If you follow my blog, you already know I’m a Good Food subscriber. We’ve been receiving their meal kit boxes for four years now and therefore, it’s part of our daily cooking life.
Last week we didn’t receive our kit as scheduled and we couldn’t contact their customer service because – even though we were expecting the delivery by Friday afternoon – they are only available between 8am and 12pm from Monday to Friday. So we couldn’t solve the problem until Monday morning!
Thinking about what to cook on our Saturday night, we decided to give PC Chef meal kit a chance, which is available on Loblaws. And, because 1) after 4 years I can assume I have a lot of experience with Good Food and 2) we were impressed by PC Chef kit; I thought it would be a good idea to write about our experience.
Good Food Service
The main advantage of Good Food is the convenience. We just have to wait for our kit to arrive. They deliver it in a special box that can isolate the temperature pretty well. More than once our kit stayed for several hours in our building hall before we picked it up and we never lost an ingredient.
Our main complaint is that we HAVE to choose our dishes on their website, otherwise they’re going to send us the least desirable ones (aka, with the cheapest ingredients and no meat).
Even though we can set our preferences, we NEVER had any steak dish automatically chosen for us. We need to access it every week to exchange some random vegetarian dish for the steak one (when there’s a steak dish available). For us, it’s annoying.
What we liked about PC Chef box
The PC Chef meal kit has to be purchased from the grocery store, but it’s good to see all the dishes they have available and choose the one you want from it. I have to check it more in the future, but I got the impression there’s not a lot options to choose from.
To our surprise, the box includes ALL the ingredients we need for the dish. It came even with butter and the parchment paper needed to bake the salmon. Although Good Food delivers almost all the ingredients needed, it doesn’t come with perishable produce, like butter and eggs, for example.
I totally get that the Good Food logistics are more complicated and that’s why they can’t deliver everything, so I don’t complain about it, I just think this PC Chef “advantage” has to be pointed.
Quality of the ingredients
I’d say both offer the same quality level. We never had any problems with Good Food ingredients and everything in PC Chef’s box came fresh and well packaged.
The instructions are very clear in both cases. The only downside of PC Chef is that it’s folded and in landscape orientation which makes it more difficult to archive. Yes, I archive the recipe cards so I can cook the recipe again if I want to.
Prices
We paid $19 for our salmon PC Chef meal kit (it varies depending on the chosen dish). The price for our Good Food Subscription is $69/week which makes it $23 per dish. (Both for 2 people)
Both prices are fair to me. Even though PC Chef is cheaper, we have to consider the Good Food’s convenience and all the delivery logistics involved. So, in both cases, you pay for what you get.
Good Food or PC Chef?
Both are great and offer similar prices. I think the decision depends more on what you’re looking for: the convenience of having it delivered at home or the option of choosing and grabbing what you want for tonight.
For quite some time we were thinking about doubling our Good Food subscription because besides the three nights we have covered by it, there are other four when we have to think about what to cook and what to buy.
From now on, we’re going to choose from the PC Chef’s options on Loblaws at least twice a week. It solves not only the problem of deciding what to eat, it actually helps us to spend less. Over time we realized that meal kits prevent us from buying more than we need and wasting food.
