Dinner is hard guys – especially when you’re not a planning person like I am not. Planning meals, going to the grocery store, figuring out how to take the ingredients in my food and turn them into a dinner – it was exhausting.
Good Food is a meal kit delivery service here in Canada. You pick out your meals from the menu each week and a box of ingredients arrives on your doorstep. I first tried this service a couple of years back after a co-worker recommended it and gave me a code for a free box. It was only after I took a good look at where my time was going and how I could free some of it up to pursue some other creative adventures that I committed to weekly delivery.
Here are 5 reasons why I love my Good Food box, but first, if you’d rather, you can watch How I Simplified Dinner, where I go into the different aspects I love about Good Food including the time, quality, recipes, and cost.
1. Good Food frees up a lot of time and mental space
By getting my meals delivered each week, I don’t have to even think about getting groceries for dinner. I know that a box is going to show up at my doorstep on Monday with everything I’ll need for the week. Further, I don’t have to deal with the stress of opening up the fridge and trying to figure out what I’m going to cook. It’s all there in a bag, I just need to grab one, stick the recipe card on my recipe holder, and simply follow the instructions. Another aspect of this is trying to figure out portions – it’s already portioned the ingredients out so I know I’m going to cook and get four portions of the meal.
2. Good Food eliminates a lot of food waste
When I go grocery shopping and try and meal plan, I never can get the proper amount of ingredients. I tend to bulk buy all the vegetables I need; a bag of carrots, a stalk of celery, a whole box of spring mix lettuce. Since I’m not very good at pre-planning, I buy the stuff I think I’ll need for dinners, and then since I’m not very good at meal planning, the ingredients don’t already have a planned use, and most of the time a lot of food ends up going bad in my refrigerator and ends up in the garbage. Wasting food is such a terrible feeling.
But, with Good Food, since the planning has been completed for me and the ingredients pre-portioned, I don’t waste anything! Another good thing is the plastic that comes with the meal kit is recyclable so there’s minimal waste there as well.
3. Good Food tastes really good
The recipes for the meals you can choose from are incredibly tasty! When I make dinners on my own, they’re not very tasty. It tends to be a sheet pan with chicken that I’ve tossed salt and pepper on, and that’s about it. Very boring.
The spice mixes provided are always nice and complex (and easy too, since they come pre-mixed!). The meals often have some sort of drizzle, topping, or sauce to put on top. And the quinoa or rice is never just quinoa or rice. You always mix in lemon zest or lime juice freshly squeezed using my adorable little cactus juicer.
Overall, the recipes you can choose from with Good Food are just so dang tasty, while still being easy to make.
4. Good Food means we don’t overeat (and always have lunch!)
With Good Food, you get to pick the box you want based on how many portions you need – and then you pick how many meals you want of that portion. So for me and my partner, we get the family box which includes 4 portions per meal. This allows us to always have leftovers for lunch the next day. The nice thing too is because the kit has the structure of so many portions, I automatically portion out the meal into four portions; two on plates and two in containers for lunch. This is helpful because it means we don’t overeat since the food is already portioned out for the next day and we know if we eat it, we won’t have lunch.
5. Good Food helps us save money.
You may think the meal boxes are expensive, and if you were to buy the ingredients in the store you may be able to get them for less money, but overall, for us, Good Food helps us save a ton of money.
Since we get four portions of each meal, we always have lunch for the next day, meaning we no longer spend money on fast food while we’re at work. Further, since we have easy-to-make meal kits in the fridge, I’m less likely to not want to cook and therefore order take-out for dinner. All of the friction that’s associated with making dinner has been eliminated, so I’m not looking for ways to make my life easier when it comes to dinner time – Good Food already has!
I’ve been a paying customer of Good Food since January of this year, so over 5 months now. I even took a break in the middle to try out Whole30 again and the stress of having to cook and grocery shop and meal plan was just as terrible as I had remembered. The happiness when I resumed my Good Food box was immense!
