Freshly Review

Facebook advertisements occasionally actually entice me. Not all ads do. Thankfully, I own some Facebook stock so I'm okay clicking on the occasional ad if it interests me. That's how I found out about Freshly and actually Blue Apron and Green Chef as well, although that was through friends on FB.

What is Freshly? It's a meal delivery service that delivers cooked meals ready to be heated. They are not frozen and you keep them in your fridge until it's time to eat. 

Here's how Freshly comes packaged.

So convenient, right? It also says it only takes 2 minutes to heat up. I found that the meat and sometimes the veggies were not cooked enough at only 2 minutes. 3-4 minutes turned out better and we have an amazing microwave that is only 4 years old, so it is on the normal range of cooking. I compare Freshly somewhat to getting freshly prepared foods at places like Central Market or Whole Foods.  The first week I ordered 12 meals, 6 different ones, so we'd have six dinners ready for the week. Each comes with 1.5 serving. I only got pictures of 5 and I'll explain why below. Here's what I got.

Homestyle Meatloaf

 

Grilled Flat Iron Steak

 

Coconut Lime Salmon

Beef Provencal

 

Moroccan Chicken

I also ordered Chicken Rustica with Roasted Cauliflower. We just ended up not eating it and throwing it out. The reason being was, it would expire before we had time to eat it. Hopefully it was just because they try to use as few preservatives as possible. I just would have liked to have known that the food would not last a week before going bad.

I was hoping to get the meals delivered early enough last Friday to serve our first meal on Friday. However, they did not arrive until after 7pm, which is no fault of Freshly. Since we have little kids, we eat around 5-5:30. The meals were overall, okay tasting. Some better than others. We liked the steak probably the best. We didn't fully enjoy the others because my husband and I got sick, we think food poisoning. We're trying to decide where it came from and hope it wasn't from Freshly. We think it might have been the tea from a Mexican food restaurant since our kids eat everything we eat, except for a few meals from Freshly they just refused. Which honestly, that saves me no time if my kids won't eat it and they are actually really good eaters. Some have some interesting spices and some were a little unusual in taste.

Before we got sick and were unable to keep anything down for over a day, I had already ordered food for next week. Although my husband said he'd rather me just cook from now on. He does like food we make from Blue Apron and Green Chef. A few of the meals had a hospital-like taste to them. If you've ever eaten hospital food, you know what I'm talking about and I haven't eaten hospital food often. I'll come back and write another review after next week. I'm trying a few breakfast items as well. I LOVE this idea but the food has to taste good. I also am not saying Freshly made us sick, we really don't know, but when you try something new and end up sick, you always wonder if it was because of that. If you do want to try Freshly, let me know and I'll give you a coupon code to get some free meals.