Mindful Chef Review 2024

Mindful Chef Visit Site

Mindful Chef at a Glance

What is Mindful Chef?

Mindful Chef is a recipe box subscription service with a unique focus on health, sustainability, and fresh, seasonal produce. It believes that delicious meals begin with the best ingredients, and all ingredients in recipe boxes are sourced from trusted farms.

Recipes are geared around whole grains, legumes, and pulses and never contain refined carbs or cheap fillers – which meant I never got that post-carb-slump after eating! All meals are gluten and dairy-free too, so people with these dietary requirements are well catered for.

Mindful Chef is ideal for anyone who cares about what they’re putting into their body – and where that food comes from, too. There are plenty of varied vegan meals to choose from. For dishes that contain meat, the fish is MSC sustainably caught, the beef is British and grass-fed, and the chicken is free-range.

Mindful Chef Meal Plans

There are three recipe boxes available from Mindful Chef: standard, vegan, and family. You can choose two to five recipes per week, and if you’ve opted for a standard or vegan recipe box, you can select meals for one or two people. Family recipe boxes are for either four adults or two adults and two to three children. 

There are 20 recipes to choose from in the standard and family meal plans, and usually around eight recipes for the vegan meal plans. These change every week, so there’s plenty of variety.

If you’re pressed for time, Mindful Chef also has a ‘Ready To Go’ range, which offers healthy frozen ready meals, smoothies, soups and broths, desserts, breakfasts, snacks, and vitamins. So staying healthy is easy, even if you don’t have time to cook.

Mindful Chef dietary options and programs

All Mindful Chef meals are healthy, balanced, and gluten and dairy free. Because of this, the dietary options are classed as vegan or non-vegan.

The recipes available with the standard box plan include many meat-free options, so it’s ideal for people who enjoy a flexitarian diet.

How Mindful Chef Works

Mindful Chef is really easy to use. Head over to the website, decide whether you want a standard, vegan, or family box and choose your meals. After you’ve done that, you’ll be asked to set up an account. Then enter your name, email address, create a password, and you’ll be fully set up as a Mindful Chef member.

Once you’re a member, you’ll just need to fill out your delivery details and enter your payment information.

How To Get Started With Mindful Chef

Getting started with Mindful Chef couldn’t be simpler – and I say that as someone who isn’t very tech-savvy at all! Once you’ve entered all your info and become a member, you can browse from the different meal plans – standard, vegan, and family – and select your meals.

Choosing your meals is easy. Clicking each photo of a meal brings up a box containing info about ingredients, allergens, calories and macros, so you know exactly what you’re consuming. Each recipe is deliciously described too, so the only hard part will be deciding which meals you want to try first!

Once you’ve selected your meals and entered your delivery information and payment details, you can then place your order, and your Mindful Chef meals will be on their way.

Mindful Chef Customer Service

If you have a question, you can head over to the Mindful Chef online help centre. There you can find answers to questions about suppliers, your account, packaging, delivery, the ‘Ready To Go’ range, and the Mindful Chef brand.

There’s also an FAQs page and articles explaining certain topics in more detail – such as how you can refer a friend to NHS discount offers. There’s also a Mindful Chef blog, where you can find lots of recipe inspiration – from warming weeknight dinners to speedy summer suppers!

If you can’t find what you’re looking for in the help centre, you can contact customer support. You can submit a request via an online form, or email the support team – who are available Monday to Sunday 9am-6pm – at hello@mindfulchef.com.

Alternatively, you can call customer services on 020 3950 0455. Lines are open Monday-Friday 9am-6pm. You can also contact Mindful Chef via their Instagram account. A member of staff will respond to your query as soon as possible.

How To Cancel or Pause a Mindful Chef Subscription

If you’re going on holiday or just fancy taking a break from your Mindful Chef subscription, you can skip deliveries, or change the frequency of your deliveries to every three or four weeks. Subscriptions are flexible, so just log into your Mindful Chef account and head over to the ‘Preferences’ page.

If you’d like to cancel your account, you can do this via the ‘Preferences’ page, too. However, if you’ve had any issues with your box or are unhappy with the service, the Mindful Chef team encourages you to get in touch with them before leaving, so they can try to fix the problem.

Is There a Mindful Chef App?

Many of us – myself included – prefer using apps to websites, so the good news is that Mindful Chef has a really great app. It’s quick, convenient, and simple to use. All of which makes healthy eating even easier. 

From the app, you can schedule your recipe boxes, state your food preferences, manage your account, skip a delivery, rate your recipes, and report any issues with deliveries. The ‘Ready to Go’ range has also recently been added to the app, so you can schedule, view, and cancel your orders there too.

You can download the Mindful Chef App on both iOS and Android.

Mindful Chef Pricing

How Much Does Mindful Chef Cost?

The exact pricing for a Mindful Chef subscription varies. It depends on the types of recipes you choose, how many meals you receive, and whether your meals are for one, two, or four people. If you’re choosing meals for two people, plant-based recipes start from around £6.25 per person, whereas meals containing meat or fish range from around £7.50 to £9.25.

As you can see, the family meal plan offers the best value. Standard and vegan meals for one will be significantly more expensive than meals for two. Couples may want to consider subscribing to a family meal plan as it’s much better value, plus you’ll end up with leftovers you can either eat the next day or freeze for another time.

However, it’s worth mentioning that if you subscribe to a family meal plan, you can only choose four meals a week, not five.

As far as pricing goes, Mindful Chef is more expensive than the industry average. However, the brand not only uses the finest ingredients from local, sustainable farmers, but each meal is delicious, varied, and nutritionally balanced. 

Mindful Chef also works with charities, is a carbon-neutral and B-Corp brand, and is guided by strong ethical principles. As someone who is trying to be more mindful about what I’m eating, this is a major positive for me. I’m happy to pay a bit extra to know my food arrived on my plate sustainably and ethically. 

Optional add-ons

Mindful Chef offers a ‘Ready to Go’ section where you can add frozen ready meals, snacks, desserts, smoothies, breakfasts, and vitamins to your meal plans. Frozen meals start from just £4.50, so this is a cheaper way to ensure you always have healthy meals to hand.

Mindful Chef Alternatives

How Does Mindful Chef Compare to Other Meal Delivery Services? 

Mindful Chef vs HelloFresh

Mindful Chef is more expensive than HelloFresh. However, given Mindful Chef’s clear dedication to sourcing top-quality ingredients from sustainable, ethical farmers, the increased price seems fair. While HelloFresh has more meal plans, it has fewer options for dietary needs and doesn’t cater for vegan, gluten-free, or dairy-free diets.

Mindful Chef vs SimplyCook

Unlike Mindful Chef, SimplyCook isn’t a meal delivery subscription – it's a recipe kit service. Each letterbox-sized delivery contains four recipe kits that include flavour pots, garnishes, and spices. Detailed instructions are also provided, so you can make restaurant-quality meals in 20 minutes. However, the recipe kits don’t contain any fresh ingredients, so you’ll need to purchase those yourself.

Mindful Chef vs Green Chef

Green Chef offers more variety than Mindful Chef, providing six different diet plans to choose from – including vegan, vegetarian, lower carb, flexitarian, keto, and pescatarian. It also comes in cheaper, with meal kits starting at £37.50 instead of £64.50. However, there is less emphasis on seasonal, sustainable, and ethical eating, which is Mindful Chef’s USP.

Mindful Chef Visit Site

Bottom Line (Is Mindful Chef Worth It?)

While Mindful Chef is more expensive than other meal kit delivery services, it’s an excellent option for people who are interested in eating healthily, sustainably, and ethically. Mindful Chef has a passion for sourcing seasonal food from local farmers and supporting charity programs like One Feeds Two, which I find admirable.

On a more personal note, as someone who tries to follow a mostly vegan diet, I was happy to see that the plant-based recipes were just as diverse and delicious as recipes containing meat and fish. Unlike other meal kit brands, they never felt like an afterthought, which I appreciated.

FAQs

Is Mindful Chef worth the money?

Mindful Chef is worth the higher price point if you value eating healthy, delicious, and balanced meals that are ethically and sustainably sourced. Meals are diverse and recipes change regularly, so you definitely won’t get bored.  

Is Mindful Chef the same as HelloFresh?

Mindful Chef and HelloFresh are two separate companies. While both deliver meal kits, Mindful Chef is more focused on nutrition and local, seasonal, and sustainable food. All Mindful Chef recipes are free from gluten, dairy, and refined carbs, and unlike HelloFresh, they offer plenty of plant-based options too.

How much does Mindful Chef cost?

Mindful Chef pricing plans vary depending on the recipes you choose, how many meals you want to receive, and whether your meals are for one, two, or four people. Generally, weekly meal costs range from £64.50 to £87.50.