Home-delivered gourmet meals cut out shopping and prep time - but are they worth the money?

It's the latest evolution of ready food: measured-out ingredients and a recipe, delivered in a carton, so you can make a high-class meal. Kate Wills chills over a hot stove

Ready meal: Kate Wills finds midweek dining inspiration comes in boxes (David Sandison)

Sticky ginger salmon with sesame rice and bok choy. Vegetable samosas with coconut chutney and tomato salad. Venison and mushroom skewers with water chestnuts. Not the menu of an upmarket Pan Asian restaurant, but what I'll be cooking for dinner tonight with the contents of a cardboard box.

Recipe boxes filled with locally sourced, fresh ingredients – all measured out in the exact portions you need – could well be the latest evolution of the ready meal. All you have to do is go online to order, open up a box and follow a recipe. The concept, in its current incarnation, started in Sweden in 2007, with the "dinner kit" service Middagsfrid, and was quickly replicated elsewhere.

As someone who likes eating (a lot) and actually enjoys cooking (but loses heart while trying to find star anise in the corner shop), the idea is certainly appealing. It's not as cheap as cooking in bulk – the cost varies from around £3 per meal (Gousto) to up to £7.50, but considering that most ingredients I buy end up festering in the back of the fridge anyway, it's not bad value for money and might even be a way of reducing the 15 million tons of food waste the UK produces each year.

The Abel and Cole box that arrives on your doorstep (David Sandison)

Each box includes recipe cards, usually with photos showing each step, and all the ingredients you need for your recipe – and some even portion up your salt and pepper (in neatly labelled, tiny plastic bags). You still have to chop the onions, crush the garlic or peel the potatoes, but the whole cooking process is made significantly shorter. For some reason, nearly every recipe box that I try is a victim of "wackaging" – the trend for infuriatingly infantilising packaging – so you have to be OK with your spinach being called "Popeye's stash". But let's face it, if you're letting someone else decide what you have for dinner, and want all the ingredients to be bought for you by "the grown ups", you're probably OK with being infantilised.

The market leader is the German-owned HelloFresh – they deliver more than 10,000 boxes a week across the world (and recently launched in Australia and the US). "It's a concept that has universal appeal," says Ed Boyes, who launched HelloFresh in the UK in 2012. "Midweek meals are when most people are lacking inspiration. So we're finding that our Mexican recipes are really popular, and one of our best-rated dishes is a healthy Southern fried chicken – all of them are a bit more interesting than the spag bol and stir-fry that families tend to cook on repeat."

Supermarket shortcut: you still have to chop the onions, crush the garlic or peel the potatoes (David Sandison)

Gousto, one of the fastest-growing recipe box companies on the UK market, was started by two former bankers, Timo Schmidt and James Carter, then 29. And although they were turned down by Dragon's Den in 2013, they went on to secure £1.2m from angel investors. "We now have 110 people working for us, around 100,000 customers and we recently sent out our millionth meal," says Schmidt. And it's not just busy young urbanites. "I'd say 70 per cent of our customers are not from London. In the countryside, people are often quite far from a supermarket or don't have access to the more unusual ingredients."

For exotic ingredients with a longer shelf-life, a few companies, such as Tastesmiths and The Spicery, are now offering pots of herbs, spices and flavourings, to which you then add the fresh ingredients. But forget that sticky jar of allspice; these are flavour combinations that are time-consuming to recreate at home, such as gochujang sauce to whip up the Korean rice dish bibimbap.

One such service is Simply Cook, set up by Oli Ashness, 27, from Kent, in his kitchen. After a few set backs, when "everything started leaking all over the post", the company launched properly in 2014 and have now posted out enough flavoured pastes and oils to make half a million meals (the kits fit through the letterbox).

All these delivered dinners occupy that sweet spot between a heat-and-eat microwave meal and cooking from scratch – but whether they catch on in the same way as online food shopping remains to be seen. If you're the kind of person who already keeps a well-stocked spice cupboard, enjoys going to the supermarket and can rustle up dinners from leftovers, then recipe boxes will probably leave you baffled. But for many people, never having to hear the plaintive cry of "What shall we have for dinner tonight?" makes these not-quite-ready-meals a godsend. If only the box contained someone to clear up afterwards, too.

Recipe boxes on trial

Gousto *****

What you get You choose from 10 different recipes each week, and place your order a few days in advance. Everything is measured out, except for such ingredients as milk and yoghurt (where you get some left over) or store cupboard staples such as sugar.

Price A box of three recipes for two people costs £19.99 for your first box (£3.33 per portion)

Verdict You can tell the ingredients are organic and locally sourced (the ginger is so fresh I can smell it when it's still in the box) and the recipes, such as wild mushroom gnocchi, are surprisingly impressive given how easy they are: most took less than 20 minutes.

Hello Fresh ***

What you get As well as its bestseller, the Classic Box, it also does a veggie version and a family version. If you're a subscriber you can choose three meals from five options, otherwise it's pot luck. Everything is measured out for you, and you order by Wednesday for delivery the following week.

Price A box of three recipes for two people costs £39.99 (£6.67 per portion)

Verdict Recipes were a bit lacking in inspiration and were more likely to be crowd-pleasers for family suppers – kebabs, pasta and pork chops were on my menu. Portions are very generous (most meals for two could easily have fed three).

Abel and Cole ****

What you get The organic veg-box stalwart branched out into recipe boxes in May and it now offers four different kits, including one targeted at dieters, with meals under 400 calories. You can't choose the meals, but it's clever that the spices come in larger portions, so you can add more or less, depending on how you like your food.

Price A box of three recipes for two people costs £36 (£6 per portion)

Verdict As you'd expect from Abel and Cole, the fruit and veg were the best quality of all the recipe kits I've tried (think potatoes with dirt on and massive tomatoes). The cuts of meat and fish were a bit stingy. Bonus points for recycling all the packaging.

Abel and Cole's Roast Salmon with French Beans and New Potatoes (David Sandison)

Marley Spoon **

What you get Choose three meals from a choice of seven. Orders placed five working days in advance. Everything measured out for you, bar store-cupboard staples.

Price A box of three recipes for two people costs £39 (£6.50 per portion)

Verdict Recipes are a bit ambitious for a midweek meal. Forty minutes later, I was still messing about with the filo pastry for samosas. As the dishes are more elaborate and can be ordered for up to eight people, this might be a better option for a dinner party.

Simply Cook ****

What you get 12 pots of spices and pastes to make four different recipes. You just add the fresh ingredients. Each takes less than 20 minutes to prepare. There is also a gluten-free option for coeliacs.

Price A box of four recipes for two people costs £8.99 (that's £1.12 per portion – plus the cost of the fresh ingredients).

Verdict Really strong flavours, and dishes that you'd probably never even attempt to cook at home – such as jambalaya. You have to buy your own fresh ingredients, but the list is fairly small. The other benefit to Simply Cook is that, if your plans change and you don't end up eating at home that week, the pots last for six months.