this shit costs like $300/week. tf buys this nonsense? i think you even have to cook it yourself.

>>21513584 (OP)
yeah those seem wild and unnecessary in my opinion. but i think if you got the cash and want to ease out of eating out all the time or if youre fat as fuck and cashed up and want a system, it could help the transition into doing more diy as you feel healthier

Quite a few of my neighbours buy that or similar rubbish (I see Blue Apron more than HelloFresh around here). I see the boxes by their bins on trash day. I've noticed that it's only one kind of person who buys them: wypipo (and one hapa and her Vietnamese-but-raised-by-wypipo wife but neither can cook so I consider both wypipo) with more dollars than sense.

I buy these because i'm lazy and don't have a drivers license. Also I barely follow the recipes and end up with tons of stuff unused but if i didn't get them i'd eat even fewer vegetals than i already do

>>21513584 (OP)
My dad brought me a hellofresh-like last week, it was pretty good, but it basically is just a single portion of ingredients you have to cook yourself.
I learned to cook better french fries from it, so that was cool.
I think you're mainly just paying for the recipes.

>>21513711
If they send you ingredients and you still have to cook it, why not buy 2x the ingredients for a fraction of the cost and just look up a recipe and cook it?

>>21513739
>why not just cook regularly yourself?
What a dumb question, the shit like in OP is meant to be a middle ground between convenience and feeling like you're actually cooking your own meals. When you do your method(fully actually just cooking like a normal person), you also need to find a recipe that looks good to you, and also source the ingredients at your store, including their amounts. It is less mental load to have everything you need for X meal come in a prepackaged section for that meal and not need to deal with leftovers or keeping a proper pantry/fridge/freezer stocked with ingredients.
It's not worth it in the least in my opinion, but I can see where it would appeal to autistic shut-ins who want to LARP as functioning home cooks because their fast food diet has made them feel bad. Clearly that's not a large enough market since I'm pretty sure most of these schemes are going under.

>>21513739
>>21513584 (OP)
The reasoning is usually 3 fold. I don't necessarily agree but it's what people who used it have told me.
1) It saves on potentially having to shop in different places
2) It saves on prep time
3) It lets you try exotic dishes without buying niche ingredients that end up piling up

Also one guy did it because it eliminates having to discuss dinner plans with the GF cause women are exceptionally prone to boredom and will start looking for problems when bored.

>>21513760
>Clearly that's not a large enough market since I'm pretty sure most of these schemes are going under.
Ironically/appropriately enough it's grocery delivery that's doing it. Because that lets you massively customize and is now good enough you can plan your dinner around it.

>>21513767
I just can't trust a minimum wage slave to bother to pick good produce out and the one time I tried a grocery delivery service they removed 3 items that were important to my dinner from my order because they didn't have them, so I had to go to a store anyway. I'm too particular about my meals and my ingredients for such things I guess. But I definitely see the utility in it for people who have trouble with transportation or people that just aren't picky about particulars for their meals and grocery hauls.

>be stupid
>have money
>don't know how to cook

Pick 2.

>>21513584 (OP)
It’s a /tv/ dinner that comes in the mail. Hard pass

It's single people food, which a lot of people see money in making for current young people who feel like they're too good for Lean Cuisines and TV Dinners that boomers ate, but they're still not really able to buy a whole grocery store's serving of meat and commit to eating it over the next few days.
Face it if they were able to commit to something as easy as buying a steak, cutting it up and having half of it one way and half of it another way, you're probably not very good at dating on a fundamental level. It's like even cheating degenerates have to have some level of commitment and if you can't fucking go "I'll have steak and a baked potato tonight, cut up the other half of the steak and make a steak sandwich with fries tomorrow" how are you gonna go "are you free Saturday night, I know this cute hole in the wall bar in Hip Neighborhood that always has good music"

>>21513584 (OP)
My MIL, who has mobility issues, was getting delivery multiple nights a week because she can't really cook for herself every night. We got her signed up for Cook Unity. She likes the food, and it's healthier and cheaper than what she was doing before. She's also in her mid 70s, though.

>>21513760
>and feeling like you're actually cooking your own meals
You are cooking your own meals

Hello Fresh is even worse than the stupid fucking frozen dinner ones because they provide you with nothing but random ingredients to cook yourself. They don't even chop the veg or anything, what is the point at all of this shit? Just get delivery groceries, it's identical.

>>21513739
>why not buy 2x the ingredients for a fraction of the cost and just look up a recipe and cook it?
One of the meals were enchiladas.
I have never cooked enchiladas before, I have never thought of cooking enchiladas before, if it wasn't for the foodbox i would have never cooked enchiladas.
Meal planning is another reason for people to buy them.
You can see it as paying for a cooking class as well.

>>21513955
WELL FUCK YO MOTHA!
COOKING IS A MAN'S JOB FUCK "WOMEN" WHO COOK!

So essentially..people too lazy to do a little mental math before shopping on serving sizes and seasonings/ingredients and googling a recipe. Its a sad world where technology gives us access to millions of free recipes at the click of a button and people still cant bring themselves to do it.

>>21513619
Jealous poorfag

>>21514115
Please explain how 'a little mental math' will get me a quarter head of cabbage at the grocery store.
Then explain to me how googling 'a recipe' will help me find a recipe that I don't already know.

>>21514141
Need 1/4 head of cabbage. Buy head of cabbage. Cut 1/4 off of it.
Think of a meal you want to eat, or try. Google recipe. Follow recipe. Eat food.

>>21514145
But then you need to either eat the same meal 4 days in a row, plan 3 other meals that also have cabbage in them, or have 3/4ths of a cabbage sitting rotting in your fridge.
How can I think of a meal I don't know about? That's part of the appeal of this as well, meal planning.

It's not for you, it's not for me, but I can at least see why people buy it, it beats the hell out eating frozen pizzas and nuggies 7 days a week.

>>21513815
This is the most elegant answer in the whole thread

>>21513584 (OP)
My sister signs up for these meal boxes all the time
She has this idea in her head that she needs to be a 50's mom making home-cooked meals but she never actually learned to cook so this is her solution

>>21514185
>plan 3 other meals that also have cabbage in them
That isn't hard. It keeps for a week it isn't like you have to eat nonstop cabbage.

>>21513584 (OP)
My girlfriend insisted we try for inspiration since we always ended up making the same stuff and there were some legit nice ones I hadn't thought of making, like a halloumi salad which I've never cooked before. Ended up discontinuing the service when the discount ended, so yeah using it for inspiration is perhaps the only actually good thing about it.

>>21514185
>cabbage sitting rotting in your fridge.

You'd be surprised how long cabbage can stay in the fridge. I have started using cabbage instead of salads for alot of stuff as it has more taste and crunch.

>>21514314
I had a head of cabbage that was in my veggie drawer for like 2 months and was fine.

>>21513584 (OP)
Rich people will buy anything because money is an unlimited resource for them. If you don't like that, then either burn them alive or shut the fuck up.

>>21513584 (OP)
It doesn't
It's like 120/wk for one guy

t. I use it :)

>>21513820
Why do people just blurt out anything
>comes to your door in grocery bags of raw ingredients in a box
>you prep and cook them yourself
>you don't use a microwave
How is it like a TV Dinner

>>21514069
theyre not random, theyre literally in the recipe you fucking retard

I used to be subscribed to HelloFresh for about a year when I was working a travel job. My travel schedule was 11 nights out 3 nights home. With such little time at home I wanted to be able to enjoy cooking for myself without having to waste time at the grocery store. It was convenient to get home from my work trip and have my weekend's food and recipe ready to go.
If you're paying full price for these things they are a complete scam though. There are ways to game the system so you're always paying at least 25% off. You can continually cycle through fake email addresses to continually have the new customer discount. And they always send "Pls come back we'll give u discount" to your old emails constantly.
Their goal and what makes these companies profitable is the hope that the same type of person too lazy to go to the grocery store will also be too lazy to go through the effort of gaming the system. So that busy yuppie couple who wanted to save some time sign up and gets used to the convenience and doesn't bother to get more discounts so they just let it ride and forget about how expensive it really is.

>>21514419
You've never been within 20 km (miles, in toy money) of a rich person. They twist and turn every cent they have to pay. That's how they got rich and that's how they stay rich.

>>21516524
Nowadays I don't travel as much any more so I cancelled my subscription. What I do now is when there isn't a specific recipe I want to try I'll read through the grocery store's weekly ad and find some food on sale. Then the grocery store has a function on their website where you can enter ingredients and it will spit out a bunch of recipes for that ingredient. I'll pick one that looks good and it automatically puts the other ingredients for the dish into my shopping list.
Yeah it's kind of soulless but when I just want to make decent slop to fill my gullet for the week it's nice and easy.

>>21514615
>you pay more
>takes you longer to prepare
>the result is the same garbage
REEEEE it's NOTHING like TV dinner!!!

>>21516559
How the hell does a TV dinner take you longer to prepare than a regular meal?

>>21513972
Yeah and you're cooking your own meals when you put a tv dinner in the oven, but that's nothing like cooking with the ingredients in these prepackaged portions. And doing that is not really close to finding/thinking up a recipe yourself, sourcing the ingredients yourself, and dealing with keeping a pantry and fridge stocked with ingredients that are exclusively for cooking that you actually use.

>>21516559
A TV Dinner is quick, cheap and shitty
Hello Fresh is slow, expensive and pretty good

Thank you for debunking yourself

If I was really rich I would get this. When you approach a certain level of wealth your time becomes more valuable so you want to waste less time cooking

>>21516538
Desi-rich people maybe.
ACTUALLY rich-rich people I've been around don't give a fuck. They can spend and spend and end up with more than they started.

I remember going to a friend-of-a-friend's place as a kid and seeing he had an -extension- built to the mansion his family lived in just for him. Complete with like 6 gaming PCs on a long-desk, a giant TV, every console you could imagine. Just as a "hangout".
Meanwhile, I lived in my grandma's house sleeping on the floor with my siblings on duvets we'd roll up in the morning. None of us even had rooms.

>>21513584 (OP)
Services like this are how I learned to cook. Not well - mind you. But you can learn the basics from following their instructions as well as get a feel for how much/many ingredients you need to shop for if you want to make the recipe for yourself.
It's a good learning tool imo

>>21514185
>you might have to make the same thing or make extra and have leftovers in the fridge
Oh no how terrible. Next you'll tell us about the horrible, terrible tale of the time your mom made you eat leftovers instead of making something new.

>>21513584 (OP)
Still cheaper than DoorDashing your lunch to work every day (like my co-workers). They spent like $400 a month on delivered fast food.

>>21513619
why are you going through your neighbours bins?