I ordered the Build lean muscle Pack from Gym Food Australia. The pack contains 20 meals intended to be consumed over 5 days, giving you an average of 2000 calories and 203g Protein, 140g Carbs, 65g Fats per day. I thought the balance of protein to carbs and fats was a perfect fit for the audience their pack was aimed at. They offer a small range of optional extras and I chose to get some protein balls. As far as catering to their audience goes I thought they were spot on and a nice easy option to have a look at.
Visit provider page: Gym Food Australia
Website & Ordering
The Gym Food Australia website couldn’t really be much easier to use. The packs are straight forward, they give you a lot of information about the nutrition in a very clear way, even using summary totals for the packages, without having to go through each meal. Their are a few neat things on the website including the daily calorie calculator to help with meal selection (not the best for those in the know, but great for someone starting out) and they even provide online coaching as an additional service. Possibly the easiest to use platform I have come across so far for online food. There isn’t any customisation however and whilst there is variety in their food, it’s not like you’re getting 20 different meal options each week, so if you’re ordering this regularly you could get rather sick of the food quickly.
Delivery
They have a postcode checker on the site to help with delivery and my home was able to receive home delivery. The only issue here was that they had a stated delivery time, someone was at home until 4 hours after the end of their window and the food had not come yet, it did come, but then it was sitting outside for over 6 hours before being stored away. This may be a fault in the delivery company and not Gym Food Australia, but none the less it was an issue. The packaging was simple, but they stored it in a styrofoam container with ice packs, so having the food outside didn’t ruin it. All food was frozen, even the protein balls, so in all fairness the food probably can be left outside all day and not have an issue.
Overall
So far I have been quite complimentary as, as a service this was quite good, however the food was another matter. Some of the meals contained a crazy amount of water, some were very bland and others just didn’t taste nice. Not all of it was bad, but honestly there wasn’t a meal that I would want to have over and over again. So they really need to have a think about their freezing process to fix the water issues and maybe get a new chef or two.
Price: $195 (for a once off and $180 for ongoing)
Price per meal: $9.75
Rating 5.5/10
Beef Mushroom and Red Wine Stew
Well the picture below doesn’t exactly look like the one on the box and it look less than appetising. I expected this dish to be thick as it was a stew and some of the flavours were ok, but I have a feeling their freezing process is just stick it in the container and then the freezer. Maybe if this had come in two vaccuum sealed packs it would have turned out different, but this was just like reheating yesterdays gravy, it doesn’t work.
Rating: 5/10
Chicken Meatballs and Tomato Sauce
This dish was alright, pasta was cooked well and the chicken meatballs itself tasted fine, but the sauce didn’t really go with them. To me it felt like they had just used the exact same sauce you would for beef meatballs and substitued chicken as it’s leaner. This just meant that the flavour of the dish overall was out of whack.
Rating: 6/10
Chicken Spaghetti Bolognese
So I have spelt this dish in my tag differently as my thoughts take me to an Italian dish called bolognese, however they have used the anglesized version and it seems they also went for a western version for taste. I did not think this was successful. At it’s core, it had the same problem as the last dish, trying to use a style of cooking for a meat that has a fair amount of fat in it (beef or pork, both if you’re doing it right) and using chicken to get the calories down. It’s an easy substitute to make, but you can’t just use the exact same flavours and expect it to taste the same.
Rating: 5/10
Fragrant Chicken Mince
This just wasn’t nice. As you can see there is a crazy amount of water in the bottom of the container and this made the whole dish soggy and unenjoyable. On top of that, the flavouring of the dish wasn’t balanced very well. Looking at the picture on the container, it seems as thought the dish is intended as a soupy kind of dish, but the freezing and reheating process just doesn’t work for it.
Rating: 4/10
Honey Mustard Chicken and Broccoli
The chicken in this dish was cooked quite well and so was the broccoli, even if it was just steamed. They should however make a change to the labelling as it was mustard seeds on the chicken and not an actual mustard as their picture would suggest. This meant there was good flavours here, but the chicken was a little dry because of it.
Rating: 6/10
Honey Soy Beef and Vegetables
This meal was nicer than most others, good amount of beef and it was all cooked evenly. I do think that they flavoring on the beef overpowered it too much and that it was too sweet however.
Rating: 6/10
Mango Chicken
Having previously reviewed a dish with the exact same paramaters in my last review, this was a pretty big let down. Chicken tasted like it was boiled and then had a mango sauce added on after, there wasn’t any infusion of flavour there. If the sauce had of been stronger this wouldn’t have been an issue, but this sauce as very watery and didn’t do much at all.
Rating: 5/10
Red Thai Chicken Curry
This dish seemed to have the right flavours, but it just didn’t taste like a curry Thai curry. Maybe they are trying to stretch the base of the curry out too far and making it watery, I just don’t know, or maybe it’s another issue with their freezing process. Chicken was cooked well and vegetables weren’t over cooked at least.
Rating: 6/10
Sweet Potato Shepherds Pie
Well the picture speaks for itself. That is in no way a shepards pie. It was basically just fairly bland mince with sweet potato mash chucked on top. I understand they are trying to make it healthy, but use better ingredients and cooking methods and make it smaller or something, cause this was just yuck.
Rating: 3/10
Pepper Pork Stir Fry
This smelt really good when I was heating it up and then I could not find the flavour whilst eating it. Maybe they are missing something in their cooking process, I still think it’s the way they are freezing it, possibly having it frozen for too long also, I’m not sure, but the flavour isn’t getting into most of their dishes. It smelt like this was going to be a spicy asian style dish and it tasted like capsicum an pork with not much else.
Rating: 5/10
Peanut Butter and Cranberry Protein Balls
If you are going to buy a pack from Gym Food Australia you MUST BUY their protein balls. By far and away the best thing I ordered, just absolutely delicious, I could have eaten them all day. Well that isn’t true actually because their macros are terrible. They aren’t so much protein balls as they are delicious ball shaped desserts that contain protein. However damn were they good and for a treat, they are a can’t go past option.
Rating: 8/10
