Some links on this page go to meal kit companies. None of them pay us — meal kits have no Amazon presence and we haven’t joined their programmes, so we earn nothing whichever way this goes. See our methodology.
Meal kits are priced for households of two or four, and the maths gets worse the smaller you go. For one person, the realistic cost lands around $14–16 per plate once shipping is included — which is takeout money for food you still have to cook yourself.
That doesn’t make it a bad purchase. It makes it a specific one, and worth understanding before you sign up.
Why one person pays the worst rate
Three things stack against a single-person box, and they compound:
1. Per-serving pricing slides with volume. Every meal kit charges less per serving as the box gets bigger. A single person ordering the smallest box sits at the top of that scale — the worst rate the company offers.
2. Shipping is per box, not per serving. EveryPlate charges a flat $10.99 per box, confirmed on their own site today, and competitors are in the same region. On a twelve-serving family box that’s under a dollar a plate. On a four-serving box it’s $2.75. The fewer plates you spread it over, the more it hurts.
3. Portions come in even numbers. Most services sell two-serving and four-serving recipes. Ordering “for one” usually means ordering two servings and eating the second tomorrow — which is fine, unless you don’t want the same dinner twice.
Put together, on a small box at typical mid-range rates:
| Box | Food | Shipping | Per plate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 servings × 2 meals | ~$48 | ~$11 | ~$14.75 |
| 2 servings × 3 meals | ~$66 | ~$11 | ~$12.83 |
Even the friendlier of those is more than double what the same meals cost from a supermarket, where $5–7 a plate is normal.
The budget route changes the answer
The above assumes a mid-range service. The cheap end of the market is a genuinely different calculation.
EveryPlate starts at $5.99 per serving — its own site, checked today — against roughly $9–13 at HelloFresh and Blue Apron. Run the same small box at that rate:
6 servings at $5.99 = $35.94, plus $10.99 shipping = $46.93, or about $7.82 a plate.
That’s within striking distance of cooking from scratch, and it’s the number that makes meal kits defensible for one person. The trade is a smaller menu and simpler recipes — which, if you’re cooking for yourself on a Tuesday, may not be a trade at all.
What you’re actually buying
The honest framing is that meal kits don’t sell food or even convenience. They sell the elimination of a decision.
For someone cooking for one, that decision is disproportionately annoying. Planning a week of meals for yourself, buying ingredients in quantities designed for families, and watching half a bunch of coriander rot in the fridge is a real, recurring irritation. A meal kit removes all of it.
Two consequences worth naming:
- Food waste genuinely does drop. Portioned ingredients mean no half-used jars. If you currently throw away a meaningful share of what you buy, your real grocery cost is higher than your receipts suggest, and the gap narrows.
- You still have to cook. Twenty to forty minutes, most nights, plus washing up. If what you actually want is to not cook, prepared-meal services are a different product and a fairer comparison than a meal kit.
The intro discount trap is worse when you’re solo
Every service leads with a large first-box discount. The pattern is consistent: your first box feels excellent, boxes two to five stay discounted, and somewhere around week six the price roughly doubles.
This bites harder for one person, because the full price you graduate to is the worst rate on the menu. Someone who signed up at an effective $6 a plate can find themselves at $14 without registering the change.
Write down the date your discount ends, at signup. It’s in your account under the promotion details. Then decide, while you’re still unbiased, whether you’d pay full price — because the moment the weekly delivery becomes routine, you stop reading the charge. Forgotten meal kit subscriptions are a common find when people audit what they’re paying for.
The verdict
Worth it for one person if:
– You go budget — around $6 a serving puts you near $8 a plate, which is defensible
– You currently waste a lot of groceries, so your real baseline is higher than you think
– You’d otherwise order takeout several nights a week, which is the comparison that actually flatters meal kits
– The planning, not the cooking, is what you hate
Skip it if:
– You’re looking at a mid-range service at $12–15 a plate. At that price you’re paying restaurant money to do the labour yourself, and there’s no version of that which is good value.
– You cook happily already and don’t mind repeating meals. Batch-cooking one recipe across three nights costs a fraction of this.
– You want to stop cooking. Buy prepared meals instead — same convenience premium, honest about what it’s for.
– You eat unpredictably. A fixed weekly delivery for someone who’s out three nights a week produces expensive fridge waste, which is the exact problem it claims to solve.
The most common mistake is judging the service during the discount period. Work out the full-price per-plate number before your second box arrives, compare it honestly to your normal grocery spend, and cancel in week five if it doesn’t hold up. You can always come back — every one of these services will happily take you again.
Verified 10 August 2026. EveryPlate’s per-serving and shipping prices are exact, read from their own site today. Other per-serving figures are illustrative mid-range estimates that vary by box size and region — confirm at checkout.