Purple Carrot meal kit includes a fresh onion and a lemon, delivered in an insulated box.
A giant insulated box arrives at your door. On opening it, you find several packets of cooking ingredients. You notice a smallish yellow onion at the end of one of the packets. Your reaction?
If you said “what in the world is that?” this service might be a good solution for you. The directions are clear and the ingredients are pre-measured, reducing the chance of mistakes even for someone with no cooking experience. If you said “that looks like an onion, but I’m glad I don’t have to go to the supermarket and buy my own” this service might also be for you. We’re amazed how half the traffic in our local supermarket nowadays seems to be Instacart or the store’s own employees, putting together orders for customers who don’t want to come into the store because of COVID or because they just don’t enjoy the experience.
If you said “why in the world would somebody send me an ordinary onion in a great big expensive box?” then you’re in our camp. Not only is this a very wasteful use of materials and carbon, but we enjoy the experience of picking out our own food and would be crushed if that was taken away from us.
Purple Carrot is a unique service because it’s vegan. We had the opportunity to try half a dozen meals over the past couple of weeks, though we did not pay for them and were not comped. The best thing that can be said is that the recipes are quite good, which is to be expected as many of them were developed by old reliable Marc Bittman at the service’s launch in 2016. However, the recipes are available online and there are very few proprietary ingredients so you could easily make them yourself and save the money and gut-punch to the environment. (They do use animal replacements like vegenaise, but if you’re vegan you probably have such items on hand and if you’re not it’s easy to make non-vegan substitutions.)
Some of the individually-packaged ingredients in a Purple Carrot meal kit.
The waste continues with the many small containers of portioned ingredients, such as rice vinegar or the vegenaise, though the containers might be repurposed for specialty oils or spice mixes in a mise en place. We consulted with a family member who’s ordered other kits, including Home Chef and HelloFresh. He confirmed that waste is an ongoing issue and said HelloFresh seems to use less packaging, but they pre-cut the ingredients which he didn’t appreciate because they seem less fresh that way
This article has a more exhaustive comparison of the services, though it doesn’t mention Purple Carrot. The writer also points out that these may be a healthier alternative to restaurant meals because they use less fat and salt. And if your cost comparison is an entrée in a moderate restaurant vs buying and preparing a comparable meal yourself and paying shipping, then meal delivery kits become a more attractive proposition.
If meal kits proliferate, maybe one service will reach the critical mass where they can deliver a reusable/returnable container, equivalent to the milk box on our porch which the local dairy restocks with milk and other items as they pick up empties. That would remove our biggest objection, and we might include them in our menu rotation.
