Research & Data on Meal Kits – Our Original Analysis

Most meal kit sites just repeat the providers' own marketing. We don't. We do our own research – on nutrition, price, and the market – and rank based on it. This page collects the data behind our recommendations so you can check the numbers yourself. Want to know how we weigh it all? Read how we test.

Collected 30 July 2026. This is the first release of an open dataset we are building: the nutrition figures UK meal kit providers publish against their own recipes, collected from their live weekly menus, with the collection date and record count attached to every number. The raw file is downloadable – uk-meal-kit-nutrition.json – under CC BY 4.0, so you can recompute anything below.

This replaces the 0–100 nutrition score we withdrew in July 2026, whose figures were not derived from UK menus. The reasoning is set out in full at how we measure meal kit nutrition.

HelloFresh UK — 163 distinct dishes, week of 17 August 2026

Two findings stand out, and both are checkable against the raw file.

The spread within one provider is enormous. In a single week, HelloFresh UK’s own published figures run from a 418 kcal dish to a 2,098 kcal dish — a 5.0-fold difference on the same menu. 15% of dishes (25 of 163) are 1,000 kcal or more per serving, while 25% (40 of 163) come in under 600 kcal. That is the clearest evidence we have for something this site now says repeatedly: which recipes you choose matters far more than which provider you sign up to. A household picking the lighter fifth of the menu and a household picking the heavier fifth are eating completely differently from the same subscription.

Only energy is published at menu level. Across all 163 dishes, the single nutrition field HelloFresh UK exposes on its menu listing is Energy (kcal). Protein, fat, saturated fat, salt and sugar appear on individual recipe pages but not in the menu catalogue. That is a meaningful transparency gap: you cannot compare a whole week on salt or saturated fat without opening every recipe individually, and no UK provider publishes menu-wide averages for any nutrient.

Gousto — 3,063 dishes from the full published catalogue

Read this before comparing the two providers. The HelloFresh figures above are one week’s live menu. The Gousto figures below are its entire published recipe catalogue — we processed all 4,672 recipe URLs in Gousto’s sitemap and extracted published nutrition for 3,063 of them (66%). Those measure different things, so we are not going to put them side by side and declare a winner. We will, once both are collected on the same basis.

What Gousto allows that HelloFresh does not: it publishes a full macronutrient panel per recipe — calories, protein, fat, carbohydrate, fibre, sugar and sodium — in structured data on every recipe page. That makes it the first UK provider for which anyone can report salt at scale. Collected 1 August 2026.

So are UK meal kits high in salt?

This is the question the published research raises and nobody has answered with UK data. Now we can, for one provider, across 3,063 dishes. The NHS puts the adult maximum at 6 g of salt a day.

The median Gousto dish contains 1.9 g of salt — around 32% of an adult’s entire daily allowance in a single dinner. 241 dishes (7.9%) carry at least half the daily maximum, and 0 exceed the entire daily maximum in one serving, topping out at 5.6 g.

That is more moderate than headlines about convenience food often suggest, but it is not nothing: eat a median Gousto dinner and roughly a third of your day’s salt budget is gone before breakfast and lunch are counted. It also sits close to the only comparable published work — Gibson & Partridge (Nutrients, 2019) found 723–1,426 mg of sodium per serve across five Australian services, and this catalogue’s median sodium is 778 mg. The international evidence appears to transfer.

On calories, the spread is the story again

Across the catalogue, 1,585 dishes (52%) come in under 600 kcal, while 93 sit at 1,000 kcal or more, from 237 kcal at the lightest to 1,527 at the heaviest. Whichever provider you choose, the dish you pick matters more than the brand on the box.

What changed when we went from a sample to the full catalogue

Worth stating plainly, because it shows why sampling deserves scepticism. Our first release covered 195 dishes and reported that 4% carried at least half the daily salt maximum, with a peak of 5.6 g. Across the full 3,063-dish catalogue those figures are 7.9% and 5.6 g — the sample understated both, and missed that some dishes exceed the entire daily allowance outright. The earlier figures were labelled as a sequential sample at the time; they have now been superseded.

Method, in full

We fetch each provider's live weekly menu and record the nutrition panel exactly as published. Where a dish appears more than once – usually portion or recipe variants – we take the median of its variants so each distinct dish counts once; this run had 181 raw records collapsing to 167 distinct dishes, and deduplication moved the median by 9 kcal (758 to 767), which we report rather than hide. We add nothing, estimate nothing, and never carry a figure across from another country's menu.

Coverage and current limits

We would rather state the gaps than imply completeness:

• HelloFresh UK – collected, 167 dishes, energy only at menu level.
• Gousto – publishes per-recipe nutrition on individual recipe pages; menu-level collection is in development.
• Mindful Chef – publishes per-recipe nutrition, but blocks automated collection from datacentre addresses, so collection currently requires a different route.
• Green Chef, Riverford, Grubby – collection not yet implemented.

Until every provider is covered, this dataset describes HelloFresh UK and nothing more. We will not extrapolate from one provider to the category, and any figure here that later proves wrong will be corrected on this page with the change noted.

Before you can compare meal kits on nutrition, somebody has to check whether the numbers exist at all. So we went provider by provider and recorded exactly what each one publishes on its own UK site, and how much of it we could collect and verify. The answer varies far more than you would expect.

The smallest provider publishes the most. Grubby lists 9 figures on every recipe, energy in both kcal and kJ, fat, saturated fat, carbohydrate, sugars, protein, fibre and salt. Gousto publishes 7. HelloFresh UK publishes one, energy, and only at menu level. If you are choosing a box because you want to manage what you eat, that difference matters more than any marketing claim about being "balanced".

What we mean by "not verified". Mindful Chef and Riverford return an automated-traffic block to every request we make, including to their robots.txt file. We tried six routes, ending with a full browser, and stopped there rather than work around a control the site owner has deliberately put in place. This is not a claim that they hide nutrition from customers: a person browsing normally may well see a complete panel. It means we cannot collect it, so we will not publish a figure for them, and they are excluded from every comparison on this site until we can.

Why Green Chef has no figure. Green Chef publishes energy per recipe, but its menu feed lists grocery add-ons alongside meals with nutrition attached to both, items such as a 40 g bag of rocket at 5 kcal. Averaging those in with dinners would drag the numbers down and misrepresent the menu, and we have not yet found a reliable way to separate the two. So we publish nothing for Green Chef rather than publish something wrong.

One number that surprised us. Across Grubby's 57-recipe menu the median serving contains 4 g of salt, which is 67% of the NHS maximum of 6 g for a whole day in a single meal. The Gousto catalogue median is 1.9 g. Those two figures are measured on different bases, a weekly menu against a full catalogue, so this is not a head-to-head verdict and we are not presenting it as one. It is a flag worth raising: cooking a kit at home is not automatically low in salt.

Every figure above comes from our UK Meal Kit Nutrition Index. The raw dataset is published under CC BY 4.0, so you can check any of it, and we would rather be corrected than be wrong.

Meal kit prices are hard to compare because kits vary in portion size and shipping rules. That's why we normalise everything to the one number that matters: cost per serving. Measured that way, the field ranges from £3.52 (Gousto) to £8.25 (HelloFresh), compared with roughly £4–6 per serving for a home-cooked meal, by our own estimate based on typical UK supermarket costs.

See the full calculations – including our supermarket baseline and a 'how we calculated this' box – in cost for a family, annual cost, and our in-depth price analysis.

To put meal kits in context, we look at industry market research: the UK meal kit market is worth roughly £1bn (2023), with market leader HelloFresh holding around 43% share and homegrown challenger Gousto around 34%. Meal kits still account for only a small slice of consumers' weeknight dinners, the average subscriber orders roughly 14–15 boxes a year (down from prior years), and price is by far the biggest barrier to continued use – roughly 8 in 10 people who cancel cite cost as the reason. These numbers shape how we judge 'is it worth trying': for most people, a meal kit is a convenience premium, not a saving.

We rely exclusively on documented, primary sources: providers' own websites (pricing, kit types), public business filings (ownership, financials), Trustpilot (customer satisfaction), our own nutrition benchmark research, and industry market research (market data). Behind every recommendation is a named, accountable editor – Mads Bukholt – and one fixed principle: we never publish a number we can't document. If you're a provider and believe a figure is incorrect, write to us with documentation via contact.