The best meal kit service is the one that ticks the most boxes for you (yeah, you). There are fancy meal kits with involved recipes, fast meal kits that help you get a homemade dinner on the table in 20 minutes and budget-friendly meal kits that keep coin in your pocket while simultaneously keeping you and yours fed. Gobble meal kits boldly attempt to marry speedy dishes with gourmet recipes for interesting dinners ready in less time than, say, Sunbasket and Blue Apron.
You know that old proverb “what’s earned with hard labor is eaten with pleasure”? Well, Gobble doesn’t subscribe to it. The meal kit service’s cheat card is doing most of the prep for your kit and taking it one step further than other services so you can get down to the business of cooking and eating your roasted salmon or chimichurri steak and spend less time mincing onion or peeling carrots.
Tasty, interesting food made by you in just 20 minutes or so? Sounds pretty good, in theory, but the proof is always in the pudding. I’m not one to just assume a meal kit accomplishes what it says it does, so I cooked up a week’s worth of Gobble meals to see if this fast-yet-fancy meal kit service could deliver on promises made.
7.8
Gobble
LIKE
- Ingredients are mostly prepped
- Lots of seafood options
- Big flavors that you can adjust to taste
- Can view menus four weeks in advance
- One of the best sign-up offers (6 meals for $36)
DON’T LIKE
- On the expensive side
- Recipes were hit or miss
- Minimum order of three meals a week
- Some ingredients weren’t super fresh
How Gobble works
Gobble works much like most others in the category. There are three plans to choose from — Classic, Vegetarian and Lean & Clean — but you can choose meals from other plans and the price will be the same, so don’t labor over this decision for long. The only other choices you have to make are whether you’d like meals for two or four people, and how many recipes per week, three or four. It’s worth noting that some other meal services allow you to order only two recipes per week.
Your box filled with everything you need to make your chosen recipes (except for cooking oil and salt and pepper) is delivered once a week — unless you cancel or skip a week, which is easy to do. You’ll also choose either a Wednesday or Thursday delivery. it should arrive between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m.
Gobble pricing
| Recipes per week | Meals for two | Meals for four |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | 72 per week | $144 per week |
| 4 | $96 per week | $192 per week |
What Gobble meals are like
Most of Gobble’s meals are healthy with a protein, vegetable or salad and a starch of some sort. There are several pasta dishes, burgers and other comfort recipes if calorie counting isn’t your thing or you want to splurge on occasion. Most of the dishes borrow inspiration from some global cuisine with a lot of Thai-inspired recipes but also Japanese, South and Central American and Italian fare.
On any given week there are about 23 recipes. Of those, 13 are main dinner recipes included with your meal kit plan, and the rest are a combination of breakfast, appetizers, soups, snacks and desserts, which can be added on at an additional cost. There are about four vegetarian meals per week and as many as five seafood options, which is more than most services.
Most meals are customizable which means you can swap equal proteins for free as in shrimp for chicken or upgrade to a premium protein as in from chicken to a cobia filet or prime steak. You can also go from non-organic meat to organic. These upgrades cost a few dollars and vary depending on the exact swap you’re making.
