Key takeaways
- We do not cook the food. MealboxGuide is a research and comparison site, not a taste-testing panel. Everything below is built on documented, checkable sources.
- We rank on six criteria: real price per portion, choice and menu size, flexibility, delivery, published nutrition, and customer satisfaction.
- Every number must be traceable. If a figure cannot be sourced to a provider's own website, a public register or a named study, it does not go on the page.
- We publish real price after the discount expires, not the headline introductory offer – the number that actually hits your account in month four.
- We earn affiliate commission from some links. It never affects rankings, and we say so on every page that carries one.
- In July 2026 we withdrew our own nutrition score after finding its figures were not derived from UK menus. The full correction is public.
What we do – and what we don't
Most UK meal kit comparison sites imply first-hand testing. We want to be exact about ours, because the distinction changes how much weight you should give what you read here.
What we do: we track every provider's published pricing across every box size and meal count, model the true cost once introductory discounts expire, record the nutrition figures printed on each recipe, log dietary tags and certifications, verify company ownership through Companies House filings, and read customer reviews at volume to find the complaints that recur rather than the ones that shout loudest.
What we don't do: we do not cook the meals and score them for taste. We have no test kitchen and we do not run a tasting panel. Where taste and portion size matter to a decision, we say what customers consistently report and we point you to work that is hands-on – MoneySavingExpert's April 2026 comparison cooked eight meals per provider and consulted a registered dietitian, and it is the best hands-on UK work we are aware of.
We would rather be narrow and right than broad and unverifiable. If that changes – if we start buying and cooking boxes – this page will say so, with dates and receipts.
Our six evaluation criteria
| Criterion | What we look at | Where the data comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Real price per portion | Cost per portion including delivery, at every box size – then the price once the welcome offer ends. Larger family boxes are usually cheapest per portion, and the introductory price is almost never what you end up paying. | Provider checkout and pricing pages, recorded and dated |
| Choice & menu size | How many recipes are on the weekly menu, and how deep the dietary filtering goes (veggie, vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, calorie-capped). | Provider weekly menus |
| Flexibility & commitment | Whether you can pause, skip and cancel freely, how far ahead the cut-off falls, and how hard leaving is in practice. | Provider terms, plus recurring themes in customer reviews |
| Delivery | UK coverage, available days, delivery cost and any free-delivery threshold. | Provider delivery pages |
| Published nutrition | The calorie and macronutrient figures each provider prints per recipe, the dietary ranges they operate, and independently auditable certifications such as Soil Association organic registration. We do not publish a composite nutrition score – see below. | Provider recipe cards; Soil Association register |
| Customer satisfaction | Trustpilot scores – always attributed to Trustpilot, never presented as our own rating – and the praise and complaints that recur across thousands of reviews. | Trustpilot, linked from every review page |
No single provider wins on all six. That is the entire reason we publish the criteria separately rather than collapsing them into one number.
How we calculate real price – the discount cliff
This is where most comparisons mislead, and it is not usually deliberate. Introductory offers in this market are steep – commonly 40–70% off the first box, tapering across the next two or three. Quote the first-box price and a kit looks extraordinary. Quote the full price and it looks expensive. Neither is what a normal household actually pays.
So we model three separate figures, and label which is which:
- First-box price per portion – the promotional number, useful only for deciding whether to try a kit.
- Blended price across the discount period – what you pay while the welcome offer tapers.
- Steady-state price per portion – full price plus delivery, which is what you pay from the moment the offer expires until you cancel. This is the number we rank on.
We also record the exact box number at which each provider's discount ends, because that is the moment most people are surprised. A kit that is cheapest in week one is frequently not cheapest in month three.
Our sources
We rely on documented, primary sources, and we name them rather than gesturing at "research":
- Provider websites – pricing, box configurations, weekly menus, recipe nutrition panels, delivery terms and welcome offers. Recorded with the date we checked, and published as an open dataset at research and data.
- Companies House and public filings – ownership, group structure, revenue and headcount. This is how we can tell you Green Chef is HelloFresh-owned and Gousto is independent.
- Trustpilot – customer scores and recurring review themes, always attributed and linked.
- The Soil Association organic register – for verifying organic claims rather than repeating them.
- NHS Eatwell Guide and WHO healthy diet guidance – the frameworks we assess nutrition claims against.
- Peer-reviewed literature, cited by name and correctly scoped. The only dish-level nutritional analysis of commercial meal kits we are aware of is Gibson & Partridge (Nutrients, 2019) – 60 recipes across five Australian services, against Australian reference values. We do not present it as a UK finding.
What we will not publish
These are hard rules, not aspirations, and they exist because we broke one of them.
- No unsourced numbers. Every figure traces to a named source with a date.
- No estimates dressed as measurements. Where something is derived or partial, the page says so.
- No third-party rating presented as ours. Trustpilot scores are Trustpilot's. We removed them from our structured data in July 2026 because marking them up as our own aggregate rating implied otherwise.
- No figure crossing a market boundary. A number measured in Denmark, Australia or the United States never appears as a UK number. This is precisely the failure behind our withdrawn nutrition score.
- No paid placement. No provider can buy a position, a score or a mention. None ever has.
- No invented reviews or testimonials. We do not publish customer quotes we cannot trace to a public source.
Corrections policy
When we get something wrong we correct it on the page, say what changed, and leave the correction visible. We do not quietly delete.
The most significant correction to date was made on 30 July 2026. We had published a 0–100 nutrition score, with per-provider gram figures for produce, pulses and meat, described as our own benchmark of 216 UK dishes. Those figures were not derived from UK menus – they had been carried over from a non-UK version of this project during localisation, with provider names mapped across, which is how the UK's cheapest kit ended up credited with a score that originally belonged to a premium organic box in a different country. We removed every instance across the site, rewrote the pages that depended on it, and published the reasoning in full at how we measure meal kit nutrition.
If you spot an error, email mads@mealboxguide.co.uk. Corrections are made quickly and acknowledged on the page.
How often this is updated
Prices and welcome offers in this market change monthly, so a comparison site that updates annually is worse than useless. Provider pricing and current offers are re-checked at least monthly, and after any announced change. Weekly menus and recipe nutrition are collected continuously. Trustpilot scores are re-read monthly. Company ownership is checked when filings change.
Every page carries the date it was last updated, and that date reflects a real change to that page – we do not bulk-refresh timestamps to look current.
Independence & funding
MealboxGuide is funded by affiliate commission: if you sign up through some of our links, the provider pays us, at no extra cost to you. Every page carrying such a link discloses it.
Commission rates differ between providers, which is exactly why the rankings are built from the documented criteria above rather than from editorial preference. The ranking logic is published so you can check it against the data yourself. If our recommendation ever tracks commission rather than the criteria, the criteria are what we are accountable to – hold us to them.
We are independent of every provider we cover. No provider has any editorial input, review rights, or advance sight of what we publish.
