Here’s the good news: By cooking at home from scratch, you’re already going for the healthy option.

We Gousto chefs know we have a responsibility as we feed more and more homes up and down the UK, to make sure we’re empowering you to make healthy choices. Healthy shouldn’t be boring, it should be varied, balanced and most importantly delicious. We’re always hard at work in the Gousto kitchen, cooking up more meals for you to choose from every week. And this year we’ve been making huge strides with our overall healthiness.  Here are a few of the changes we’ve been working on so far in 2021:

More of Your 5-a-day

You’ve been asking us for more veg, so we made it happen. Now all of our recipes have at least one of your 5-a-day, and more than half of our recipes serve up 2 or more of your 5-a-day.

And that’s not all. We’ve also been adding more ‘visible veg’. Visible veg portions, unlike 5-a-day, only counts veg you can see – like salad, greens, and peppers – instead of less obvious veg such as onions, tomato paste and tinned pulses. We’ve made the  veg portions bigger, added vegetable sides, more salads, and even taken some recipes back to the drawing board. It’s been a lot of behind the-scenes work, coming to your dinner table soon!

A new Calorie Controlled range

Have you spotted our new Calorie Controlled collection? After so many of you spoke to us asking for lower calorie options, we created this range specifically to help you find them on our menu. All with two visible veg portions, every recipe is under 550 calories including all the ingredients you add at home like oil, butter, and salt.

As part of our Calorie Controlled collection we’ve also started cooking up new ‘Lighter’ recipes; lighter twists on classic recipes such as Lighter Sesame Chicken ‘Katsu’ With Edamame Rice, Lighter Broccoli-Topped Smoky Fish Pie, and Lighter ‘Creamy’ Mushroom Gnocchi. These are at least 30% lower in calories and/or fat than the original recipes.

New and improved Healthy Choices

We’ve levelled up the Healthy Choices section of our menu to make sure all the recipes inside are more nutritious and balanced with at least 2 of your 5-a-day. Anything you find here will always have less than 750 calories, 12g saturated fat and 3g salt, including any ingredients you’re adding yourself at home.

What else is new?

Spotlight on salt

Earlier this year the World Health Organization (WHO) reviewed current salt targets from different countries to establish global benchmarks for sodium levels in foods. The goal is to reduce the average salt intake across the population by 30%, to <5g salt/<2g sodium per day. This could lead to reduced blood pressure and subsequently a reduced risk of heart disease, linked to 3 million avoidable deaths worldwide.

We’re always looking for ingredients that are better for you in every way – healthier and tastier. We recently struck gold with stock powders which have a better flavour and half as much salt as our old stock cubes.

We analysed all of our ingredients against these new guidelines from WHO, and the good news is that most of them are well within the new limits, since we already follow Public Health England guidelines for salt reductions. But you can be sure salt will be big on our agenda throughout the rest of the year, as we start coming up with exciting new recipes and ranges. Spoiler alert: this Christmas will be better than ever.