Home Chef: Our Honest Review

Home Chef is among the most popular meal kit services in 2025, joining the likes of Blue Apron, Sunbasket, EveryPlate and HelloFresh. With dozens of meal kits and prepared meal subscription services vying for your dinnertime dollars, Home Chef looks to distinguish itself with the most customizable recipes of any of them, allowing you to swap out one protein for another or replace meat with a plant-based alternative. Home Chef meal kits are also some of the easiest to execute, with certain dishes eating up no more than 20 minutes of your precious time. 

Meal kits can make life easier and save time, but they can also be expensive and aren’t ideal for every eater. To see if Home Chef is worth it (and who it’s best for), a meal kit expert, an editor new to cooking and a wellness editor who is also vegetarian put several meal kits to the test. I’ve tested Home Chef already, making two weeks’ worth of meals. But I wanted to compare notes and opinions with others. I asked two of my fellow editors to make two to three additional meals each to see how Home Chef was standing in the current ranks in 2025.

Here’s our firsthand reviews of Home Chef meal kit delivery. 

What is Home Chef and how does it work?

In a sea of competitors, Home Chef has emerged as a leading meal kit delivery service with an emphasis on flexible and customizable meal plans, and recipes that can be tailored to your taste. The service launched in 2013, just a year after Blue Apron, and was acquired by grocery giant Kroger in 2018. Since the buyout, individual Home Chef meal kits can now be purchased in most Kroger stores in addition to a mail-order subscription.

Home Chef is a subscription service for weekly meal kits, so there is no online option to buy one or two meal kits. New customers sign up via the website or app and a short quiz helps determine which meal plan is best for you, as well as which recipes and ingredients should be avoided. 

Then you’ll choose the number of recipes per week — as few as two or as many as six — as well as how many servings you’d like per recipe: two, four or six. Subscribers can opt to select their own meals each week or let the Home Chef team pick them. You’re free to skip a week anytime you’d like and can add meals or servings (at cost) to your delivery as you go.

I found the meal plan selection and ordering process simple, clear and intuitive. When selecting meal kits, a major differentiator between Home Chef and others is that you can swap the protein in just about any recipe. Alternative ingredients include several steak cuts, chicken, shrimp, scallops, mahi mahi and Impossible meat. Certain premium swaps will incur an upcharge of a few bucks, while others won’t.

Meals are delivered once a week in neatly packaged cooler boxes, with each ingredient pre-portioned in separate plastic bags and ready to be cooked. In our first delivery, we also received a small Home Chef binder that is made to keep your recipe pages for future use when you want to recreate meals, which was a nice touch. Meals should be made within a few days of arrival, as many ingredients are not suitable for freezing. 

What are Home Chef meals like?

Home Chef meals are largely easy to prepare and don’t require a ton of technical skill. The company aims to please a wide range of eaters, and that means a lot of comfort foods and dishes that are familiar to American diets. You won’t see a ton of unfamiliar flavors either, with lots of classic dinner recipes, including burgers with potatoes, baked chicken or pork tenderloin with vegetables and a savory sauce, pasta dishes, teriyaki steak and peppers over rice or chicken tacos. That’s not to say you won’t find some more creative menu items, such as prosciutto and butternut chowder or bruschetta and shrimp risotto. 

Home Chef offers premium meals it refers to as the “culinary collection,” but they are priced differently (more on that below). A good many of Home Chef’s seafood options, such as crusted ahi tuna and pan-seared mahi-mahi, fall into the premium meal category, as do higher-end cuts of beef. In sticking with the theme of flexibility, you can pop one of these premium meals into your weekly order anytime (at a cost) if you’re feeling fancy. Below is an overview of Home Chef’s meal categories. 

• Culinary Collection: Premium meal kits with higher-quality ingredients.
• Express: Ready in 15 minutes or less.
• Fast & Fresh: Oven-ready meals that require almost no prep.
• Oven-Ready: Meals that arrive in an oven-ready tray.
• Family: Dishes that are only available in 4 or more servings.
• Plus: Include premium ingredients and recipes.

Read more: Purple Carrot Review: Healthy Plant-Based Cooking Made Simple

How easy are Home Chef meal kits to prepare?

The meals we tried were easy to prepare, which is one of the calling cards for the meal kit service. Home Chef has quick-fire meals using fresh, pre-portioned ingredients that take just 15 minutes or so to make. There are also some more complicated dinner projects that can take as long as 45 minutes. It’s completely up to you which type of meals you’d like to have sent, but beware: If you let Home Chef choose your meals, you might get some of the 45-minute meals in your box.

Our Flex Editor received two simple meals to try out, including a baked chicken dish and burgers with carrots and fries. They were both extremely easy to prepare and tasty and she had no qualms about the quality of the meat or produce. In fact, it was even her first time making burgers, and she considered it a success. 

Because the simple chicken dish was a one-pan meal, it allowed for plenty of time to clean up any small messes that were made during the preparation while the dish was baking in the oven. She appreciated how seamless the recipes were. For example, she made the tomato topping for the chicken while the veggies were baking, so there was no wasted time in between steps.

If you want something even simpler though, there is also a category of oven-ready meals that only require assembling the fresh ingredients in an aluminum baking tray (provided) and popping it into the oven with almost no chopping or prep. These are about as quick and easy as meal kits get, but your bragging rights for a home-cooked meal stay firmly intact. Some meals labeled express plus take only 20 or 30 minutes to prepare and those labeled family meals can be assembled simply in one pot and are designed to feed up to six people.

Support materials

Each meal kit comes with a comprehensive description, nutritional facts, prep time and a recipe card with ingredients and directions. It was especially nice to have a section on the recipe card that detailed what ingredients would be used more than once so you are away beforehand of what you might need to preserve. 

The recipe card features a nice, big, glossy image so you can visualize the dish and know what to aim for, plus photos for each step of the process. There’s also a Home Chef mobile app that’s helpful and easy to use. All Home Chef recipes can be found online in a pinch. The instructions for each dish I made were easy enough to follow but, at times, a bit wordy. Home Chef tends to give even more information than the average home chef will need, perhaps with true beginners in mind.

Our wellness editor does wish that Home Chef provided more information on where the produce and other ingredients come from, or at least what they are made of. For instance, when making the elotes quesadillas, in order to see what is in the chipotle crema, she had to look at the nutrition facts online.

Home Chef allows you to swap easily proteins 

Home Chef’s big claim to fame is that its meal kits and plans are highly customizable to suit you or your family’s rhythm. You can swap or upgrade the protein in most of the weekly meals. If a meal includes a “customize it” button, that means you can jump in and swap the chicken for pork, for instance. Some proteins, like salmon, steak and plant-based proteins, trigger an up-charge of $3 or $4 per portion. 

Who is Home Chef good for?

We’d suggest Home Chef for anyone who is trying to learn to cook from scratch or lighten their meal-planning or grocery-shopping load. Because many of Home Chef’s meals are fast and easy to prepare and can feed up to six people, this is one of the best meal kit services for families or people who are new to cooking. It’s also good for people who are fairly specific about what they like to cook and eat since you can make so many changes and swaps. Because Home Chef makes it so easy to skip weeks — and won’t charge you for skipping — it’s great for those who travel or have unpredictable schedules.

Is Home Chef good for vegetarians and vegans?

Our wellness editor, a vegetarian of 20 years who often eats plant-based, tried three vegetarian meals from Home Chef. While they were tasty, the meals were all on the more indulgent side with plenty of cream and cheese. As a result, this would not be a good fit for vegans, as Home Chef does not offer vegan recipes. She also doesn’t think that Home Chef would be a good choice for vegetarians looking for healthier, non-comfort food options.

Is Home Chef healthy?

Though Home Chef does offer calorie-conscious, carb-conscious and vegetarian meals, based on the three vegetarian meals that she tried, our wellness editor wouldn’t say that Home Chef is healthy. She wishes that her recipes had less cream, cheese and pasta with more of a focus on healthy grains and produce. However, this all depends on what recipes you get and your own dietary preferences. As a result, she recommends checking the nutrition facts for each recipe online.

How much does Home Chef cost?

Home Chef’s meal kits are purchased per kit and you can order as many as six per week. The per-serving price is $10 for nearly every plan except for the smallest — two meal kits with two servings each — which clocks in at $12 per serving. This puts Home Chef right in the middle when compared with other services. Home Chef is a few bucks more expensive per meal than Blue Apron and EveryPlate, but cheaper than premium services like Sunbasket and Green Chef. 

However, if you sign up today, you receive 30% off your first order, which brings the price down to $7 per serving, plus free shipping (which is originally $11 per delivery, one of the more expensive surcharges of any meal kit service) and the service offers frequent discounts and promotions that could bring the price of your box down.

What I cooked and how it went

The three of us cooked 11 Home Chef recipes in total. Ingredients arrived fresh and intact with no spills or spoilage. Most of the meals I made were sufficient and some were better than that. But a few proved to be a bit clunky or overly simple and not worth the cost, especially considering you can buy the same ingredients for about 50% less (I did the math). 

Here’s a full breakdown. 

One-pot pork chili con carne with bacon bits: This pork chili seemed overly simple at first but turned out to be one of the best of the bunch. Let’s just say I will be adding bacon to my chili from here on out. 

Sweet potato bowl with poblano pepper and cilantro-lime rice: This recipe was very clunky and definitely not worth the per-serving price. The poblano was far too big. I only added three-quarters of it after dicing and the finished dish was still way too hot, even for a spice lover like me.

Moo shu pork tacos: This recipe was a super-fun, quick and easy meal kit to execute. It took less than 20 minutes and the flavors were balanced and interesting, thanks to the toasted sesame oil and spicy sriracha. 

Keto-friendly pork stuffed peppers: I liked these low-carb Italian-style peppers just fine but, again, with such simple ingredients, it’s hard to stomach paying $10 to $12 per serving.

Honey sriracha chicken with crispy wontons was an oven-ready meal, meaning all I really had to do was assemble the chicken breast, precut vegetables and edamame in a baking tray (provided) and cook for 20 minutes. The temperature and timing were on point and the chicken came out tender, while the vegetables kept their snap. 

Bruschetta shrimp risotto: This recipe was the most complicated Home Chef meal kit I cooked. Risotto famously requires a bit more attention than most dishes, but it was still fairly easy to make and a delicious meal in the end. I might have wanted a bit more detailed instruction on tending to the risotto, especially if I were a beginner learning the ropes of the rice dish.

Minecraft mushroom fields beef burger with truffle potato and carrot “torch” fries: This recipe was our Flex Editor’s introduction into burger making and she was thoroughly pleased with how they turned out. Of course, you can’t go wrong with pairing a burger with fries, but the carrots were a nice addition. The kit provided enough beef for four burgers and the produce and ingredients were all fresh. Although it was a fairly simple meal, the simple mushroom sauce helped fancy it up and added a tasty flavor. 

Sheet pan tomato salsa chicken with roasted butternut squashlotes: This meal was even more simple than the burgers since it was a one-pan meal that required minimal prep and dishes, making it an ideal weeknight dinner for a busy household. The chicken had a tasty flavor, but the cutlets were quite thin in comparison to the photo of the meal provided by Home Chef, so it wasn’t the most filling dinner. 

Vegetarian Home Chef recipes

Mexican-style elotes quesadillas: While our wellness editor found this recipe simple to make in about 35 minutes and delicious, it was on the more indulgent side. Though each serving was 610 calories, it did contain 71% of the daily value of salt and 80% of the daily value of saturated fat. As a result, our wellness editor went light on the salt, cheese and crema. She also added pinto beans for more variety and fiber.

Cozy gnocchi soup: Again, while tasty, this recipe was on the heavier side with a cream sauce base, Parmesan cheese and gnocchi. Our wellness editor had trouble finishing the dish because it was so filling. It also contained 80% of the daily value of sodium, so she was careful not to add extra salt during the cooking process.

Cheesy basked spinach rigatoni: Like the other two vegetarian meals, this was on the heavier side with the cream sauce base, butter, Swiss cheese and a French roll. It was tasty, but after two other indulgent meals, our wellness editor wanted something a bit lighter and more produce-forward.

Home Chef packaging and environmental friendliness

In a previous study, Home Chef received the worst green score of four major meal kit services that were tested for plastic waste in packaging. Each recipe is housed in its own plastic bag, and there are numerous small plastic bags and containers within them. Besides the excessive plastic associated with each meal, most of the rest of the packaging is recyclable, including the boxes, insulation sheets and ice packs. 

Our wellness editor thought that Home Chef could do a better job packaging its ingredients, since some of the same ingredients were repackaged two or three times for one recipe. Personally, she also found the binder to be a waste because it’s not something she needs in her kitchen and would have preferred the recipe cards on their own. (However, if you plan to stick with Home Chef for a long time, she acknowledges that the binder could be nice to have on hand.) Similar to other meal kits she’s tested, she wishes there was more biodegradable or compostable packing, or a method of sending the ice packs back for reuse.

Our editors’ experiences compared

Editor Name	Cooking experience	Food preference	CNET role	Key opinions on Home Chef
David Watsky	Experienced chef and meal kit expert	Gluten-free	CNET’s Kitchen & Home Tech Senior Editor	– User-friendly service struck a fair balance with consistently good meal kits that were unpretentious and easy to prepare. – Found many recipes clunky and not worth the $10-$12 per serving cost. – Appreciated the ability to swap proteins and skip weeks. – Overall, Home Chef may not be worth the price compared to other services like Blue Apron.
Corin Cesaric	Novice cook	Meat and veggies, plus plant-based options	CNET’s Health & Home Flex Editor	– Found the ease and quickness refreshing. – Had no concerns about the quality of the meat or produce.
Anna Gragert	An experienced home cook	Vegetarian, health-conscious	CNET’s Health & Wellness Editor	– Not the best meal kit service for vegetarians or vegans. – Meals were tasty but on the indulgent side and not as healthy as preferred. – Prefers more accessible information on ingredient sourcing and less plastic packaging.

The final verdict on Home Chef

This user-friendly service struck a fair balance with consistently good meal kits that were unpretentious and easy to prepare. I appreciate the ability to change proteins in nearly any recipe and I’m sure families with picky eaters will, too. In the end, many of the meal kits I prepared just felt unrefined and some of the recipes were a bit clunky. I could let that slide if Home Chef meal kits cost less than they do, but at $10 to $12 a serving, many of the meals I made just didn’t seem worth the price. 

However, in our most recent tests, Flex Editor Corin Cesaric, who is a self-proclaimed amateur cook, found the easiness and quickness of her two meals refreshing. As for Anna Gragert, our wellness editor and a vegetarian of 20 years, she found that Home Chef isn’t the best meal kit service for vegetarians or vegans.

Compare that with Blue Apron, another meal kit service I’ve tested, which offers high-end recipes such as bistro steaks and roasted trout, for a cheaper price per serving than Home Chef when you factor in shipping. Blue Apron and other meal kit services don’t allow for as much customization as Home Chef. If that’s important for you and the crew you’re feeding, Home Chef could be the right fit to make your dinner routine a snap.