Advertisement

10 best recipe boxes and food delivery subscriptions for all the family

Move away from your go-to recipes and dive into new cuisines   (iStock/The Independent)
Move away from your go-to recipes and dive into new cuisines (iStock/The Independent)

No matter how much you love eating and cooking, it takes a fair amount of thought, planning and shopping to start whipping up an exciting meal. From checking the fridge and cupboards, to writing a list, doing the shop and then carrying it home – that’s all before you’ve even sliced an onion or flicked on the oven.

Recipe boxes are the answer to all of this, when you don’t have time to go to the shop but you want a proper home-cooked meal.

Easing much more of the burden than an online food shop ever could, these clever kits come with all the ingredients in the exact amount you need – meaning there’s very little, if any, food waste – along with very easy-to-follow recipe cards you can keep and reuse. There’s not really much more you can ask for, bar someone else cooking it for you.

You can choose from a huge range of recipes, and most brands cover a range of diets and cuisines, so whether you fancy Mexican or Indian, or want something vegan or just meat-free, you can get it.

Some companies only use organic food, and some use produce from family-run farms, but all are inspiring and will get you cooking great meals at home with ease.

How we tested

We’ve tested some of these boxes over years, and some we go back to time and time again, with some of the recipes becoming stalwarts in our repertoire. We’ve cooked and eaten meals from every box, looking for how easy the recipes were to follow, eco-credentials such as packaging, the range of recipes on offer and the delivery.

Everything we tested was to feed two people, but where there’s an option for boxes to feed more, we’ve specified. These are the ones sure to make your stomach rumble.

The best recipe boxes for 2022 are:

  • Best overall – Gousto: £24.99 for two recipes per week, Gousto.co.uk

  • Best for organic produce – Riverford: From £12.75 for a meal for two, Riverford.co.uk

  • Best for reducing carbon footprint – Abel & Cole: From £33 for three dishes, Abelandcole.co.uk

  • Best for pasta – Pasta Evangelists: From £13.50 for two recipes per week, Pastaevangelists.com

  • Best for a range of cuisines – Cookaway: From £26, depending on added extras, Thecookaway.com

  • Best for Vietnamese recipes – Phomo: £19.90, Phomouk.com

  • Best for game meat – Wild & Game: £49.99 for about seven cuts of meat, Wildandgame.co.uk

  • Best for tofu lovers – Mindful Chef: From £31 for two pieces per week, Mindfulchef.com

  • Best for local produce – Hello Fresh: From £33.48 for three recipes per week, Hellofresh.co.uk

  • Best for vegans – Grubby: From £26 for two recipes per week, Grubby.co.uk

Gousto

Founded in 2012, Gousto is perhaps the most well known of all the recipe boxes around. And in our minds, it’s the best too. To us, it has the widest variety of enticing meals – ranging across Thai, Mexican, Indian, BBQ, Moroccan and Italian to name just a few, with plenty of vegan and veggie meals too – which often makes it hard for us to choose just a few.

We find Gousto’s recipes are also the most reliable to make, and importantly, remake again. We’ve had numerous boxes over the years and there’s always solid recipes in there that we come back to time and time again. And most importantly the recipes are always as good as the first time, and plenty have now earned places in our weekly recipe repertoire, such as a cauliflower and spinach dal recipe, and spicy beans with homemade tortilla chips. The ingredients are good quality and the meal always turns out looking like the recipe card.

We go for the regular box, and you can choose two, three or four recipes per box. The portions are generous, and there’s often some left over, which means lunch for tomorrow is sorted. The cards are a little bigger than A5, and the recipes on the back include pictures too, so even beginners won’t be put off by the steps. It’s without doubt the box we’d recommend to everyone, no matter their cooking skill, or diet.

Gousto is also a B Corp company, meaning it has attained extremely high standards when it comes to sustainability. It’s also free to cancel any time.

Buy now £24.99, Gousto.co.uk

Riverford

Hailing from a farm in south Devon, and headed up by the ever forward thinking Guy Singh-Watson – who is largely seen as one of the forerunners in organic farming and sustainability – Riverford’s boxes are all organic and full of punchy dishes with truly excellent product. Recipes range from plant-based to veggie and meat. There’s also new guest chef slots, such as the formidable Asma Khan of Darjeeling Express, who has three dishes from her latest book, Ammu, available to order.

After converting the family farm he grew up on to be organic, Guy has pushed Riverford to branch out to have a restaurant, cookbooks, online shop and to have pioneered one of the most successful food box delivery schemes in the county, amassing to about 50,000 boxes a week too. And it’s also attained B-Corp certification for its all round excellent quality and ethics. Case in point, the boxes the food comes in are reused up to 10 times, so don’t recycle them in your council recycling, but pop them outside ahead of your next delivery and Riverford reuses them.

We loved our broad bean salad with pangrattata and mozzarella, which breathed new life into our summer salad repertoire, but some recipes can be a little long-winded and take an hour. But all of this info is stated as you order.

Buy now £12.75, Riverford.co.uk

Abel & Cole

As another of the forerunners in the recipe box revolution, Abel & Cole offers up brilliantly inspiring dishes, where everything is deliciously organic.

As helping people to reduce their carbon footprints is such a key part of Abel & Cole’s philosophy, last year it added its meat-free meal kits to its ever-growing repertoire. Within this, there’s a weekly menu of 12 dishes to choose from, and it shows the amount of carbon saved – Abel & Cole found that these recipes used, on average, 63 per cent less carbon than if they included fish or meat, such as swapping out the lamb in a classic shepherd’s pie.

Recipes are all created by the very talented in-house team, and include dishes like spag bol with lemon gremolata or baked potato with coronation chickpeas, as no one is ever too good for a good ol’ jacket. Every week, there’s six recipes for four people, and six for two people. Across the rest of the recipe boxes, there’s eight categories to choose from, which are: veggie, vegan, foodie, quick (meaning a mximum cooking time of 30 minutes), light, serves two, serves four and everything.

We’ve always found Abel & Cole’s recipes to be very well created, easy to follow and super tasty with plenty of zing, if at times a little more fiddly – and time-consuming – than expected, but perhaps that’s more of a comment on our cooking skills than anything else.

Buy now £33.00, Abelandcole.co.uk

Pasta Evangelists

Any Dragon’s Den fan may recognise this brand from an episode way back in 2018, where surprisingly, Pasta Evangelists didn’t win any of the dragons over. Instead, it’s gone from strength to strength in the years since. The pasta is high quality, and best of all, takes very, very little time to prepare. All you need to do is pop the pasta in boiling water, heat up the pre-made sauce, serve and then douse in parmesan, and voila.

There’s a decent selection to choose from, and within London the meals come in letterbox-friendly packaging, while outside it’s larger boxes. Our favourite dishes include the beef shin and barolo wine ragu along with the lobster ravioli – decadent but excellent. There’s gluten-free options too. You only need to select two dishes to order, and can choose as many as you like per week, along with drinks and puddings too for the full shebang. It makes a dinner party incredibly easy for even the most unlikely culinary host.

Our top tip? If you’re buying for two, select the double-up portion and it’s absolutely plenty for two hungry people, and you’ll likely have a little leftover for lunch. The pasta can even be frozen, so you can keep some in the freezer for when you can’t be bothered to cook and don’t want takeaway. It’s simple, but very good.

Buy now £13.50, Pastaevangelists.com

Cookaway

Inspired by cuisines around the world, Cookaway does things slightly differently. Its offering is split into seven cuisines: Japanese, Italian Malaysian, Indian, Spanish, Pakistani and the newest, which is Greek, where all the menus have been designed by experts in their fields, such as food writer and MasterChef 2014 winner, Ping Coombes who created the Malaysian dishes.

We tried the Indian Cookaway box, created by Nidhi Verma, who is also the brand’s founder. The box contained the Punjabi keema matar with fragrant basmati rice. We’d never cooked rice in a wide-bottomed pan like that before and found it to be faultless. We’ve since cooked the dish again and really loved it.

Cookaway also does live cookalongs with the chefs too which you can sign up to and enjoy from your own kitchen. This is a particularly great way to do it if it’s a new dish to you, or cuisine, as you’ve got the expert right there on hand. It’s even a great gift for a novice cook to get involved in on a Friday night.

Unlike some of the other recipe boxes, not every ingredient is included here, so before starting, make sure you’ve read through the entire recipe card first, and gathered everything you’ll need. It’s usually things like oil or salt that even the most novice of cooks will have stashed away somewhere, hopefully! There’s also no subscription model here which we really like as you don’t feel tied in.

Buy now £26.00, Thecookaway.com

Phomo

Relatively new to the game is Phomo, a Vietnamese delivery kit, and it is (to our knowledge) the only entirely Vietnamese offering of its type. Created by Daniya, the idea is to help to create “pho, in a mo". Who doesn’t love a catchy phrase, especially when it comes with great food?

There’s four different kits of the classic Vietnamese dish to choose from: beef, chicken, king prawn or vegan. We tried the steak pho kit, which is made up of gluten-free rice noodles, slices of rare-cooked pasture-fed steak, beef bone broth, plus all the garnishes, including chilli, lime, coriander, Thai basil, spring onions and beansprouts to create a zingy bowl of hearty, spicy goodness. Broths are pre-made so it’s speedy, and really these boxes are more about finishing off a dish, like a high-end restaurant at home box.

The deliciously warming broth has been cooked for 16 hours, and then poured over the beef to cook it, which is how we cooked it. But you can fry it quickly if you wanted it more cooked.

Buy now £19.90, Phomouk.com

Wild & Game

If it’s just really good meat you’re after, Wild & Game is the box for you. But do be aware not all the ingredients you’d need with each recipe are included. It does, however, come with a recipe booklet with seven recipe ideas and the meat you’d need for each dish, so you know how to use your cuts of meat, which are especially helpful if you’re not so sure what to serve up your grouse breast with.

If you need more inspiration, there’s a whole hoard of recipes on the Wild & Game website too, simply split up by game type, and will really expand your thinking on what it can be used for, from stuffing squash to barbecue skewers, proving game isn’t just for wintery stews.

The idea was born out of trying to find a way to make better use of the underused game meat. We’re already big fans and think it’s a great alternative to intensively farmed meat, as it has a lower environmental impact, as well as a sustainable supply chain. For us, we think this has great benefits too, as it means you can freeze the individually packaged (and most importantly for us, clearly labelled, as no one wants unidentified meat lurking at the bottom of the drawer) pieces of meat. As it’s unlikely you’d want to eat all your meat within the same week if you had all the ingredients to go with it.

We received seven cuts of different meat, and found the meat to be excellent quality, with deep flavours that you just don’t get with your usual chicken from the supermarket. We also loved coming up with different ideas to use more unusual meats, which meant it pushed us to step outside our lovely (but slightly over-done) go-to recipes.

Buy now £49.99, Wildandgame.co.uk

Mindful Chef

The USP here at Mindful Chef is offering up healthy meals, but that’s not to say the others aren’t healthy too. Don’t worry though, there’s no diet fads or calorie counting here, phew. Instead, it’s more about nutrition. All of this information is listed on the site when you’re picking your recipes. So if that sort of information isn’t for you, it’s worth keeping that in mind too. There’s no refined carbs, such as white rice, and all recipes are gluten and dairy free too.

A quick look on the website and you’ll see that all the recipes are bright, bold and pretty enticing. And good news if you’re veggie, Mindful Chef recipes are often made with you in mind, as one thing you’ll notice is a lot of recipes feature tofu or tempeh. Although we love meat-free meals, we usually prefer using vegetables creatively or pulses such as lentils instead of tofu or tempeh, which is just a personal preference.

We do love that some recipes are as speedy as 10 or 15 minutes, which we know is a saviour for time-rushed people. Mindful Chef also goes that little bit further, as since 2017, it has partnered with One Feeds Two, a charity that donates a school meal to a child living in poverty for every meal purchased. It’s also a carbon neutral company.

Buy now £31.00, Mindfulchef.com

Hello Fresh

Another recipe box company that’s practically a household name is Hello Fresh, and came to life in 2011. What’s different here is that it is really paving the way for using local producers, from the well-known Tomato Stall from the Isle of Wight you’d likely already come across, to meat seller Kepak in Ireland which only works with family farms that produce exceptional quality meat. Its supply chain cuts out the middle sections and HelloFresh is carbon neutral too.

We liked the variety of recipes here, plenty of them take 20 minutes, part of its "rapid range", and we found that to be accurate too. We also like that recipes include spice levels too, so we can work around guests if they’re not such spice fans. Weekly recipe choices cover everything from Middle Eastern chicken to tacos, Thai noodles and more. We really liked the harissa spiced beef pilaf dish which was speedy and packed a flavoursome punch.

Buy now £33.48, Hellofresh.co.uk

Grubby

Solely vegan, Grubby is the UK’s first totally vegan recipe delivery box. It’s also the only one we’ve come across that offers up tunes to play while you’re cooking too in the form of a Spotify playlist. If that’s not bang for your buck, we don’t know what is. It also champions locally sourced organically grown British produce, where most of it is grown in Kent, Essex and Bedfordshire from family-run farms. The food is organic too.

Grubby was set up by Martin in 2019, after working in office catering for many years, he wanted to find something quick and easy for people to create for dinner when they got home from work. The packaging is 100 per cent recyclable, and if you live in London, your delivery will be made by bike, and waste is offset through food waste partners.

There’s more than 60 recipes to choose from. We had two, and loved the harissa spiced courgette with couscous and garlic tahini dressing, which is full of texture and flavour, as well as the sweet tang from the chopped apricots and added crunch in the form of the flaked almonds.

For every box delivered, Grubby donates a meal to a child who needs it. Plus, subscriptions are flexible too.

Buy now £26.00, Grubby.co.uk

The verdict: Recipe boxes and food deliveries

Gousto is our absolute favourite for its breadth of choice, easy-to-follow recipes and its ultimate reliability to easily remake the dishes to the same standard time and time again.

We also really liked Phomo for its originality, Riverford for its interesting and delicious recipes, and Abel & Cole for its inspiring and innovative sustainability efforts.

Lastly, we think Grubby is really excellent quality and strives to do all the small, yet important, things right, from using organic produce, to bike-powered deliveries and providing meals to children living in poverty.

Enjoy plant-based goodness delivered to your door with the best vegan subscription boxes