I am a huge fan of meal kit delivery services. Before meal kit delivery services came into my life, I spent countless hours searching for the perfect recipe on Pinterest. Sometimes those recipes turned out great. Other times, the recipe was a total Pinterest fail.
With meal kit delivery services, someone else has already found great recipes and figured out the perfect proportions. No more horrible meals and late-night calls for pizza delivery! You can read more about why I love these services at Why You Should Try Meal Kit Services.
Another great thing about the meal kit delivery services is the variety of services to try – each of the services offers something a little different.
When I was looking for meal kit delivery services to try, some friends mentioned how much they liked SunBasket’s organic, nutritionist-approved food. Plus, I love a good discount and SunBasket offered $35 off my first delivery.
I tried SunBasket for five weeks. Read my review below to decide whether you’d like to give them a try.
Plans & Cost
SunBasket offers two plans:
- Classic Menu: 3 meals per week with your choice of 2 or 4 serving sizes per meal. Cost is $11.49 per serving.
- Family Menu: Your choice of 2, 3, or 4 meals per week with 4 serving sizes per meal. Cost is $9.99 per serving.
I opted for the Classic Menu with 2 serving sizes per meal.
The Classic Menu is slightly more expensive than some other meal kit delivery services. Some services price all their meals at $10 or less per serving. However, SunBasket’s food is organic, so it makes sense that its meals are priced slightly higher than other services that don’t provide organic food.
For all meal kit delivery services, I recommend checking to see if there is a discount code before signing-up for the service. You can usually get some kind of discount for your first delivery.
Selection Options
With my 3 meal plan, I was given 11 different meal choices. *Eleven* different meal choices! That blew me away. With some other meal kit delivery services, I’d only get 6 different options. Plus, with SunBasket – there are no exclusions. Other meal kit delivery services will sometimes remove options as you make your selections so that you stay under a certain cost. That’s not the case with SunBasket – you can choose from any of the 11 options for your meal choices.
Each of the meal options highlights whether it is Paleo, gluten-free, lean & clean, dairy-free, vegetarian, or soy-free. So people with special dietary needs can easily identify meals that work for them and don’t have to comb through the ingredients.
Delivery
When I signed-up, I was given the option of Monday or Wednesday delivery. I chose Monday delivery, which works well for me. However, it can be nice to have more options for the delivery day, especially for people who like to cook later in the week.
I was really happy with the delivery timing. For the 5 weeks I tried SunBasket, my delivery arrived before 6PM every week. For some other meal kit delivery services I tried, the meals were delivered really late in the evening, so I wasn’t able to cook on the delivery day for those services. Because SunBasket was delivered before 6PM, I was able to cook a meal on the delivery day.
Packaging
The SunBasket delivery box is bigger than most of the other meal delivery services I’ve tried. Plus, the insulated padding was bigger than the insulation for other services. That meant more trips to the trash/recycle bin with SunBasket.
Like many other meal delivery services, SunBasket says its insulated padding is recyclable. While it might be recyclable, I’m not sure it’s something you can put in general recycling. My community’s recycling service doesn’t accept plastic grocery bags because they jam up the recycling machines. The insulated padding in meal kit delivery boxes seems to fall into the same category.
Inside the box, the meat was placed at the bottom with some extra ice packs. All the other ingredients were separated into individual bags by meal. I love that SunBasket groups all the ingredients by meal into individual bags. It may seem like a little thing, but it’s nice to just grab a bag and know it has everything you need to cook the meal. Some other meal kit delivery services throw all the ingredients together into the box and you have to separate it yourself.
Tip: The little cups and containers SunBasket uses to store the liquid ingredients are great. I especially liked the little screw-top containers – you can save them and use them to transport liquid dressings in your lunch.
Difficulty to Prepare
When I first starting using SunBasket, they provided postcard-size recipe cards for each of the meals I requested. The last week I tried SunBasket, they switched to a recipe booklet, which had all the recipes for the week. The booklet was great – you could purchase your own ingredients and make any of the other recipes you didn’t order for the week but still wanted to try.
Of the meal kit delivery services I’ve tried, I thought the SunBasket recipe cards were the easiest to follow. They don’t over-explain things – they just briefly tell you what is required in a bulleted format.
I thought the meals were fairly easy to prepare. But they were time-consuming. It usually took me about 45 minutes to prepare a meal. Since I was only cooking 2 serving sizes per meal, that seemed like a lot of effort for just 2 serving sizes.
Taste
I’d characterize the SunBasket meals as a little adventurous – they’re not your average, familiar tastes. With SunBasket, you’ll be introduced to some really interesting tastes. One side dish was shallots and carrots cooked in a marinade. I would have never thought to put those things together, but it was amazing.
One of my all-time favorite meals of the year came from SunBasket. It was an Italian-sausage bean dish that I will fondly remember for a long, long time. Seriously. It was that good.
I didn’t love everything that came from SunBasket – there was a sole, caper dish that just didn’t turn out well.
Of the 15 meals I had during 5 weeks, I absolutely loved 5, really liked 7, and didn’t care for 3 of the meals.
Portion Size
For me, some of the portion sizes were on the small side. It’s likely that the portion sizes were appropriate for a balanced meal, but sometimes I felt I needed a little more food. I would occasionally add rice to the meal to help fill me up.
Customer Service
I get the impression that SunBasket really wants to please their customers and succeed, but are still working on some minor issues in their process.
Once, they sent me the wrong meal. I emailed their customer service, who sent me a link to confirm I’d received the wrong meal. After clicking on the link, my account was credited for the wrong meal. While a refund might be preferred, I appreciated how responsive they were to my request.
I had some problems with both the mobile and desktop websites. Some days, it wouldn’t let me sign-in and would tell me that I entered the wrong user name or password. The next day, I’d use the same user name and password, and it’d log me in without a problem.
Tip: If you want to cancel your service with SunBasket, you have to send them an email. You can’t just click on a button on the website to cancel the service. To make sure you’re not charged for meals you don’t want, mark all the meals as “skip” on the website right before you email your cancellation request. That way you won’t accidentally get charged for meals while SunBasket is processing your cancellation.
Overall Notes
I would recommend SunBasket to someone who likes a lot of variety and wants to occasionally sample new and interesting tastes. SunBasket is great for people who want organic, nutritious food. Plus, its various dietary options like Paleo, gluten-free, and vegetarian, are great for meeting special dietary needs.
I really enjoyed my experience with SunBasket and will continue to dream about that Italian-sausage dish forever! Happy dining!
Comments or Questions?
Have a comment or a question? I’d love to hear from you! Visit me on Instagram @eastbymidwest and leave a comment or DM, or send me an email at pam@eastbymidwest.com.
