Hilary liked that Home Chef also offers snack, dessert, and breakfast options like maple brown sugar oatmeal bites from GoOats. “I will be buying these again because who doesn’t want to eat oatmeal that tastes like doughnut holes?” if you’re looking for family-friendly meals to feed picky eaters, you will find a lot to appreciate here.
What our tester didn’t like about Home Chef
The packaging could feel gratuitous on Home Chef meals (a chronic problem with meal delivery services), and after a few weeks receiving this meal kit for testing, Hilary found that the flavor profiles didn’t blow her away and became monotonous.
The Best Virtual Grocery Store: Hungryroot
Hungryroot is a great option for people who want the occasional meal kit, but are also in the game for cutting down on grocery shopping time. It’s essentially a virtual grocery store with hundreds of recipes built around the food on its digital shelves. If you’re interested in getting help with your meal planning, this meal delivery service is a great place to start. You get a weekly set of recipes based on special diets and dietary preferences (vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, diabetes-friendly, etc.), and they’re usually very simple, nutritious, and easy to assemble: grain bowls, salads, burgers, plates featuring meat and/or veggies. You can also order a selection of stand-alone groceries, including organic produce and an array of sweet and savory “healthy” snacks you’d likely find in a hip media company’s pantry, like dried mango jerky, organic Medjool dates, and almond chickpea cookie dough. “After using Hungryroot for half a year, I eventually grew bored of the recipes, which were basically permutations of a core set of foods and ingredients—the same sesame ginger sauce applied to different styles of bowls and salads, for instance. But I became deeply attached to several grocery items, such as the prepackaged garlicky herb chickpea duo, a dish I loved mixing into quinoa or farro for a quick and refreshing lunch,” our tester, culture editor Karen Yuan said. Hungryroot is best if you’re in discovery mode and want to poke around grocery aisles for hidden gems without ever leaving your apartment.
Like Karen noted above, the recipes are extremely simple for Hungryroot. This can be advantageous of course—great for cooks who are learning or people who feel really stressed and just want to be given simple solutions. But multiple staffers who tried this kit noted that the recipes were so simple that they veered more toward the territory of emergency meals they could have already thought of themselves. There’s not a lot of innovation in the recipe or meal ideas here. Hungryroot is great as an online grocer, but it’s not going to change the way you cook.
The best family-friendly meal kit: Marley Spoon
If you’re in the meal kit game for inspiration rather than to save time, this is your kit. Meet Marley Spoon, a.k.a the easiest way to get Martha Stewart’s most beloved recipes onto your dinner table. This meal kit collaboration between the American lifestyle icon and the popular Berlin-based meal company offers a plethora of classic, family-friendly meals. With more than 100 dishes to choose from every week, they have one of the biggest menus we’ve seen from a traditional meal kit service. “I enjoyed the red chili beef enchiladas, where all of the flavors from the tomatoes, bell peppers, and chorizo chili spice melded together deliciously. I was also a fan of the pastrami-spiced burger with homemade thousand island dressing,” said Tiffany, who also tested this meal kit.
This is the kit that offered the most genuine inspiration and taught our testers the most new cooking techniques. And for the days when you’re short on time or don’t want to clean a bunch of dishes, they offer some faster, “tray bake” meals (like this alfredo chicken and gnocchi) that don’t require as much prep.
Downsides to Marley Spoon
However, this is not the kit to go for if you’re looking for easy meals: “I liked that all of the dishes came with pre-portioned ingredients and pre-made spice blends, but I should note that there’s still a lot of prepping you’ll have to do—whether that’s chopping zucchini, snipping herbs, cutting chicken breast into 1-inch cubes, or making a tomatoey caramelized onion sauce from scratch,” Tiffany says. These recipes take a little more time and effort, and they also require you to have some of your own pantry ingredients on deck. In many cases, you’ll need to have your own butter, garlic, and red wine vinegar to make the meals. These recipes aren’t a pour-and-stir situation, instead they actually require a good amount of attention. That said, Marley Spoon is a great option for people who want a meal kit that still allows them to cook, as opposed to one that does all of the cooking done for them.
The Best Prepared Meal Delivery Service: CookUnity
Of all the premade meal delivery services I’ve tried, CookUnity is my favorite. All of the recipes are crafted by award-winning chefs (many of whom we’ve featured here at BA, like Taïm’s Einat Admony, Teranga’s Pierre Thiam and Mokbar’s Esther Choi). Unlike its competitors, CookUnity doesn’t primarily focus on special diets, weight loss, or a “health” aspect, which tester Tiffany appreciated—”Sometimes, I just want a delicious meal and I’m not worried about if that meal is low-carb, high-protein, or if it has an ideal serving of fiber,” she said.
That said, CookUnity offers a huge variety of options. “It has one of the most robust weekly menus I’ve seen, and you can definitely find meals that’ll fit any kind of dietary preference, like vegetarian, dairy-free, gluten-free, and so on.” Tiffany found most of the meals she tried to be hearty, flavorful, and well-seasoned, especially compared to other premade meal kits on the market. Some favorites of the meals she tried? The grilled chicken yassa with jollof rice and plantains, the short rib with herb mashed potatoes, and the ginger salmon cakes with miso-sriracha sauce. For the best results, you’ll want to reheat the meals in the oven, but you can also reheat them in the microwave if you’re short on time. If you’re interested in a solid meal delivery service that does all of the meal prep and cooking for you, CookUnity is worth it. Just play around and try a bunch of meal options to learn what you like best.
Fully prepared meals are never going to feel as fresh as their meal kit counterparts that require actual cooking. These meals are great for times where you’re really in a pinch, and want something elevated from what the frozen dinner aisle at the grocery store has to offer.
The Best Meal Kit for Quick Meals: Gobble
While many food delivery services emphasize 30-minute home-cooked meals, Gobble advertises entrées that take half that amount of time to prepare from start to finish. And they make do on that 15-minute promise. “With meals like Tuscan pork sugo with peppers and aloo matar with marble potatoes, I’d say this is the best meal kit service if you want hearty dishes with bigger portions,” BA contributor Tiffany Hopkins said when she tested this meal kit. “In my experience with other meal kit services, portions tend to be small, so you really get your money’s worth here.” Tiffany’s favorite meal was the chicken burger with sriracha aioli and yuca fries. “The recipe was easy to follow; the sauces, dressings, and spice blends were premade; and the burger was juicy with lots of flavor thanks to the Cajun seasoning, spicy aioli, and honey-Dijon slaw.”
The weekly menu includes roughly 15 easy-to-make dinners, but Tiffany especially appreciated were all the optional add-ons. Gobble offers various à la carte salads, soups, and flatbreads that make it easy to plan a meal with multiple courses. I recommend getting one of the soups to have on hand for a quick lunch—Tiffany particularly loved the chicken tortilla soup when she tried it. They even have the option to add on breakfasts (like Belgium waffles and bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches) and desserts (like premade chocolate chip cookie dough and chocolate lava cake). While Gobble does offer meals for more specific diets—including low-calorie, dairy-free, plant-based, and vegan—that’s not the primary focus. This is the place to go when you’re just looking for tasty, satisfying meals that pretty much anyone would enjoy.
What our tester didn’t like about Gobble
This is not the meal kit to turn to for a specific focus on healthy eating—the meals can feel heavy after a while. Because Gobble places so much emphasis on speedy meal preparation, a lot of the work is done for you, but that can mean that meals feel less fresh than competitors like Marley Spoon or Purple Carrot. It’s great if you need a quick meal, but not if you want to really prepare something fresh for yourself or your family.
The best bang for your buck meal kit: Dinnerly
If you’re looking for both ease and affordability, then Dinnerly could be another meal kit delivery service for you. It proclaims it’s “The Affordable Meal Delivery Service,” and at $8 a meal it does come in cheaper than most competitors. “I liked that there were many dinner options to choose from (28 a week, to be exact) and that every meal came with an easy-to-follow recipe card with only five steps. I went with the pastrami-crusted steak, orange chicken, and Thai red curry stir-fry—all good, all fuss-free,” said tester and BA contributor Rachel Gurjar. The flavors were on point but mellow, so to take them up a notch, Rachel added more seasoning. “For the orange chicken I doubled the orange juice and soy sauce and also added honey and chile flakes.” Rachel recommends not sticking to the recipes exactly (though you certainly can), but she genuinely liked that they offered a good base to play around with flavors you like, and tweak them to your own satisfaction.
As noted above, our tester Rachel viewed Dinnerly’s meal kits more as templates. She felt like she needed to up the ante on the base flavor profiles by increasing the seasoning. If you need inspiration, but don’t mind riffing on the original recipes, this is the kit for you.
The best plant-based meal kit: Purple Carrot
Purple Carrot is a plant-based meal kit for vegans and people who just want to eat more vegan meals (wannabe-gans?), who like to cook but prefer to skip picking out recipes and grocery shopping. Our tester, contributor Sarah Jampel, noted that the kits didn’t save me much time in the kitchen—”there are plenty of vegetables to peel and chop, and in my experience, multiple pots and pans (and even a blender) to clean after the cooking is finished.”
Still, Sarah liked that she could skip the trip to the store and the endless scroll through recipes. Purple Carrot also offered a number of the dishes that felt genuinely innovative: “There were recipes with ingredients I wouldn’t ever think to combine (crisped gnocchi with furikake and a miso-tomato sauce? Color me skeptical-curious).” She liked the bold and bright flavors in a Thai tempeh khao soi that took about an hour but tasted like it took four—”and I even learned a technique or two (like sprinkling tempeh with sugar for the last few minutes of cooking so that the crumbles caramelize) that I’ll use when I’m riffing in the kitchen without the friendly guidance of a meal kit.” Purple Carrot, like Marley Spoon, is a meal kit for learning new techniques and getting genuine flavor inspiration, but not for saving time. That said, they do offer the option of ease with a few fully prepared meal options.
What our testers didn’t like about this meal kit
This is not a meal kit you turn to for easy recipes or easy cleanup—everything Sarah made dirtied multiple pots and pans.
The Best Meal Kit for Sustainability: Green Chef
If you’re interested in sustainability and cooking with organic ingredients, then you’ll appreciate Green Chef—the first certified organic meal kit. It offers a weekly menu of 30 meals to choose from and caters to a variety of diets, including Mediterranean, keto, vegan, and gluten-free. When Tiffany tested this meal delivery service, she liked the the variety of flavors the menus offered. “With options like salmon with creamy chimichurri, creamy mushroom and meatball soup, and Italian roasted carrots with barley and ricotta, I found it easy to stay satisfied without getting bored.” One of her favorite meals she tried was the enchilada-spiced ground turkey bowl. Not only was it tasty—smoky and savory with a pleasant crunch thanks to toasted pepitas—but also the premade enchilada sauce and ready-to-use paprika-cumin blend helped keep the prep and cook time down to 25 minutes total. This isn’t the meal delivery service for one-pot recipes, but it is your best bet if you want high-quality, fresh ingredients from local farmers and eco-friendly packaging that’s made from recyclable, reusable, or compostable materials.
Tiffany didn’t like that there was a lot of cleanup involved in these recipes. “While all of Green Chef’s recipes are simple and easy to follow, most of them require using multiple pots and pans (at times, too many for my liking).”
Other meal kits we’ve tried…
Courtesy of Blue Apron
When I tested Blue Apron against other meal delivery services, I found that it offered way more variety, and some genuinely interesting recipe ideas that I wouldn’t have thought of myself. A lot of these kits can rely on the same ingredients and even produce (I’ve never eaten more green peppers than I did during the couple of months I spent testing meal kits) but Blue Apron changes up their ingredients and flavor profiles. There’s a downside there: The recipes take longer for this meal kit than the others I tried. This is not the meal kit you turn to when you’re looking for an easy dinner solution (might I suggest some of our top selections for the best prepared meal kits to solve that particular problem?). But it is the meal kit to turn to when you’re looking for genuine inspiration and variety in your diet—maybe you’re in a rut with the same five weeknight recipes.
