The difference is these meal kits have already been pre selected with the appropriate amount of ingredients. The meals have detailed instructions. When we grocery shop, we would pick what we felt like eating and cooking, sometimes easy things, sometimes hard things. We have several appliances so i found it quite easy to just throw some food in the air fryer or the instapot or the oven... instead of dicing and chopping and having 3 different pots going at once. Usually you can store food until your ready to cook, but because this is shipped to us it has a smaller shelf life so it does need to be cooked within the week. As far as making it easier, we did eat out a lot and spent a lot of money so this seemed like an better alternative to them.