None of the links on this page earn us anything. They go to each company’s own site so you can read the rule yourself, and no company mentioned here pays us. See our methodology.
Cancelling a meal kit is easy. Cancelling it in time is the hard part. Almost every brand locks your next box several days before it ships, and a cancellation that lands after the lock still bills you for that box. This page lists the cutoff for each major brand as the companies themselves state it, then shows what a missed one costs.
All rules below were read from each company’s own pages on 7 October 2026. They change, so check the cutoff shown in your own account before you rely on any number here.
The cutoffs, side by side
| Brand | Cutoff to stop the next box | Source read |
|---|---|---|
| HelloFresh | 5 days before delivery, 11:59 pm PST | HelloFresh FAQ |
| EveryPlate | 5 days before delivery, 11:59 p.m. PST | EveryPlate FAQ |
| Factor | 5 days before delivery | Factor FAQ |
| Green Chef | 5 days before delivery, 11:59 PM PT | Green Chef terms, section 10.3 |
| Home Chef | Friday, 12:00 p.m. Central, before delivery (Wednesday for Tempo meals) | Home Chef terms |
| Blue Apron | Before the order shows “Processing” | Blue Apron terms |
Four of those six run on the same five-day rule. The practical effect is that a box arriving Tuesday has to be dealt with by 11:59 pm on the Thursday before. Green Chef’s own terms use exactly that example.
Home Chef is the odd one. Its deadline is a named weekday and clock time rather than a count of days. Read the date in your account rather than doing the sum yourself.
Blue Apron is different in kind. Its terms say Autoship orders can be cancelled online at any time, but an order marked “Processing” or “Shipped” cannot be cancelled, and you owe the charges for it. The terms don’t give a day count for when an order becomes “Processing”, so we can’t tell you how many days that is. The Blue Apron+ membership is separate: the terms say you must cancel it before the scheduled billing date to avoid the next monthly or annual charge.
What a missed cutoff costs
The rule is the same where we could read it: cancel after the deadline and you still receive, and pay for, the next delivery. Green Chef’s terms add that you are not eligible for a prorated refund for the current week. Home Chef’s say you receive the next delivery and are not refunded any portion of its cost.
The arithmetic is short:
Missed boxes × your box total = what the late cancellation cost you
Take an invented example: a box that comes to $70 with shipping. Missing the cutoff once costs $70. Green Chef’s terms say a late cancellation takes effect for the following delivery week, so that is one box. But a reader who cancels late, assumes it worked and never checks for a confirmation can easily miss a second cutoff.
For a sense of scale, a $70 weekly box is $3,640 over 52 weeks. One missed cutoff is about 1.9% of that year, which sounds small until you notice it is the entire margin between a plan that was worth it and one that wasn’t. Use your own box total from your account page, not mine.
Skipping is not cancelling
This is the most common way people end up still subscribed. Home Chef’s terms say it directly: skipping a delivery does not permanently pause or cancel your subscription, and if you don’t come back to skip further weeks, deliveries resume. The other brands’ pages describe skip, pause and cancel as three separate actions in your account for the same reason.
- Skip removes one week. The next week still ships.
- Pause holds deliveries until you resume. HelloFresh’s FAQ describes pausing as the way to avoid charges when you don’t want a particular week’s box.
- Cancel ends the subscription. You can usually come back, but see the next section.
If you’re going away for a fortnight, skip two weeks. If you don’t know when you’ll want a box again, pause or cancel, and be honest about which one you mean.
How to do it, and how to prove you did
Where the company publishes the path, it is the same shape everywhere. Green Chef’s terms give it in full: log in, click your name, open Account Settings, find the subscription status section on the plan settings page and click Manage, then follow the prompts. They also accept cancellation by phone or email, stating your full name and registered email address. Home Chef says you can cancel online while logged in or by emailing its support address. Blue Apron says online, by emailing support, or by contacting customer support.
We could not read the FAQ pages for Blue Apron or Home Chef, which block automated requests, so we are not describing their menus click by click. What we can say is that both accept cancellation through your account.
Two habits protect you:
- Cancel at least a day before the cutoff, not at 11:50 pm on the last evening. The cutoffs are stated in Pacific time for HelloFresh, EveryPlate and Green Chef and Central time for Home Chef, so an East Coast reader has less evening than the clock suggests.
- Take a screenshot of the confirmation screen, and check your email for a cancellation confirmation. If none arrives, assume it didn’t go through. The same advice applies to every subscription, as our guide to cancelling forgotten subscriptions explains, and our piece on what to do when a company won’t let you cancel covers the next step if the confirmation never comes.
Cancelling can cost you the discount
Meal kit discounts are built to be lost. EveryPlate’s own promotion terms say that the free breakfast offer is only valid for as long as you remain active, and that if the subscription is cancelled it becomes invalid and will not be reinstated on reactivation. Its win-back offers are written for customers returning after one year or more.
HelloFresh’s FAQ says something similar about its Amazon Prime shipping discount: it expires after 12 months or if you cancel your HelloFresh plan or your Amazon Prime membership.
So the sequence matters. If you’re at box three of an eight-box intro ramp and thinking about leaving, work out what the ramp is worth first. If you’ve decided to leave, leave once, cleanly, rather than cancelling and reactivating week to week to chase a new deal. Home Chef’s terms also reserve the right to refuse re-subscription, so a cancelled account isn’t guaranteed to come back.
Verdict
Cancel if your box has become something you skip more often than you eat, or if the intro discount was the only reason the price worked. A skipped box you forgot about costs the full amount, and the arithmetic above applies every week.
Skip instead of cancelling if you’re travelling for a week or two, or you’re mid-ramp on a discount that you’d lose by cancelling. Skipping keeps the account active and costs nothing, provided you hit the cutoff.
Don’t cancel on the cutoff day. If you’re the sort of person who remembers at 10 pm on the evening it locks, set a calendar reminder for two days earlier, not a promise to yourself. And if you’re on Blue Apron+ rather than Autoship, the date to watch is your billing date, not a delivery cutoff.
Readers who should not rely on this page alone: anyone on a regional brand or a plan not named here, and anyone whose account shows a different cutoff from the one listed. Your account page is the rule that actually governs your box.
For choosing a plan rather than leaving one, see our Blue Apron vs Home Chef comparison.
Cancellation rules verified against each company’s own FAQ or terms pages on 7 October 2026. No prices are quoted on this page; the $70 box is an illustrative figure only.