Wow! I should have been checking in to egullet more often. Thank you liamsaunt! We recently started getting some purple carrot kits (mix of TB12 and non, depending on which menu looks better) and having missed the first few weeks of TB12, I wondered which recipes they were. Thanks to you, now I know!
We've been using meal kits for over 2 years now. We get between 6 and 9 meals a week from various services. We've tried Gobble, Blue Apron, Plated, Green Chef, Din (RIP, we loved you!), Chef'd, Sunbasket, and now Purple Carrot. Have not tried PeachDish or Hello Fresh. My husband hates food waste, we are busy and eat out a lot, and prefer lots of vegetables and variety in our meals. Meal kits are cheaper than eating out and usually provide more diverse vegetables than restaurants. So they are a big win for us.
We started with Gobble first. Still our most regular supplier, but they are nowhere near as amazing as the first year. I'm finding most services get dumbed-down over time, in that the less common ingredients, bold spicing and spicy-hot ingredients start to go away. Gobble used to have amazing garnishes, more aggressive spicing, and more diverse ingredients. It has strongly tilted to meat and potatoes and chicken breast (which we don't like). Probably because is the company grows, the customer base becomes more like USA average in taste and preference and this puts pressure on the company to deliver to that preference. Just read Blue Apron comments from customers on the more interesting recipes -- "too spicy", "too weird", etc. Unfortunate, but what can you do? This problem likely doomed Din (a higher priced, extremely amazing and more exotic service out of SF with recipes from a set of rotating restaurant chefs).
What makes Gobble our most-used service is that they are halfway between you-cook-it-all and just-heat-it-up meals. Many sauces are pre-prepared. Longer cooking ingredients (rice, potatoes) often come pre-cooked and you heat them up. Some veggies are pre-chopped. So meals take just 15-20 minutes to make. And better than a frozen dinner. They also let you choose the number of dishes you want from a set of 7 recipes provided you get at least 2 (each serving 2 people). So you can get the typical 3 different dishes, or just 2, or even 4 or more . And you can double, triple up. Say this week has your favorite pork tenderloin with carrot-ginger puree (bring it back, Gobble! the chicken breast version was just sad) -- you can get 2 of them and 1 of something else. They also have interesting soups and sides as an add on sometimes.
Sunbasket is our next favorite. More labor intensive than Gobble, but often more interesting. You must order 3 dishes and only 3, but can double/triple up. More organic and carefully sourced ingredients.
I liked Blue Apron but you can't freely pick your 3 dishes (as soon as you pick a dish from the offerings, others are made not available to pick -- not all combinations are available). We like vegetarian dishes and found that our most wanted veggie dish was usually only available if you choose all vegetarian and we also usually want one fish or meat dish as well. I've heard they are running a trial of more flexible offerings so we may re-try them when/if that rolls out to everyone.
Chef'd is neat since you can order from their entire set of possible offerings and don't need to subscribe. But I found the ingredients to be lesser quality and the fish to be less fresh than the others.
Right now, Purple Carrot has been impressing us. Beet curry? Sauteed radishes? Sauteed chayote? Brazil-nut 'kung pao' with shiso leaves? Yeah! Bring it.
