Sunbasket vs. Green Chef

Sunbasket Pros and Cons

Green Chef Pros and Cons

Sunbasket vs. Green Chef: Price

Sunbasket meal kits start at $11.49 per serving, and the prices go up from there depending on what you order. When choosing your meals, you must meet an order minimum of $45 before checking out. While most meals on the menu hover around $13-$15 per serving, some entrees can get as pricey as $17.99 per serving. Sunbasket also offers Fresh & Ready meals, which start at $9.99 per serving. However, because Green Chef does not offer a similar product, we'll disregard this for the purposes of our price comparison.

Meanwhile, Green Chef starts at $11.99 per serving for the maximum plan of four meals per week with six servings each. But, unlike Sunbasket, Green Chef operates on a volume-based pricing system, meaning the per-serving cost will depend on the size of the order. For example, if you order the minimum plan, which includes three two-serving meals per week, the price increases to $13.49 per serving—but that's about as expensive as it gets.

Both Sunbasket and Green Chef charge a flat rate of $9.99 for shipping. Sunbasket also offers a large selection of excellent add-ons that will likely tempt you to fork over additional cash. We tried several of these items and were consistently impressed.

Between the average meal costs and the add-ons, you'll likely end up spending more with Sunbasket. On the other hand, if you stick to lower-priced meals and stay away from the add-ons, you could end up spending slightly less than with Green Chef. For now, Green Chef wins on price. However, it's a small difference, and price alone seems unlikely to be a deciding factor in this contest.

Sunbasket vs. Green Chef: Meal Choices

Both Green Chef and Sunbasket have good variety both within weeks and week-to-week, with a diverse array of veggies, proteins, and flavor profiles. Additionally, both companies' menus are around the same size, with Green Chef offering 30 meal kits each week and Sunbasket offering 17 meal kits and 16 Fresh & Ready prepared meals, for a total of 33 menu options. However, Sunbasket also features a robust selection of add-on items, including breakfast items, sides, snacks, and sweets, while Green Chef does not.

Green Chef offers meals that accommodate six different dietary preferences: Keto + Paleo, Mediterranean, Vegetarian, Vegan, Gluten-Free, and Fast & Fit (which includes convenient, calorie-conscious meals). While there's no menu filter that allows you to sort the dishes by these preferences, each dish is tagged with the appropriate dietary style, making it easy to find what you need.

Sunbasket, on the other hand, has multiple menu filters that allow you to sort various dietary accommodations to the top of the list when making your selections. These filters include eating styles like vegetarian, pescatarian, diabetic-friendly, paleo, and keto-friendly, as well as dietary avoidances including dairy, soy, and shellfish. You can even sort by sodium, sugar, protein, fiber, carb, and calorie content.

Overall, Sunbasket seems to serve more types of diets than Green Chef. In practice, though, Sunbasket is really best for omnivores than for strict adherents. If you're committed to a specific diet—like keto or paleo, for example—Green Chef may be the better choice because, while Sunbasket gives you access to more weekly options, it actually has fewer options than Green Chef within these specific dietary categories. Basically, Sunbasket is better if you're somewhat flexible with your diet, interested in mixing and matching from different plans, and stocking your pantry with yummy add-ons.

Many of Sunbasket's meal kits let you swap proteins. Green Chef's meals, on the other hand, are unalterable. As mentioned above, Sunbasket has many more add-ons, so if you're looking for flexibility and overall variety, Sunbasket is the clear winner. But if sticking to a specific diet is important to you, Green Chef is likely the better choice.

Sunbasket vs. Green Chef: Creativity of Dishes

Sunbasket let us down in this area. Even its "Chef's Table" selections, which carry a premium price and which the company describes as "designed with extra-luxe ingredients and innovative flavor combinations," failed to impress our tasters. The dishes were fine, but not particularly interesting, innovative, or worth the extra cost.

Sunbasket's meals are often built simply from a protein, sautéed vegetables, or salad, and pre-made sauce. Our "Chef's Table" fettuccine and scallop dish was tasty, but it lacked complexity and was excessively dominated by the flavor of sun-dried tomatoes. Sunbasket's standard dishes impressed us even less, particularly in terms of flavor. Innovation is nice, but to enjoy a meal, all that's required is a pleasant counterpoint of a few well-chosen flavors and textures. Too often, Sunbasket's dishes were one-note, or even somewhat bland. Only one dish was memorable: a steak dish that featured a delicious chipotle mustard vinaigrette. All others were forgettable.

Green Chef, on the other hand, wins this area handily. While our meals were not especially complex or innovative, they were all delicious, with little touches that made them distinctive and memorable. Hazelnuts added a pleasant crunch and nutty counterpoint to spicy honey-glazed carrots and green beans; pepitas and a Cuban spice blend elevated meatballs with dirty cauliflower rice; and coconut and sesame-ginger amino sauce beautifully accented flaky filets of barramundi.

Sunbasket vs. Green Chef: Flavor, Freshness, and Quality

There were no major issues here with either company. We did find Green Chef's seafood to be slightly higher quality. The fish in our honey-citrus glazed salmon, for instance, was more moist and flavorful than the salmon in Sunbasket's farro bowl with spinach and green goddess dressing. And speaking of Sunbasket's farro bowl, the apricots in it were nearly flavorless. Sunbasket's beef, however, was excellent. We tried rib-eyes and New York strips; both were well-marbled and succulent. Overall, both services do a good job, but Green Chef has the edge here, both in terms of ingredients and the flavor profiles of the finished dishes.

Sunbasket vs. Green Chef: Recipe Clarity/Difficulty

Neither service creates difficult recipes that require a high level of cooking skill. If you can chop and sauté vegetables, cook pasta and grains, pan-sear proteins, and follow directions, you'll do just fine. Sunbasket's are somewhat easier because the company has a category of recipes that requires no vegetable chopping. This was the case with the Farro Bowl discussed above. The farro and all the veggies were pre-prepped. All we had to do was cook the protein and combine everything.

Green Chef does not offer pre-prepped ingredients, but it does give you some assistance. On the keto + paleo plan, where cauliflower "rice" is frequently utilized, the cauliflower arrives already in its "riced" state. Roasted peppers in the dirty rice were already roasted. But there are no kits like the few Sunbasket offers with no chopping required.

Sunbasket probably wins here because of the greater level of pre-preparation that's available, as well as the presence of Fresh & Ready meals that require no cooking at all. Still, this is unlikely to be a dealbreaker either way. As in the price comparison, we don't think there's a meaningful difference in the cooking difficulty. Neither service is very difficult; and if you do find it hard, you'll quickly learn.

Sunbasket vs. Green Chef: Supporting Material

Both companies include printed recipes in the box. We weren't a big fan of Sunbasket's. They're smaller than Green Chef's, printed on roughly 4- by 6-inch folding glossy card stock, without pictures of each step. In contrast, Green Chef uses large (roughly 8 1/2- by 11-inch) color glossy card stock with helpful pictures of each step.

In the course of our meal kit testing, we've found that sometimes reading recipes detracts from the fun of cooking. Especially with simple recipes like these, we enjoy using pictures to guide us rather than reading the tedious description of the cooking actions. "Peel and thinly slice the onion. Scrub the potatoes; cut the potatoes crosswise into 1/4-inch-thick slices..." After you've made a few kits, you don't need to read these details anymore, but with Sunbasket you have to because there are no pictures.

Both Green Chef and Sunbasket have apps, but only Sunbasket puts your recipes in the app. These digital versions are a little easier to read than the printed recipes, but there are no pictures on the app either. Green Chef easily dominates this area.

Sunbasket vs. Green Chef: Types of Diets Served

Sunbasket serves the following diets: paleo, gluten-free, lean and clean, carb-conscious, vegetarian, mediterranean, pescatarian, and diabetes-friendly. Green Chef serves the following diets: vegetarian, keto, paleo, and "balanced living," which basically means omnivore. Green Chef has subcategories within these plans, like vegan and pescatarian, but this doesn't change the menu, only the selections that Green Chef makes on your behalf if you decide not to choose your own meals. Both services also tag their kits with labels like gluten-free and dairy-free to make it easier to see when a kit has certain attributes that you may be looking for.

In Green Chef's Keto + Paleo category, all nine options are keto, but only four or five also carry the paleo tag. Sunbasket's selections are a big grab bag of all its dietary labels, and categories often overlap. Neither service expressly caters to Whole30, but if you're following this diet, you'll likely do equally well with either service, although you may have to occasionally leave out a minor component, like crumbled feta.

As mentioned, Green Chef does not allow you to customize any of the recipes. What you see is what you get. Sunbasket does give you some different protein choices. There are some Sunbasket kits that let you choose from among a dozen or so different proteins, include plant-based "meats" and tofu.

The services are pretty similar in this area as well. Calling a winner is a tough choice, but we give the edge to Green Chef because it has more choices within specific popular diets like vegetarian and keto.

Sunbasket vs. Green Chef: Nutritional Value

This is another category that is unlikely to sway you one way or the other. We'll go ahead and give the win to Sunbasket here for one simple reason: When utilizing grains, Sunbasket tends to include whole grains more often than Green Chef, which often makes use of white rice and white flour buns and tortillas.

Green Chef does use whole and semi-whole grains here and there, such as quinoa and pearled barley, but overall there's more white rice, white-flour pasta, and the like than there is on Sunbasket's menu. Aside from this difference, nutritional profiles are very similar, with comparable calorie counts, macronutrient breakdowns, servings of vegetables, and protein portion sizes.

Both services make all this information equally accessible, with full ingredient lists and nutritional breakdowns viewable for each recipe, both online and in each company's app.

Sunbasket vs. Green Chef: Customer Service

Sunbasket's customer service agents are available via phone, text, and email. In addition, there is a FAQ; an automated web-based system for reporting and resolving issues with your order; "Ask An Expert," a feature allowing you to get answers from knowledgable Sunbasket customers; and a chatbot.

The self-service feature and the chatbot seem to be essentially the same thing presented in different formats. You can use them for reporting things like a damaged box, missing or incorrect items, and more, and you may receive a resolution automatically. One of our boxes arrived damaged and we were offered an immediate refund/credit through the automated system. We declined because our meals were unharmed, but it was good to know that the issue could be so easily resolved.

We had a few general questions, so we reached out to an agent via text and received a response about 40 minutes later. The agent answered all of our questions, but one answer—that we'd receive free shipping on an order over $90—turned out to be incorrect. We like chat-based customer service (with a human agent) and were disappointed that Sunbasket does not provide this avenue.

Green Chef, however, does have a web-based chat feature staffed with live agents. The company also provides phone support seven days a week. We found Green Chef's FAQ section to be more useful and comprehensive than Sunbasket's, not to mention easier to find. We reached out to an agent over web-chat to ask a handful of basic questions. All were promptly answered, and the accuracy of those answers has held up. Green Chef wins.

Sunbasket vs. Green Chef: Making Changes and Canceling

The companies are similar with regard to managing delivery changes. The only difference is that Sunbasket lets you enter a temporary delivery address, applicable to a single delivery, while Green Chef only allows you to change your address in your account settings. Both services allow you to change your delivery day, skip weeks, and cancel your service from within account settings. Sunbasket allows you to cancel from its mobile app, but Green Chef only allows cancellation via its website.

It's much more meaningful and straightforward to change your plan with Green Chef. When you change your Sunbasket plan you get this message "Changing your selections will only impact future unpublished weeks. Switch back any time." This means that you must wait a few weeks for your changes to be reflected in Sunbasket's automatic selections.

With Sunbasket you always see the same menu, regardless of which plan you're on. The automatic selections change based on your preferences, but only newly published weeks will reflect recent changes, while previously published weeks won't be affected. That means you'll have to make your own choices for a few weeks before your changes fully take effect.

Sunbasket vs. Green Chef: Additional Features

Both services have mobile apps that allow you to manage your deliveries, account settings, and be notified of shipments and deliveries. Sunbasket, as we've discussed, has a huge number of add-ons that Green Chef doesn't have. In terms of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG), Green Chef offsets its carbon emissions and Sunbasket donates food and meals to charitable organizations.