Sidekick Reviews

I have had it for about two weeks now(so take my review with a grain of salt) and I have tried to make a few of the recipes. But it’s difficult to translate some of the items into items available in my local store here in the US. Back bacon for example, I’ve googled the heck out of it and shopped around with no luck. And I totally misunderstood what was meant by loose white potatoes(I figured maybe baby Yukon Gold potatoes) and there are many other examples in just the first set of recipes I choose to try to make.

It also is not very easy to actually see the actual recipe so I was surprised when you use the potatoes to basically make mashed potatoes(obviously they meant what we call russet potatoes).

To me, Sidekick still has a long way to go before it works for most American households.

I love these guys. They’re great and I watched each video every week. I thought I’d try Sidekick out. While it has some great ideas, it needs LOTS of work to be able to compete with other similar apps that do it much better.

It’s pretty user friendly, but still can be hard to find things. The biggest issue between Sidekick and others, it doesn’t give you the option to put dietary issues. I cannot have anything lactose and don’t want any recipes that include it. I tried looking for many ways to find options to show me things without dairy in it, but I could not find anything. And not just for lactose free, if you have any dietary issues, I could not find a way to put so.

Unfortunately, there are similar apps that do this far better. And they tend to start with asking about any dietary issues you may have, so it can upload recipe’s immediately for your dietary needs. If they can make this more user friendly and give you options for dietary issues, I may come back and try it again in the future. But for now, this needs some major work.

I admit I am a USA user… so there are some things I am willing to put up with/deal with myself. What least me to my less stellar review however is the fact that the calendar does not go back more than a week. I use Sidekick for shopping and packs are where it is at, however it defaults (I found it was a setting like 10mins ago sry) to starting each week on a Monday… and I do not do my weekly shop till Thursday. Sometimes I get lazy and let cooking slide a day or 2 which is fine. Except when the weeks don’t match up and my listed pack goes poof because what was “last week” is now 2 weeks ago according to Sidekick . App doesn’t store things you don’t check off that you cooked (also that list infinity scrolls through everything you have cooked multiple times until you realise what it is doing… so frustrating) and there is a way to save things that I would like to cook… but apparently that is a seperate process from selecting a menu/pack whatever. Now I’m hungry on a weeknight and having to scroll through all the salmon recipes on the site to find the one I happened to include from the pack, but didn’t cook THAT dish. Not saving me time or money or saving food waste ( I’m not really a fish person and am not going to use this otherwise).

I was looking forward to this. But unfortunately almost all of the recipe packs have at least 1 meal that contains an allergen for someone in my family and there's no way to filter them out like in typical meal
prep kits. And the few recipes I could cook were only for 1 or 2 people. So it falls flat for me because the selection is worse than that of a meal kit. I was expecting more selection since the team doesn't need to procure the food too. Maybe it will get better over time but allergen filtering is a must even if it has substitution ideas. Also you can't read the recipe easily before cooking (the first step in cooking) it so I didn't know what to expect from a dish.

I tried Sidekick , because I love the ideas and I’d not to have to worry about menus. The thing is, I was hoping (since Barry is allergic to pineapple) that there would be an option to opt out of food that you are allergic to or can’t tolerate. There isn’t and since mine is just a trial (for the month), I’m thinking this is not Sidekick for me.

I was hoping to subscribe because the recipes seem really good, but since I have several food allergies it’s just not going to work for someone like me. For example, I’d like to have vegetarian options without eggs (since, yeah allergic) and low carbs. I thought I just would choose the vegan options - but there isn’t one and the and the veggie one included egg as the center. I guess I’m really disappointed because I thought there would be more options for customizing the choices you would have, but there isn’t.

Downloaded this because I wanted to cook one of the recipes from a video but I think maybe I am not the target audience. I am a fairly seasoned cook and Sidekick felt like it was made for people who are trying to learn the flow of cooking and prepping a meal. I just wanted a basic recipe and didn’t need the Instagram post style recipe or the in-recipe timers. Additionally, it didn’t seem like it was made to switch between recipes - every time I tried to exit the recipe, it would ask me if I had completed it, and other little quirks like that made it harder to work with. Maybe the idea is that all you’ll need is this one recipe for dinner, but that just doesn’t vibe with my cooking style. I think there are things that could work, but I really just had the sense that I am not the ideal user here. Maybe I should have downloaded the cookbook app instead??

I do enjoy Sidekick, I use it off and on (not just because of its functionality, but because of the recipes themselves). I only have a few gripes:

1. I wish I could disable the automatic timer when going through a recipe step-by-step. I have my own timer I prefer.
2. The text when viewing a recipe in the step-by-step format is small and often requires scrolling. I assume they intend for you to listen to the audio prompts, but I like to listen to other things while I cook.
3. It’s reasonable to be logged in to more than one device at a time, and it’s pretty inconvenient to get logged out of one when I use the other.

Enjoyed trying it out for free. Really glad that you can search by diet and add preferences and allergies in. Like that there are quite a few vegan recipes. The only minor issues I had were that it’s obviously geared towards UK users (just involved finding substitutions for certain things on my end) which makes perfect sense and I don’t expect that to change, but also that there isn’t an option for captioning on the end-of-challenge congratulations videos. Definitely a worthwhile app for upping your cooking skills.

Sidekick truly delivers what it says. I am so impressed! Life is busy, and what Meal Packs does is take out the need to meal plan and decide what's for dinner, helping to stop my husband and I from buying out and wasting miscellaneous food in the fridge. Not only that, the recipes are perfect for mid-week cooking, easy and delicious. It's been fun to discover different cuisines I would NEVER have before tried during the week!

To anyone who's tried food subscriptions and have given up, I'll just say that I've done a subscription food box before, and to me it's greatest failing had been small portion sizes plus complex recipes compared to a higher cost. In contrast, Meal Packs gives you your list of ingredients for you to shop for what you need and can afford, in addition to a focus on recipes that would be easy after a long day of work. You are given the power of flexibility with this subscription!

A couple other things for USA users:

1. Get a scale! Makes it so much easier for Meal Packs and the Cookbooks app.

2. Ingredients can sometimes be hard to find or straight-up different. I just take a best guess and so far it hasn't ruined the recipes! Don't be afraid to substitute items.

A final thought, just that the only thing that would make Sidekick even better would be to allow for custom Meal Packs. There are individual recipes that I like the most out of some packs, and I would love to pair them with other recipes I love!

I’ve been using Sidekick for a year and a half and it has genuinely saved me a lot of money on groceries and made me a better cook. It’s like having a meal kit subscription, but with zero packaging waste and better instructions thanks to the audio guide. There are so many recipes I never get bored, and they’re all easy, delicious, and generously portioned. If you’re not a UK user you have to make slight adjustments to ingredients sometimes and it’s easier to use metric measurements the way the recipes are written, but it is 100% worth it and the learning curve is minimal. Cheers, Sorted!

I was wondering how many veggie options there would be when I first signed up - there are just as many veggie options as there are meat/fish! That was great to see, because I’m used to veggie options being limited. As someone that lives alone, the option to scale recipes for 2/4 people has been amazing (and I’ve seen a couple 1 person recipes). A few of the recipes have been so delicious I went out and bought the ingredients again to remake that same week. I feel much more confident cooking and being able to prepare a full meal. This has made cooking fun! Thank you Sorted food :)

I am a single mom and this has been the game changer. It’s a way to provide elevated meals at a reasonable price in a reasonable time. My daughter went from eating cereal for dinner many nights a week to having a home-cooked meal most nights. It’s our time to spend together And enjoy dinner together. I highly recommend this for anybody who wants a app that doesn’t feel like having some complicated routine inserted into their life. Sidekick makes it easy, from cooking to shopping to planning. Every aspect of dinner is covered here. I am so grateful for the time I get to spend with my daughter over a proper meal, and it is all because of Sidekick.

I love to cook but felt such anxiety trying to get back into the swing of things after having my first child. It seemed overwhelming to think of meal planning, prepping, and cooking meals I was used to that were sometimes longer meals and required a lot of prep. Sidekick helped virtually eliminate my meal planning; it also helped reduce waste and helped me be able to make delicious quick meals for my husband and I. Now I either use the 4 person option or double the portions and my almost 2 year old loves eating these dishes as well! It helped me feel more myself and kept us healthy cooking at home instead of going out and doing take out more often.

We love Sorted this app! Sidekick makes it simple to plan meals once a week, get a grocery list, and have everything on hand for easy, delicious home cooked meals on busy weeknights. When there is a recipe we all love, we often add its ingredients to our pantry staples for a fast weekend lunch or dinner when plans change. The recipes for 2 are very generous, easily feeding 3 if you don’t have the appetite of a 20-something athlete. Tons of options for vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and other dietary needs, making it easy to plan a meal for friends who have restricted foods. Cannot say enough good things about Sidekick, or how it has improved my stress level and my wallet.

I’ll start by saying I love everyone at Sorted Food and truly enjoy all of their content. We love the concept behind the this app app and the recipes we tried were fantastic! It’s well thought out meal planning with great recipes and instructions that are easy to follow. The biggest issue we ran into really had more to do with our local groceries not being well stocked which meant we had to go to several stores to get all the ingredients or improvise substitutions. We did appreciate the fact that they recently added nutrition information to their recipes, but currently there’s no filter or search option available for those nutrition facts, which would be very helpful for us. There are a lot of great things about Sidekick that we love, it’s just not the best fit for us at this time. We look forward to trying it again in the future!

i love Sidekick so much!! i’ve probably been using it for over a year now and it truly has changed my relationship to cooking! i get so overwhelmed with meal planning and grocery shopping and Sidekick makes it so easy, and i have cooked so many amazing meals with it. i am vegetarian and love how the new update makes it so easy to see so many new and interesting vegetarian/vegan packs! i used to have to flick through meat options to find the veggie options, and it’s so exciting to see recommendations based on my preferences!

also, i see a lot of people from America criticising Sidekick for not working well for American audiences. i used Sidekick for at least 6 months while living in Australia and have now been using Sidekick for around 6 months since moving to the US (Tennessee). Sometimes there are certain ingredients I could find in Aus that I struggle to find here, but it’s truly not that many at all. I can usually find pretty much all of the ingredients I need at my local, reasonably cheap grocery store. my experience with Sidekick is just as good here as back in Aus!

If you’ve ever been tempted by one of the many meal kit deliveries, try this first! You will not regret it. Sidekick has saved our mid week cooking! We were terrible at meal planning and then the busy week would have us reaching for a frozen pizza or box mac n cheese way more often than we would like. With this app, we now plan one or two meal packs for the week and get everything we need on Saturday. Sidekick even allows you to add groceries to the pre prepared list making it super easy to do our weekly shop. We have loved cooking something new each week and have never been disappointed in a recipe. Being in the US we have had to find a few work around ingredients such as bacon = pancetta or sour cream = crème fraîche and they are not perfect but work pretty well. Truly a fantastic app to help you cook and eat better!

Edit: Thank you developers for your response and the changes you made to Sidekick were great.
I have more ideas! Sometimes there’s just one recipe in a pack I don’t fancy; could an option to remove or add a recipe to the pack shopping list be added? Or a way to Choose our favorite recipes and have one shopping list?

I’m new to the club and am enjoying the recipes. I made the bell pepper pesto recently and it’s going to become a staple! It is so good!
If you’re from the USA like me, get a digital food scale if you don’t have one! They provide some imperial system conversions, but they do not provide measurements in cups. I’ve also noticed a few times that the converted measurements are provided in the initial list of ingredients but not in the actual recipe guide. I think it’d be helpful if there was a drop down recipe list that could be easily accessed without leaving the narration.

This is the meal planning tool I’ve always wanted! I love to cook new and different food all the time but I’d buy specialty items that were expensive and I’d never use them again. It resulted it wasted food and money. But this app is amazing! I really appreciate the focus on sustainable practices and reducing food waste. Sidekick is straight forward and super easy to use. It’s so nice getting to jump back and forth between the full recipe and audible step by step directions with pictures. Additionally, the meal packs feature takes the stress out of planning your weekly grocery shopping and meal prep. And if all that isn’t enough, the food is delicious! I am in love with Sidekick and am really happy to support a team of people who are making such a positive impact. I highly recommend Sidekick for anyone and everyone!

I’ve been using Sidekick since the start of the year and my wife and I enjoy a good 90% of the recipes we’ve tried. It has been a huge time saver to make one decision on Friday and then get a clear shopping list and know exactly what we’ll have for dinner. This not only helped get us out of a food rut, but it makes shopping much less wasteful. I don’t throw out uneaten veggies anymore because I have a plan for all the fresh food!

If you are American and thinking of trying Sidekick , make sure you get a digital scale that reads in grams and be willing to substitute some ingredients that aren’t always easy to find in US grocery stores.

I would love to see Sidekick continue to develop and add an option to star our favorite recipes and/or to create custom packs of favorite meals.