Green Chef's Keto Meal Kit - a review

Pistachio crusted salmon

For the last few years there has been a great increase in mail order meal kits. Now there are almost too many to name: Blue Apron, HelloFresh, Sun Basket, Plated, Green Chef, etc. Until recently I had ignored all of these companies. After all, I know how to cook and I'm single.

Then Green Chef started promoting a new Keto meal plan and since I'm doing keto now, I thought it might be interesting to try. I ordered the 3-meal per week plan for two people. That means six meals for single me. Their keto box has no dairy.

Greek chicken

My box arrived last week and here is my review. Basically, if you are doing keto, this is not a good deal. If you are only interested in a healthy, flavorful meal kit service, then I thoroughly enjoyed the dishes.

This keto box is good only for lazy keto. For strict keto folk who are really into counting carbs, this box might be a bit over for you. I'm lazy keto and felt that they did a good job of keeping to low carb count. Also, if you are super strict on your ingredients, you have no idea what the ingredients are in the spice and sauce blends. For instance, many don't know that for strict keto, soy sauce is not allowed. You have to trust that they are using keto-approved ingredients.

Keto is more than just low carb, it's mostly about high fat. There is nowhere near enough fat in these meals. You would need to douse with oils/ghee to raise the fats. This is where lack of dairy plays a big part as well, as adding cheese would be helpful to upping the fat amounts. Or more avocado as an ingredient. After eating these meals for the week I noticed a measurable decrease in ketones. Quite a lot, actually. I normally am in the 1.5-3 range and during this week I was under 1.  I registered as low as .1, so at least I wasn't all the way to unmeasurable, but still, I miss my ketones and fat. It was interesting to see that my energy levels decreased as my ketones decreased.

Portions were huge. Again, if you count everything and don't want to go over protein, well, they give you way too much. The chicken breasts were very large and should have been half the amount per meal per person. I also have enough cauliflower tabbouleh from tonight to last 4 days!

Overall flavor was excellent. I can't deny that I enjoyed having some really flavorful, new dishes over my generally simple meals that I do for myself.

As for ease of preparation, they were pretty easy to put together and I was able to get them all done under 30 minutes each.

Vietnamese steak salad

There is too much packaging! The freezer bags (the kind with goo that keeps the shipment cold), while reusable, are not recyclable. Even though they tell you to cut and dispense of the goo in the trash, that's still a petroleum product and not good for the environment (according to Mother Jones).

Lastly, I feel that the word 'keto' is getting thrown on way too many things just like Big Food has already hijacked 'natural', 'organic', and 'gluten-free'. Green Chef even admits that they actually say 'keto-friendly'. In their case it means that the ingredients are pretty keto, but that's about it. Again, not enough fat, too much protein, low but not necessarily low enough carbs. 

Stay tuned for a post I'm currently finishing up about packaged keto foods.