- Single Compartment Trays - We have been critical about the use of microwaveable trays without any compartments. Sadly, the company has yet to upgrade this quality control issue. Putting the entree, side, and vegetable all in one compartment guarantees a messy meal, and makes it very difficult to plate. If the vegetables in the tray leak excessive water, you can count on the entire meal to be soggy with any season washed away. Only this service uses the single compartment tray, most likely to save money, but at the expense of their customers.
Elderly and Senior Meal Delivery Solutions from the Experiences of Family Caretakers for New Family Caretakers
Homestyle Direct
Homestyle Direct Review Prepared Senior Meals and Meal Delivery Service
Senior Prepared Meals from our Orders
About Homestyle Direct Senior Meals
Homestyle Direct is a prepared senior meal company who works with Medicaid
in Idaho and twenty other states. They also make their meals available for private-pay on through their website. For about $7 a meal, family caretakers can ship their choice of breakfast, lunch, and dinner to any family member living in the U.S.
They offer a large selection of meals on their menu to meet any special needs and satisfy the palate. From the menu selection tab on their website, consumers will find a plethora of meal options which meet many nutritional requirements including: Weight Loss, Good Health, Low Carb, Low Sodium, and Gluten-Free. The company is a Medicaid approved home-based meal provider. All their meals are certified by licensed dietitians to ensure they satisfy dietary requirements and nutritional content.
Our Homestyle Direct Reviews
We have seen some improvements since our last review, but far from being a senior meal delivery, we would recommend. We are encouraged with the efforts made by the company to improve and hope this is the beginning of an evolution towards providing seniors, the elderly, and family caretakers a quality solution.
- Shipping continues to be an issue. Our delivery of 12 meals had four meals with broken seals on the microwave trays. For food safety reasons, we recommend discarding any meals with broken seals.
- New Labels - They did address the issue of putting non-microwave items and items that shouldn't be microwaved in the same concealed microwave tray. Based on the meals we ordered, a white label means there is something in the tray to remove, and a red label means there isn't.
- Improved Vegetables and Sides - We liked the increased portion sizes of the sides and vegetables. We also thought the quality improved, even if the variation was limited in the menu selection.
- Poor Reheating Instructions - A white label meal has to be defrosted in the refrigerator and plated. A red label meal has to be reheated from frozen. The heating instructions on the white label tell you to "defrost the meal but reheat for 2 minutes from thawed or frozen," then warn you not to overheat because you can make "their delicious meals tough." Wouldn't you reheat a meal less if it were thawed? So it's the consumer fault if the meals are ruined from following their directions and overheating?
- Excessive Water in the single compartment trays. Our most recent delivery had fewer meals ruined from excessive water in the trays, but it is still an obvious problem.
- Single Compartment Tray - What do you think will happen to two pancakes if you put them in a single compartment tray with diced peaches and cream? Of course, the pancakes become mushy from absorbing all the fluid when they are reheated. The rest of the prepared meal delivery industry solved this problem years ago.
- New Proteins - A lot of the menu changed since our last review a year ago. Some of the new proteins we liked very much like the Tavern Battered Fish and the Boneless Fried Chicken Cutlet. However, we felt the other ten meals in our order were massive failures.
- No Value - We threw away 7 of the 12 meals we purchased, considering them either unsafe to eat or too damaged from excessive water in the tray. This raised the cost of an edible meal to $16.80 each.
Our Previous Purchases
Overall, we were very disappointed with our latest purchase. If we can say Mom's Meals
was the most improved service at this price range, the we can say this service is most in decline.
Our 3rd Purchase
This is our fourth time reviewing this service, and overall, we would say we have seen a decline in quality from our past purchases.
- No Satisfaction Guarantee
- A red flag to us when buying senior meals.
- Non-Microwave Items in the Tray - Again, this is a complaint we have had that remains unchanged, and even worse. Obviously, items like butter will melt if not removed. This time we found a metallic-like package of Craisins in a breakfast meal. The instructions say to peel back a corner of the seal before microwaving, but you can't see into the tray to know something like butter or Craisins are in the tray. It appears our package of Craisins broke during reheating and we found tiny bits of the metallic-like packaging in our food.
Meals We Would Reorder
Cheese and Green Chile Tamale - $7
This is a meal you want to start your order with. It is unchanged since the last two times we ordered it, and that's a good thing because it's perfect. The only possible improvement that could be made would be to add a second tamale, or perhaps a green vegetable side dish.
Chinese-style BBQ Pork Lo Mein - $7
We thought this senior meal was very good. There was some BBQ flavor in the Pork, although not as much as you would experience at a Chinese restaurant. The spaghetti (not really Lo Mein) was tender and reheated well without getting crusty hard, and the vegetables added the perfect amount of texture to make this a tasty meal.
Italian Pork and Beef Meatball Pasta - $7
These are those frozen meatballs you can get at any market, but they do give you one to two more than other meal delivery services in this price range. The pasta was good, although a little more sauce would have been nice. The vegetables are frozen and appear a lot of meals, but this is still a good value at $7.
Cheesy Italian Chicken Breast Dinner - $7
It's not cheesy, and we hate how the sides of rice and vegetables are all blended together because of the one compartment tray. It is a boring meal, but it is okay and worth $7.
Grilled Wild Salmon with Dill Lemon Butter Sauce - $7
Kudos for giving customers a piece of salmon at this price per meal, especially if it is truly wild-caught over farm-raised. The portion size is generous too.
Meals We Would Not Reorder
Bacon Cheddar Cheese Omelet - $7
While the omelet was homemade and as good as we had last time, (and we respect a company that makes a homemade omelet) but we preferred the more traditional sides of the hash browns and bagel. The tiny Biscuit became crusty-hard in the microwave, and we really didn't care for the cost-saving decision to replace home-cooked potatoes with packaged Craisins.
Cheeseburger - $7
This meal was not good at all. The bun became crispy-hard when reheated in the microwave (as happens to bread), the sweet potatoes were good, but didn't seem to fit the profile of this meal, and there were no green vegetables to make this a complete balanced meal.
Alaskan Pollock Potato Gratin Casserole - $7
From concept to execution, something very wrong happened here. The fish part of this dish is more like a mushy Croquet cooked in fish stock. The vegetables were just tossed on top, and the garlic bread reheated crunchy in the microwave. There was a lot of "I don't care about my customers" in this meal.
Stuffed Bell Pepper - $7
If you are thinking of traditional comfort food, as we were, you will be sadly disappointed, as we were. In fact, we took a bite to taste it, and then it went into the trash. The single compartment tray makes it impossible to separate the side pasta and mixed vegetables.
Breaded Chicken Fried Steak - $7
In our Opinion, another "We don't care about customers" senior meal. They put two pads of butter in the tray, which you can't see. When you take it out of the microwave, you discover two piece of paper the butter was on. The butter was the best-tasting part of the meal. It is impossible to separate the frozen peas from the small lump of instant mashed potatoes.
Yankee Pot Roast - $7
Excessive water in the single compartment try ruined this meal, but the meat didn't look too appetizing anyway.
Eggplant Parmesan - $7
Like the Stuffed Pepper, you will probably wonder how a company would be okay with putting their name on this traditional comfort food meal. Following the reheating directions on the package, the bread came out of the microwave like a rock, the Eggplant (not that it was any good) was cold, and the greens were warm. Even reheating is a challenge with single compartment trays.
Philly Beef Noodle Bake - $7
We can't say this meal was a bake, it was more of a boil. Another that was ruined because of excessive water in the single compartment tray.
$7 a meal sounds inexpensive, but when you starting throwing away half of them, you are now paying $15 a meal.
Beef Strip Loin Steak Dinner - $7
The small portion of Beef was tough and fatty. The peas and potatoes were all mushed together because of single compartment tray, and the roll didn't reheat well.
Korean BBQ Beef - $7
This was another meal ruined by excessive water in the single compartment meal. We wouldn't serve it to our loved ones, and we would doubt you would too.
Our Summary
In June 2018, this company settled a lawsuit accusing them of Medicaid Fraud. The company denies any wrongdoing but still paid $357,125 to settle the charges of illegally billing Medicaid for $888,152.
In our most recent experience of having these senior meals delivered, we threw out more food than we ate. As we have documented, our senior meals arrived drowning in excessive water. We don't know why these meals were ruined. Maybe it was condensation from freezing hot meals to quickly, or maybe residual water from canned vegetables leached into the rest of the meal. Whatever the cause, the water damage could have been isolated if the company used microwave trays with compartments. Very few, if any meal delivery services use single compartment trays anymore.
On their website they say: "Our mission is to enrich the lives of the people we serve—in body, mind and spirit."
We didn't get that feeling. We felt the company doesn't care about quality control, or the value of the service they provide their customers. We felt like they only care about making money. Our feelings are enhanced when a company does not stand behind the quality of their food and service with a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee, as most companies have.
Shared Experiences from Other Family Caregivers
"These meals are not homemade or cooked at Homestyle Direct they are cooked somewhere else in a factory frozen delivered and their kitchen employees separate the Meals into plastic containers and then they re-freeze the food and deliver it out. One could only imagine how many times the food has been re-froze or how long it has set out and left to thaw then re-froze."
-Dawn, Kimberly, Idaho
3/16/2018
"The meals are getting better. I don't know why they are taking so long to compartment the meals with new trays. The food would improve so much and so would their customers. I like when they change their meals every six months. I sent some food suggestions, and they actually use them. The staff is very friendly, and they have actually added some desserts. I have pancreatic cancer and its hard to prepare my meals so in a flash they are okay! As in time they will I hope to learn from trial and error. But I hope they will improve. Some meals are hit and miss yes so are things a fancy restaurant I would recommend them over some other Medicaid food services."
-Dan, New York
2/12/2018
"I have been getting meals for over 2yrs and never had the trouble like most of these folks had. From What I read they don't have any idea how to cook them. I love most of them especially the salmon. Like the cheese burger. You have to take the bun out and heat it separately. It turned out perfect. Sometimes you need to use common sense."
-Sherry Foote, Casper WY
4/25/2019
"It really depend on who is doing the review, I myself really liked the meals, the only one i would change a bit is the pork tamale, the pork was a little dry but the flavor i loved, keep improving your meals and you will do fine thank you, I really appreciate "
-Julie Kost, Coon Rapids, MN
7/25/2020
"One has to be very cautious with Homestyle Direct when food allergies are involved. This last month, I had fifty (50) meals that were mis-marked. They said they were a meal they were not. They were also a substitute for my regular order. They reserve the right to substitute, however, I would like to think they would check with me about my food allergies before substituting almost all of my monthly food. For this month, I have fifty child-sized servings of applesauce and the ten meals they did not substitute.
As mentioned above, the meals come in a huge Styrofoam containers that cannot be recycled where I live. I don't think they can be recycled anywhere. I have to watch for the Fed Ex guy to diver the meals and beg him to carry them over the threshold of my door. Otherwise, I have to flip the box to get it in and that damages the contents. If they sent the meals weekly in a smaller box, it would e much easier for seniors to manage.
The quality of the food is not great. I have felt like they were feeding cattle instead of humans when every meal seemed to have some kind of vegetable medley containing soybeans. I do not want to eat soybeans even if you call the edamame.
Most of the meat in the meals is of the mystery variety. I don't believe breakfast sausage should be a sickly light gray color. They had one meal that could have been excellent, Shrimp and Grits with actual shrimp in it. However, the grits were not cooked when you just heated the meal up. I had to pick the shrimp out, cook the grits and put the shrimp back in. That is not a microwave meal.
I have had trouble with open packages. If I call and tell them that so many meals came open, they try to get me to eat the meal anyway. They have no concept of food safety at Homestyle. Raw, slimy gray meat touches stuff that should not be heated. It is just horrid. They will not send extra meals if yours arrive damaged. I had one time been told that they had refunded Medicaid, but I seriously doubt they did.
If you have a choice, please don't inflict Homestyle on Seniors."
-Susan J., Kingman KS
2/17/2022
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Your Homestyle Direct Review
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from the viewpoint of a family caretaker who has the responsibility of feeding one or two senior or elderly loved ones. We take into consideration shipping, packaging, storage, reheating, food quality, and price per meal to determine if the meal delivery service is a good value, convenience, and an option to support their family caretaking responsibilities. Advertisers do not influence our reviews.
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