Hungryroot Meal Delivery Service

Do you ever wish you could hire someone to go grocery shopping for you? We don't mean hire someone to buy things from your list, but rather tell someone what you like and trust them to fill a cart that will keep you satisfied. That's what Hungryroot does. It's not a traditional meal-kit delivery service, nor is it an online food shopping site. Rather, you enter your food preferences and Hungryroot picks groceries for you. Some come as suggested meal kits with recipes to follow or ignore completely. Others are standalone grocery staples like carrots, crackers, and dried pasta. Customize your box or take a leap of faith and stick with the suggestions. Hungryroot's selections are top-notch and it's a lot of fun to try if you're looking for inspiration or a challenge in the kitchen. It earns our Editors' Choice award for not only being a great subscription service, but for also filling a unique niche in the market.

Hungryroot Pricing

Hungryroot's pricing varies based on how much food you want, but at a minimum, you can expect to spend about $75 per shipment. The spread of food shown in the image below cost a little more than $100.

(Credit: Jill Duffy)

Before you pay, Hungryroot shows you a sample bill detailing how many meals you can expect to get out of the shipment. You can adjust these numbers before finishing the transaction. Your estimated bill changes in real time.

(Credit: Hungryroot/Jill Duffy)

At a minimum, you must order at least six servings of lunch or dinner items. Hungryroot limits you to a maximum of 16 total meals, too. So, for example, you can get six lunches and no dinners; four lunches and 10 dinners; or eight lunches and eight dinners—anything goes as long as you are within those bounds. Depending on how many servings you order, the estimated price comes out to between $9.69 and $11.39 per serving. Those prices are largely based on you following the suggested recipes.

In addition, you get a selection of breakfast foods, snacks, sweets, and prepared meals. Again, you can customize the amount to some degree. Whether you pay a delivery fee depends on if your total plan costs less than $70 (an additional $6.99) or more (free).

If you go by the estimated price per meal, Hungryroot costs about the same as traditional meal delivery services. Most fall between $7.99 and $12.99 per serving, from meal kits to prepared meal services like Fresh N Lean. Many also charge a shipping fee, though in some cases it's included.

(Credit: Hungryroot/Jill Duffy)

The Hungryroot Menu

When you create a Hungryroot account, you answer a few questions: How many people are you feeding? What are some of your goals with Hungryroot (such as try new food, lose weight, or grocery shop less)? Then you enter dietary needs. The options are vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, dairy-free, gluten-free, soy-free, tree nut-free, peanut-free, and egg-free. You can select more than one. Similar to HelloFresh, Hungryroot serves all diets. Green Chef is our top choice for vegetarians.

From there, the questions veer more toward your habits. Do you eat breakfast? If so, is it packaged snacks or a proper meal? Do you want breakfast from Hungryroot? The site takes you through a similar process for all your meals.

Lastly, you see pictures and short descriptions of foods for each meal and select the ones that seem appealing. For lunch and dinner, for example, you can choose veggie noodles, stir-fry, grain bowl, salad, pasta, marketplace (protein, starch, and veg plate), or flatbread. Again, you can select as many as you like. It's only after you lay down a credit card that you get to see what's in your basket. From there, you can customize the selections using a credit system. In other words, rather than customizing your shopping cart to reach a dollar amount, you reach a credit amount. A stir-fry meal kit with three or so items might cost 12 credits, whereas a bag of baby carrots is two. This can get slightly confusing if you're trying to account for every dollar you spend.

(Credit: Hungryroot/Jill Duffy)

Our Hungryroot package perfectly catered to our allergy and dietary requirements. It's impressive how the company managed to profile taste buds so accurately. Some highlights were Beyond Burger patties, a "superfood tomato sauce" that we'd describe as runny ajvar, rainbow veggie mix (shredded kale, purple cabbage, and carrots), shaved raw Brussels sprouts, baby broccoli, and corn tortillas.

One dud was a container of raw, vegan, oatmeal spice cookie dough. It's mashed white kidney beans mixed with sunflower butter and flavored primarily by maple sugar and cinnamon. We baked a batch, but didn't care for them.

After your order, you can give feedback to Hungryroot by logging into your account and indicating whether you want to see these items often, sometimes, or never again. You can change your mind, too. If you mark something "never," it will show up in your view of options in the future, but it will be grayed out to remind you that you said you didn't want it.

(Credit: Jill Duffy)

Packaging

Packaging is a perennial problem for meal-kit delivery services, and really most home delivery services. Our Hungryroot items were packaged into a cardboard box and then further wrapped inside a reusable silver bubble wrap cooler.

An ice pack that came in the box could also be reused. You can defrost it, snip a corner to dump the watery gel into the trash, and wash and recycle the bag, provided you can find a place that accepts number four plastic. The gel is non-toxic and is what most meal kit delivery services use, although others use dry ice instead. If you're lucky, the dry ice has evaporated by the time you open the box. If not, you have to be very careful not to touch it, as it can freeze-burn skin.

Beyond the box packaging, Hungryroot isn't particularly wasteful with individual item packaging. Some meal kit services wrap everything in plastic, from carrots to individual cloves of garlic. Others leave items loose in a paper bag if they're more or less dry. Hungryroot's items all look like they could have been plucked off the shelf of a supermarket. In other words, the packaging doesn't seem like more than you would have from a typical grocery run, unless you buy items in bulk and bring your own containers (and kudos to you if you do).

(Credit: Jill Duffy)

Cooking and Eating With Hungryroot

While reviewing most other meal kits, we usually make it a rule to follow the recipes as they were provided, rather than make substitutions or changes. With Hungryroot, though, we felt free to veer off course of the suggested recipes. After all, they were merely suggestions. Buying individual groceries, while not always as convenient, encourages you to think creatively.

We made bean tacos, some with pinto and some with spiced black beans, topping them off with avocado crema. All those ingredients came from Hungryroot. We added fresh cilantro and lime, plus a dash of hot sauce.

(Credit: Jill Duffy)

For a savory breakfast, we threw a mix of mushrooms into a hot pan and added Hungryroot's baby broccoli. When it was cooked through, we put it on top of Hungryroot's whole wheat sprouted flatbread and drizzled it with the company's tomato superfood sauce.

One day for lunch, we decided to try Hungryroot's lemon artichoke quinoa cup. The instructions say to put the premade components into a bowl and microwave until warm. It also suggested topping it with cherry tomatoes, so we did. A squeeze of lemon and some scallions added a bright pop of flavor.

(Credit: Jill Duffy)

We made several salads by tossing equal parts of Hungryroot's rainbow mix and shaved Brussels sprouts in a mustard vinaigrette. For sweetness and crunch, we added dried, diced apricots and sunflower seeds (our own). One night we ate that same salad alongside a Beyond Burger, also courtesy of Hungryroot. We served the burgers on some fresh buns bought earlier that day, and used some vegetarian kimchi as a topping. This is the kind of mix-and-match cooking kit that leaves us smiling. Like Blue Apron, Hungryroot gives you an education along with your food.

All the produce was fresh and packaged to last several days. While there was no rush to go through all the shelf-stable items, many of them found their way into snacks and desserts. Granola bars from Purely Elizabeth were a hit; Biena's Rockin' Ranch dried chickpeas less so.

Verdict: Great Groceries

Ordering your first Hungryroot box presents a bit of a mental hurdle—when you aren't picking out groceries for yourself, $75 to $100 is a lot to spend. But the items you receive will be the types of foods you enjoy, while also stretching you to be more imaginative and try new things. That earns Hungryroot our Editors' Choice award. For a more traditional meal-kit subscription, we recommend Blue Apron for novices, Fresh N Lean for prepared meals, Green Chef for vegetable-forward eaters, or HelloFresh for omnivores.