Credit:
Reviewed / Betsey Goldwasser
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Credit:
Reviewed / Betsey Goldwasser
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Home Chef delivers meals with fresh, high-quality ingredients and well-written recipes that break down the cooking methods into digestible steps. Read More
The meal kit delivery service provides quick, easy, creative dinners thanks to pre-prepped ingredients and sauces. Read More
This meal kit delivery service has plenty of meat-free meal options, but isn't just for vegetarians. The recipes are easy to follow and user-friendly. Read More
Freshly delivers delicious ready-to-eat meals directly to your door, no cooking required. Read More
HelloFresh offers affordable meal kits with big portions and straightforward recipes. However, they don't have tons of vegan options. Read More
Unlike many products we test at Reviewed, a meal delivery service isn’t something you buy once and use for years; it’s a subscription service that asks you to make choices each week from different menu options. It changes how you cook.
Since the launch of Blue Apron in 2012, a seemingly endless number of competitors have emerged—with offerings that include everything from vegan and plant-based meals to comfort food and Martha Stewart-approved dishes. So, choosing the right meal delivery service can be complicated and confusing.
After several years of testing more than a dozen meal kits and cooking 50 different dinners during busy weeknights, our favorite meal kit delivery service is Home Chef. It forgoes gimmick in favor of providing consistently excellent recipes, quality ingredients, and enough variety to satisfy most diets.
These are the best meal delivery services we tested, ranked in order:
Home Chef has great flavors, the best recipes, and tons of options.
Like its name suggests, Home Chef provides customers with the tools necessary to become true masters of the kitchen. From Home Chef’s fresh, high-quality ingredients to well-written recipes that break down intimidating cooking methods into simple digestible steps, everything about this service made us feel like we were preparing restaurant-worthy (or at least guest-worthy) meals without too much fuss.
Home Chef also offers oven-ready meals (which come with their own cooking trays) and the option to swap out proteins, making it appealing to an even wider swath of busy cooks.
Take Home Chef’s Farmhouse Fried Chicken with Mashed Potatoes, Green Onion Gravy, and Corn. While browsing the company’s website, we initially saw fried chicken and laughed. How could a food so many people find impossible to cook at home be executed well in a meal kit? We were shocked—and thrilled!—to find that Home Chef’s recipe yielded wonderfully even, juicy chicken with nary an oil burn in sight.
If the words “fried chicken” make you clutch your heart in health-related fear, don’t worry. Home Chef’s offerings are diverse enough to include healthy meal options and accommodate almost any dietary preference, including vegetarians and vegans. It offers 20 dinner options per week, as well as a handful of oven-ready meals, plus some lunch and snack choices as add-ons to its main menu.
We were impressed by the depth of flavor in the Yang-Yang Beef with Shishito Peppers, a lighter alternative to traditional American Chinese food, and loved the Hot Honey Salmon with Zucchini and Tomatoes for its summer simplicity. Vegetarian meals—like the Wild Rice and Brussels Sprouts Harvest Bowl—were on the table in less than 30 minutes.
Most Home Chef meals I tested, like the Wild Rice and Brussels Sprouts Harvest Bowl, were restaurant-worthy creations.
At the heart of Home Chef’s success is its organization. Any experienced cook knows that preparation is half the battle, and this company knows it too. Ingredients are divided per meal into labeled bags that easily slide into the fridge, recipe instructions are consistently clear, and time estimates are largely accurate. Plus the website is easy to navigate, allowing you the freedom to choose what you want and skip delivery weeks at will.
This clarity and organization made for faster fridge-to-table times than a lot of the competition. It also saved us the stress of forgetting ingredients and re-reading recipes four times over.
Home Chef's organization helped make it our favorite meal kit.
Home Chef would be wise to incorporate more biodegradable packaging into its existing model. It could also stand to reimagine some of its vegetarian offerings that fell a little flat.
Favorite meal: Farmhouse Fried Chicken with Mashed Potatoes, Green Onion Gravy, and Corn
Cost: Visit Home Chef for updated pricing. When we tested, meals were $9.95 per serving, regardless of frequency or quantity. Boxes can serve two, four, or six people.
High-quality ingredients
User-friendly recipes
Quick meal options available
Packaging isn't entirely biodegradable
Paneer Tikka Masala was our favorite dish we tested from Gobble, our pick for best pre-prepped meal kit.
Sunbasket has a large menu, easy recipes, and organic ingredients.
Although Sunbasket isn’t strictly for vegetarians, this meal delivery service offers a wide variety of meat-free recipes that will satisfy vegetarian and vegan customers with its certified organic produce. Fresh Pappardelle Verde with Sweet Pea Pistou and Sugar Snap Peas and Crispy Tempeh Tenders with BBQ Sauce and Lemon-Shallot Green Beans were among its vegetarian- and vegan-friendly offerings when we tested. And Sunbasket makes a great alternative to Purple Carrot, the vegan meal kit service that we had a number of issues with during testing.
We were impressed by how easily our Sunbasket dinners came together, relying on just a few key ingredients and spice blends to do most of the heavy lifting. That meant spending less time cooking and more time enjoying the food. Sunbasket now offers oven-ready and pre-made meals with the high-quality ingredients in each dish. We particularly loved the flavorful veggies and non-meat protein options, making Sunbasket perfect for people who avoid eating meat.
The fresh pasta in our favorite dish we tested, the Fresh Pappardelle Verde with Sweet Pea Pistou and Sugar Snap Peas, was a really lovely change from the typical dried box pasta you might expect. This dish was bright, the flavor was well-balanced, and the portions were filling.
We love Sun Basket's fresh ingredients and variety of meal options.
You can easily skip weeks, adjust delivery frequency, pause your account, or cancel your subscription entirely by easily navigating the Sunbasket website.
The biggest downside to this meal subscription as it stands is that the portions aren’t big enough to have leftovers for eating later.
Favorite meal: Fresh Pappardelle Verde with Sweet Pea Pistou and Sugar Snap Peas
Cost: Visit Sunbasket for updated pricing. When we tested, meals were $11.99 per serving for two people, $10.99 per serving for four people, regardless of frequency. Different plans are available.
Great for vegetarians
Wide variety of meals offered
Easy recipes
Portions not big enough for leftovers
Freshly is the best pre-made meal delivery kit we tested.
Freshly was the closest to a home-cooked meal that our editor, Meghan Kavanaugh, experienced while testing the best pre-made meal delivery services. Unlike the other services in this roundup, Freshly delivers fully prepared meals directly to your door, no cooking required.
Once the dinners were plated, you wouldn’t believe they were microwaved. Most of the ingredients tasted fresh and high-quality. Meghan was pleasantly surprised by how much she enjoyed Freshly’s Steak Peppercorn—having never cooked steak on her own, she would’ve been proud if she had whipped that up herself. There’s no getting around a sub-par steak.
Freshly's Steak Peppercorn with Sautéed Carrots & French Green Beans.
And while the pork carnitas dish wasn’t the most appetizing to look at in the microwave, it was packed with flavor and tasted so good that she would jump at the chance to order it again. The same goes for the bolognese—she loved the fact that the cauliflower offered a carb-conscious alternative to the classic.
She mostly appreciated the portion sizes. With pre-made dinners, if you’re left hungry enough to need more food, it almost defeats the point. Freshly offered plenty of food to leave her feeling full, even after a workout.
She did find the cancellation process to be a bit cumbersome. She was taken through several steps on the Freshly website that included confirming on multiple pop-up boxes that she did indeed want to cancel. But with the quality of the food and the fact that skipping meals for weeks at a time was simple, hopefully it’s not something you’ll have to do once you join.
Favorite meal: Steak Peppercorn with Sautéed Carrots & French Green Beans
Cost: Visit Freshly for updated pricing. When we tested, meals ranged from $7.99 each for 12 meals a week to $11.50 each for four meals per week. Each meal serves one person.
No cooking required
Ingredients taste fresh and high-quality
Good portion sizes
Not always appetizing to look at
Cumbersome cancellation process
HelloFresh has great flavors and fun recipes that are easy to learn.
Big portions
Affordable prices
Straightforward recipes
No consistent vegan offerings
Website difficult to navigate
EveryPlate meals are super affordable, although their menu is limited.
Affordable
High-quality ingredients
Quick and easy recipes
No recipes for special diets
Limited meal options
Marley Spoon is eco-friendly and unique, but portions are small.
Flavorful dishes
Inventive recipes
Eco-friendly packaging
No recipes for special diets
Smaller portions
Doesn't publicly archive recipes online
Blue Apron has very easy recipes, but they lack flavor and depth.
Affordable
Accurate cooking time estimates
Quick and easy
Flavors and ratios sometimes off in recipes
Disorganized packaging
Limited menus
Green Chef's menus are healthy, but oddly restrictive.
Like Sunbasket, Green Chef promises organic ingredients and a variety of different diet-based meal plans (think keto, paleo, and vegan) at different price points, with about eight options to choose from per week.
What sets Green Chef apart from other services is its commitment to organic and ethically sourced ingredients. The company is USDA-certified organic, meaning that customers are buying certified ingredients from suppliers that follow strict standards. That includes undergoing annual compliance inspections, maintaining a strict list of approved ingredients, requiring documentation of organic practices, and providing guidelines for protecting the soil ecology and water quality.
While Green Chef occasionally swaps in non-organic ingredients when necessary, this is about as close as you can get to 100% organic with a meal kit. Its certification helps explain the company’s more limited weekly menus and higher prices. You can learn more about how they source its ingredients on the Green Chef website.
When we tore open our bags for dishes like Red-Miso Steak Stir-Fry and Chicken with Harissa Apricot Sauce, we were surprised to see that many of the ingredients were pre-prepped. The carrots and cabbage were already chopped, the miso sauce was already prepared, and there was a baggie of finely minced garlic and ginger that was almost a paste.
The pre-prepped bags made cooking easy, but many ingredients were wilted or browning.
All these pre-prepped ingredients made preparing our food very speedy and simple. Most were plated and ready to eat in 30 minutes, and we only dirtied a handful of prep bowls, one pan, one pot, and a cutting board.
However, convenience has its drawbacks. Many of the pre-chopped veggies were brown or wilting by the time we went to cook with them. This, of course, is what happens when ingredients (especially organic ingredients) are chopped well before they’re prepared. But otherwise, we quite enjoyed Green Chef.
Favorite meal: Red-Miso Steak Stir-Fry with Udon Noodles, Carrots, Edamame, Pickled Ginger and Carrots
Cost: Visit Green Chef for updated pricing. When we tested, meals were $9.99 to $14.99 per serving, depending on your plan.
USDA-certified organic ingredients
Offers different diet-based meal plans
Includes some pre-prepped ingredients
Limited weekly menus
Higher prices
Purple Carrot's recipes are often inaccurate and bland in flavor.
Vegan and vegetarian-friendly
Confusing recipes
Bland flavors
Missing ingredients
There are several options to choose from when it comes to buying a meal delivery kit. To help make your selection a little easier, here are some of the most important factors to keep in mind before you subscribe to a delivery service:
As with any subscription service, the price is one detail that should not be overlooked, especially since you'll be paying for the delivery on a weekly or monthly basis. Meal kit services tend to cost about $7 to $12 per serving, with some dishes going even pricier for higher quality meals.
As a rule of thumb, I'd stick to the basics when you first start out with a meal delivery service. See what it has to offer at a price point that matches your budget, and then weigh your options if you decide you want to switch things up.
Not everyone is a connoisseur in the kitchen, and some folks may want their dinner to be prepared more quickly or easily than others. Certain recipes can take longer to prepare, while some may be less labor intensive. Before ordering your meal kit, check to see how long each recipe is intended to take, as well as how much additional chopping, cutting, or prepping you may have to perform.
If you find yourself having little to no time to cook, then a pre-made meal kit like Freshly could be your best option.
Meal delivery services tend to offer a variety of options to meet a wide range of dietary needs, whether it be low calorie, vegan, or gluten-free dishes. There's also the benefit of customization, which allows consumers to change some of the ingredients within the meal kit to suit their needs. This is particularly useful when it comes to protein options or excluding a particular ingredient due to an allergy or taste preference.
Before you select your meal kit service, check to see what delivery days or times it offers. Some may vary based on your location, but you'll typically be able to select a delivery date for Monday-Friday, with some services offering weekend availability. This is important to keep in mind as you sign up for your first delivery to ensure you are receiving your meals at the most convenient time for you.
Note each of the top 5 services include gluten-free and vegetarian options, but you may need to manually choose your meals each week.
We’ve been testing meal delivery services for the past six years, trying out everything from well known meal kit companies that have been around for a while to new entries on the market.
For each service, we ordered one box of three meals worth two servings each. Using the service's website, we chose a diverse variety of meals when available. We prepared the food on a weeknight for ourselves and our partners and evaluated the quality of ingredients, recipe accuracy and variety, difficulty, speed, cleanup, taste, and more.
We also considered cost, how eco-friendly and user-friendly the kit’s packaging was, and how easy (or difficult) it was to cancel the service after we were done testing. We scored and compared each meal and kept detailed notes like true food nerds.
Meal prepping and grocery shopping can feel overwhelming. Meal kits are a great way to expand your tastes and eat healthier, bringing you through the cooking process one step at a time and slicing the time it takes to prepare your food in half. We found many recipes that only took 15 or 20 minutes, and oftentimes less!
If you’re overworked and grabbing fast food after late nights at the office frequently, a meal delivery service may be for you. High levels of sodium, fat, and calories are to be found in the most popular takeout options and the portion sizes are often grossly out of proportion.
One study found that popular restaurant meals can have a whopping 1,500 calories on average per serving. Using a meal kit service can help you better manage your portions and ingredients to eat more nutritious meals and lead a healthier lifestyle. Meal kits can also be a good option if you’re following a specific diet, whether it’s for weight loss, diabetes, or personal preference.
There's some things you should know about meal kits before choosing one for you.
Even if you’ve already decided which service is right for you, chances are you’re still confused about what your first box actually entails. While each service has different approaches to ordering, packaging, and delivery, we’ve found that most services have some baseline similarities.
You’ll get a discount on your first box. Almost every service we tried offers a large discount on the first box. While this is an awesome benefit for new customers, don’t let it fool you into thinking one service is much cheaper than the others. Our price breakdown for each service reflects the price you’ll be regularly paying per meal, disregarding initial discounts.
Your box is good to sit on your doorstep until the end of the day. Because delivery windows for these services are as broad as a full day, they package ingredients to last outside your actual refrigerator until the end of the day. Most often, produce and dry ingredients will be grouped in bags above ice packs, and any meat will be fully insulated below ice packs.
The packaging is going to be bulky and cumbersome. As much as certain services pride themselves on eco-friendly boxes, there’s no way around the massive amounts of packaging.
Recipes are usually seasonal, but favorites are often repeated. Every meal kit service has a different approach to repetition, but most try to make recipes as seasonal as possible to keep you from getting bored and to guarantee fresh, sustainable produce. That being said, most companies make note of the most popular dishes and offer them many weeks a year, regardless of the season. If you really love one of your meals, hold onto the recipe card for future reference so you can request it again—or make it yourself using store-bought ingredients.
Cook your meals soon after receiving them. Meal kit ingredients are typically fresh and high-quality, but there’s nothing special preserving them—they’re just like what you buy from the grocery store. Because of transit times, they might actually be older than what you buy from the store. Use common sense when approaching certain dishes—seafood, fresh greens, and chicken should be prepared first, while red meat, pork, and harder produce can last a few more days. Freeze any meat you won’t be eating in the first few days after receiving your box.
Cancel at least one full week before you want your last box. Most meal kit companies have solid customer service and flexible cancellation policies, but it’s important to consider the long-term logistics that go into assembling your box. If you’re interested in canceling your subscription service, make sure to do it at least one full week before you want your last box. If you want to skip a week or take a break from deliveries, most services allow you to make those selections, too.
Many meal kits are now offered in grocery stores. To combat the high operational costs of delivery-only services, many companies have partnered with (or been acquired by) major food stores and are now offering its kits in the grocery aisles. While we only tested delivery services, many of the recipes we tried are also available in stores for equal or lower prices.
Some meal kit companies now offer prepared and heat-and-eat meals. We've noticed a recent trend toward speed and convenience in the meal kit world, both with traditional companies and with frozen and ready-to-eat brands. Home Chef now offers at least two oven-ready dishes per menu every week, and Sunbasket has introduced both oven-ready and pre-made options.
We recommend having a good cast iron pan or a Dutch oven handy.
Cassidy covered all things cooking as the kitchen editor for Reviewed from 2018 to 2020. An experimental home chef with a healthy distrust of recipes, Cassidy lives by the "Ratatouille" philosophy that, with a few techniques and key tools, anyone can cook. She's produced in-depth reviews and guides on everything from meal kits to stand mixers and the right way to cook an egg.
Madison Trapkin
Contributor
Madison covered all things cooking as the kitchen editor for Reviewed in 2021. Formerly the editor-in-chief of Culture Magazine, Madison is the founder of GRLSQUASH, a women's food, art, and culture journal. Her work has also appeared in The Boston Globe, Cherrybombe, Gather Journal, and more. She is passionate about pizza, aesthetic countertop appliances, and regularly watering her houseplants.
She holds a Bachelor's degree from the University of Georgia and a Master's of Liberal Arts in Gastronomy from Boston University.
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