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It is extremely easy to hate on the idea of assemble-your-own meal delivery services, and pretty fun, too. Even the best meal kit delivery services usually equate to a cardboard box full of ingredients shipped to your door, along with instructions on how to turn said ingredients into a meal. They’re a perfect vessel for making lazy riffs about startups, millennials, people who can’t cook, and Instagram ads. So many Instagram ads.
People who regularly cook are flabbergasted that someone would pay a premium to avoid going to the grocery store. People who regularly order delivery think paying for a box of uncooked ingredients is like paying to be given homework. But with prices for all kinds of food goods going up, paying for a meal delivery service might be right on par with what you'd spend for a couple bags of groceries. Many are even offering their own à la carte section if you want to load up on pantry staples while you meal prep for the week. They're also helpful for avoiding waste if you're someone who wants just the right amount of ingredients for a dish without buying a whole jar of sauce. Or, maybe you're seeking some culinary inspiration (and fresh ingredients) to expand the limited range of dishes you can passably throw together. Some don't require cooking at all so you can pop something in the oven while you choose a show on Netflix. Among the dozens of options on the market, there will probably be at least one that you’ll like.
The Best Meal Delivery Services, at a Glance
Too many words on the page to read through it all? We hear you. It's a meal kit story, for crying out loud, and convenience is king! TLDR; here are the absolute best meal kits in our estimation, after plenty of testing and tasting and chopping and heating. Some for the time-starved, others for the aspiring chefs, all delicious:
- The Best Meal Delivery Service, Overall: Blue Apron
- Another Solid Basic Meal Kit Option: Home Chef
- The Best Meal Delivery Service for Vegetarians and Vegans: Purple Carrot
- The Best Elevated Meal Delivery Service: Sunbasket
- The Best “Oh Shit, I Actually Don’t Want to Cook” Meal Delivery Service: Territory Foods
- Another Great Chef-Prepared Meal Delivery Service: Cook Unity
- The Best Meal Kit for Delivery and Takeout Converts: Gobble
- The Best Meal Delivery Service for Cooking International Foods: Marley Spoon
- The Best Plant-Based Meal Delivery Service for Feeding a Family, or Just One Hungry Person: Mosaic
- The Best One-Stop Meal Kit and Grocery Delivery Service: Hungryroot
What kinds of meal kits are out there?
Some meal kits are built for the experienced cook, throwing in challenging recipes and new flavor profiles to explore. A few offer family-friendly portion sizes for feeding several mouths, delivering simple meals for small, fussy eaters. Some are built to get you to eat more veggies and on the whole, live a little healthier. Others can help you lean into your ultra-specific dietary needs (no gluten! dairy-free options that don’t give you the gurgles! exclusively vegan or vegetarian options! Paleo meals or low-carb, diabetes-friendly foods!), and fine-tune your diet thanks to filtering systems and ingredient breakdowns. Still, other meal kits are built to wean you off your Postmates habit with what are essentially culinary training wheels (all the meal prep ingredients bagged up and pre-cut for you so all you have to do is follow step-by-step recipe cards). No matter how you’re looking to cook, there’s an option worth trying.
How we tested
Here at GQ, we’ve tested dozens of meal kits over a number of work nights and weekdays, to maximize the “low on time” aspect and really figure out which were the easiest to pull together in the 30 minutes post logging off and pre-booting up Netflix. The best meal kits offered lots of tasty-looking recipes and fresh ingredients, as a baseline. But the absolute “neck and shoulders above” options fully streamlined the entire process—from planning online to unpacking to meal prepping to the actual sautéing (or simply popping into the microwave, no shame in that). Hell, some even come with tiny wine options for pairing with your food that feel like the Michelin star version of a meal out of a cardboard box.
It can be a little disorienting wading through all of the options. Thankfully, all of the startups will happily hand you some of their venture capital money to experiment in your own kitchen. Every company will give you a discount on your first meal kit, praying that you will either be enraptured by their food. Or, like a good millennial, too lazy to unsubscribe to yet another subscription service afterward. But with all of these introductory discounts, you can test all of our favorites below pretty easily. And you should. Below, our top picks for the best meal delivery services for every type of home cook.
The Best Meal Delivery Service, Overall: Blue Apron
Blue Apron is the OG meal kit, and against all of its knockoffs, the company established (and continually redefines!) the blueprint for a good meal kit. The ingredients are fresh, the recipes are smart, and there are enough options to satisfy most people. If we were to recommend one meal kit to someone and we knew nothing about their experience and fussiness level, we’d recommend Blue Apron.
You can think of Blue Apron as your starting point. Get your feet wet here, and you’ll soon have much to judge the others off of. The entire process feels more thoughtful than most of the others. Your recipe options vary from easy to complex, and you can plan your meals and deliveries using the site pretty easily among chef-curated picks, nutritionist-approved recipes, family-friendly picks, fast and easy dishes, plus vegetarian options. The recipe cards are clear and useful, and the corresponding app is also nice, too. Since all the recipes are listed on there, this kit is one of the best options for learning new recipes and then later recreating them on your own. The recipes lean on the simple side, but not always—one week offered a feta and olive pizza, tempura zucchini bao, and crispy chicken and potato salad.
Where other meal kits often feel like someone just went to the grocery store for you, the Blue Apron kits are a bit more color-by-numbers. Things like spices, honey, and vinegar come in nice Blue Apron bottles and tear-off packets that feel made for the recipe; other meal kits often cobble together these things in odd looking plastic vials or create food waste by giving you more than you need. The vegetarian recipes are somewhat limited, better for someone who occasionally goes meatless rather than someone who is a no-messing-around vegetarian. (For that, we suggest Purple Carrot.) Its expansion into Beyond Meat burgers is a nice touch, though, that feels like the service is taking a step in the right direction.
Like many of the other options on this list, Blue Apron has also started offering ready-made, heat and serve meals that you can easily nuke in the microwave, including plenty of pastas and rice dishes. You'll also find oven-ready dishes like a tomato gnocchi that you can pop in the oven for 45 minutes to get dinner on the table. Other add-ons like Blue Apron’s wine delivery service (for an additional fee) give it an edge over its other food-focused competitors. It sends you six mini 500-milliliter bottles, paired to your food options, that elevates the experience beyond the TV dinner-esque meals you might be expecting with a box subscription.
Overall, Blue Apron feels the most polished, offers the most variety in terms of meal options (from express to self-prepped) and feels relatively inaffordable compared to plenty of other takeout options. Whether you’re a knife neophyte or a curious cook, a single person with roommates or a parent in need of a family plan, here’s where you start.
Menu highlights: lemon-caper trout, shawarma-spice lamb pitas, duck à l'orange, squash and pinto bean tacos
Price: Individual servings start at $8 for four meals per week that each serve four people, not including $10 for shipping.
Another Solid Basic Meal Kit Option: Home Chef
Home Chef, like Blue Apron, delivers the baseline meal kit experience—and that’s a good thing. The recipes vary in length and complexity, and your weekly menu is completely customizable depending on your dietary preferences and how much effort you want to exert. That means you can test your cooking mettle when you want to and switch to cruise control when you just need to stuff some food in your children’s mouths. Most of the meals take between 30 to 45 mins to cook, but some are even quicker: a Carolina BBQ chicken we tried came oven-ready, pan and all. Add chicken and cheese on top of the broccoli, and you’re good to go. Also in the mix are Greek spinach and feta chicken, fajita-butter strip steak, and a French onion steak risotto. With all of the different options in prep time and cost (the strip steak was $15 per serving), it actually feels like you have a lot of control week-to-week.
And though Home Chef hews toward basic, middle-of-the-road comfort food options—its top dishes include steak and potatoes and shrimp penne—the service also includes some “Culinary Collection” gems that try their hand at some more inventive flavor palettes: a burger topped with balsamic bacon jam and blue cheese, for example, or a spicy mustard salmon. The recipes below each option are super clear, so you can look ahead to see if you actually know how to do everything in the recipe (hey, you gotta push yourself to get better). You can also customize each kit with your preferred meat, which makes choosing recipes for picky eaters way easier.
The “extras” section is where it's at, too. You can add chicken breasts and burgers for your weekend grill session, plus smoothies and lunches that you just have to reheat or mix. If you’re trying to buy yourself some buffer time in between trips to the grocery store, that goes a long way.
Menu highlights: smoky shrimp fra diavolo linguine, Hawaiian-style shrimp tostadas, Southwest-style two bean chili, golden BBQ brisket wraps
Price: Each Home Chef serving starts at $9, and the minimum weekly order value is $50.
The Best Meal Delivery Service for Vegetarians and Vegans: Purple Carrot
A lot of meal kits offer similar, crowd-pleasing recipes—American classics, recipes from other cuisines that are varying degrees of authentic, and, like, three vegetarian dishes that appear to just be regular recipes where they removed the meat and called it a day. Purple Carrot gives you a true assortment of vegetarian and vegan meals, and with fresh ingredients that will be up to snuff for even the fussiest of farmer’s market attendees. (Okay, there’s no pleasing them. But for everyone else.) There was a creamy corn bisque in one rotating menu of organic meals, and also crispy quinoa cakes, almond butter tofu with pea shoots, and roasted sweet potatoes with a citrus salad.
Purple Carrot sells its cook-and-prep meals in serving sizes of two or four. You can tack on extra add-ons to your order, like salads, avocado smoothies, and whatever “golden milk chia pudding” is. They’re meant to be ordered as breakfasts or lunches, but they seem like they’d be equally useful as appetizers or snacks throughout the week. Everything comes bagged up and separated to minimize waste (so there may be one head of broccoli if a meal calls for it, and just a little bit of spice or sauce, instead of you dealing with a recipe that calls for just one tablespoon of a giant jar of something—womp, womp). There's a recipe booklet included in each box for you to follow along with, but we will warn you that if you're a cereal and eggs type of guy, there's a learning curve here and it's not a three-ingredient sort of deal. We'd suggest it for someone with at least intermediate level cooking skills who knows their way around the kitchen, and doesn't mind cheffing it up a little once the box of ingredients arrives.
Recently, Purple Carrot also added a prepared meals section of heat-and-serve meals for cooking novices. Though we haven't had the pleasure of trying them, they range from golden aubergine korma to Thai peanut noodles with spicy sweet potatoes and collard greens.
Menu highlights: blood orange poke bowls with quinoa speckled rice and sea lettuce dressing, lemon zucchini noodles with cashew cream and crispy artichoke hearts, lemon poppy-seed pancakes with cardamom-fig yogurt, winter squash soup with sticky rice and sesame bok choy
Price: Dinners start at $11 per serving, lunches cost $9 per serving, and breakfasts cost just under $5 per serving. Prepared meals cost $13 per serving.
The Best Meat-Forward Meal Delivery Service for Omnivores and Pescatarians: Green Chef
Green Chef prides itself on serving only organic ingredients and shipping meals via a delivery process where 100% of the emissions are offset. All of its offerings are supposedly curated by chefs to ensure that you're prepping foods that are well-dressed and balanced. And though the marketing might lead you to believe these are plant-based meals exclusively, there's plenty to satisfy meat eaters on the menu.
As with most of these kits, the cook times for Green Chef were often overly ambitious. 25 minutes for a pesto shrimp and couscous bowl really translated to somewhere closer to 45 minutes, but definitely under an hour for a reasonably capable home chef. Most ingredients came pre-apportioned, but not chopped, with just enough vegetables and meat to complete your meal without any waste. The sauces and flavors were spot-on in the two meat-based dishes we ate: The pesto had good acidic tones, and the porcini cream sauce in a recent beef tenderloin dish was delicious and umami-rich for a lazy weekend dinner. But while we ordered servings for four people, our tester would estimate that there was really only enough food to fill about three people, or just two people with a hearty appetite.
Overall, we thought there was a considerable amount of variety among the weekly menus, from chili-spiced tilapia to fig and prosciutto pita pizza or pork chops with creamy chive sauce. Another perk is that the service even offers daytime breakfast-to-lunch meals in bulk, which is typically an underserved offering among the meal kit market, if what you're really needing is quick dishes for the moments before or during the work day when you're glued to the computer.
There are also helpful tags on each dish as you make selections for your weekly boxes, to help you muddle through what's gluten-free, has low added sugar, is light on sodium, and beyond. On a recent menu check we also clocked about 11 vegan and vegetarian options combined among 50 meals slotted out for the week (including roasted sweet potato farro bowls and butternut squash risotto), which is pretty decent. Still, we think its Mediterranean and meat-heavy options are where Green Chef really shines. For hardline vegans and vegetarians, you'd probably be better off with a plant-based kit like Purple Carrot or a grocery-slash-meal service like Hungryroot. For everyone else, you're in for a real treat that can help you save on weekly Grubhub deliveries.
Menu highlights: Harissa barramundi with hot honey glaze, fig and prosciutto pita pizza, roasted sweet potato farro bowl, pork with cherry BBQ sauce
Price: Meals start at $13 per meal, with optional add-ons.
The Best “Oh Shit, I Actually Don’t Want to Cook” Meal Delivery Service: Territory Foods
If you're jonesing for filling and healthy, heat-and-serve alternatives to takeout (even if that means forking over a little more money to do so), Territory Foods is one of our absolute favorites. It works with local chefs and nutritionists to curate a meal plan that works for your tastes and dietary restrictions, no matter whether you're going keto or only want to eat meals that are vegan from here on out. Each menu lists meals and the chefs who made them—like Chef Seamus Mullen's za'atar pesto chicken, Chef Damian's roasted shrimp with poblano sauce, or Nouri's mung bean curry with coconut sticky rice—along with some quick nutritional information on fats, carbs, proteins, and calories for your perusal.
In order to keep things as fresh as possible, the service delivers twice a week in compostable packaging, with everything non-frozen so you can pop them in the oven or the microwave without dealing with watery defrosted meals. Since the service works with a roster of diverse chefs, the options are varied, and get experimental with cuisines and flavorings (so not just your standard mac and cheese, or steak and mash). Thanks to that expert touch, the food is also really good, like something you'd pick up at a fancy restaurant, and surprisingly filling, so you might even have some food left over for tomorrow's lunch.
One other feel-good benefit is that Territory Foods donates part of its proceeds to nonprofits like Feeding America and the James Beard Foundation, and provides an option for customers to donate (instead of purchasing meals).
Menu highlights: Coconut curry chickpeas, chimichurri steak, vegetable paella, lemon dill chicken, peanut tofu noodle stir-fry
Price: Meals start at $10 for low-calorie meals between 250 and 450 calories, and range up to $14 per meal for "standard-size" meals between 400 and 650 calories.
Another Great Chef-Prepared Meal Delivery Service: CookUnity
Like Territory Foods, Cook Unity has made a name for itself by selling chef-prepped, pre-made meals for people who are sick of eating the same grain bowls and pastas from the restaurants in their delivery zone. First, you set up your meal plan by establishing how you like to eat (keto vs Paleo, e.g.), which proteins are your favorites, and any dietary restrictions. From there, based on your zip code, you'll get to select from dozens of meals. Our tester had 138 options to choose from, which is a pretty wild variety for any meal delivery service.
Here again, it's not just an anonymously chef-prepped menu, but one where you can research exactly who made which dish, from smaller names to renowned restaurant owners in your area. Each chef is listed on the cardboard packaging that comes with your meals, which also cites heat and serve instructions, plus nutritional info. The lengthy list of options means you can find a range of culinary specialities here, from authentic Chinese pork buns to deeper cuts like slow-roasted Cornish hen, all prepped in small batches in local kitchens in your area.
Everything is also served fresh, so you don't have to feel like you're heating up a TV dinner rather than getting takeout. There were some hits and misses in the batch of meals we tested: A tagliatelle pasta with pork on top was very tasty, with rich seasonings mixed in, while a salmon with broccoli and basil sauce felt a little dry and underseasoned even with the dressing top. And while CookUnity offers convenience and premium offerings, we felt a little short-changed by the portions. The fish only showed up with veggies on the side, and without a grain in the mix, it felt more like a light, low-calorie lunch than a filling dinner. For portion sizes alone, we'd still recommend Territory Foods' options over these. But if you want to branch out with your heat-and-serve lunch options, you can't beat the variety CookUnity offers, with more than the double the menu items that some of these other services offer in a single week.
Menu highlights: Orecchiette with Middle Eastern beef ragu, Mexican grain bowl with spiced shrimp and tomatillo-chile sauce, creamy jollof pasta and primavera vegetables topped with fresh parsley
Price: Meals cost between $8 and $9 per meal, with a minimum order of four meals per box.
The Best Meal Delivery Service for Cooking International Foods: Marley Spoon
Many of the “international cuisines” offered among meal kits feel like some butchered interpretation of the real deal, if you find them at all among the comfort foods and basic pasta dishes that make up most of the menus we see. Of all the meal kits out there, we were most impressed by Marley Spoon's diverse meal selection, which prides itself on its connection with the domestic queen herself, Martha Stewart. These easy-peasy, six-step meals are inspired by Martha's vast archive of recipes, and run the gamut from tofu vermicelli bowls to Provençal pork, al pastor tacos, parmesan Dutch babies, and shrimp tortilla soup. Each entree is tagged and categorized by terms like “fish” if you're pescatarian, “low calorie” if you're watching your waist, and “no added gluten” if you're allergic. There are even special treats and desserts that pop up, like a seasonal eggnog tart and cheese and prosciutto board, that we peeped during the holidays among their “premium” selections. Or, fresh and ready meals if you don't want to cook at all.
The service promises lightning fast prep times for these dishes, mostly between 20 and 30 minutes. In reality, unless you're absolutely booking it—Chop't style—in the kitchen, we found that the 30-minute time estimates for completing a recipe could be doubled in some instances, even for fairly seasoned cooks. But that's probably true of many kits that promise Rachael Ray-esque meals. You should also have some familiarity with basic cooking skills if you want to keep up with the intermediate-level recipes here. Though nothing was tremendously hard to pull off, some of them needed a bit more tailoring, tweaking, and time.
Best of all for someone craving Thai dishes, say, or some authentic-ish Mexican food, you'll find ingredients like fish sauce, curry spices, a prepped enchilada sauce, and tamari brown sugar that can help you approximate international foods. Dishes like a speedy Mongolian beef rice dish and a Cuban crispy shredded beef were delightful, much tastier than takeout and felt reasonably “authentic” thanks to the addition of sauces. Others were a little overambitious (a recent curry noodle dish felt overseasoned with a hodgepodge of Indian and Thai flavors that didn't really nail either cuisine), but the food was still filling, decently easy to make, and—with some adjustments—we'd go in for round two.
Plus, the pre-portioned servings were really helpful for eliminating the guesstimation we'd normally experience in the produce aisle, and the tiny baggies of provided spices were much less of a headache than trying to flag down the right obscure spice among a local grocery store's limited selection. Overall, if you're looking for more variety and culinary flair than just your average meat and potato meals, Marley Spoon is the one to try.
Menu highlights: Salmon with roasted beet rice pilaf, honey olive oil cake, chicken saltimbocca, baked falafel platter, oven-fried pulled pork flautas, kale and pear salad
Price: Meals start at $9 per portion.
The Best Meal Kit for Delivery and Takeout Converts: Gobble
If you want to feel like you're moonlighting as a television chef, there’s nothing better than Gobble. Gobble does as much of the work for you as it possibly can (just shy of sending you a ready-made meal), promising that all of their recipes can be made in 15 minutes or less. They do the “peeling, chopping & marinating,” leaving you to throw things in bowls, cook things, and tell made-up stories about your childhood that led you to this recipe. (Hey, no one said you have to tell your friends all of this stuff came in a box before they arrived.)
Many of the recipes are simple, but tasty (though we've noticed that Gobble has kicked its menu up a notch in recent months with more international offerings and less TV dinner-esque entrees). And while the easy prep times suggest less complex dishes, they usually got around this with pre-made sauces or spices that helped. While the shorter cook times were obviously convenient, they usually meant that the recipes could be made with just a single pan; other meal kits leave lots of dishes in their wake. You pay a bit extra for this prepping convenience, but you’re already doing the whole convenience thing with meal kits anyway. Might as well go all in.
This meal kit is perfect for those who shudder at the thought of spending a whole hour preparing their meal, and the recipes are stress-free. Also great: its lunch kit, which allows you to batch cook six healthy lunches on Sunday all at once. Again, no one said you have to tell your coworkers you didn’t whip these up each morning.
Menu highlights: Butter chicken with basmati rice and naan bread; Argentinian steak with chimichurri potatoes and roasted vegetables; harvest salad with kale, roasted squash, and maple vinaigrette; parmesan yuca fries with truffle aioli
Price: The “3 Nights, 2 People” plan gets you three recipes for two people each week for $72, plus $7 for shipping.
The Best Elevated Meal Delivery Service: Sunbasket
Sunbasket’s meals are pricier than average, but that cost is covering all the high-quality ingredients, ethical sourcing, and thoughtful extras: This isn’t a regular meal kit, it’s a fancy pants, healthy meal kit. You may not necessarily be saving that much money compared to your local takeout options or your nearby grocery store, but if you live in a place where your Grubhub options are limited to Taco Bell and the fried chicken place down the street, it's worth it to shell out a little more for quality, organic ingredients that can be shaped into a variety of meal options.
Sunbasket's list of plans is vast and makes picking recipes much easier for those who stick to a specific diet. There’s a plan for paleo, those who are “carb-conscious,” vegan, gluten-free, pescatarian, vegetarian, you name it. Other categories can be filtered by your level of expertise: “Quick & Easy” makes sense for beginners or the convenience-driven, whereas “Chef’s Choice” features premium meals that are perfectly suited for people who are ready to graduate to more advanced meals that feel a little more sophisticated than chicken and pasta. Some past Chef’s Choice offerings: Moroccan lamb tagine, seared tuna with kiwi-avocado salad, and a chickpea paella.
The service has also expanded its offerings with a “market” section that covers premium grocery and pantry items (so not your average milk and eggs) which we'd categorize as the Whole Foods of meal kit add-ons. For the holidays, that meant smoked turkey drumsticks, Black Forest ham, peppermint alfajores, and salted caramel truffles. And for every other time of the year, you can also peruse things like sliced prosciutto, empanadas, crab cakes, and organic juices with your order. Deluxe!
For people who are hand-wringing about the environmental impact of having boxes of food shipped to your doorstep every week, take comfort in Sunbasket’s packaging, which uses exclusively recyclable, compostable, and reusable containers. It also works with local farmers, ranchers, and fishermen to source the tastiest ethically-sourced meat, and only uses organic produce in its meals.
Overall, Sunbasket is great for anyone who wants a five-star meal kit experience, not the basic TV dinner experience. More seasonal recipes, more high-quality meat, better-for-the-environment packaging, high-end grocery staples, and plenty of house-made sauces that are tasty and require absolutely zero effort from you to make.
Menu highlights: Greek beef skewers with arugula-pear salad and hazelnuts; prosciutto flatbread pizzas with mozzarella, white beans, and arugula; Korean BBQ tostadas with pollock, charred scallions, and carrot slaw; jumbo shrimp in sage brown butter sauce with sunchokes and hazelnuts
Price: Meals start at $10 per serving, with market add-ons priced per item.
The Best Plant-Based Meal Delivery Service for Feeding a Family, or Just One Hungry Person: Mosaic
Several meal kits specialize in blends and purees for babies who are finally getting into solids or toddlers graduating to finger foods, but if you're just looking to feed a few fussy kids and teenagers (or just one grown adult with a voracious appetite), there's also Mosaic Foods. It's one of the rare meal delivery kits we've tried that offers ready-made, chef-prepared, family-size meals in one single serving, instead of having you order multiple servings of the same dish. It's a pretty welcome addition to the, uh, meal kit canon considering that many of thee services only offer light lunch-sized options.
Family meals arrive frozen in a large metal dish that's ready to be popped in the oven. Mosaic's founders were inspired by the good home cooking they grew up with, which pretty accurately captures the essence of Mosaic's family-size dishes. They're like unfussy home cooked meals in a TV dinner format, with an emphasis on plant-based ingredients.
Some dishes do feel a little sparse (the veggie pot pie is basically a thin wisp of puff pastry laid over a bunch of vegetables), but on the whole, you're looking at a pretty well-balanced menu of delicious meals with interesting flavor profiles: BBQ meatloaf and sweet potato mash, an enchilada verde bake, and a crowd-pleasing penne alla vodka. It would be nice if there was a little more exploration beyond the universe of pastas and mashes, but for a meal that's meant to please everyone in the family (including young children), we get it. If you'd prefer buying individual meals, Mosaic also sells a variety of veggie bowls, risottos, soups, and oat bowls for any plant-based eater looking to branch out from their local takeout options.
Menu highlights: eggplant moussaka, penne alla vodka, brussels and squash harvest bowl, miso tempeh bowl, BBQ seitan pizza
Price: Family-size meals (serving four) cost $20 per dish; oat bowls, soups, and veggie bowls range from $5 to $11 per dish. Minimum orders start at $70, and orders ship free over $100.
The Best One-Stop Meal Kit and Grocery Delivery Service: Hungryroot
Hungryroot is more of a grocery service than a weekly meal kit subscription, but there's enough overlap to land it on this list. Instead of selling dedicated meals, or clearly defined ingredients for said meal, the whole thing is like a one-stop grocery store that lets you pick and choose, while scooping up other pantry items like Banza pasta on the way to checkout. Before you sign up and input your credit card information, the company guides you through a short quiz to chart some basic info on how much you eat and what kinds of foods you prefer. From there, you’ll get a curated grocery plan that includes suggestions for primarily plant-based recipes (though it does sell meats and seafood), along with the corresponding grocery items you’ll need to complete them.
The freedom to go grocery shopping online and plan meals all at once is pretty damn convenient, with all things being adjustable: Maybe you want to add on crackers and fair-trade coffee to the mix à la carte, or maybe you want to swap out the suggested quinoa in a vegan chorizo taco bowl recipe for some other grain that doesn't taste like dirt—sorry, we had to say it. And the meals themselves are also meant to be ready to go in under 10 minutes, usually with around three ingredients each, so they tend to be extremely easy to prepare. It’s food that saves you time and somehow tastes pretty good! A welcome treat for the time-starved. (Everyone.)
Recipe highlights: yuzu miso salmon rice bowl, chicken shawarma with kale side salad, pesto tagliatelle pasta, carnitas 'n guac tacos
Price: Pricing depends on the number of servings for breakfast, dinner, and lunch you choose (along with how many add-ons you want to tack on for additional groceries). Weekly boxes start at $65 for three two-serving meals, and shipping is free when you spend more than $70.