My First Experience With Plated

There’s a new startup that I honestly feel like I’ve been waiting for all my life, it’s called Plated and they make it incredibly easy to cook at home by sending you a box full with both ingredients and recipes. As I’ve said many times before, I hate grocery shopping. Always have, always will. I do enjoy cooking but I’m too busy to look up recipes and then buy each individual ingredient because like I said, I hate grocery shopping.

Enter Plated, a fellow Techstars startup (woot!) who is making it easier than ever to pick recipes and then have all the ingredients sent directly to your house, and without breaking the bank. Oh and they just raised a whopping $15M which doesn’t hurt. Today I got my first Plated shipment and I wanted to share my experience.

Plated

Here’s what the box looked like when I got it, and I could tell instantly that the contents were kept fresh because the box was actually cold to the touch on the outside. I do think it’s probably pretty important to make sure you’re home the day your shipment is delivered, this isn’t one of those things you’d want to pick up three days later since it is full of fresh food.

Plated Unboxing

When I opened the box I saw the two recipe sheets for the dishes that I ordered along with a shiny silver cooler that is packed inside the box. The cooler plus three ice packs is what keeps all the ingredients cool and it definitely did the trick since everything was still nice and cold.

Plated Cooler

Inside were lots of little baggies full of ingredients and labels specifying which recipe each was for. I honestly don’t think I would ever go through the trouble of making recipes with this kind of complexity unless someone did all of this for me and Plated nailed it. In the end this is what came in my first box:

Plated Box Contents

This week we have two nights of dinner covered, one night will feature a Balsamic Chicken Salad and the next Spicy Drunken Noodles. Both meals look amazing and I’m actually excited to cook for once in my life which is 100% because I didn’t have to look up recipes and then shop for a million ingredients.

As far as cost goes we got this first box for $20 and subsequent meals are $12/plate if you’re a member. Given that we easily spend 2x – 3x this when we go out to dinner I see this as a great way to save money while eating something a bit more exciting at home than my world-famous pasta with red sauce.

If you want to sign-up for Plated and try it for $20 just click here.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton