I Tried Freshprep Meal Prep Delivery: Here’s How It Changed My Life

Fresh Prep is a Vancouver-based company that helps eliminate the obstacles to cooking a wholesome meal at home

Making dinners at home on a regular basis has been a goal of mine for a long time, and one that I’ve found very challenging until I started using Fresh Prep’s meal prep delivery service. I work full-time, go to school part-time, exercise, shoot and edit photos for clients, create content for my blog, try to keep my house clean, and so on. Even though it’s important to me to eat healthy and save money, my weekly commitments left me little time for choosing recipes, grocery shopping, and making meals from scratch. If you’ve experienced similar challenges and find it hard to cook at home with your busy schedule, keep reading!

I’ve tried different strategies, like meal prepping on Sundays for the rest of the week, but I prefer to eat freshly made meals and I got tired of eating the same meal for dinner two days in a row. I found it difficult to decide on a week’s worth of recipes beforehand so I’d often pick a recipe the day of. I’d go grocery shopping right after work and it would be late at night when I was finally done cooking, eating, and cleaning up. It wasn’t until I tried Fresh Prep that all the pieces clicked into place and my goal of cooking homemade meals became a consistent reality. Damon and I have been using it since October 2017 and it has changed our lives.

Here’s how Fresh Prep changed our life (keep reading until the end for a code for 3 FREE plates):

1. It provides complete meal kits with all the ingredients and simple, delicious, and easy to follow recipes that you select the week before (you can also have Fresh Prep choose for you based on your dietary preferences).

Each Fresh Prep bag contains prepped and portioned ingredients

2. Ingredients are PREPPED, as in cut, chopped, diced, and measured. With the exception of some ingredients (like lemons and lime) that are kept whole, your cooking time is reduced significantly because your onions, garlic, butternut squash, carrots, etc. are already chopped up. I hate cutting onions and we all know how long it takes to cut butternut squash, so this part of Fresh Prep is a God-send! We’ve tried 3 other meal prep services (I’ll talk about that in a different post), and Fresh Prep sends the most pre-prepped ingredients out of all of them.

Fresh Prep ingredients for Beef Pad Thai. Fresh Prep uses free-range eggs, sustainably sourced seafood, and meat that’s free from antibiotics and hormones.

3. All the meals are done in under 30 minutes. I’ve come in wildly over the time estimates in cookbooks enough to be totally distrusting of under-30-minute claims, but I’ve realized that most of the time is taken up by prep work. With Fresh Prep, meals actually take less than 30 minutes! Some meals, like the delicious Vietnamese Vermicelli and Tofu Salad with Crunchy Peanuts, Thai Basil and Lime only take 20 minutes. It’s amazing to come home after work and have dinner ready in half an hour.

A happy cook. I’m wearing the Maxwell dress from MM.Lafleur

4. Fresh Prep meals are delicious. Let’s be honest, there’s no point using a meal prep delivery service if the recipes don’t end up tasting good. Fresh Prep has completely exceeded our expectations. There’s so much variety week after week. We’ve had Italian, French, Korean, Chinese, Thai, and Greek cuisine along with some healthy Westcoast-style dishes. There are 8 different recipes to choose from each week comprising of fish (such as salmon, tilapia and shrimp), chicken, turkey, beef, pork, and vegetarian recipes. There’s usually about 3-4 vegetarian recipes each week. Some recipes that have been such a huge hit that I literally want to beg Fresh Prep to bring them back, such as Maple Glazed Salmon with Chard & Quinoa Pilaf, Chicken Thighs with Pan Gravy, Garlic Fingerling Potatoes & Parmesan Green Beans, Butternut Squash Mac & Cheese with Asiago, Kale & Caramelized Onions, and Spinach Lemon Garlic Linguine with Shrimp & White Wine. 

Fresh Prep‘s delicious Spinach Lemon Garlic Linguine with Shrimp & White Wine

5. There’s zero food waste. All the ingredients are portioned so you use everything you get. I love cilantro and it drove me crazy to have stems of cilantro leftover and go bad in the fridge. It’s so nice to get the exact portion of ingredients that you need for a recipe. As for spices, there’s no more buying a $8 jar of spices that you use one time. Other than salt, pepper, olive oil, and the occasional butter, they’ll provide all the spices.

6. You can pack a lunch! You can get as many meals/week and portions/meal as you like, which means that a great time and money-saving strategy is to utilize Fresh Prep to pack your lunch. If you live alone, you can pack the leftovers from the 2-person meal for lunch. If you’re a couple or a family, you can add 2 additional portions to each meal so that you have enough leftovers for lunch. Now you can make dinners at home and bring a lunch. #Adulting!

Fresh Prep delivers their ingredients in reusable cooler bags. (Also how cute is my rooster dish towel?)

7. Fresh Prep makes home-cooking FUN and the variety in recipes means our cooking repertoire has expanded enormously over the last 4 months. I’ve learned some amazing recipes and some useful tips and tricks. Damon’s favorite thing about Fresh Prep (aside from having way more homemade dinners) is that he gets to try new recipes when he’s taking a turn to cook. Damon is a very competent cook but he said that he ends up cooking similar dishes over and over again. Fresh Prep gives him a chance to make dishes he wouldn’t have normally made, such as vegetarian dishes and ethnic dishes. Our weekly menu with Fresh Prep is fun and exciting and we look forward to dinner at home every day.

8. We are saving money and eating healthy. Servings cost as low as $9.75, which works out $78/week if you order 4 meals a week for a couple. Damon and I are aiming for a 28-day Eat-at-home Challenge next month, or 7 nights/week of home cooking, which works out to $136.50/week of Fresh Prep meals, the same as about 2 dinners at a restaurant. If you have a family of 4 (or more), or if you want to order 2 extra servings to pack for lunch, the price/serving is as low as $9.00.

9. Fresh Prep makes me feel successful in achieving my goal to cook dinner regularly and confident that I can continue this habit. It makes me feel like a great home cook, helps me save money, and it makes the nights when we do go out to eat a special occasion.

If you’d like to eat at home more often, I hope you give Fresh Prep a try because I think you’ll love it. Fresh Prep is available in the Greater Vancouver area, including Squamish, Abbotsford, and Tsawwassen (see their delivery zone map).

Get 3 FREE plates in your first Fresh Prep order by using this link

I’m wearing the Maxwell dress from MM.Lafleur