Everyone wants to live healthy lives, but a healthy lifestyle requires a healthy diet. Eating healthy requires meal preparation and knowing how many calories, among other nutrients, you’re taking in with every meal to balance your nutrients; most importantly, it requires the money, knowledge, and dedication to coordinate all of this.
Easier said than done, most people don’t have the knowledge or dedication to coordinate a weekly healthy diet. That’s where diet food programs come in. You’ve probably heard of programs like Factor or HelloFresh; if you haven’t, they’re websites where you can order pre-made or unmade meals and have them delivered to your house with the exact correct portion sizes for a healthy meal. They offer a variety of options: your typical salads, spaghetti, sandwiches, and other bowl meals. Their menus change each week to offer a variety of food; if they didn’t, people would get sick of it very fast.
There’s one huge problem with these programs, however: they’re very expensive. Going into these food kit programs, they ask you for your food preferences, what you like, whether you are vegetarian, how many people are eating, etc., and then comes the bill. I went onto Factor and selected my personal preferences, picked every meal in the day, and said only I was eating them; my bill came out to $337. $337 to eat a week’s worth of healthy food for one person. That’s 26 meals, around $13 per meal. The price on its own is already high, but this is for a week’s worth of food— not a month, not a year— just seven days.
These food companies focus on health and convivence first, making the customers pay for their quality and service. Customers might not even like these foods, you never hear anyone say “Factor has some of the best food I’ve ever eaten” and at that point is it really worth sacrificing everything else for a healthy meal?
The average person cannot sustain themselves financially through box kit foods that are almost as expensive as getting takeout every meal of the day for a week.
These food box kits should be affordable for everyone, or at least the average person, and they should offer monthly and yearly plans that don’t drain your wallet dry.
If offering smaller portions helps out, then so be it; people want a convenient way to eat healthy food without getting charged a small fortune.
Fast food and other convenient unhealthy foods are way more popular in part due to how easy and cheap they are to eat. These food kits should try to appeal to convenience and health rather than cost. Otherwise, these will eventually die out from becoming too expensive for a general audience.
