Sunbasket vs. Home Chef

Sunbasket Pros and Cons

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Home Chef Pros and Cons

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Sunbasket vs. Home Chef: Price

Sunbasket has a very "what you see is what you get" pricing model. Meal kits start at $11.49 per serving and Fresh & Ready prepared meals start at $9.99 each, and the price goes up from there depending on what you select. While many meals hover around the $13 to $15 range, some meals can go up to $17.99 per serving. Sunbasket has a weekly order minimum of $45, and you can essentially order whatever you like to get to that price point. There's also a $9.99 shipping fee, but it doesn't count toward the $45 minimum.

Home Chef, on the other hand, operates on a volume-based pricing system, which means the servings get cheaper the more you order. For example, if you choose the minimum weekly order of two meals with two servings each, the per-serving cost is $11.99. However, if you order six meals with six servings each (the maximum weekly order for Home Chef), the price drops to $9.99 per serving. Protein customizations, selecting Culinary Collection meals, or adding extra items may cause an uptick in price. No matter which plan you choose, the shipping is a flat rate of $10.99 per delivery.

Both services offer premium meal kits with higher price tags, as well as add-ons like breakfast items and a la carte proteins. However, even with these categories, overall, you'll easily spend more with Sunbasket. There is one exception, though. If you look only at the Fresh & Ready/Easy Prep categories, Sunbasket is the better choice, both in terms of price and choice of meals. Otherwise, when it comes to price, Home Chef is the winner.

Sunbasket vs. Home Chef: Meal Choices

Sunbasket offers 17 weekly meal kit options and another 16 Fresh & Ready choices. The meal kits are divided into two categories: standard and "speedy," which are designed to be ready to enjoy in 15 to 20 minutes. The number of options in each category varies from week to week. All Sunbasket's kits serve two, but you can order up to eight of any one kit, for a total of 16 servings of any particular meal.

Sunbasket also has a vast collection of over 100 add-ons—everything from juices to snacks to fresh lobster ravioli. We tried several of Sunbasket's add-ons and enjoyed them all—sometimes more than the meal kits themselves.

Home Chef's meal kits are also divided into two categories: standard meal kits and "easy prep" meal kits, which require little to no prep and minimal cooking time. Like Sunbasket, Home Chef typically offers around 15 standard kits and 15 easy prep kits, for a total of 30 meal options weekly. All menu items are available in sizes of two, four, and six servings. There's also a collection of over 30 weekly "extras," including things like dessert, breakfast and lunch items, salads, and assorted à la carte proteins.

When it comes to eating styles, Sunbasket caters to more types of diets than Home Chef. Vegetarians, vegans, and followers of the paleo diet will have more luck with Sunbasket's menu. Both companies allow protein swaps in a majority of their kits, but Sunbasket consistently offers a broader selection of substitutions.

Both companies offer substantial variety within their weekly menus, with a broad selection of vegetables, proteins, and internationally inspired flavors. And both change their menus weekly, so you get plenty of variety across time. That said, given Sunbasket's larger selection of add-ons and protein substitutes, the company prevails when it comes to choice.

Sunbasket vs. Home Chef: Creativity of Dishes

In terms of creativity, Sunbasket and Home Chef left us feeling equally unimpressed, but in slightly different ways. Home Chef's menu didn't set us up to expect a lot of creativity, so we weren't let down by simple dishes or average flavors. Conversely, we had high hopes for Sunbasket, and so we felt more disappointed by the relatively expensive yet boring food. In fact, a soup and a personal-size pizza from Sunbasket's collection of add-ons (which Sunbasket doesn't make) were more flavorful and memorable than most of the meal kits we tried.

With Home Chef you're paying for convenience more than creativity, so the simplicity is indeed a feature, not an error. Indeed, a couple of our simple dishes—beef kofta lettuce wraps, for instance, and steak with porcini mushroom sauce—were quite delicious.

Sunbasket, on the other hand, failed to deliver on creativity and flavor. Our salmon farro bowl with apricots sounded interesting on paper, but the apricots were flavorless and the green goddess dressing was pale and bland. Moreover, the premium "Chef's Table" meals turned out to be rather basic—just protein and sautéed veggies, or protein and pasta—and not flavorful enough to justify the extra cost.

While there's no big winner here, we'd rather you be pleasantly surprised than disappointed, so we'll give this one to Home Chef.

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

Overall, we found Home Chef to be more flavorful, and when a dish was a little on the bland side, it was easy to fix. None of the flavors were off or objectionable. More often the problem was that elements lacked flavor or they weren't anything more than the sum of the parts.

Sunbasket tends to let its sauces do the heavy lifting, and sometimes they aren't up to the task. In addition to the bland green goddess dressing and the flavorless apricots, a spicy pineapple mayo in a coconut shrimp dish was similarly lackluster. However, a chipotle mustard vinaigrette that accompanied a steak dish was scrumptious.

Luckily, neither freshness nor quality was an issue. The vegetables were uniformly lively and the proteins—whether beef, poultry, or seafood—were fresh and of high quality.

Sunbasket vs. Home Chef: Recipe Clarity/Difficulty

Neither company's recipes were difficult to execute. Beginners should be able to handle the technical requirements; the knife work is simple, the procedures straightforward, and the multitasking kept to a reasonable minimum. Slicing and dicing vegetables, searing proteins, and boiling pasta, grains, and so on make up the bulk of the kitchen work. As long as you don't get distracted and burn something, or neglect to season the food, your dishes should turn out well.

You won't need a lot of special gear, either. A modest set of pots and pans, a sharp knife, citrus zester, strainer, sheet pan, and an oven will likely accomplish most tasks. And both companies ask that you supply only salt, pepper, and cooking oil.

This category is an honest-to-goodness tie. There's no meaningful difference here between the two companies.

Sunbasket vs. Home Chef: Supporting Material

Both services supply you with printed recipes. Home Chef prints its recipes on 8 1/2 x 11 color glossy card stock, and each step in the recipe features an illustrative photo. The pictures are really helpful. Once you've prepared a few meal kits, reading instructions can become tedious, and sap some of the pleasure from the process. As a bonus, Home Chef's recipe cards are three-hole punched so you can organize them in a binder.

Sunbasket's recipe cards are relatively small, printed on approximately 4" x 6" folded glossy card stock. There are no pictures to illustrate the steps, only descriptive text and a photo of the finished dish. We preferred Home Chef's hard copies over Sunbasket's.

Both Home Chef and Sunbasket also offer mobile apps with digital versions of the recipes. Like its printed recipes, Sunbasket's app doesn't include step-by-step photos either. Home Chef's app has the same photos as the cards, plus a place to input notes in case you want to make the recipe again.

Note that both apps file all the recipes you've received into a recipe/cookbook section—very handy if you want to recreate any of the kits on your own. But Home Chef takes this one step further with a Shopping List feature. In the cookbook section of the Home Chef app, just tap "Add to Shopping List" under the recipe you want to recreate. For the Shopping List feature and the hole-punched recipe cards with step-by-step photos, the win in this category goes to Home Chef.

Sunbasket vs. Home Chef: Types of Diets Served

Home Chef is not ideal for people following a special diet. The "Calorie Conscious" and "Carb Conscious" tags are about as far as the company goes. You can select a vegetarian plan, but the number of natively vegetarian dishes is quite small. Many dishes can be made vegetarian by swapping out the main protein. However, the only such alternative is Impossible Burger, which could get old fast.

If you maintain a special diet, Sunbasket is the better choice. The company accommodates the following: paleo, gluten-free, carb-conscious, vegetarian, Mediterranean, pescatarian, diabetes-friendly, fresh and ready, keto-friendly, and meals under 600 calories per serving. Whole30 is not explicitly supported, but many meals qualify, though perhaps with some minor modifications. Sunbasket also supports protein substitutions for many of its meals, and the selection is more diverse than Home Chef's.

Sunbasket vs. Home Chef: Nutritional Value

Sunbasket gets the win here for two reasons. First, as noted above, Sunbasket provides a much greater level of support for healthful diets. Roughly half of the weekly options fall into the under 600 calories category, and those dishes with more calories typically top out around 900. Added sugars are relatively rare. Second, when its meals include grains, Sunbasket is more apt to draw on whole grains such as brown rice, quinoa, and whole-wheat bread.

Home Chef's meals peak closer to 1,100 calories per serving and are more likely to include refined grains like white rice, white bread, and added sugars. Home Chef also provides less nutritional information than Sunbasket, leaving out metrics for cholesterol, saturated and unsaturated fats, fiber, and sugars, and sometimes withholding some ingredient information, like, for instance, what comprises a cream sauce base.

To illustrate the overall difference between the two companies' nutritional approaches, we compared one of Home Chef's higher-calorie meals with one of Sunbasket's more indulgent selections. The ciabatta steak sandwich with bacon aioli from Home Chef contains 994 calories, 86g of carbohydrates, 52g of fat, 47g of protein, and 1550mg of sodium. Sunbasket's black Angus rib-eye with horseradish mayo and Lyonnaise potatoes has 890 calories, 57g of carbohydrates, 50g total fat, 57g of protein, and 540mg of sodium. Sunbasket is the winner here.

Sunbasket vs. Home Chef: Customer Service

Home Chef has an exhaustive FAQ that covers most basic questions about the service. If that fails, Home Chef has a contact form on its site, as well as a customer service call center that operates Monday through Saturday. There were no problems with our order, but we called customer service anyway to test it out. A friendly agent answered right away and helpfully answered a few simple questions.

Sunbasket provides customer service over the phone, as well as via text and email. There are also a number of self-serve features, including an FAQ; an automated web-based system for reporting issues; the "Ask An Expert" feature, which connects you to knowledgable longtime Sunbasket customers; and, finally, a chatbot.

The automated reporting system and the chatbot appear to be the same thing presented in different ways. You can report a damaged box, missing or incorrect items, and more, and sometimes resolve the issue without having to talk to a human. For instance, one of our boxes arrived damaged. We reported it, and the system automatically gave us a refund/credit.

To obtain general info, we also reached out to a Sunbasket agent via text and received a response about 40 minutes later. The agent answered all of our questions. However, the agent said we'd receive free shipping on an order over $90 which turned out to be incorrect. This error notwithstanding, we'll give this category to Sunbasket simply because it provides more avenues for service than Home Chef.

Sunbasket vs. Home Chef: Making Changes and Canceling

The two companies are closely comparable in this area, allowing you to enter a temporary delivery address, change your delivery day, skip weeks, and cancel your service from within your account settings. Sunbasket allows you to cancel from its mobile app, but Home Chef only permits an indefinite pause.

Both services let you change your delivery day. Sunbasket delivers Sunday through Thursday, and Home Chef delivers Monday through Friday. Both also permit weekly deliveries.

Home Chef's deadline for making changes gives you a bit more flexibility than Sunbasket's. Its menu closes at noon Central time the Friday before delivery, whereas Sunbasket's is noon Pacific the Wednesday before delivery. For this reason alone, we'll give the edge to Home Chef.