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To find the best meal delivery services, the GH Institute's food and nutrition experts conducted an extensive review of over 40 meal delivery services with more than 280 home chefs just like you. For three months, our testers evaluated each service, including traditional meal kits, semi-prepared options and fully prepared ready-to-eat meals. Convenient and practical, meal delivery services can be a serious weeknight dinner game-changer. They offer culinary inspiration, add new foods to your repertoire and even save you a trip to the grocery store. These services range from guided cooking kits to fully prepared, individually portioned meals and typically offer more cost-effective and healthier options than takeout. More budget-friendly services like EveryPlate and Dinnerly will typically cost around $5 per serving, while most other popular services like HelloFresh and Freshly will cost anywhere between $8 and $11 per serving.
These meals don’t come frozen, but you can freeze most of them to cook later . Expert-recommended prepared meal delivery services include Sunbasket, CookUnity and more. Prepared meal delivery services can take the stress and time spent huddled in a corner at the grocery store out of your weekly cooking duties.
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While there were only six plant-based options to choose from, I thought Freshly’s menu otherwise offered a good variety of options. With its extensive menu of frozen, fully prepared meals, Trifecta Nutrition provides nutritionally balanced meals that can help support your training and fitness goals. Snap Kitchen doesn’t offer a lot of plant-based options, but it has a variety of choices for those who follow low carb or paleo diets. Ingredients are premeasured, and recipes require six steps or fewer to help streamline meal prep. Breakfast costs $4.49 per serving while lunch and dinner start at $8.99 and $11.00 per serving, respectively. If you have an exceptionally large appetite or massive calorie requirement, the average meal delivery service may not be enough to satisfy you on a regular basis.
Freshly is the meal service for those who either don’t love to cook or simply don’t have the time, but still love to eat great meals without heading out to a restaurant or grocery store take-out bar. The pre-made meals come refrigerated on ice, making it easy to store right from the box to your fridge for safekeeping. The meals are single servings, making portion control a breeze as well as prep (there isn’t any) and cleanup . Freshly is the way to go when looking for ready-made meals that heat up in a snap and are substantial enough to satisfy for a lunch or dinner for one. And I didn’t feel like taking a food-coma nap afterward since all the ingredients were so light and nutritious.
Best organic
Meals are available in two portion sizes, including standard and “boost” serving sizes. Meals are delivered on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday of each week, depending on your location, and weekly boxes can be skipped or canceled in your account settings. According to a study that WW funded involving 1,267 people, following a WW diet for 1 year was more effective for weight loss than using self-help materials and brief nutrition counseling sessions . Blue Apron is one of the few delivery services that allows you to choose your own delivery day, and you’re allowed to change your delivery day anytime by going to your account settings. However, meals may contain anywhere from 350–900 calories per serving, so if you’re looking to maintain a calorie deficit, you may want to pay close attention to the nutrition labels of other individual meals. Some people may prefer to order from companies that use organic produce or eliminate ingredients like artificial sweeteners, food dyes, and preservatives.
After testing more than 20 of the most popular premade meal subscriptions in 2022, these are the 11 best prepared meal delivery services your money can buy. That's why we've rounded up some of the best premade meal delivery service options available now. Splendid Spoon specializes in ready-to-eat meals for one person, such as smoothies, soups, and bowls. It also has prepared plates that are more akin to a microwavable TV dinner. Factor, Freshly, Balanced Bites, Fresh N Lean, and vegan services Mosaic and Veestro fall into this pre-made category. Conversely, Blue Apron is a service committed to helping you learn to cook—to the degree that it also sells chef's knives, meat thermometers, and other equipment you might need as your skills progress.
How we test meal kits
Services including Home Chef even provide the cooking tray in many of its meal kits so there is exactly zero cleaning to do after. Nothing beats a healthy, home-cooked meal, but the process of planning, shopping, preparing and cooking can be extremely time-consuming and not work for everyone. Fortunately, there's an easy answer for busy bees looking to cut down on fast food and takeout. Prepared meal delivery services will ship delicious, premade meals right to your front door, so you can enjoy something hot and fresh without the tedious legwork. Some meal delivery services offer a la carte purchases, but most require a subscription.
Subscriptions are flexible, as you can skip a week or pause your subscription whenever you need to. However, you can enter your zip code on their website to determine whether or not they offer delivery to your location. Orders are delivered using mostly reusable, recyclable, or compostable packaging materials. Meals are delivered in packaging that is recyclable, biodegradable, or reusable. Orders are delivered in mostly recyclable packaging with detailed information on how to recycle each component available online. You can read more about my experience trying Blue Apron in our full review.
What Is the Healthiest Meal Delivery Service?
Prepared meals range anywhere from $5 to $18 per serving, depending on the service and specific meal plan you choose. Meal kit services like Blue Apron and Sunbasket will send all the ingredients to make healthy easy meals, but you still have to cook them. All you'll need to do is follow the included recipes, so no trips to the grocery store or searching for recipes online. Usually, the ingredients arrive premeasured, and certain recipes can take as little as 20 minutes to complete from start to finish. Meal kits generally have to be cooked within a few days of arriving or the food will start to spoil. Meal delivery services such as Freshly, Fresh N Lean and Mosaic Foods send actual meals that are all ready to heat and eat -- no cooking involved.
There are tons of meal kit services that will deliver delicious and healthy meal kits right to your doorstep. We've rounded up some of the best meal delivery service options available right now so you can get food on the table, reduce waste and save time. Home Chef is best known for its meal kit delivery, but it also offers a Fresh & Easy plan with multiple oven-ready and grill-ready meals designed with minimal prep and clean up in mind, according to the service. Within its rotating weekly menu of more than 30 meals to choose from, Home Chef will offer about 10 options that are pre-made. Sunbasket “has a variety of options that can be modified for carnivores and strictly plant-based eaters alike,” said Lisa Moskovitz, a registered dietitian and CEO of NY Nutrition Group. Each meal indicates whether it accommodates certain dietary restrictions, including gluten-free, soy-free and vegetarian.
Not everything felt restaurant quality but this company delivers a lot of crowd-pleasers, including chicken tikka masala and chili-topped macaroni and cheese. I wouldn't call the Freshly meal choices diet food, but they aren't terribly unhealthy either and a lot of them are just what you want after a long day. Most companies calculate the price of your kits on a sliding scale, based on how many servings you order. A box of three meals per week with two servings each has a higher per-serving price than a box containing four meals per week with four servings each—even though the larger box has a final higher cost. Purple Carrot is a vegan meal kit service that teaches you to appreciate the ingredients you’ve harvested from the earth.
Meals feature organic produce, eggs, and dairy products, and responsibly sourced meats and seafood. Overall, I thought Freshly’s meals were very flavorful, and I liked the creativity of the plant-based dishes. The Buffalo Cauliflower Mac and Cheese and the Baked Lentil Pasta were some of my favorites.
When you receive a meal kit order, you must deal with the packaging, and sometimes there's a distressing amount of it. Some services reduce the amount of material used or have moved toward compostable materials . College students know that instant ramen is an absolute lifesaver when it comes to quick and easy meals.
Both charge $4.99 per serving, and Dinnerly's prices dip by another $0.50 per serving if you order a large box of meals. Blue Apron is an Editors’ Choice service that fills your belly and educates you about food. Beyond walking you through recipes, the instructions teach you about cooking and encourage you to become more creative as a home chef.
What exactly is a meal kit delivery service?
On the other hand, though many of the entrees were tasty, I felt they weren’t quite filling enough for a full meal, and some became a bit mushy after reheating. While I enjoyed most of the items that I tried, the Bites stood out as my favorite for a quick snack on the go. I also liked their plant-based ice cream and the many unique types of smoothies available.
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