Review: Hungryroot Meal Kit

Hungryroot is a delivery meal plan that wants to know all about your life goals. Would I like to save time, money, or both? Lose weight? Lower my cholesterol? Do I have a problem with eggplants? Also, am I more of a candy person or a chocolate person, and what are my feelings about “spiced” versus “spicy” food?

On the one hand, Hungryroot works much the same way as other meal delivery kits. You receive a box with food and recipes each week, and then you prepare the food. But underneath its hood, Hungryroot packs some sneaky technological sophistication. Long before GPT-4 sprouted an entire generation of AI-powered meme-stocks, Hungryroot began developing its own proprietary AI models to serve up highly personalized food menus—gauging each customer's micro-preferences and dietary restrictions to a granular level.

And so if the meal kit sign-up process feels a bit like going on a speed date with a food robot, it’s hardly an accident. Saving time sounds great, I tell my bot concierge, and I like spicy food. I’d also like to curb my LDLs. Wild-caught fish when possible, and please don't deliver desserts and snacks to my house: I'll eat all of them the first day, and I do not want this.

Four days later, my results and preferences and budget converged on my address as many versions of chicken. Chicken tacos, chicken-stuffed peppers, chicken Caesar, chicken rice bowl, and a penne pasta dish somewhat confusingly called chicken bruschetta alla vodka. (I could have chosen other options besides chicken: Hungryroot has seemingly limitless recipes each week. But in order to best test an AI-assisted meal kit, I for one welcome my new robot dietitian.)

My colleague Molly Higgins, who is vegan, simultaneously tested out her own very different goals and preferences on Hungryroot. These involved no chicken at all.

Ostensibly, when you sign up, a Hungryroot dinner will cost you $13 a serving, while lunch costs $12 and breakfast is a mere $4.50. But in practice, the number of meals you choose translates to a weekly supply of “points” whose sum may be different for each dish. And so while one dinner plate is 11 points, another might be 12. Snacks might cost just a couple points apiece. And if you don't use all your points this week, next week is for ribeye.

Easy, Breezy, Chicken-Caesary

In any case, when I told Hungryroot's questionnaire that I wanted my meal kit to help me save time, the algorithm listened. Among five recipes and some prepackaged breakfast items, only one meal took more than 15 minutes to prepare.

Most plates were as much assembly as actual cooking. One lunchtime meal's only prep involved slicing sous vide chicken breast atop a Caesar salad mix. An avocado chicken rice bowl mostly involved composing a few ingredients, after a few minutes heating a rice pouch and pan-searing some precooked “chile limon” chicken breast. Add to this a pleasant Southwestern-style black bean and corn salad, plus a squirt of avocado crema, and voilà: a casual West Hollywood lunch.

The only dish that took significantly longer to cook than to eat was a pair of stuffed red bell peppers—which featured a better-than-expected enchilada sauce, courtesy of new-school Mexican-American brand Saucy Lips. Here, too, the chicken came pulled, precooked, and preseasoned, and the rice again arrived in pouch form. My own cooking mostly involved heating peppers in a toaster oven, barely more effort than heating frozen lasagna.

Indeed, my week of Hungryroot sometimes felt less like cooking than a week spent grazing in the prepared food section of an upscale grocery store, or one of the nicer fast-casual food courts—the kind that has Sweetgreen and Baja Fresh instead of Wendy's and Chipotle.

Custom Concern

That said, among my recipes, ease of cooking came at the expense of fresh produce. My box contained just two red bell peppers and an orange. When I mentioned this to my vegan co-tester, Molly, her response was quizzical. She didn’t have this problem at all. Her meals were full of veggies. My own survey responses had accidentally convinced Hungryroot's algorithm that I'd rather not cook.

“All of the meals had fresh produce, took half an hour or less, most were under 500 calories, and those that weren’t were high protein (plant-based protein, of course),” Molly wrote. Some meals mixed vegan proteins and vegetable sides. Others included veggie-filled stir frys and a plant-based taco plate made with chipotle-spiced, charred cauliflower. While I was gently warming a premixed black bean salad, Molly was out there charring brussels sprouts.

“The standout for me was—of course, pandering to the health-conscious vegan—the super fresh, healthy lentil-quinoa mix with a precut veggie mix of kale, cabbage, and carrots, along with avocado, lemon, olive oil, and salt and pepper,” Molly wrote, describing a wholly different culinary universe from the meals I cooked.

This variation from customer to customer is mostly by design. Hungryroot might not offer the scratch-made cooking authority of the Martha Stewart–endorsed Marley Spoon meal kit, whose recipes are each tested according to their own precise ingredients. The sell is, instead, very simple recipes tailored to your own, hyper-granular restrictions and preferences.

Don’t like mushrooms? Can’t eat scallops or gluten? Refuse beef that isn’t grass-fed? Too tired to cook? Plus, you only like French food? Hungryroot's little AI bot will still endeavor to fill your shopping cart with recipes that will feed your very particular self, according to ingredients that are in stock locally. Molly’s world is not Matthew’s world, and vice versa.

Charging Blind

But however tailored the meal planning, some aspects of managing Hungryroot’s service can nonetheless be infuriating. During the sign-up process, you will be asked countless questions about your preferences, and be informed that Hungryroot’s software is busy creating a menu profile on your behalf—attuned, presumably, to the desires in your heart.

But until you enter your credit card information and commit to a meal plan for the first week, you won’t be allowed to see the options generated on your behalf. Which is to say, you’re asked to commit to an order—at a minimum, $52 for four servings of dinner—without yet knowing precisely what the order might contain. If you do sign up and then quickly change your mind, it may also be difficult to reach customer service to cancel.

This will be a problem only for your first delivery. For any successive weeks, cancellation or pauses to your subscription are easy, intuitive, and immediate through the website—as long as you do so by the Thursday before a scheduled delivery.

But this introductory-week lock-in has become a bit of meal-kit industry standard, and Hungryroot makes it more difficult than most plans to see the week’s available meals before entering your credit card. In part, this is a result of Hungryroot's personal and regional customization. That said, Hungryroot does allow you to browse a mind-boggling 12,000 potential recipes in its online “Cookbook,” without commitment.

Another quibble: Though meals were enjoyable overall, both of us came away thinking Hungryroot's food could have often done with a bit more zip. “My biggest takeaway from almost every meal was that it needed a dynamic element in flavor—most meals would’ve been drastically improved with something crunchy, fresh, acidic (or with a little spice) to notch up the sometimes-one-note umami flavor,” Molly noted.

Calibrating the intensity of spice or bright acidity is always a delicate balancing act for meal kits, which must appeal to even the gentlest palates. Most kits, understandably, err on the side of letting customers resort to the hot sauce in their bag. But as the artificial intelligence developed by Hungryroot gets more sophisticated, it's not hard to imagine a future where it isn't just the shopping cart that's personalized, but also the spice or acid balance on each recipe.

The promise of Hungryroot is of course endless customization, an AI-assisted whittling down from literal thousands of options to just the things you like. This amounts to a potential vision of food delivery's future, as apps predict your preferences and offer to send the ingredients to your home. For now, Hungryroot's meal-kit present is also pretty copacetic.