Gousto!

Gousto is a fresh meal cookery service which delivers fresh ingredients to your door with recipe cards to make home cooking easy.

How easy was it to order?

Overall I found the website more restrictive than some of the services I have tried. Its easy to select a plan and get started but you have to email if you would like any changes to your order or remove anything from it. On the plus side you do get to choose your meals rather than get what's given.

First select "Trial", choose how many people you want to feed and how many meals a week, I chose the 3 meals for two people at £42. Next register and enter your payment details. You also have the option of adding fruit (£8) or cookies(£5) to your order. I was slightly disappointed to see that fruit (the healthy option) is more expensive than cookies but we will have to see what arrives!

Once the order was confirmed I was asked to visit the recipe page to choose my menus for my first delivery. If you forget to pick your meals then a selection will be made for you.

 

Delivery and Packaging

 My Delivery was on time and left in my garage as requested. It was packaged in a sturdy box with woolcool material (as used my Hellofresh! and Abel & Cole).

 

 

 

 

 

What's in the box?

In my box was a Gousto bag, all the ingredients for my three meals and the meat and dairy products were packed in a separate plastic bag with ice blocks. I also had a paper bag full of fruit.
The fruit bag contained raspberries, cranberries, 2 pears, 4 bananas, and 5 small apples. For £8 the quality of the fruit did not exceed anything I could buy from the supermarket and was not good value - Tesco charge £4.23 for this amount of fruit loose minus the cranberries. 

I experienced 2 problems with my order, firstly there was some confusion over the dates on my recipe cards and a shorter date on one of my ingredients, secondly my crème fraiche had split so leaked a little on other products. On reporting these problems however I was assured that the expiry dates were very conservative so if stored correctly should be fine after the date printed and I was given a discount on my next order as an apology for the leakage.

Gousto reported that they are looking into more secure packaging and was to extend the expiry dates.


I will post the recipes separately!

Ratings  

Delivery - Only one choice of delivery day but no extra charge for delivery.

Packaging - despite some leaking products the packaging was appropriate for the ingredients.

Quality & Taste - The ingredients were a good standard quality.
 
Value for Money - More expensive than some similar services, the fruit bag was disappointing for the price.


Other comments: I couldn't help feeling that I was paying extra for the nice Gousto bag, I'm not sure if this comes with every order or just the first but It doesn't seem to actually hold a purpose other than being a gift. I enjoy the new recipes but felt that we were lacking in meat, for a quite high price I had a vegetarian dish and 2 chicken dishes. Usually I would expect the option of red, meat, sea food and more exotic ingredients for £42.
I will try dropping down to 2 meals at £30 to give Gousto another chance as the customer service was very good.

     

Overall Rating: