The Real Cost of Eating Well in Cape Town: Cooking vs Takeaways vs Prep

"Is meal prep delivery worth it?" is really a question about what you're comparing it to. Here's the honest arithmetic for a week of dinners in Cape Town, with the numbers people usually leave out.

Cooking from scratch

A decent home-cooked dinner for one — protein, vegetables, a carbohydrate, some oil and seasoning — costs R60 to R110 in ingredients at current prices, depending on the protein. Call it R85 on average. Five dinners is R425. That's the number people quote.

What's missing: the ingredients you buy for one meal and don't finish (the half bunch of coriander, the rest of the cream), which for most households is 15–25% of the food bill; the electricity; and the time. Forty minutes of cooking and cleaning, five nights a week, is over three hours. Whether that time has a rand value depends on your week, but it isn't zero.

Realistic all-in: R500–R550 a week, plus three hours.

Ordering in

A takeaway that's actually a meal — not a pizza — from a delivery app in Cape Town runs R120 to R180 once the delivery fee and service charge are added, and the small-basket fees on top. Five nights is R650–R850. The food is usually heavier than you'd cook, the portions are uneven, and you get no say in what's in it. It wins on effort and loses on everything else.

Meal prep delivery

A fresh, cooked-on-the-day plate from Prepd is R139 to R179 depending on the protein, with a R55 delivery fee per box, and 10% off your first order. A five-plate box is roughly R750–R850 delivered. Per dinner that's R150–R170 — more than cooking, a little less than ordering in, and with nothing wasted, no shopping, no cooking and no washing up. Every plate is 460–580 calories with the protein listed, which for a lot of people is the point: eating well becomes the default rather than the thing that takes effort.

So which is it?

If you enjoy cooking and have the evenings for it, cook. It's the cheapest and it's a good way to live. If you're ordering in more than twice a week, meal prep is cheaper and better for you, full stop. And if you're somewhere in between — cooking when you can, falling over when you can't — the honest answer is a box for the hard nights and the stove for the rest. That's how most of our customers use it, and it's why we never made it a subscription.