Three months ago we dropped our meal kit delivery service. Instead we did our own meal planning and shopping. Was there any difference in our spending on groceries as a result?
To find out, I used the following hledger balance command to generate the weekly costs of our meals. Note that the category of “groceries” includes both what we buy at a supermarket and what the meal kit delivery service costs, so this one command gives us all we need:
hledger balance expenses:groceries --weekly -o groceries.csv
I then opened the resulting csv file in a spreadsheet and averaged the weekly costs for 2026 up until we dropped the meal kit service. Next, I averaged the weekly costs for the weeks after we dropped the meal kits. I compared the “before” weekly costs with the “after” weekly costs. The result was just a tad over $40 per week of savings after dropping the meal kit delivery service.
How trustworthy is the above calculation?
I checked a few things that might have thrown off my calculation. One is that we pay a yearly membership fee of $99.00 to a grocery store. I categorize this fee as a grocery expense, so I wanted to know when the expense occurred. If it happened during the meal kit delivery service, it would make the grocery expenses look higher then. However, the $99.00 was charged after we had dropped the meal kit delivery service. So, if anything, are savings are even more than the $40 per week mentioned above, because the $99 is averaged into our recent grocery costs, not the ones earlier in 2026 when we were using the meal kit service.
A second thing to examine was dining out. If we increased our dining out after dropping the meal kits (“I can’t think of anything to make for dinner tonight, so let’s eat out”) then that’s not really savings on groceries. Yes, you are spending less on groceries but it’s because you are eating out more. After some hledger work, I see that our dining out costs have actually dropped a bit. So, no, we have not replaced grocery costs with dining out.
One last item, however, may be temporarily lowering our grocery costs. Specifically, this is because when I took over the food preparation when my wife started her medical treatments, I looked at things that we already had in our freezer or pantry and used them. For example, on our lazy susan, I found 3 cans of cannelloni beans. Not sure why we had them, but there the were. So, every couple of weeks I looked for a way to use them in a recipe. As such, our recent food expenses have been lowered because we were consuming things that we had paid for months ago. However, since it was mostly a can of one thing or another, I don’t think that it contributed to a significant lowering of our recent grocery expenses.
I have to admit, that even if things had been cheaper using the meal kit delivery service, I would have resisted going back. I like the flexibility of finding recipes that fit with my wife’s current medical regime. I like being able to plan the portions to just however much we want them, rather than having to cook the amount that came with the meal kit. Finally, the weekly delivery service was, well, weekly, and sometimes we want to acquire food on something other than a seven day schedule.
So, no, I wouldn’t have wanted to go back to the meal kit service even if I found that I could save doing so. However, it’s icing on the cake to find out that our eating costs less now.