Yumble….Can it Really Help De-Stress a Mom?

Meal delivery kits are all the rage nowadays. There are several companies to choose from and most cater to a variety of diet preferences. When my husband and I considered trying one, my first thoughts when looking at the menus and serving sizes were…”why only 2 or 4?”, and “I am never going to get my picky 2 year old to eat this stuff!”.  So one night, when I couldn’t sleep, I googled “meal delivery for toddlers”. I wasn’t expecting to get any results back, but I was at least filling my time until my brain turned off enough to sleep. Much to my surprise, there it was: delivery meals for kids. A couple of different companies showed up in the results. So I ended up choosing Yumble for a couple of reasons: 1. They delivered to our zipcode,  2. the meals looked like something I would feed him on a daily basis, and 3. It was cheaper than the only other service that delivered to our area. Read on for a full review of Yumble and also a discount link to order if you would like to try it for your family!

So you may be asking, why on earth would you want a meal delivery for a kiddo? Well, for this mama it was several reasons, but the biggest reason was my stress level. My son ALWAYS decides he is starving when I am cooking. At no other time during the day does he think he is just going to fall off the face of the planet as he does when this Mama steps into the kitchen and he hears me get a frying pan out. The problem with this is that he is tugging on me, whining, wanting up on the counter, or he is just making himself at home in the pantry shoving anything into his mouth he can find. I can’t get him a decent meal ready fast enough. So the thought of a healthy pre-cooked meal waiting for him in the fridge when I start cooking that he can have was a really attractive option for me. Would it ruin meal time? Not really, because every day he already would eat his “dinner” before us, and then just sit with us at the table while we ate. So the goal was really only to get better food into his stomach, and to do that it needed to be ready to go. This way he could sit and eat while I cooked, and I wasn’t half frazzled every single night at dinner time. Also, as much as I try try try, I just do not have a day or a weekend day I can spend prepping food. That stresses me out even more, and the failure to do so when planning on doing it, just makes me feel like I’ve failed and the week has not even started yet. So for our lifestyle at the moment, this seemed like a too good to be true option.

So what exactly is Yumble? Yumble is food for kids 2-14 that is delivered straight to your doorstep. It is already cooked, and all you have to do is warm it up in either the microwave or the oven. There are some options (like the munch a lunch) that is kind of like a lunchable so no heating is necessary. You can choose between having 6, 12, and 24 meals a week delivered. The more meals you get, the cheaper per meal they cost. Delivery is always free, and depending on where you live, your delivery comes on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. Pricing ranges from 7.99 a meal (47.94 a week) to 6.99 a meal (167.76  a week).

In order to do a review of Yumble I had 2 weeks of deliveries sent to our house. I kept the first week and had Lucas try every one. The second week I handed them out to Mom friends with varying kid ages and asked them for feedback. Yumble didn’t ask me to write this, nor did they send me free meals to review. I paid for this on my own, because I was truly interested in this as a healthy option for my Tiny Healthy Human, and everyone else as well! All of the pictures below are from me or the Moms that volunteered to try the meals!

I’m going to discuss Yumble based on Pros and Cons of what I experienced as well as the feedback from the other Moms. So, I will go by topic and discuss the good and bad of each.

1. Website itself-Ordering is super easy, and the website very user friendly. You are allowed to skip meal weeks at your choosing. There is no requirement on how many weeks you have to buy. So you could buy a couple of weeks and then skip 4 months straight if you wanted to. The bad side of ordering is that there is no app for phones, so you have to physically log into their web browser. They send a “reminder” email to choose your meals or skip for the week, but they do so LESS THAN 24 hours before your choice closes. So if you see the email at lunch and then forget for the day and remember right when you wake up the next day (speaking from experience right there), it is too late. Since this service is targeted towards busy Moms, in my opinion,  that is something that needs to be changed. One meal delivery service my family has tried (review also coming) sends text reminders a week and 2 days before your choices close, which is fantastic! Yumble should seriously consider something like that.

2. Packaging- I was super worried about getting these meals during the summer. Would they still be cold? The answer, yes. I actually wish some other meal delivery kits we have tried would take note of how these guys ship. That being said, there was a hiccup with sweating and ruining some of the packaging on week 2. The packaging is a thick paper that comes apart and has some form of activity on it for the kids. Coloring, or making a mask, etc. If the paper gets ruined thanks to the ice packs sweating then what good does that do anyone?

3. Super Fast and Easy-All Moms reported getting the food heated up and on the table was a breeze. The bad part of this, in my opinion, is the packaging. Several other moms reported this as well. The food comes in black plastic #1 PETE. Pretty much all microwavable meals in the grocery store come in this. However, it is not a plastic I use in my home if I can avoid it. It contains Polyethylene Terephthalate, which can leach antimony when heated. Antimony is used as a catalyst and a flame retardant, and has been labeled a “possible carcinogen”. Pretty much every website I looked at that discussed plastics said this is definitely an “avoid it” plastic. It is also only manufactured as a onetime use, so if you do use it, do not re-use it!! Did that stop me from feeding the food to my son or the other moms using it? No. What the majority of us did was move the food to a glass container and heat. Now that is an extra step and one more dirty dish. So for me and some families that don’t use this plastic, Yumble isn’t a fridge to oven kind of meal. On another note, some meals do not require heating, so they are a great option for school, a field trip, or days when you just need to reach and grab a hefty snack and run out the door.

4. Ingredients- This is the BIG question here. Especially for this Mama. We eat about 90% organic in our home. Yumble is not organic but they say they “use organic ingredients whenever possible” and that when so done, they would label the ingredients as organic. So I purposefully looked at every single ingredient in every single Yumble meal we got. Never once was their an organic ingredient listed. That was disappointing. They do say their proteins are all antibiotic and hormone free. They do not use food dyes, preservatives or ADD refined sugar.The facility they prepare in is not a nut free facility, although none of their recipes contain nuts. They also cater to varying diets. There is no mention of GMO on their website and I have not received an email answer back regarding that. To me that was a little odd, considering anytime I had a question, customer service got back to me within 12 hours! They do use corn as an ingredient and also soy lecithin and soybean oil in a lot of their meals, so unless they tell me they don’t use GMOs, then you can bet those ingredients are GMO. If I ever hear back, I will edit the post accordingly.

As for the rest of the ingredients, I didn’t see any icky fillers (which is good considering they say no preservatives). They use whole wheat as an ingredient and as a mom I would prefer to see 100% whole wheat, but for me that isn’t a deal breaker. The one thing for me though, that may be a deal breaker is the sodium. I looked at the meals that I ordered for Lucas (the ones I thought he would eat) and I was appalled at the amount of sodium!! The macaroni and cheese with broccoli bites came in at 1,110mg!!!! And the “munch a lunch” I mentioned earlier packs a whopping 1,920mg!! For a 2 year old!!! I’ll be honest, it was my fault I didn’t look at the nutrition information before I ordered. I would have never in a million years let my kid eat that!

Let’s just talk about sodium for a minute so you can understand why I am not happy about this. The American Pediatric Association, World Health Organization, and Center for Disease Control have all set the “ideal human daily intake” of sodium at 1,500 or less. That is for everyone, children and adults alike. Some associations say more, some say less and some actually break it down by age group. I prefer breaking it down by age group, because I think that my adult kidneys can handle the processing of a higher amount of sodium than my 2 year olds. What I have found for toddlers age 1-3 (this is from my nutrition textbook I have referenced before on this blog) is 0.9g a day. That is 900mg of sodium. Ages 4-8 is 1,300mg and 9-13 is 1,500. So some Yumble meals have more sodium than my toddler should have ALL day! I am not ok with that. Increased sodium levels lead to increased blood pressure as a child and as an adult, with the varying other health risks associated with that. Did you know the CDC reports that 9 in 10 children eat too much sodium and 1 in 6 kids ages 8-17 are living with high blood pressure!!!??? 1 in 6!! Just.Can’t.Even. This was a blow to my heart right here. Now, not all Yumble meals are super high in sodium, so if you choose Yumble and are concerned about sodium, make sure to look at all the nutrition info before choosing the meals! (you can see all the ingredients and nutrition info when choosing your meals each week.)

5. Ok, now that I am done harping on that. Let’s look at tastiness. Did the kids actually eat these?? I saw other blog reviews of Yumble and they all talked about their picky eaters loving Yumble. Perfect. My son is super picky so this will be the magic pill. Nope. It wasn’t. He didn’t even like the cheese on the munch a lunch and the kid will scrape a hard piece of cheese off a sidewalk and eat it he likes cheese so much. He tried every single one and only ever ate a bite or 2 and wouldn’t touch it. This is honestly why I decided to reach out to my mom friends because I knew my review would have serious bias if I didn’t! So I had a total of 8 kids, ages 2-10 try these. Here is what I concluded after looking at the mom’s reviews. If your child isn’t a picky eater, this is perfect for your sanity! Super fast and easy and they gobble it up! If your child is a picky eater, more than likely they will not eat it. 100% of the mom’s who reported having picky eaters reported their kids took one bite and were done. Now, don’t let it discourage you from trying it (especially with the discount). Just go into it knowing your probability for success will be low!! Lol!! Every Mom reviewer that told me their kiddos liked the food said they would consider ordering it for their family, so to me that is a huge win!

6. Cost- Yes, Yumble is not cheap by any means. It just isn’t. It is pretty much the cost of a kid’s meal when you go to a restaurant. I did however price compare our local grocery store that delivers your groceries to your door with Yumble. Now, with getting the groceries delivered you still have to prep and cook the food. Yumble still won out on cost. If you meal plan and go  buy your own groceries and come home and once a week meal prep for the kiddos so you can essentially do this, then yes that would be cheaper. Most moms though are willing to spend a little more to have just a little more time and a little more sanity with their family, and this is definitely one way to do that.

To sum everything up,  based on experience and comments from other local Moms, Yumble is a good option for Moms and Dads who are short on time and don’t have picky eaters. If you have a picky eater and still want to try it (I would, even knowing now that Lucas didn’t like them, I like knowing that information), just do one week and then immediately skip the following weeks so that way you can wait and see if your kiddo likes them before ordering again! Everything comes straight to your door and you just put everything in the fridge until you are ready to use them.

I would recommend that if you do choose Yumble to get one or two of the little glass Pyrex dishes to put the food in to heat (mine shown to the right). If you want to try Yumble out, click this link so that you get a special Raising Tiny Healthy Humans discount. https://yumblekids.com/FWI6CW

If you decide to try Yumble, please be sure to leave a review on our Facebook group of Yumble so other parents can decide if they want to try it or not!  Happy healthy eating to you and your Tiny Healthy Humans!

Erin