Green Chef ship all of its sauces, stocks, and herb blends premixed, with some of its veggies precut to reduce prep time. The service also offers “Quick & Easy Lunches” with precooked proteins, and it sells add-ons to meals, like meat and seafood sampler packs, ready-to-blend smoothie kits, frozen desserts, canned coffees, protein shakes, additional side dishes, packaged ramen, and dumplings. Green Chef even emailed me an offer to include fresh dog food in my order (in partnership with The Pets Table).
The meals were very easy to cook: Simply grab the labeled bag of the meal you’d like to make and the included full-color recipe sheet (printed on a nice, durable card stock paper) and go. The recipe instructions were well-written and easy to follow and included color pictures of every major step. Green Chef is very clear about what it doesn’t include: salt, pepper, sugar, butter, and oil. Everything else you need is in the box. I am confident that a beginner cook could easily follow the instructions and make a delicious meal, but the cook times might vary based on experience and confidence in the kitchen. Most of the meals used at least two pans (a sheet pan and a skillet, for example) and prioritized smart, simultaneous cooking techniques (e.g., boiling the bulgur while the squash was roasting in the oven so you can focus on the pork fillet on the stovetop). These are not (for the most part) one-pan meals.
The food was, in general, good. I had favorites and a few misses, but nothing was truly terrible. My favorite meal (Italian Turkey Stuffed Squash Boats) consisted of well-seasoned ground turkey, bulked up with nutty bulgur and tender kale before getting spooned over golden brown roasted zucchini and topped with a creamy riff on pesto. The ““boats” description is a bit funny because one zucchini was tiny and one was huge, so the filling overwhelmed the vessel, but the taste was great and presentation just didn’t matter that much to me in the end.
What I didn’t like mostly came down to personal preferences rather than flawed recipes or bad ingredients. My least favorite meal was the Spiced Salmon with Mango Salsa with roasted purple sweet potatoes, bell pepper and black beans, and Cotija cheese. The salmon fillets were fresh, high-quality, and delicious. They cooked perfectly per the recipe instructions and were well-seasoned with a delicious cumin-coriander-oregano spice. But the rest of the meal just didn’t work. I received two very large purple sweet potatoes, one can of black beans, and about ¼ of a small bell pepper for the hash. The ratio was just entirely off—we barely got any bell pepper and felt like we were eating an unending pile of potatoes. I did not enjoy the Cotija with the fish, either—it felt like an odd pairing, but that’s just my personal taste.
Overall, I think this kit would work well for people who would still like to cook (but not for hours after work or school) and prioritize ingredient sourcing but just don’t want to or cannot dedicate time to grocery shopping each week. The recipes were reliable if a bit repetitive, and the food was always fresh.
What was the ordering experience like?
Signing up was simple: I entered my email address and was automatically offered a first-time customer discount (50% off a two-month subscription, first box is free). Once I entered my payment information, I was able to edit my upcoming meals and delivery dates. You’ll initially be prompted to select a general dietary preference (Protein Packed, Plant-Based, Mediterranean; Gluten-Free; Keto; Delicious Discoveries; Calorie Smart; Quick & Easy; Gut & Brain Health) that will filter your top recipe selections, but you can still pick from any of the 80 options for meals each week. It’s also easy to skip an entire week or change the delivery date for any given week without canceling or messing up your entire subscription.
How was the unboxing experience?
Everything was packaged properly and kept cold, with nothing forgotten or damaged. Each individual item (half a bell pepper, diced onion, every individual zucchini) was wrapped in its own plastic bag, and since the sauces and flavor bases are all premade, they all came in plastic packaging too. Each meal’s ingredients came packaged together in a sealed brown paper bag, marked by a label with the recipe name on it. The meat/seafood was stored separately at the bottom of the box, under a cardboard divider and right on top of the ice packs to keep it cold and fresh and to prevent cross-contamination with the produce.
The included ice packs were commercially recyclable (not curbside) if you emptied out the filling then cleaned and dried the bags, and the rest of the packaging was recyclable cardboard.
Overall, I’d always love to see less plastic, but the packaging was effective and made the kit easy to use. I will note Green Chef devotes a section of the site to sustainability and makes the following claim: “Our distribution centers are powered by 100% renewable electricity, and we go the extra mile by offsetting 100% of delivery emissions as well as the plastic in each box. Through our partnership with Plastic Bank, we’ve contributed to removing over 1.7 million kilograms of ocean-bound plastic from vulnerable communities.”
