2022 Healthy Meal Delivery Services
You are not alone in your effort to consume enough vegetables and lean protein in order to maintain a healthy and balanced diet. The world is full of fast and attractive snacks that are high in empty calories and might be difficult to avoid. However, stocking your fridge with tasty and nutritious readymade meals, such as those provided by these healthy meal delivery services, makes it much simpler to resist the junk.
In 2022, there are several dozen prepared food services and meal packages available, with the majority of them offering some healthy alternatives. But, surely, we can do better than that. We can provide you with the greatest tasting healthy meal subscription. Whether it’s keto, low-carb, diabetic-friendly, or plant-based meal delivery, I’ve tried some of the top businesses to identify the best healthy meal subscriptions and meal kits for 2022.
Sunbasket offers both nutritious meal packages and ready-to-eat meals for your hectic week.
Sunbasket
Kits for healthy meals
While Blue Apron was the first major participant in the meal kit delivery business, specialist kits and delivery services with menu options and recipe plans and meal selections for organic, low carb and keto, paleo vegetarian and vegan lifestyles quickly followed. Green Chef, Sunbasket, and Purple Carrot are meal kit delivery services that provide vegetarian-friendly sustainable and organic meal kits with fresh preportioned ingredients for healthful home-cooked cuisine. The offers and target audiences of these healthy meal delivery services vary, but all can be modified to keep tasty meal packages arriving week after week, even for a finicky eater on a particular diet.
Purple Carrot is the world’s first and only plant-based meal kit service.
Carrot in Purple
Services that provide healthy prepared meals
Healthy prepared meal delivery services such as Veestro, Freshly, Splendid Spoon, and Trifecta have gone a step further, delivering delicious and fully prepared healthy food on a weekly or monthly basis, including frozen meals (or sometimes partially frozen), fresh salads, grain bowls, breakfast items, and more. Healthy prepared meal delivery services may take the guesswork out of breakfast, lunch, and supper, which is important when you’re short on time and want to reduce excursions to the grocery store. Because of some inventive menu options and extensive nutritional information transparency, these ready-to-eat nutritious meal services help people – even those with a special dietary preference or specific dietary restrictions such as food allergies – stay on track with a good diet and healthy eating habits.
The best service for healthy meal kits
Sunbasket’s healthy meal delivery is the most focused on high-quality and primarily organic goods, meats, seafood, and fruit in easy-to-cook dishes, many of which are particularly intended for various diets and dietary constraints. Sunbasket meals are well-balanced and offer low-carb, gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, keto, paleo, and Mediterranean diet alternatives.
This meal delivery business has 15 to 18 supper selections on the menu each week. Many of them are fascinating but not difficult to make, such as shrimp paella, turkey-cranberry meatballs with roasted Brussels sprouts, or sweet potato taquitos with a black bean salad. A light and simple pan-seared chicken thigh with Balinese spice and a refreshing mint-cabbage salad was my particular favourite. The weekly meals will not entice you with mashed potatoes or thick heavy sauces, yet an occasional comfort food option is offered for cheat day.
Pricing and subscriptions: Sunbasket has abandoned the fixed-price model in favour of meal-based pricing. Most are between $14 and $19, making it one of the more expensive services, but it is also one of the most popular.
Home Chef
The best keto and low-carb meal packages
Home Chef (full review here) is a wonderful alternative for getting easy and tasty low-carb, keto-friendly meals delivered, with over 35 weekly meal options and recipes on its website, including quick one-pan dinners and oven-ready dishes that require practically no prep. However, with so many meals each week and customization choices, Home Chef can accommodate any diet or nutrition goal.
Speaking of which, you can simply switch the protein and sides in your meal kit recipe with Home Chef, so if a dish sounds delicious but you don’t like pork or don’t want potatoes, you can substitute chicken, fish, or vegetables as one of the recipe components. Home Chef meal kits also allow you to order twice the protein in your lunch or supper without doubling the overall quantity, making it an excellent low-carb meal kit choice for those following the keto or paleo diets. You may also order antibiotic-free protein instead of the conventional version from the menu for an additional fee.
In addition to the healthy items, Home Chef has a good amount of comfort meals that aren’t so diet-friendly, such as meatloaf and potatoes or heavier pasta dishes, so you’ll have to filter these out to avoid temptation or rely on self-control.
Meals start at $7 per serving, with extra premium Home Chef dishes and add-ons available at market pricing. For a few bucks more, you can add fruit, which is an excellent defence against 3 p.m. cravings or late-night munching problems.
Green Chef
Best organic dinner delivery service
Green Chef is a healthy organic meal-kit delivery service that will customise your plan to keep you on track with a paleo, keto, vegetarian (plant-powered), or simply a balanced diet. Green Chef’s meal packages contain around 90% organic fresh ingredients, and its meats are responsibly caught, farmed, and grown without hormones or antibiotics.
Green Chef, like Blue Apron or Sun Basket, supplies all of the organic goods required to create a pretty basic dinner in under 30 minutes, and smart recipe cards with images make following directions straightforward, like with the simple teriyaki pork meatballs or parmesan-crusted chicken. There are several meal kit services on this list that provide more total alternatives each week, but Green Chef clearly wins marks for quality, healthiness, and ease of use. The artichoke crab cakes with quinoa and zucchini were my favourite Green Chef dish, but everything I prepared was light, fresh, and delicious.
Green Chef’s organic services start about $12 each meal and allow you to modify or skip weeks when travelling, among other things.
Blue Apron
Best calorie counting meal kit
Blue Apron, the most well-known meal kit service, offers a lot of healthy, fresh alternatives on the menu – and just a lot of options in general. Blue Apron collaborated with Weight Watchers to create healthy meals such as sheet pan tandoori-style chicken and fish in lemon-caper sauce. These dishes are in line with the program’s point system, making it simple for participants to follow a healthy diet meal plan and stay on track. Blue Apron provides clients with eight to twelve tasty meals every week, including more than one vegetarian dish choice and a handful that were prepared for the Weight Watchers Freestyle programme.
Separate from Weight Watchers meals, their vegetarian options receive high marks in the reviews I read; however, if you are a full-fledged vegan or vegetarian, there are likely better vegetarian specialty meal kits and meal delivery services with more daily or weekly plant-based options and ingredients. Blue Apron also features one of the most user-friendly meal planning interfaces among meal kit businesses, as well as possible wine pairings.
Pricing and subscription: Prices per dish start at $8 and go higher from there, with the option of preparing two to four meals each week and two or four servings per recipe. Keep an eye out for special promotions.
$110 off the first five boxes
Purple Carrot
Best vegetarian meal kit delivery service
Purple Carrot (full review here) is the original plant-based meal kit service, and it has a devoted and expanding client following. The 100% vegan meal kit service gets merits for its creative and unique fresh meat-free ingredients and meal prep alternatives, such as cauliflower and quinoa kofta or sticky apricot seitan stir fry.
Purple Carrot categorises its offers so that even nonvegetarians may find high-protein or gluten-free meals. Be aware that some Purple Carrot recipes need some time and expertise to make, but if quality, homemade vegan meal kits are a priority for you (and extra visits to the store are not), this is likely the best option.
In addition to the delicious vegan meals, you can customise your weekly delivery with extras like banana chia pudding or overnight oats with apricot, goji berries, and cashew butter.
Pricing and subscription: Purple Carrot meals cost around $12 per serving, which isn’t inexpensive for vegan cuisine, but you can select between two plans tailored for singles or couples (three two-serving meals per week) or a family (three three-serving meals per week) (two six-serving meals per week).
Fresh N Lean
The best healthy prepared meal delivery service (no cooking required)
JAN 2022
This is one of the greatest meal delivery services overall, not simply one of the best healthy meal delivery services. I personally evaluated all of the top prepared meal providers, and Fresh N Lean came out on top, checking off more boxes than any other. The meals are nutritious and well-prepared; they taste great and look fantastic. Furthermore, depending on the plan you choose, the service is reasonably priced.
Fresh N Lean offers five meal plans to assist people stay on track with their dietary objectives, including low-carb, vegan, paleo, and protein plus alternatives. All of the prepared meals I sampled were crafted from simple, whole ingredients and tasted like high-quality home-cooked dinners. While I like almost everything on the menu at Fresh N Lean, my favourite was a delicious braised beef with veggies in a coconut-cilantro sauce.
Pricing and subscription: Fresh N Lean meal prices vary depending on the diet plan you choose and the number of meals per week. If you purchase 10 or more meals each week, it costs about $8 to $10 per meal. If you simply order lunch or supper, the cost per meal will be less than $15. Fresh N Lean is not the cheapest meal delivery service, but it is also not the most costly, and it is well worth the extra money.
Pete’s Paleo
The best paleo meal delivery service (no cooking)
In a week-long taste test, Pete’s won me over, cementing its spot as one of the top healthy, organic meal delivery services. While it is not inexpensive at roughly $14 each meal, it is actually less expensive than other meal programmes that utilise organic products and quality meat, and the cuisine was better than most of them.
Pete’s Paleo meals were also meticulously prepared. Meats were tender, veggies (mainly) cooked to perfection, and all of the tastes blended well. The cuisine wasn’t too seasoned, and the recipes were light, perhaps even safe – but that’s nothing a few shakes of spicy sauce can’t cure.
Pete’s Paleo should hit the mark if you’re exercising, avoiding gluten, or following a paleo diet and looking for a lot of protein, good fats, and nutrient-dense carbohydrates like sweet potatoes and beets. Pete’s offers a variety of ordering choices, and the meals are designed to be frozen, so if you don’t want to subscribe, you can keep a stock on hand for those times when you need a fast fix.
Pricing and subscription: The price each meal varies depending on the meal plan you select, but most are approximately $14 per meal. There’s also Pete’s Paleo Lite, which includes fewer quantities and less expensive dishes. The lower the price per meal decrease, like with other meal-delivery services, the more food you purchase at once. However, there is no discount for subscribing to this service.
Under the Eat What You Love area, there are also prepared meal bundles and a la carte alternatives, so your best approach could be to explore all of the different meal plans and see if one looks like a good fit.
Mosaic Cuisine
Best vegetarian dinner delivery service (no cooking)
FEB 2022
Mosaic is a newcomer to the industry, but it is currently the greatest 100% plant-based meal delivery service I’ve experienced. None of the nine Mosaic dinners were poor.
Personal favourites included the soft jackfruit chilli and the olive, pepper, and feta ragout, but there are many more that are equally delicious. There are no mushy veggies, which is a problem in meal delivery, and meat substitutes like jackfruit, tofu, and vegan sausage are used creatively and cooked to perfection.
Pricing & subscription: When compared to other services, Mosaic is very reasonably priced. Most meals are $9, which isn’t awful for what you receive, and they’ll be a welcome relief on those hectic days when you don’t want to cook but don’t want to spend $20 on takeout.
You may buy as many meals as you like from a selection of around 28 lunches and dinners, six soups, and six cereal bowls, but there is a minimum order of $70 for every shipment (about eight meals). However, because you may have your meals delivered every four weeks, it would break down to only a couple each week – a wonderful alternative if you’re seeking to check out the service.
Mosaic meals are currently available for delivery to over 80% of the country, including both coasts and the majority of the Midwest. Before proceeding, you should check the company’s website for your ZIP code to verify if it is accessible where you reside. Check out our Mosaic Foods review.
Freshly
The best food delivery service with cheat day alternatives (no cooking)
Freshly is a simple yet reliable ready-to-eat meal delivery service (not a meal kit). And, as the name implies, it is new. Freshly’s meals eliminate the need for any prep work required by services such as Blue Apron and HelloFresh, offering single-portion meals for the health-conscious individual who may not have time or interest in cooking.
Freshly’s meals are delivered fresh, not frozen, and are easy to reheat in a microwave or standard oven. The typical meal selection has 500 calories per serving and is gluten-free, all-natural, and sugar-free. Freshly’s ready-to-eat meals include a hearty penne Bolognese bake, chicken with coconut curry, and turkey mushroom meatloaf.
While not every meal is “healthy” (by most definitions, at least), most are, and you may easily feed yourself or your family nutritious meals without having to repeat dishes. However, if you battle with control, this may not be the best solution for you because those spaghetti dinners are only a click away.
FreshlyFit, a healthier take on the original meal delivery service, was just released by Freshly, however I did not enjoy the dishes when I tried them earlier this year.
Pricing and subscription: Freshly meal plans begin at $47 for four meals ($11.79 a meal) and decrease in price as you buy more. If you decide for the 12-meal-per-week plan, each meal costs only $9. Check out our Freshly review.
Splendid Spoon
Breakfast and lunch meal delivery at its finest (no cooking)
This is without a doubt the greatest meal delivery service for ready-to-eat, nutritious breakfasts and lunches. Splendid Spoon hopes to tempt people who want to make breakfast and lunch simple, straightforward, and nutritious by delivering ready-made smoothies, soups, and cereal bowls to their house on a weekly basis.
Splendid Spoon places an emphasis on nutritional nutrients without sacrificing flavour. Soups include cauliflower tikka and Mexican tomato, while smoothies offer flavours such as almond butter and jelly, blueberry acai, and a green matcha smoothie with spirulina, ginger, and turmeric. Soups and smoothies are classified based on their general intended impact, such as “heal,” “energise,” and “refresh.” Splendid Spoon also has a full-day soup detox add-on to help you “reset” your system.
While I like all of Splendid Spoon’s soups and smoothies, keep in mind that several are rich in sugar, so if cutting back on the white stuff is a goal for 2022, you may want to search elsewhere.
Pricing and subscription options are available from Splendid Spoon.
For as a breakfast plan that includes five smoothies per week (most of which are low in sugar) or a lunch plan that includes five days of grain bowls for $70. Alternatively, you may get the full shebang: For $100, you get five days of smoothies and meals (soups and grain bowls). It is a membership service, but you may quit at any moment, including after the first week if you simply want to test it out. For $195, the brand’s most popular package, the Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and Reset, includes five noodle bowls and a one-day soup cleanse.
Sakara Life
Best cleanse meal delivery (no cooking)
Sakara Life is a vegan and organic meal delivery service that delivers fresh (never frozen) harvest bowls, soups, salads, breakfast items, and snacks to your home through messenger service, eliminating the need for you to worry about cooking or preparing meals.
It’s delicious, with robust tastes and wonderful sauces. with vibrant hues and vibrant greens Sakara food arrived twice a week, so it was always fresh, and the various recipes kept me intrigued, such as vegan moussaka, roasted peach chana masala, and ginger almond noodle bowls.
The main disadvantage of Sakara Life is the cost, which is still $54 a day for just two meals. This vegan meal delivery service may be more feasible for a shorter cleanse or to organise for a certain week when you know you’ll be extremely busy but don’t want your good eating habits to suffer, in my opinion. If you can afford it. Everything is delicious — like premium spa cuisine — and obviously nutritious.
Pricing and subscription options Two, three, and five day plans are offered for roughly $80 each day. A less expensive alternative is to choose only lunch and supper, which comes out to $58 per day – still not cheap by any means. Shipping is included in all of this.
The Level II Detox cleanse costs $450 for five days and includes meals, vitamins, detox teas, detox water drops, snacks, and more. The Bridal Cleanse lasts 20 days and costs $1,680.
Veestro
Best vegan dinner delivery service (no cooking)
Veestro’s meals are supplied ready-to-eat, frozen, and vegetarian (no cooking or assembling necessary), and can be prepared in a microwave, pan, or normal oven (conventional oven or skillet suggested by me). Veestro’s plant-based meal delivery service will be one of the more economical meal delivery choices, with 15 meals per week (three meals per day) costing only $130. Veestro provides an incredible assortment of vegetarian and vegan meals, and you can design a box of 10, 20, or 30 meals at a time to be delivered in bulk whenever you want.
If calorie tracking is vital to your health objectives, Veestro’s “Weight Loss” programme seeks to keep the three daily meals around or under 1,200 calories with recipes such vegetable red curry with tofu, seitan soba noodles, meatless shepherd’s pie, and breakfast burritos. After you’ve created your first plan, you can begin to personalise it by rearranging dishes you enjoyed and skipping those you didn’t.
I think the cuisine was reasonably good for the price, that Vesstro employs more unusual ingredients and tastes than some of the restaurants I had. I wouldn’t eat these every night, but having three or four on hand in the fridge or freezer for those hectic nights is great.
Pricing and subscription options are available. A personalised or chef’s choice 10-meal plan costs $12.82 each meal. Twenty meals cost $11.93 each meal, and thirty meals cost $11.03 per meal. The weight loss plan, which includes three meals per day for five days, costs $179 for five days of food or $251 for seven days of food.
Hungryroot
Best food delivery service for impromptu cooking
JUN 2022
Hungryroot is half food delivery service, part meal kit provider. Unlike typical meal kits, Hungryroot customises a grocery delivery with simple dish options that may be made from them. While businesses such as Blue Apron and Sunbasket tie you into recipes with very precise items portioned for that specific meal.
Plans begin at $8.49 per serving or $65 per week. Hungryroot allows you to add extra servings in increments of two to four for a fixed fee of $10. The cost per dish reduces as you order more. Shipping is free for any weekly plan that exceeds $70.
How I put each healthy meal delivery service to the test
Because healthy food is subjective, and people’s nutritional needs and objectives varies, I attempted to approach this list from various perspectives in order to decide which meal services were the healthiest for different sorts of consumers. People following the keto diet, for example, may regard low-carb meal delivery to be the “healthiest.” Others who believe that vegan and plant-based foods are healthier than meat-based meals may hunt for a service that offers more vegetarian alternatives.
I also carefully examined the websites of each meal delivery service, noting what information was offered (ingredients, nutritional information), how clearly the menu was structured, and how straightforward it was to select a healthy meal plan and purchase meals. When they came, I took notice of how professionally they were wrapped and ensured that each was in good condition.
I used a two-pronged strategy to reheating food. I diligently followed the cooking directions on the package for some. However, because they are ideas, I reheated other meals as I would if I were left to my own devices. Frequently, this meant gently warming in a nonstick pan or reheating in an air fryer. Many meal delivery services have a microwave heating option, but I found that it nearly always delivered poor results.
What to Think About When Purchasing Healthy Meal Delivery
- Your nutrition objectives: The first thing you should think about is what your nutrition goals are, ideally with the assistance of a health expert, because certain services are better suited to specific diets or health problems. There are vegan meal plans that will make it simple to eliminate part or all meat from your diet. There are additional firms that specialise in keto, paleo, and low-calorie cuisine if you’re seeking to decrease carbohydrates or calories from your weekly consumption. Others provide diabetic meal plans if you must closely monitor your blood sugar levels.
- Meal kits vs. cooked meals: You should also consider whether a meal kit service or a prepared meal subscription is ideal for you. If you like the concept of cooking but don’t want to handle the purchasing and preparation, a service like Blue Apron or Sunbasket will do the job for you a few times a week. Prepared meal delivery is the obvious alternative if you’d rather not cook at all. They’ll provide ready-to-eat meals that may be kept in the fridge or freezer for anyone needs them.
- Cost and value: Another crucial factor to consider is the price you are willing to spend. Meal delivery may make life lot simpler, but only if it comes at a cost. Some meal delivery providers, such as Mosaic Foods, offer plans starting at $5 a dish, while others charge closer to $14. Use our comparison table to help you decide which meal services are best for your budget and then go from there.
What effect food and nutrition have on your overall health
Most health professionals will tell you that eating a healthy, balanced diet is the single most important thing you can do to enhance your health. While rigorous diets aren’t at the top of the list for physicians and dieticians, eating more whole foods, protein and vitamin-rich veggies, and less salt, bad fats, and sugar can significantly improve health results over time. Heart health, bone health, cardiovascular health, and even mental health are all closely related to diet, and signing up for a healthy meal service or subscription is one way to get started on a new dietary regimen.
FAQs about healthy meal delivery
Is healthy meal delivery a viable diet option?
Healthy meal kits and meal delivery services provide tasty, crafted meals that are tailored to your specific preferences and nutritional requirements. One reason people, including myself, prefer meal kits and meal delivery over traditional fad diets is because they remove some of the risk of nutritional self-sabotage.
Before making any major dietary changes, consult with your doctor or a health expert. However, there are meal delivery services that cater to various sorts of nutrition regimens, including keto, paleo, Mediterranean diet, low-calorie, vegan, vegetarian, and diabetes-friendly diets.
What is the most affordable healthy meal delivery service?
Mosaic Foods is one of the top prepared meal delivery services, offering a variety of nutritious, plant-based meals for as little as $9 per serving or as little as $5 per serving if you book family meals.
HelloFresh and Home Chef both feature a large selection of healthy meal kits and meal plans that start at roughly $7 per serving if you choose numerous meals per week. EveryPlate and Dinnerly are the most cost-effective meal packages. Both provide meals for roughly $5 or $6 per dish, but there aren’t as many healthy selections and you can’t make many adjustments to the meals.
What is the best food delivery service?
This is entirely dependent on your nutritional objectives. Also, keep in mind that almost every meal delivery service promises to be nutritious. Fresher ingredients, a greater range of properly balanced and nutrient-packed meals, as well as extensive guidance and information to make tracking nutrition, carbohydrates, calories, fat, and protein easier, distinguished the alternatives on this list from the competitors.
Even within this list, there are meal services aimed toward specific health and nutrition goals, such as plant-based meal delivery, paleo meal delivery, and low-carb meal delivery.
What is the distinction between meal kits and ready-to-eat meals?
Some of the firms featured below provide healthy prepared meal delivery, providing completely cooked meals that are typically frozen or partially frozen and ready to eat when they arrive. Others include health-focused meal packages with premeasured ingredients that come in a box and are ready to cook on a weeknight. Meal kits and meal delivery are not the same thing, but both make dinnertime easy and can lead to healthy eating habits in 2022. Furthermore, we discovered the top healthy meal services for individuals on particular diets such as keto or paleo, as well as those who like organic prepared meals and meal kits.
This material is designed for educational and informative purposes only and is not intended to be health or medical advice. If you have any questions about a medical condition or your health goals, always see a physician or other trained health expert.