Costing it: Do meal kits really save you money?

Meal kits offer the exact ingredients you need, reducing waste, but what about the cost? Photo / Getty Images

Cooking with meal kits is a great fast way to produce a tasty dinner. They’re a hell of a convenience.

But are they cheap?

Back in July, a press release landed on my desk from Canstar that said one in five meal kit customers say they believe they receive better value for money than if they had purchased their meals through a supermarket.

I’ve always wondered about the maths of meal kits. I suspected customers might be fooling themselves, served up with a dollop of confirmation bias - a mental shortcut studied by behavioural economists.

Challenge accepted, Canstar customers. I ordered four meals from HelloFresh and set out to weigh/measure the ingredients and price the meals, right down to the last teaspoon of olive oil and a quarter of a teaspoon of salt.

As soon as I started telling people what I was doing, I was hit with a long list of reasons why meal kits are great. They are. But this exercise was solely about cost.

This was not an academic study. One week of meals is a snapshot. And the more I pondered the exercise, the more dilemmas there were to consider, even on cost alone.

For example, meal kit aficionados kept telling me they have leftovers for the next day’s lunch. Even if that is the case, my price comparison was for the actual meals. That means like-for-like on a weight/volume/calorie count.

At New World prices, three of the four-person meals cost between $21.91 and $23.97. Drill into that, and the next dilemma arises. Meals are far cheaper than that if planned around what’s in season, on sale or can be bought in bulk.

Pork schnitzel can be expensive to buy. Photo / Elizabeth Clarkson.

The next dilemma was, if I were to buy pork schnitzel, I wouldn’t be paying $24.99 a kilogram, which it came to on the day I did the comparison. New World’s head office told me that within the previous month, pork schnitzel had been on sale at $15.99/kg at my local branch.

No one in my house is going to get 125 grams of $24.99/kg worth of meat on their plates. There are way more cost-effective and healthy ways to put protein on the plate.

Ditto on the real-life front - cabbage was $6.99/kg and cucumber $5.99/kg on the comparison day. I walk past when they’re that price. I wait for the sale, or only buy when they’re in season.

Then there was the issue of paying a premium for ready-chopped vegetables. Personally, I’m not willing to pay for someone else to pre-chop my vegetables, although the only relevance to this article is that I’m considering cost, not convenience.

Meal kits include very nice blended spice mixes. Tuscan spice mix and chermoula, for example, are very expensive pre-blended, but contain basic run-of-the-mill dried herbs and spices. But for the sake of being as honest as possible regarding price comparison, I found the nearest equivalent spice blends in the supermarket and sucked it up.

Another reason why meal kits wouldn’t cost us as much as the comparison showed was that the prices are from my local New World supermarket which, according to locals, is one of the most expensive in New Zealand. If you’re shopping at Pak’nSave, local vegetable markets or Chinese/Indian supermarkets, your bill will be even lower again.

Another big point is that the maths behind why some people think they spend less on meal kits is that they throw leftovers and ingredients away. They might buy a bag of capsicums for a recipe, then throw half of them out. Or a jar of chermoula, and use it once only.

DIY meals require that you use up the ingredients you buy. That means planning meals around what’s already in your fridge, freezer and pantry. When, for example, we didn’t finish the HelloFresh coleslaw, I cooked it up into a tasty soup for the next day’s lunch.

Another lateral way to compare the cost of meal kits with traditional home-cooked dinners is by considering what might have been cooked instead. We don’t spend $20-plus a night on meals for four in our house unless it’s a special occasion. A more realistic figure for us is $10-12. And a lot of people spend less than that.

I’m not alone. When I log into various money-saving groups such as CheaperWaysNZ, thrifty families focused on their food bills are sharing nutritious dinners that cost less than $2 per serving. That’s $8 a night for four people.

Now, what you’ve been waiting for. The verdict on cost. The total cost of a HelloFresh meal kit for four, including delivery and pantry stables, was $41 per night. That’s for standard meal options. There are also premium-priced options, which cost more.

HelloFresh cost $41 per night.

For the record, I checked Bargain Box, and that would have been $38 including freight. For the record, the price excludes pantry staples, which don’t usually add up to too much.

Whether it’s $41 or $38, That’s still a lot more than the $21-23 for our first three meals at New World prices. There is a big “but” here. Our fourth meal, which included 500g of salmon, came to $39 at New World. Averaged over the four nights, all four meals combined came to $27 each, which is $14 per night less than HelloFresh. But most meals are around $20 cheaper.

When pondering the veracity of Canstar’s customers’ claims of saving money with meal kits, a couple of ideas come to mind.

First, some may be comparing the cost of a meal kit box with their weekly supermarket bill. They’re not counting the grocery spend for breakfasts, lunches, snacks, desserts, tea, coffee, alcohol, toilet paper, nappies, cleaning products and so on. There are also dinners for the other days of the week.

One group that could be saving money (albeit not on their supermarket shop) are people who rely on UberEats, takeaways, or eating at restaurants for the majority of dinners. I guess some people have the money to do that, and a meal kit does cost less than that style of eating.

The next thought is: If you’ve costed everything out and are still saving money on the actual cost of the four dinners, then you have to be buying very expensive food at the supermarket. Maybe it’s the $73.99/kg lamb cutlets, or the $59.99/kg beef eye fillet with a side of goodness knows what?

Finally, there is nothing wrong with buying meal kits. This exercise was only about cost. The meals are great, and it’s less effort than making fancy meals from scratch. Meal kits help vary your diet, and if you don’t know how to cook, you can learn from the process

For anyone who can afford to pay $41 or more a night regularly for a meal for four, then my advice is: go for it. If your savings are on track for your age, and you’re not struggling to pay the mortgage, rent and other bills, then buying meal kits makes sense. They can work as an occasional treat as well.