The best vegetarian and vegan meal delivery for 2021 – CNET [CNET]

With so many plant-based meal kit companies on the market, it can be a challenge to find the best vegetarian and vegan meal delivery options to suit your tastes — but we’re here to help you sort through a number of leading options. Blue Apron, which kick-started the revolution long ago, has opened the door for many prepared meal and meal kit delivery services to pitch delicious meals to customers with every dietary restriction or preference, not to mention routines and budgets. Whether you’re an omnivore looking to shake up your diet with less meat with a few meals a week or an herbivore looking for a clean eating meal plan you should be able to find a vegetarian or vegan meal delivery service to fit your dietary needs here.

While Purple Carrot remains the only fully dedicated plant-based meal-kit service — no animal products or byproducts used in any of its recipes — most other meal-kit and meal-delivery services have integrated vegetarian options. Green Chef, for instance, offers as many as nine vegan or vegetarian meal kit recipes per week, in addition to its lineup of meals that do have meat. HelloFresh has roughly six per week and Sunbasket offers three or four plant-based meal options along with a full market of vegan-friendly grocery items and snacks you can add to your weekly shipment.

The same goes for prepared meal-delivery services, which require no cooking at all. There are a few strictly vegan meal services like Veestro and Daily Harvest to peruse, but even ones that do have meat, such as Fresh n’ Lean and Factor, offer vegan meal plans with as many as 12 plant-based options a week to keep you well fed, even when there’s no time to cook.

You may be wondering, with all these players in the game, which is the very best meal-delivery service for vegans and vegetarians in 2021? The answer varies a bit depending on what you’re looking for and each meal kit or delivery operation takes a slightly different approach. For example, some vegetarian meal-kit companies use plant-based foods like Impossible Burger that imitate meat, while others emphasize whole foods in lunch and dinner recipes. There are also vegetarian meal kits that specialize in organic ingredients and produce, in case that’s important to you, while others aren’t organic but are able to offer more budget-friendly meal plans. Some meal kits are also more complicated to execute, aimed at chefs with cooking experience looking to hone their skills, while others are quick to prepare and help you get a healthy, no-fuss dinner on the table sometimes in as little as 20 minutes.

Having personally tested as many of the plant-based meal kits and prepared meal services as I could get my oven mitts on, I’ve settled on this list of the absolute best meal-kit services for vegans and vegetarians in 2021. We’ll continue to update this list periodically as new players enter the arena.

Read more: Best healthy meal delivery services for 2021

Read more: Best prepared meal delivery for 2021

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