The Insane Savings Cooking at Home Brings
Are you tired of spending a fortune on restaurant meals and meal kit services? Do you long for the satisfaction of creating delicious, home-cooked meals that don’t break the bank? Today you’ll discover the secrets to saving money by cooking at home.
The True Cost of Cooking at Home
Intuitively, we all know there are benefits to cooking at home. You can use healthier ingredients, set portions to a reasonable size, avoid food allergies, and of course, save money compared to ordering restaurant delivery or using a meal kit service. But just how much money do you save by cooking at home? We decided to analyze the true cost of cooking at home from scratch, compared to delivery from a restaurant or a meal kit service.
We found on average, it is almost five times more expensive to order delivery from a restaurant than it is to cook at home. And if you’re using a meal kit service as a shortcut to a home-cooked meal, it’s a bit more affordable, but still almost three times as expensive as cooking from scratch.
Maximizing Savings: Carb-Based and Protein-Based Meals
When cooking at home, you’ll save a substantial amount of money on carb-based meals like pasta or pizza, and you’ll save the most on protein-based meals when compared to ordering from a restaurant or meal kits.
For example, making a Cheese Pizza, Mac & Cheese, Cauliflower or Quinoa bowl is incredibly inexpensive to make at home — it only costs about a dollar per serving! However, these are the type of meals where meal kits are the worst value since you’ll be paying around $12 for them as part of the “bundle” you’re required to purchase.
Breaking Down the Costs
Before diving into the results, let’s spend a moment on the methodology of this analysis. We looked at 86 popular meals and examined how much it would cost to acquire them as: groceries for home cooking, restaurant delivery or meal kit delivery. For home cooking, we’ve calculated the price per serving based on the consumed portion of ingredients. For example, you purchase a whole onion for the recipe, which requires half an onion per serving, so the price per serving is ½ of the onion.
For restaurant delivery, we looked up menu prices on the websites of the most famous restaurant chains in the US. Then added an average $5 delivery fee based on delivery prices from Caviar, UberEats, and Grubhub. Since meals sold within a meal kit are usually part of a bundle, we took the average price of a meal across the bundle and then allocated a $2.50 delivery fee per meal. For home cooking, we looked at the cost of ingredients.
Restaurant vs Meal Kit vs Home Cooking
By far, getting dinner delivered from a restaurant is the most expensive meal option. At over $20 per serving on average, a restaurant delivered meal is almost three times as expensive as a meal kit and five times as expensive as cooking at home from scratch. Obviously when you cook at home, you’ll spend more time but you usually end up with a healthier meal because you’re the one to decide what exactly goes into it.
Restaurant delivery, however, isn’t the only alternative to cooking at home. You can also have meal kits delivered to your house. These kits are sold at a premium compared to cooking from scratch because the raw ingredients are pre-assembled and pre-portioned for you.
Rules of Thumb for Saving Money
What rules of thumb can be gleaned from looking at all this data? First, If meat is involved, you can save a lot of money by making the dish at home instead of ordering it from a restaurant. These types of dishes are the most expensive entrees on the menu at restaurants but don’t cost you that much to cook from scratch.
Second, if the ingredients are items like flour, cheese, and pasta, which are very inexpensive at the grocery store, avoid getting them from a meal kit service. On the other hand, meal kits can be a pretty good option if you want to cook more complicated meals with many ingredients, especially a meal like Curry Chicken which has many spices.
Lastly, cooking at home saves you money across the board. Although you will spend more time than ordering delivery from a restaurant, you will get a nutritious and delicious meal for about $4 a person. So, why not start today? Embrace the joy of cooking and start saving money now!
