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.

Our flagship original dataset is the Green Score — a nutrition rating from 0 to 100 that measures each kit against standard dietary guidelines for grams of fruits & vegetables, legumes, and meat/fish per serving. It's built on a benchmark of 216 recipes we analysed in October 2024.

The results are striking: Gousto leads with a score of 48.7 (322 g of vegetables/day), while the meat-heavy classic kits land around 21–25. The average across the five benchmarked kits is 29.1 — so even the middle of the pack falls well short of the guidelines. You can find the full analysis and methodology in are meal kits healthy? and green score explained, and the full field is ranked on healthy meal kits.

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.