Is a Meal Kit Actually Worth It for a Family With Fussy Eaters? Our Parent Pack Put EveryPlate to the Test

EveryPlate meal kit was put to the test by one of our Parent Pack families, complete with fussy kids, a particular husband, and real-world dinners. There is a particular kind of optimism involved in sitting down at the beginning of the week and deciding that this will be the week your family eats beautifully planned, nutritionally balanced dinners every night. You make the meal plan, write the shopping list, buy the vegetables and feel remarkably organised about the whole thing. Then Monday arrives. Someone has sport, someone else is late home, you forgot to defrost the chicken and a child who happily ate broccoli last Tuesday announces they have never liked broccoli in their entire life. Your partner then wanders into the kitchen and asks what you’re thinking for dinner while standing approximately three metres from the refrigerator.

By Wednesday, at least one of those carefully selected vegetables is beginning its slow journey towards the bin, nobody wants the dinner you planned and takeaway is starting to look increasingly attractive. It’s little wonder meal kits have become such an appealing proposition for busy families. The promise sounds almost too good: choose your meals, have the ingredients delivered and remove the shopping, planning and 5pm staring-into-the-fridge portion of family life.

But there is one fairly substantial problem with every meal kit marketed to families. The food still has to pass the family test, and convenience means very little if you spend 30 minutes preparing dinner only for your child to look at it as though you’ve served them a bowl of gravel.

So rather than simply looking at what EveryPlate promises, we handed it over to one of our Parenthood360 Parent Pack families to find out what happens when a meal kit meets the people who actually have to eat it. In this particular household, that meant not one but two selective eaters, and our reviewer wasn’t especially optimistic about getting everyone to agree on four dinners.

“If you have a household full of selective eaters, meal planning can feel like an endless battle,” she told us. “In our house, getting my fussy son and my equally particular hubby to agree on a single dinner menu usually requires a minor miracle.”

They decided to give EveryPlate a trial run in the hope of taking some of the pressure out of midweek dinners. Her verdict after putting four meals through the real-world family test? “Honestly, it’s been a massive win for our family dinner routine.”

And that got us thinking. When parents ask whether a meal kit is worth it, perhaps we’re asking the wrong question. It isn’t simply about how much food arrives in the box or how long a recipe takes to prepare. The real question is whether outsourcing some of the thinking around dinner makes family life noticeably easier, while still putting food on the table that everybody actually wants to eat.

Why Does Deciding What’s for Dinner Feel Like Such a Big Job?

The actual cooking isn’t always the exhausting part of feeding a family. It’s the relentless decision-making that comes before anyone turns on the stove. What are we eating? Do we have the ingredients? Will the kids eat it? Did we have chicken yesterday? What needs using before it goes off? Who is home tonight? What time does training finish? Do we have 20 minutes to cook or 45? And why, despite doing this every single day for years, does dinner somehow continue to arrive as a complete surprise at approximately 5.30pm?

Then there is the shopping. You can have a perfectly respectable fridge full of food and still somehow lack the three ingredients required to make any one complete meal. Alternatively, you buy ingredients for a recipe with great intentions, plans change, and by Friday you’re staring guiltily at a zucchini you were absolutely going to do something wonderful with on Tuesday.

This is where a meal kit potentially earns its place. It doesn’t eliminate cooking and it certainly doesn’t mean you never need to visit a supermarket again, but it can remove several of the decisions that happen before dinner. The meals have been chosen, the ingredients required for those recipes have arrived and the instructions tell you what needs to happen next.

For a family with selective eaters, however, there’s an additional consideration. It doesn’t matter how convenient dinner is to prepare if nobody wants to eat it. Our Parent Pack reviewer therefore wasn’t judging EveryPlate purely on convenience. She wanted to know whether the recipes were approachable enough for her family without being so safe and predictable that dinner became boring.

Her experience across the week suggests there may be a useful middle ground. The dishes were familiar enough to get her son and husband on board, but the sauces and flavour combinations made them feel different from simply rotating through the same handful of family dinners yet again.

The Chicken Schnitzel Disappeared Before Anyone Remembered the Photo

First up was Chicken Schnitzel with Potatoes and Salad, and this was the meal that perhaps provided the best review without intending to provide a review at all. Our Parent Pack tester was meant to photograph each dinner. There is no photograph of the schnitzel.

“I have to apologise in advance because there is zero photo evidence for this one. We literally gobbled it up before I even thought about taking out my phone!”

In an age where we’ve become accustomed to photographing dinner before anybody is permitted to touch it, an entire family forgetting about the review and simply eating everything might be one of the better endorsements a meal kit can receive.

“The schnitzel fried up perfectly golden and crispy on the outside while staying super juicy inside,” she said. “Paired with classic roasted potatoes and a fresh side salad, it was pure comfort food. Even my son, who usually eyes anything remotely green with deep suspicion, cleared his plate.”

That last sentence is probably the one parents of selective eaters care about most. There is no meal kit capable of guaranteeing that a fussy child will eat dinner because children have been known to reject foods they enthusiastically ate 48 hours earlier, sometimes because they have been cut differently or are apparently “too crunchy” despite yesterday’s complaint being that something wasn’t crunchy enough.

But familiarity can help. Schnitzel and roast potatoes aren’t asking a cautious eater to take an enormous culinary leap, while the salad allows families to introduce something fresh alongside foods they already recognise. For our tester, that combination worked.

The Classic Cottage Pie was another familiar family meal and scored highly on flavour. Our reviewer described the filling as “rich, deeply savoury, and cozy”, adding that it felt “like a warm hug on a plate” with what she considered a spot-on meat-to-sauce ratio. This time, however, there was a criticism, and we think it is important to keep those in because a useful parent review shouldn’t read like an advertisement.

Her issue wasn’t with the flavour. It was with the topping.

“A cottage pie relies heavily on that glorious top layer, and I would have loved a bit more potato and a much more generous handful of cheese to get that golden, bubbly crust we all crave.”

We tend to agree with the principle that there is no such thing as being too generous with the glorious top layer of a cottage pie. More importantly, though, her observation highlights something worth considering when choosing a meal kit for a family. Portion satisfaction isn’t only about whether the total amount of food is technically enough. Sometimes the balance of ingredients matters too, particularly if you’re feeding bigger eaters or children who predictably make a beeline for one particular component of the meal.

It also reminded us that using a meal kit doesn’t mean surrendering all control over dinner. If your family likes a mountain of mashed potato on cottage pie, adding another potato isn’t exactly going to destroy the convenience proposition. Meal kits can provide the framework without parents having to treat the recipe card as an unbreakable culinary contract.

Can a Meal Kit Be Convenient Without Dinner Becoming Boring?

This may be one of the more interesting parts of the meal-kit equation. Most families have a collection of dependable dinners they return to because they know everybody will eat them. Tacos, spaghetti bolognese, schnitzel, sausages, pasta and whatever other dish you’ve prepared so many times you could probably make it during a power outage all earn their place in the family rotation for good reason.

The problem is that parents get bored too. Sometimes the appeal of takeaway isn’t simply that nobody wants to cook. It’s that nobody can face deciding what to make or eating the same dinner for what feels like the 700th time.

The Chicken Pasta was where our Parent Pack reviewer felt EveryPlate moved beyond basic convenience and delivered something a little more indulgent. She described it as “a flavour-packed midweek luxury” and thought the sauce was easily the standout.

“Visually, this dish was stunning, and the sauce was the absolute star of the show. The flavour was incredible, rich, savoury, and restaurant-quality without feeling overly heavy.”

That’s a pretty strong endorsement for something prepared at home on a weeknight, but this was also the meal where her parent radar kicked in. As much as she loved the flavour, she wanted considerably more vegetables.

“While the taste was top-tier, it definitely needed more veggies mixed in. Throwing in diced zucchini, or mushrooms would have added a nice pop of colour, extra texture, and a bit more nutritional bulk to balance out the pasta.”

It’s a fair criticism and one we’d take into account when considering meal kits for a family. Convenience shouldn’t automatically mean vegetables become an afterthought. Equally, this is another area where parents can use the supplied meal as a base rather than a finished rulebook. If you’ve got mushrooms, zucchini, spinach or another vegetable sitting in the fridge, adding it can increase the volume and adapt the dinner to how your family prefers to eat.

In fact, there could be an unexpected benefit here for reducing food waste. Instead of looking at three random vegetables in the crisper and trying to invent an entire meal around them, having dinner largely taken care of gives you somewhere to use the extras. That lonely zucchini we were feeling guilty about earlier may finally have found its purpose.

The fourth meal, Chicken Pad Thai, tested something else altogether: could a relatively affordable home meal kit scratch the same itch as ordering takeaway?

Our reviewer admitted that recreating street-food classics at home can be “hit or miss”, but thought EveryPlate nailed this one. She described it as a “craving-satisfying takeout night at home”, with the sauce providing the flavour the family was hoping for.

“The sauce had that perfect tangy-sweet punch, and the noodles cooked up great without getting gummy. It satisfied our takeout craving completely, with zero complaints from the fam.”

Those final five words may deserve to be printed on a certificate and framed in the kitchen. Four different meals, a fussy child, a particular husband and zero complaints from the family over the Pad Thai is no insignificant achievement.

There is a financial question here too. Meal kits aren’t automatically the cheapest possible way to feed a family, particularly compared with carefully planned supermarket meals made from inexpensive staples. But that’s not necessarily the comparison every household is making. If a meal kit replaces takeaway, reduces impulse supermarket purchases or prevents ingredients bought for abandoned dinner plans from ending up in the bin, the calculation starts to become more nuanced.

Parents need to consider what they’re actually replacing. If you’re already planning every meal, shopping efficiently, using every ingredient and rarely ordering takeaway, a meal kit may simply represent an additional convenience expense. If Wednesday routinely ends with an emergency supermarket run and Friday frequently becomes takeaway because nobody can face another decision, there may be more value in having several dinners already sorted.

Do Meal Kits Really Save Parents Time, or Just Shopping Time?

This is probably where expectations need to be realistic. EveryPlate isn’t delivering finished meals to your door. You’re still chopping, cooking, frying, stirring and cleaning the kitchen afterwards, so a meal kit isn’t going to magically give you your evenings back.

What it can reduce is the invisible work surrounding dinner. There is no searching for recipes, writing a separate ingredient list for those meals, wandering around the supermarket finding everything or reaching 5pm without a plan. It can also eliminate the irritating discovery halfway through cooking that the ingredient you were absolutely certain was in the cupboard disappeared sometime last week.

That matters because parental mental load is often made up of dozens of seemingly insignificant tasks rather than one enormous job. Dinner is relentless because the question resets every single day. You can successfully feed everyone tonight and receive precisely zero credit towards tomorrow.

For our Parent Pack family, that reduction in midweek stress appears to have been one of the biggest wins. The recipes were “approachable without being boring”, which is probably exactly where a family meal kit needs to sit. There was enough familiarity for selective eaters but enough flavour and variety for the adults not to feel as though they were eating children’s meals all week.

Our reviewer was particularly impressed with the sauces, saying they “punched well above their price point”. Her criticisms remained consistent and practical: she wanted larger quantities of certain components, particularly extra potato and cheese for the Cottage Pie, and she would like to see more vegetables included in dishes such as the Chicken Pasta.

Those aren’t insignificant observations, but neither were they enough to substantially change her overall verdict.

“Ultimately, winning over both my son and husband in the same week is no small feat, making this kit an easy 4.5 out of 5 stars for our family.”

And we think the words “for our family” are important. Meal kits are one of those products where there isn’t really a universal verdict. A couple with adventurous eaters will judge one very differently from a household containing three children who each have their own personal list of unacceptable foods. A family home every evening has different needs from one racing between sport and activities four nights a week. The value isn’t simply what’s inside the box. It’s whether that box solves a problem your particular household actually has.

So, Is EveryPlate Worth It for Families With Fussy Eaters?

For our Parent Pack household, the answer was a very definite yes, albeit with a little extra potato, cheese and greenery thrown in for good measure. The Chicken Schnitzel disappeared so quickly there wasn’t time for photographic evidence, the Cottage Pie delivered the “warm hug on a plate” our reviewer wanted despite needing a more generous topping, the Chicken Pasta felt like a “flavour-packed midweek luxury”, and the Pad Thai managed to satisfy the family’s takeaway craving without anybody reaching for a delivery app.

Most importantly, EveryPlate achieved the thing our tester actually wanted it to do. It made family dinners easier without giving her another battle at the table.

“EveryPlate delivered exactly what we needed: delicious, stress-free family dinners that everyone actually looked forward to eating.”

That is probably a more meaningful measure of success than whether every ingredient quantity was perfect. When you’ve got selective eaters, getting everyone to look forward to the same dinner can feel like a minor parenting miracle in itself.

The Parenthood360 take is that there is no meal kit capable of solving every family dinner problem. Your child may still announce they no longer eat chicken despite chicken being their favourite food yesterday. Someone will still ask what’s for dinner approximately seven seconds after you’ve already told them. And there will inevitably be an evening when even following a recipe card feels considerably more ambitious than ordering pizza.

But perhaps the real question isn’t whether EveryPlate can make family dinner perfect. It’s whether it can make it easier. For our Parent Pack family, it did. The flavours impressed, the recipes worked surprisingly well for selective eaters and the service took some of the mental load out of deciding what to put on the table night after night.

And that may be the real appeal of meal kits for parents. You’re not simply paying for chicken, potatoes, pasta and sauce to arrive at the front door. You’re outsourcing several decisions you would otherwise have to make yourself. When you consider how many decisions parents make before they’ve even reached lunchtime, there is something rather appealing about opening the fridge at 5.30pm and discovering that, for once, the question of what on earth we’re having for dinner has already been answered.