- If you just don’t have time or energy to actually cook your own meals, you might like to try a meal delivery service that sends pre-made meals to your door.
- Daily Harvest is the best pre-made meal delivery service we’ve tried with its fresh ingredients, healthy foods, and good prices.
- If you want to cook your own meals but take the guesswork out of your ingredients, check out our guide to the best meal kit services.
Meal kit services are all well and good until you make your way to the stove. Because let’s face it – even if you’re being provided with ingredients, recipes, and step-by-step directions, a box full of pre-cut vegetables and pre-portioned proteins does not a great chef make.
While meal kits cut down on the amount of shopping and planning you have to do for dinner, they don’t actually cut down on the amount of time you have to spend in front of your burners of your oven. And that, my friends, is why I present to you not meal kits, but delivered meals.
It is a subtle difference, you see, but a key one to be sure. Meal delivery services don’t send you ingredients on ice – instead, they send you entire dinners or lunches or breakfasts on ice. And rest assured, this is not your mother’s frozen TV dinner. The meal delivery services of 2019 are healthy, delicious, and surprisingly creative. So whether you’re pressed for time, exhausted, or simply not a genius in the kitchen, these services may be your saving grace.
When picking your meal delivery service, you’ll want to keep a few things in mind. First and foremost, what type of meals are you looking for? If you’re a fan of smoothies for dinner, you may want to look to a different provider than if you tend to have your biggest meal at the end of the day.
Second, you’ll want to keep any dietary restrictions in mind. Luckily, just like meal kit offerings, many meal delivery services can cater to a wide range of restrictions, whether that’s vegan, paleo, or gluten-free.
Also, think about exactly how much effort you're willing to put into making your meal. While some services will send you microwave-ready meals, others may require a spin in the blender, or perhaps some time in boiling water. Of course, all are easy, but some are admittedly easier than others.
Finally, price points should come into consideration. There can be a pretty wide range in price tags based on ingredients, dietary restrictions, and the like, so if you're looking to save calories and money, you'll want to choose carefully.
No matter which of our favorite meal delivery services you choose, we're sure you'll have many delicious meals to look forward to.
Here are the best pre-made meal delivery services:
- Best meal delivery service overall: Daily Harvest
- Best vegan meal delivery service: Veestro
- Best complete meal delivery service: Sakara Life
- Best meal delivery service for kids: Yumble
- Best meal kit-adjacent meal delivery service: Hungryroot
Updated on 12/30/2019 by Jen Gushue: Updated picks, prices, links, and formatting.
The best meal delivery service overall
Daily Harvest offers a wide range of meal options that are easily portable, super delicious, and extremely healthy.
For breakfast, lunch, and yes, even dinner in a cup, Daily Harvest is here to provide. The company that started out being all about smoothies, chia puddings, and soups has now expanded its reach and is offering more substantive victuals as well with its newly introduced harvest bowls and even the occasional cookie.
No matter what you get from Daily Harvest, you'll get foods that can be easily thawed, blended, or heated in order to provide you with the superfoods and sustenance that you need to brighten up your day.
The new harvest bowls are some of my favorite additions to the mix, and as ever, they're made of plant-based ingredients including quinoa, kale, lentils, and vegetables. They come in the same cup containers that you've come to know and love from Daily Harvest, and can still be prepared in a snap - if you're really in a rush, just pop the whole cup in the microwave. If you're feeling a bit less stressed for time, you could even go so far as to heat the contents of the cup on your stove (the recommended preparation) before popping it back into the original container for an on-the-go meal.
I'm particularly fond of the Brussels Sprouts + Lime Pad Thai, though the Broccoli + Cheeze (made with nutritional yeast rather than dairy) is also delicious. While you may think, at first blush, that the contents of a single Daily Harvest cup won't be enough to satiate your appetite, you may be surprised. It's true that its offerings don't look like much in terms of volume, but they are surprisingly filling.
That said, you can always supplement your cups with some additional ingredients, or even with a bed of rice or pasta. Plus, now that there are a total of 16 harvest bowl options, you could always mix and match a couple of cups for a bigger meal.
Daily Harvest ingredients are picked at peak freshness and flash-frozen to preserve farm-fresh nutrient density and flavor without leaning on preservatives or added sugar. Although it's not the cheapest option in the world, it is extremely convenient, and a great favorite among folks at Business Insider.
Pros: Delicious and nutritious, wide range of flavors and options, extremely easy to prepare, portable
Cons: Not the cheapest option; smaller portion sizes
Click here to read our full review
The best vegan meal delivery service
For the vegans among us, the best option for prepared meals decidedly come from Veestro.
Just because you're eating frozen food doesn't mean that you're heating up greasy microwave dinners as you sit in front of the television and live out every negative stereotype on the planet. Instead, live your best vegan life and make health-conscious and delicious choices with Veestro.
Veestro is a meal delivery service that makes it easy to get more plant-based foods into your diet without sacrificing taste or convenience. The company sends fully prepared 100% plant-based meals to your door.
All meals are preservative-free and organic (96% of all ingredients used), and the recipes are created by a vegan chef with 30 years of knowledge to fall back on. Don't worry about prepping ingredients - Veestro doesn't need you to do any heavy lifting. While I'd certainly recommend that you fire up your stovetop or preheat your oven for best results, you can just as easily throw these meals in the microwave if you really don't feel like cooking.
There are plenty of ways to interact with Veestro. You can pick and choose from 50 meals all priced starting at $10, like baked mac and "cheese," Tuscan calzone, portobello steak, and quinoa soup. Or, you can opt for meal packs, like an introductory starter pack, protein pack, and gluten-free option. These start at $8 per meal. Then there are also juices and various weight loss plans, all of which are 100% plant-based.
While frozen food normally incorporates artificial ingredients and preservatives, that's simply not the case with Veestro. The red curry is pretty awesome, and honestly, I could've eaten the enchiladas for days. Particularly noteworthy are the company's sauces, which look a bit unappetizing when they arrive frozen solid, but become surprisingly delicious once you drop the packages in hot water. Really, they make the meal.
At $8 to $10 per meal, Veestro is about comparable to meal kits, if not a bit cheaper, and you get the added convenience and freedom to concentrate on other parts of your life while still enjoying healthy, tasty food.
Pros: Healthy, extremely easy to make, 100% plant-based and a great way to get your vegetables
Cons: At the end of the day, if you're not a fan of frozen food, this may not be the meal for you
Click here to read our full review
The best complete meal delivery service
If you want breakfast, lunch, and dinner to be taken care of, Sakara is here to the rescue.
Let's not beat around the bush here - Sakara is expensive. In some cases, prohibitively expensive. Pricing starts at $70 a day. Three days of meals will cost you at least $239, while five days jumps up to $350. Pricing is based on three meals a day, so it will vary depending on how you customize the plan. If you're already living in a big city and eating out for every meal, that may be comparable. But if you're grocery shopping, let's be honest - this is by no means saving you money.
But what Sakara is saving you is time. More importantly, this brand may just be giving you the gift of life - at least, an extended version of it. That's because all of Sakara's meals are not only delicious but completely plant-based and packed with superfoods.
When you sign up with the service, you're effectively signing up for a whole new lifestyle. You see, Sakara isn't just sending you a frozen dinner - instead, you'll receive an entire day's (or multiple days) worth of meals, complete with drinks and snacks.
Included in your plan could be things like a Sakara Cobb Salad with coconut "bacon," which is really seed-crusted avocado; Butternut Squash and Mushroom Lasagna; or Golden Pineapple Un-Fried Rice with tempeh and red cabbage. All entrees are nutritious and surprisingly filling thanks to their healthy servings of protein.
For breakfast, you might find a Superfood Shot Breakfast Bowl with blueberries and nuts, or a Sacha Inchi Pumpkin Scone with Apple Butter. All meals are packaged in order to stay fresh for the days in which you're meant to eat them, and do a great job of keeping the fresh vegetables crisp and vibrant.
Ultimately, if you're short on time and long on money, then Sakara is likely the best option around.
Pros: Extremely healthy, plant-based meals, surprisingly delicious food, thoughtful packaging
Cons: Incredibly expensive
Best meal delivery service for kids
Yumble makes nutrition-packed meals for kids that will satisfy both picky eaters and busy parents.
So, you're on the meal delivery service train, and your Daily Harvest subscription is on its way, but what about the kids? It would be a shame to have to spend the evening cooking up something for the little ones just because they're not into your kale quinoa bowl. For that, there's Yumble, a meal delivery service that caters directly to kids and all their picky eating habits.
Yumble - a Shark Tank success story - offers a wide selection of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks so your kid can have a healthy, substantive meal on the spot. Yumble offers options like cheese ravioli with a side of green beans and mac and cheese with a side of broccoli. For the more adventurous kid, you may opt for a bean burrito with a side of cheesy sweet corn or veggie chili over brown ride with a side of broccoli.
Many of their meals contain hidden veggies, so even if junior refuses to eat anything but mac and cheese for every meal, the cheese sauce contains hidden cauliflower puree, ensuring they're getting some extra nutrition unbeknownst to them.
Founded by a certified youth nutrition specialist, you can rest assured that each Yumble meal is properly balanced for a growing child's needs and contain no added preservatives, artificial colors or flavors, high-fructose corn syrup or added sweeteners, and no trans-fats.
Meals come with both microwave and oven heating instructions, and if you opt for the microwave route, many meals are ready to hit the table in under two minutes. As anyone who's ever had a fussy toddler on their hands can attest, minutes matter when they're hungry.
The price is also right. Operating on a the-more-you-buy-the-more-you-save model, the basic package of six meals per week costs $7.99 per meal. If you have more than one child or want to serve them more than one meal a day from Yumble, you can opt for 12 meals per week at $7.49 a meal or 24 meals a week for $6.99 a meal.
Pros: Will satisfy picky eaters, developed by a youth nutrition specialist, ready in under two minutes
Cons: No guarantees that your child will like the meals
The best meal kit delivery service
If you're not so sure about meal delivery services but are in love with meal kits, the offerings from Hungryroot may just be the first step you need to become a convert.
There's something beguiling about meal kits. What with their pre-portioned vegetables, their well-sized proteins, and their packaged sauces, it's almost like having a sous chef backstage. Of course, it makes cooking a breeze, too, even if you don't generally consider yourself a chef. But as wonderful as meal kits are, they still require some amount of preparation, some amount of standing over a stove, or some amount of preheating an oven. That is, unless you have Hungryroot.
I like to think of Hungryroot as inhabiting the space somewhere between a meal kit and a meal delivery service. The subscription-based company sends healthy, almost-ready meals to your door. All you need to do is heat things up and mix them together. That means that instead of having dinner ready in 25 minutes, as you might with a meal kit, you can have dinner ready in about five minutes (if you're efficient). With servings costing around $6 to $7, this is also a pretty budget-friendly option.
All of Hungryroot's options are 100% vegan and gluten-free, making them perfect for just about any dietary restriction. But don't worry, meat-eaters - even though these meals are appropriate for herbivores, they're still delicious enough to satisfy even the most dedicated carnivore. Plus, thanks to the cornucopia of nutrients, complex carbohydrates (like sweet potatoes, cauliflower, quinoa, beans, and oats), and healthy fats (like olive oil, coconut oil, cashews, almonds, and avocados), you'll stay full for quite a long time.
Your menu could include things like Southwestern Quinoa Tofu Scramble, Green Goddess Lentil Salad, Moroccan Spiced Chickpea Tagine, Kohlrabi Peanut Takeout Noodles, Pad Thai Fried Rice, and desserts like Black Bean Brownie Batter or Almond Chickpea Cookie Dough. All are surprisingly easy to make, and if you really want to include some meat, you can always swap out the included proteins for your own. While servings may seem small at first blush, I was pleasantly surprised to find how filling they really were (not to mention how tasty).
Even if you have just 10 minutes to spare every night, you can still make yourself a delicious almost-homemade meal.
Pros: Easy to prepare (without depending on a microwave), delicious, plant-based and healthy, wide selection of meals
Cons: Some folks may want larger portions or meatier proteins