key worker and Strava discounts, so if any of these apply to you, make sure you don’t forget to use them.
Are Green Chef recipe boxes actually healthy?
The recipes are designed by nutritionists so you’d expect them to be healthy across the board.
There’s a strong emphasis on lower carb and keto meals which is great if you’re following the keto diet which can sometimes be difficult to navigate.
The only problem having lots of lower carb recipes is the obvious lack of fibre rich meals. I think they know this too as they don’t even list the fibre content in the nutrition table of each recipe.
So healthy? I’d say healthy-ish. There’s an abundance of vegetables in the dishes which is a great way to get a wealth of nutrients in your diet.
Green Chef overall, is good if you’re following a lower carb diet but not so good if you’re not. A simple improvement would be to add more beans, pulses and wholegrains to the recipes and take away the emphasis on low carb, which would give more of a variety of healthy meals whilst still keeping some of the keto friendly recipes it is known for.
Taste-testing Green Chef
I ordered the spiced chicken and Mediterranean tray bake and the beef burgers with cheesy truffle chips. Both recipes were very easy to make but I was left with meals that were a little uninspiring.
The tray bake was just chicken, onions, peppers and tomatoes with a little nduja flavour served with rocket. This is similar to something I’d make at home normally without the need for a recipe to follow. When I ordered it, I thought it would deliver on taste which would have been great considering the simple ingredients and recipe. But it didn’t.
The burgers and chips again, were a little too simplistic. Baked chips and homemade burgers. I’m not a burger fan but thought maybe homemade would be good but it was nothing special. And the chips were just baked chips – which I make at home, again without the need for a recipe.
Although the food was nice enough, if you want healthy food to be appealing, then it needs to deliver on taste, and both these recipes were pretty average. And for the price you’re paying, I’d like them to taste better than the everyday food I cook.
The recipes in my opinion, are just too simple. Yes, you want quick and easy recipes, but not overly basic recipes, especially when you consider the cost of the subscription.
Would I recommend Green Chef meal boxes? No, unless you want to follow a keto diet, in which case having the carbs all worked out for you can be a time saver.
Would I order again? Only if it was free like it was this time. Thankfully, it is pretty easy to cancel the subscription (or pause it as they like to call it). For me the pause is on indefinitely.