Homegrown Foods

A Minneapolis meal kit for people who like to cook

Homegrown Foods is a cook-at-home meal kit from Minneapolis. It sends pre-portioned ingredients and recipes, and you do the cooking: chopping, sautéing, roasting, seasoning. Its homepage headline, "DINNER WORTH COOKING.", sums up the pitch, and the How It Works page puts it as cooking from scratch without starting from scratch.

The About page says the company has been running since 2013, when meal kits were just arriving in the U.S., and that it is still independent, still plans menus in Minneapolis and still packs every kit by hand. The founder, Aleks Till, writes that the idea came after having kids made shopping several stores for one dinner impractical. What the company takes off your plate is the planning, the shopping and the fiddly prep: it makes many of the sauces, marinades, dressings, spice blends and doughs itself and measures everything out, so the spice blend arrives mixed and the marinade is ready to pour.

How ordering works

You pick the dinners you want from the weekly menu and choose how many people each dinner feeds: 2, 4 or 6. The minimum per delivery is 6 servings. Frequency is up to you, and the site lists every week, every other week, once a month or occasionally. Menus are posted several weeks ahead, and you can plan 4 weeks ahead at checkout or up to 4 months ahead from your account. You can skip weeks, switch deliveries on or off and change dinners. If you don't want to choose every week, you can set preferences and the company builds a default selection around them.

A typical menu mixes chicken, meat, fish or seafood and vegetarian dinners, plus Pick-Your-Protein Go-Tos such as a curry (chicken, beef, seafood or lentil) and a pizza (chicken, pepperoni, white clam or three cheeses). The company says at least 3 dinners each week work for customers who are gluten-free or dairy-free.

Each weekly menu has its own order deadline. The published schedule showed, for example, delivery starting September 30 for orders placed by Sunday, September 27, so the cutoff is the Sunday before.

What it costs

Homegrown publishes a single flat price: $13.75 per serving. Delivery is free in the Twin Cities and $10 across the rest of the Upper Midwest, and the order minimum is $82.50, which works out to the 6-serving minimum at $13.75. There's no introductory discount on the pricing section, so this reads as the ongoing rate. Gift certificates can be redeemed at checkout.

The company is upfront about why it's not the cheapest: its pricing section says "You're not just paying for groceries," and lists the meal planning, shopping, recipe development, portioning and prep work that come with them.

The food

The menu is seasonal and eclectic, and every dinner lists its cooking time, calories and protein. On one published week: German Butter Chicken and Spaetzle (1 hour, 790 CAL, 78g protein), Coney Dogs with Quick Pickles (40 min), Salmon with Beet-Pomegranate Wild Rice from a Sophie Dahl recipe, Senegalese Peanut Soup, a vegetarian Coney Dog made with tofu hot dogs, and Sameh Wadi's Baked Giant Beans. Later weeks include Cincinnati Chili, Cider-Braised Pork Shoulder, Salmon in Chraimeh Sauce from Ottolenghi and Tamimi's Jerusalem, and Wild Rice-Stuffed Acorn Squash using wild rice the site credits to the Minnesota Ojibwe Nation. Cooking times on the menus range from about 20 minutes (plus slow cooking) to 1 hour 15 min for a from-scratch macaroni and cheese.

The current homepage menu shows the range: Chicken Salad with Apples and Candied Almonds, Bacon Arepas with a South American salad, Shrimp Capellini Pomodoro, an Indian-Spiced Parsnip Soup, Mexican Fried Eggplant Tortas from a Serious Eats recipe, and Vegan Drunken Noodles with tofu and Thai basil. Local products turn up by name, such as extra-sharp cheddar from Ellsworth, Wisconsin in the macaroni and cheese and breadcrumbs from Rustica baguettes.

Sourcing is a point of pride. The homepage lists organic produce, pasture-raised beef, good cheese and imported pasta and rice, and says the company buys from regional farms whenever it can. Every delivery includes a Prep Sheet telling you which dinners to cook first based on how perishable the ingredients are, plus Do Aheads to make busy nights easier.

Where it delivers

Kits are packed fresh in Minneapolis and handed to regional couriers. In the Twin Cities the company uses Accell and Quicksilver Express, which it says it has relied on for more than a decade, and for the wider region it uses Spee-Dee Delivery. The delivery page names the area as the Twin Cities metro plus communities across Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota and Illinois, and a ZIP code checker tells you whether you're covered, which day your delivery arrives and what it costs.

Kits come chilled in insulated packaging with ice packs, so you don't need to be home. The company reuses its delivery bags, coolers and ice packs: leave them out for your next delivery and the courier takes them back. The About page says the company has spent years cutting disposable plastic, testing glassine bags and compostable containers, and admits there are still places where it hasn't found an alternative that works. Kits can also be given as gifts: the How It Works page lists the occasions as "New baby. New home. Recovery. A busy season." The footer also links to a separate Thanksgiving Kits page.

What's left open, and who it suits

Delivery days aren't published as a list; you find yours with the ZIP checker. The site doesn't say whether every dinner can be swapped between proteins beyond the Go-Tos, and outside the Twin Cities the extra $10 adds noticeably to a small order.

Homegrown Foods suits Upper Midwest households who enjoy cooking and want interesting, seasonal recipes with the tedious prep done, at a transparent flat price. The flexible rhythm, from weekly to occasional, makes it easy to use now and then. It is less suited to anyone outside the listed states, and to people who want the fastest possible weeknight dinner: many recipes take 45 minutes to an hour.