Best prepared meal delivery services for 2021 – CNET [CNET]

Prepared meal delivery services are one of the best inventions for a busy person. You can get healthy, freshly made meals sent to your door to be eaten on the spot or frozen for later. All this amounts to saving you loads of time and stress when there’s no time to cook. Good ideas usually spawn lots of copycats and that’s certainly true in the case of ready-to-eat meal companies. Finding the best prepared meal service in a sea of options takes a little time, and testing. Don’t worry, we’ve done the legwork so you don’t spend money trying ’em all and sorting out the duds.

Oh, and meal delivery doesn’t have to break the bank either. We’ve uncovered meal services with portions as low as little as $8 a serving. Excluding unhealthy fast food, it’s tough to find restaurants or takeout services that’ll feed you nutritious and tasty food for so little dough.

Making dinner can be enjoyable, of course, but dinner burnout can catch up to you quickly. Since most restaurants charge a pretty premium for delivery, an easy meal plan from one of these services can help lighten your daily load without busting your budget. And if meal delivery elicits thoughts of overly salted instant mashed potatoes and mystery meat, know that prepared food — both fresh and frozen — has come a long way in the past few years. I’ve tested more than 20 of the top meal delivery services and many of them churn out healthy meals that take minutes to heat and will even help keep your nutrition goals on track.

While you can find a service in just about any style and for any niche diet, the best prepared meal delivery services are able to deliver fresh-tasting food made with healthy ingredients that tastes good enough that you’ll, ya know, want to eat it. The best meal subscription plans offer menus with recipes that are developed by chefs and are made to order just before being sent to you. That means they’re not crammed with salt and preservatives to keep them tasting edible and can be a good way to keep yourself honest, eating well and feeling good.

For those who still want to cook but need a little helping hand, oven-ready meal kits will cut out the prep, shopping and planning. But if it’s a fully prepared meal you’re after, there are services for that and we’ve tested some of the best-known meal delivery operations — along with a few newbies — to see which ones cut the mustard and which ones need a lot of ketchup just to be eaten.

Finding the best prepared meals isn’t easy but all the choice benefits you, the consumer, especially if you know where to look. The prepared meal subscription category has exploded with new chef-led brands offering premade meals to fit every taste preference, diet plan, lifestyle and price range. You can find healthy prepared meals for vegetarians, vegans, folks keeping to a keto diet, paleo plan or just about anything else. Finding the best prepared meal service depends mostly on your own preferences and nutrition goals, but to help you narrow it down, we’ve been testing and tasting up a storm to bring you our top picks in a few popular prepared meal delivery categories.

Before we get to the which, let’s go back to the why. Even if you’re not trying to overhaul your entire diet, committing to eating healthier even a few times a week can have a huge impact on overall nutrition intake and help create good eating habits. It helps when that healthy food actually tastes good, too. But if you don’t have the time to start meal-prepping and macro-counting, or learn a whole new set of healthy cooking skills, eating healthier probably feels daunting. Finding a convenient and healthy prepared meal delivery service for your healthy eating goals could be an easy way to make some strides in the right direction.

Read more: Best keto meal delivery for 2021

Prepared meal delivery

What exactly is a prepared meal delivery service? This breed of meal delivery will send fully cooked, often nutritious meals made with organic ingredients straight to your home. From there, it’s as simple as simple gets: Just pull a delicious meal out of your fridge or freezer and warm it up — no cooking required — and you’ve got a satisfying lunch or dinner ready to go.

Menu options are endless and certain prepared meal delivery services such as Freshly and Veestro have taken note of modern healthful eating habits, offering prepared menus and healthy meals tailored for almost any dietary preference, including carnivores, vegetarians, flexitarians, vegan and other plant-based diets. They can also cater to those with dietary restrictions who are keeping to a keto, low-sodium, gluten-free, organic, low carb, low-sugar or paleo diet. Even picky eaters will find something they like with all these prepared meal options.

Now, you might be wondering how meal delivery recipes differ from the frozen meals or classic TV dinners you find in the grocery store — and it’s a fair question. For one: Most are made just before shipping to you, so each individual meal is significantly fresher — which you can often taste. Because they don’t sit on grocery store freezer shelves, most are free from unhealthy preservatives or mounds of salt, too. Lastly, these prepared meal delivery services use higher quality ingredients, in general, and get a bit more creative with their rotating recipes, although it does vary from brand to brand. Prepared meals range anywhere from $8-$15 per meal, depending on the service you go with and the specific meal plan you choose.

Oven-ready meal kits

Another option to consider is deliveries of oven-ready meal kits that still have to be cooked but require very minimal prep, effort or technical skill to make a fresh meal. You may be wondering how these differ from the standard meal kit delivery services. While the meal-kit revolution, which led to household names like Blue Apron and HelloFresh, was all about providing you with the basic ingredients and instructions on how to pull together a delicious meal, you may not have the time or patience to do all that cooking. Oven-ready meal kits are just that: A fresh meal ready to be assembled and cooked without any complicated recipes or tiresome prep. 

Read more: Best meal kit services for 2021: Home Chef, Freshly, Blue Apron and more

These “oven-ready” meal delivery plans, which fall somewhere between a classic meal kit and meal delivery, are uncooked but preassembled to be thrown together to be baked, roaster, stir-fried or dropped into the slow cooker with no major prep required for a healthy, fresh-cooked meal. Think simple dishes like roasted chicken breast with precut vegetables and a flavorful sauce. Home Chef even provides the cooking tray in many of its meal kits so there is exactly zero cleaning to do after.

Just a reminder: While many of the meal plan services we sorted through are fully prepared, the meal-kit services like Home Chef and Gobble are not yet cooked, so know you’ll still be turning on the oven — and please don’t eat any raw chicken. 

Having tried offerings from every company on this list (and many more), I’ve determined the best prepared meal service for each type of diner from vegans to those seeking a more restaurant-quality experience. Luckily there’s a meal delivery service geared to almost every person, with budgets ranging from the affordable to the total splurge. 

As you’ll read, some of these meal delivery services and meal kits are centered on a particular concept. Home Chef, for instance, has simple meal kits down to a science with fresh ingredients and recipes that are already prepped and ready to be cooked in as little as 15 minutes. Other operations such as Veestro specialize in premade or prepared vegetarian and vegan meals for those going meatless or dairy-free but still looking for an alternative to cooking.

I’ll concede, there’s still nothing quite like a home-cooked meal, but some of these simple and affordable services just might be the thing to lighten your cooking load and cut down on trips to the market this fall and winter.

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After bravely testing the most popular services available in 2021, we settled on this list of the absolute best prepared meal delivery services your money can buy.

• Best overall prepared meal delivery service: Fresh n’ Lean
• Best meal delivery that you still have to cook (a little): Home Chef
• Best meal delivery for Paleo and clean eating: Pete’s Paleo
• Best meal delivery for vegetarians: Mosaic Foods
  
• Best meal delivery for vegans: Veestro
• Best meal delivery service for quick breakfasts and lunches: Daily Harvest
• Best meal delivery for eating organic: Trifecta Nutrition
• Best prepared meal delivery for gourmet food: Home Bistro
• Best meal delivery for comfort food with a healthy edge: Freshly

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