10 Best Meal Delivery Services, Tested by an Ex-Restaurant Critic
AI News Desk
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Wired
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37 min read
Life feels increasingly unmanageable.
Life feels increasingly unmanageable. The best meal delivery services and meal kits are the ones that make your home life easier—and can maybe make dinner something to look forward to, rather than dread. I've worked as a food critic on both coasts for more than a decade, and I like to cook. And so I didn't expect to appreciate meal kits as much as I do.
But I've found that the best meal kits I've tested have helped me climb out of a cooking rut of turning to the same dishes, and the same flavors, over and over. Meal delivery services like HelloFresh and Blue Apron are marvels of logistics—a convergence of growers, butchers, purveyors, and sauce makers from all over the globe, kitted out into little individual portions and sent to your doorstep with one-sheet recipes. But the best meal delivery services don't just ease the pain of planning new meals or buying groceries—they help you eat better and maybe even live a little better.
The promise of the internet has always been the world at your door ( maybe even economically, if you do it right ). This, in part, is why WIRED devotes so much coverage to the best meal prep kits, as well as all manner of other food delivery services .
The WIRED Reviews team has requested and tested more than two dozen meal kit delivery services since 2017. I've tested nearly all of them again over the past two years, often multiple times. Quite simply, the best meals I've eaten from a meal kit have come from Marley Spoon , which offers a path to genuinely good home-cooked meals on nights when I might otherwise feel uninspired.
But over the past couple of years, some have also made bold plays to expand both convenience and options. Others among my favorite meal kits, like Green Chef or Purple Carrot , offer hassle-free solutions for organic, gluten-free, and plant-based home cooking.
During my testing, I assessed each meal plan's recipes, breadth of selection, sourcing, ease of preparation, convenience, organization, packaging, high-quality ingredients, and suitability for different eating restrictions and needs. I also tested the best new and innovative meal kits for those looking for alternatives to Blue Apron or HelloFresh's long-standing meal delivery services. And not for nothing, I sorted out some often maddeningly non-transparent pricing. Here are the best delivery meal subscriptions I've tried.
Be sure to check out my investigation into whether sometimes Meal Kits Are Cheaper Than Groceries when trying out new recipes, and WIRED's related guides, including the Best Plant-Based Meal Kits , Best Food Gifts You Can Buy Online , Best Coffee Subscriptions , and Best Delivery Chocolate Boxes .
Updated July 2026: I retested top budget pick EveryPlate and top prepared meal service CookUnity. I tested a grill box from HelloFresh, and moved salad delivery service Gardencup out of WIRED's top picks pending new testing. I updated Marley Spoon's listing with information about the brand and leadership shake-up in 2026. I also updated pricing, plans, and descriptions throughout.
In the decade since it was introduced on American shores, the strength of the Martha Stewart–endorsed Marley Spoon meal delivery service has remained steadfast: It's the cooking.
The best individual meals I've cooked among the 20 or so kits I've tested in the past two years have come from Marley Spoon . A hearty Hungarian-influenced creamy mushroom chicken , a boldly Cajun-spiced whitefish, or a delicate eggplant parm. Those meals are still on the menu.
But Marley Spoon has also been evolving of late. Over the past year or two, the German-founded meal kit has added more menu items, more cosmopolitan meals with global flavors, and a greater variety of preparation times that now include a lot of 15-minute meals. It's done this without raising the price of the meal kit this year—no mean feat amid rising food and shipping costs.
The classic “Martha's Best” recipes are now augmented by meals that emphasize convenience and global flavors. A third of the menu is now prepared, ready-to-heat meals. I see more 15-minute dishes and tray oven bakes. Marley Spoon also seems to have broadened its international fare, with takes on a Moroccan-spiced apricot and beef tagine and Indian-influenced keema matar that's as easy to make as garam masala sloppy Joe.
Still, more than other meal kits, Marley remains devoted to classical cooking technique—the sort they teach in culinary school and on Martha Stewart's TV shows. This is no accident. When the German-founded meal kit arrived in the US, it did so with the cooking maven's endorsement and a lot of her recipes and techniques. Recipes often call for light seasoning throughout the process—not all at once. A kale and sausage soup, deeply savory, might be balanced with acid from a surprising splash of red wine vinegar.
Marley Spoon is more honest than most meal kits about the time it actually takes to cook a recipe. While your 15-minute meal might acccctually still require 20 minutes, it definitely won't take 30 or 40. There is one point of inconvenience with Marley, one that might help them keep the company's prices from climbing: Unlike other top-line kits, Marley sends your ingredients jumbled in a box, which reduces packaging waste but also leaves you hunting for the right spice mix or dried ingredient. The meat sourcing also isn't as transparent as some kits.
A financing and CEO shake-up for Marley Spoon in spring 2026 means I'll be watching Marley Spoon's offerings closely to make sure the quality proposition remains intact. But for now, it's the best meal kit I know. While maintaining value, Marley Spoon offers genuine good cooking and acts as a little school in culinary techniques. Some other meal kits on this list might offer more flexibility. Marley offers a firm backbone.
Home Chef lets you do pretty much whatever you want. Do you want two servings of two recipes, but eight servings of a third? No problem. Did you want to add an oven-ready steak meal for six to this week's order, and only this week's order? Also not a problem. Have a large family? Home Chef offers a cheaper family plan for batched meals. Want fewer meals this week than your typical order? Each meal will cost a little more, but you can still cut back your order without canceling completely.
More than any other meal kit I've tested, Home Chef is optimized for convenience, down to the transparent plastic bags that house each meal's ingredients. The recipes are finely detailed, with easy-to-follow instructions. Nutrition and allergens are listed in even finer detail online. Each recipe is classed according to difficulty, and even the theoretically highfalutin' “culinary collection” meals aren't hard to make or dauntingly culinary—mayhaps a stuffed chicken breast, perhaps some gnocchi.
It's not for nothing that WIRED previously listed Home Chef as the best meal kit for beginner chefs: The recipe instructions are full of little hand-holds and added advice. That said, the meals I've tried weren't quite as sophisticated and tasty as those you'll get from my top pick, Marley Spoon, nor as varied and interesting as HelloFresh. One “culinary” meal was basically a stuffed burger with seasoned fries.
But convenience, flexibility, and good administration count for a lot in this world. So do relatively low prices, at $10 a meal on most standard plans and $8 a plate for the kid-friendly family plan. If you've got a family life with meal demands that change from week to week—which is a lot of the people looking to meal kits to solve problems—Home Chef may be precisely the meal kit you need.
HelloFresh is pretty much synonymous with “meal kits.” It's the biggest of the services, and among the oldest. It's become a global brand, available in 18 countries. Chances are, if you've tried a meal kit, it's among the first you tried. What's surprised me, though, is how much HelloFresh keeps improving since the first time I tried it five years ago: better sourcing, and more cosmopolitan and modern recipes.
The brand has become a powerhouse of logistics. These days, you get seasonal or even regional ingredients, depending on where you live. Proteins are sourced from multigenerational, family-run meat purveyors. Each subscription box is also well-organized, with each recipe's ingredients portioned into labeled bags. All you need is pots, pans, a stove, and some basic oil- and salt- and butter-type kitchen staples.
Especially over the past year, HelloFresh has undergone a near-astonishing expansion of its menu. Where I live, more than 400 menu items are available each week, spanning a truly global range of cuisines. One day, I can find myself deep in a Gambian-inspired peanut stew. The next it's an aspirational Hainanese chicken feast , a simplified Thai-style green curry shrimp, Tex-Mex enchiladas slathered in cheese and ranchero sauce, or Guamanian-inflected chicken kelaguen. Or I can just make myself a salad, wrap, or sandwich.
This summer, HelloFresh has even offered single-order grill boxes in partnership with meat delivery service Good Chop , with 32 servings comprising burgers (six), dogs (eight), steaks (four), sausages (eight), and bacon (eight strips) for $80. (In my experience, the steaks and bacon were the two best selling points.)
Where possible, HelloFresh has even begun dabbling in seasonal ingredients, like conehead cabbage I charred on my grill last summer. In some areas, HelloFresh has even added regional dishes and ingredients. Honestly, it's an exercise in logistics that makes the nerd in me a little giddy. After criticism, including my own, the company added more rice to the rice meals last year. This said, shipping prices are up, and the per-serving price has hiked around 50 cents a serving this year as well—a tribute to the rising gas and food prices that have plagued 2026.
The global offerings don't make much claim to authenticity, mind you. Also, HelloFresh's 20-minute meals sometimes take as long as 40 minutes to make. But the offerings from HelloFresh look a lot like how people eat these days. They are bright, light, and lightly internationalized: with pan-Latin steak and rice bowls, beef stir-fried with ponzu and plum, Dutch-inspired orange Dijon chicken, Thai-style curries, and maybe some mango salsa atop a vaguely Southwest-y pork roast. It's an Alison Roman world. We're just living in it.
Hungryroot has among the lowest prep times of any meal kit I've tested that isn't actually pre-prepped—perfect for your friend who “doesn't have time to cook" and instead finds their DoorDash budget ballooning. Hungryroot meals tend to take about the same amount of time to cook as to eat, 10 to 20 minutes for most meals I've tried.
Each meal tends to be assembled from a small number of components, with a lot of the prep already done. An organic sauce or salsa or dressing, some version of pre-mixed salad, a sprig of broccoli, a pack of sous-vide chicken or smoked pulled pork. It's a bit like running a personal fast-casual restaurant out of your home kitchen.
It's also nice that you can customize Hungryroot to suit your needs and dietary preferences. The big idea behind Hungryroot is to be a full-service, AI-assisted food concierge. First, Hungryroot logs all your dietary, lifestyle, and budget preferences. (Hate a mushroom? Follow a low-salt diet? Don't like masala spices, specifically? Don't worry). Then, it suggests a whole world of ingredients and recipes, which you can sub out from a seemingly endless list each week, depending on local ingredient availability. Usually, there's room leftover in the plan to add some fresh fruit or a sweet treat. One detriment of this ultra-customized system is you've got to get pretty far through the ordering process (and enter your credit card) before seeing your personal menu. Here's the online “cookbook” of potential menus , for those who'd like an early glimpse.
I'll put it simply. CookUnity is the only prepared-meal delivery service I've tried that has ever delivered a meal better than local restaurant takeout. Specifically, from the Seattle kitchen run by chef Gaurav Raj, I've tried multiple Indian gravies from butter chicken to chicken lababdar that tasted better than I could get at the Punjabi restaurant down the street.
Prepared meal delivery services promise a hunger-squelching holy grail: fresh meals, delivered to your door in a box that's ready to heat and eat, minus all the effort of actually cooking it. But my results from many other prepared-meal delivery services have been mixed. Indeed, some struggle to better the TV dinners they resemble. The reason CookUnity has been a big standout is its unique business model.
Most prepared meal plans come from a single big corporate kitchen. But CookUnity is more like a cross between a meal service and DoorDash. CookUnity enlists restaurant chefs, often big names like Jose Garces or Rick Bayless or Iron Chef contestants, to design recipes and hire cooks who make your meals out of regional commissary kitchens, and ship them never-frozen down the street. This model leads not just to quality, but diversity of food.
Over two years of testing, I've tried multiple well-composed salads, a surprisingly wonderful truffled beef stroganoff, credible Filipino adobo, and Japanese-style katsu with curry that crisped up tantalizingly in an air fryer.
Menus, chefs, and (probably) results may vary depending on your region and your distance from the cooking hub. Hubs now include New York, Austin, Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, and Toronto. (See the delivery map to check whether CookUnity services your area.) I've had good results from the small Seattle hub, and WIRED reviewer Louryn Strampe said the adobo flank steak and rigatoni alla vodka she scored from the Chicago hub straight-up blew her mind.
Prep tends to happen one of two ways: Either you nuke it, or you can follow the chef's ideal heating instructions for a stovetop or oven meal to create optimal texture and flavor. After reheating, you might also stretch burrata cheese over your pasta, or ladle cumin-forward sauce on your salmon. The meals are filling, the textures are spot-on, and the packaging is compostable and recyclable . Each meal lasts in the fridge between four and seven days from the date of delivery, through the miracle of modified atmosphere packaging .
After retesting CookUnity this year during warmer weather in Oregon, I found that my meals arrived at food-safe temperatures—no small feat, given that my meals drove in from four hours away in Seattle.
In the summer of 2025, America's OG meal kit brand, Blue Apron, underwent a transformation into a new model: No subscriptions required. So let’s say it’s Friday, and you'd like a kit so you can make some nice orecchiette and pork ragu next Tuesday, when your boss comes over for dinner (because life is, of course, a sitcom from the 1970s). You can just order it. Four days later, a bag will show up with recipe instructions and all the ingredients: ground pork, currants, fresh zucchini, all that. Rather have beef? You can sub that in. And you don't need to sign up for any minimum number of meals, nor subscribe and then need to cancel again.
This is a bit of a game-changer for meal kits, frankly, though the scenario I just described would end up a bit expensive ($10 a serving, plus $10 shipping). And so Blue Apron also has a DoorDash-style loyalty model: Blue Apron Plus. You pay $10 a month, the price of shipping on a single order, and then shipping is free for the month—meaning if you order more than once a month, you save money by signing up. Price per meal has fanned out since the reboot, ranging from $8 a serving for lunchtime salads and wraps to $13 for hearty bakes and seafood plates. This allows you to choose meals based on budget.
This is an ambitious turnaround for a meal kit that WIRED reviewers had loved in the past before going through some bumps in the road under new ownership beginning in 2023 . So far I've had pretty good results. My test last year included fun and internationalized recipes, like a crisp and lightly spicy bang bang chicken, bao bun burgers with shishito peppers, and za'atar-spiced salmon, plus an excellent and hearty shrimp and feta bake. Prep for most recipes hovered around 30 minutes. And on each, it was possible to sub out a main protein. WIRED reviewer Kat Merck tried Blue Apron's low-effort, assemble-and-bake meals and came away mostly impressed by the sourcing and quality of the ingredients—but also wondered whether the focus on simplicity led to compromises in some recipes. She couldn't bring herself to bake meat from raw on a harissa beef dish, per instructions, without first draining the grease. And so she still cooked it in a skillet first.
Further testing has shown that Blue Apron's new recipes often suffer from hiccups and vague instructions. A Chilean salmon sent by Blue Apron in August didn't measure up to the Norwegian version favored by HelloFresh's brands. Allergens and eating restrictions are also difficult to navigate, and nutrition info is a little too buried on the new website. But it's an intriguing new model, and the low-stakes, no-obligation $10 loyalty model seems like a bargain for small households and those who order most weeks.
With most plans at $7 a serving plus shipping, HelloFresh budget option EveryPlate remains the lowest-cost meal kit I've tested. And yet, this budget meal kit still uses the same proteins from local purveyors as HelloFresh’s much more expensive plan.
The secret is not skimping on calories or portions, but rather simplicity. EveryPlate's meals derive their flavors from a small set of ingredients, and a single sauce or herb or spice mix—or perhaps some citrus cross-utilized as both juice and zest. Ingredients also tend to be cross-utilized quite a bit, which doubles as good cooking.
In a test this year, I made myself a fun Tex-Mex-style “quesabirria” with a chili-style spice paste; a hearty plate of pork chops with thyme and shallots; and a ground-turkey rice bowl that relied on ginger, garlic, and a mix of soy glaze and citric ponzu sauce.
HelloFresh's low price makes it the only meal plan I've tried that wouldn't require any particular adjustment in my grocery budget—at least for two people. And yet, this budget meal plan from HelloFresh is somehow able to offer dinners that even your judgy mom-in-law would recognize as a balanced dinner.
This year's pork chop meal in particular is the sort of meat-and-two supper that I probably took too much for granted when I was a child. Pan-seared chops. Crispy-leafed brussels sprouts baked in the oven. Fresh mashed potatoes. But what elevated the meal from basic staple to weekday extravagance was a thoughtful shallot-garlic-cream pan sauce, cooked with fresh thyme in the juices from the pork I'd just finished searing. The sauce was rich, complex, aromatic, and just enough outside my usual repertoire that I felt like I'd learned a useful secret.
The laundry list of staples you're expected to have in your fridge for EveryPlate is a little longer than with more expensive kits, and includes flour and eggs. The box of ingredients is not as organized as HelloFresh's. The menu is significantly shorter than HelloFresh's at about 35 options, but still competitive with many meal delivery services. While the meals skew more basic than adventurous, I came away impressed by the simple good taste and economy on offer from EveryPlate, at a price that would not stretch a lot of household budgets.
My colleague Molly Higgins, who eats no meat, had a good experience with EveryPlate's shorter menu of vegetarian options this spring, and was able to secure a week's worth of food for less than she ends up spending on groceries in New York. Sure, you may want to fill out a meal by adding your own rice to supplement Korean-inflected beef or pork with squash and carrots. ( A great rice cooker makes this easy .) This adds up to an economical meal, one you might appreciate on a Tuesday when you're out of other ideas.
Best budget meal delivery service for large families: Marley Spoon's lower-cost meal kit, Dinnerly , was WIRED's former budget pick. It's still a good affordable pick for small families, if not quite as low-cost as EveryPlate. But for large families (six portions), it's almost certainly the best budget option at a mere $6 a meal, with a much larger selection of recipes. Compared to my testing last year, Dinnerly's recipes have grown lighter, more sophisticated, and maybe a little smarter: a za'atar chicken recipe here, a Mediterranean-inflected pork tenderloin or lemon-butter shrimp there. Often it feels like you're getting my top-pick kit, Marley Spoon, at a slight discount. The difference shows up mostly in the simplicity of Dinnerly's ingredient list, usually comprising a simple herb or spice accent rather than a complicated medley of flavors. $6 a serving for six-serving meals. $8-$9 a serving for four-serving meals. $10 -$11 a serving for two-serving meals.
Of all the plant-based meal kits WIRED vegan meal-kit tester Molly Higgins has tried, Purple Carrot took the, uh, carrot. Purple Carrot offers boxes filled with premade, frozen, oven-ready meals—with adventurous dishes like mole enchiladas, or an artichoke-stuffed ravioli that needed a little extra seasoning. But where Purple Carrot truly shines is with its fresh-made recipes. And unlike some meal kits that make you go hunting through a box, the ingredients for each of Purple's recipes arrive well-organized in individual plastic bags, accompanied by beautifully designed recipe cards. It's also a flexible plan: Order what you'd like each week, with a minimum $50 order.
Purple's recipes are devoted to the joy of cooking—sometimes to a fault, in the case of some hour-long recipe preps. (Advertised shorter prep times, as is often the way with meal kit recipes, were bald-faced lies.) Higgins, a natural cook, loved the time spent sautéeing, searing, mixing, and spicing. She especially enjoyed the results. A lovely Mediterranean rice salad with stuffed grape leaves took just a half hour to make, with some simple oven-roasted radishes, grape tomatoes, and zucchini.
The results of the cooking are a parade of textures as tasty as one would expect at a restaurant, but with relatively little effort required, Higgins says. Another meal of squash dumplings required both boiling the squash and individually stuffing the dumplings, which took north of an hour. It ended up being Higgins's favorite meal of the week, a case where effort meets reward. But the effort was nonetheless real. Purple Carrot bursts with texture, flavor, fun international ingredients, and the spirit of invention. If you're the sort who likes to take time in the kitchen, there's vegan gold at the end of that rainbow. Lately, Purple Carrot has also branched out into special meals, like a box designed in collaboration with fitness influencer Robin Arzon .
Green Chef is first and foremost the organic arm of HelloFresh. But it also caters very well to eating restrictions, with a strong vegetarian and dairy-free focus. Keto meals are also on offer. More than half of Green Chef's meals are gluten-free, offering a heartening diversity of options. These are prepared in dedicated gluten-free facilities, using gluten-free ingredients that have been traced back to their source, as attested by in-person inspections and validation by Washington state's Gluten Intolerance Group (GIG) . (Yes, I called up GIG and verified the stringency of its validation program. Spokespeople there said they've also never received a report of gluten contamination in a Green Chef meal.)
Green Chef's recipes are also simple and well-managed. In 2025, they were more unimpeachable in terms of technique than any other kit I'd tested from parent company HelloFresh. But as HelloFresh's flagship plan stepped up its game over the past year, this hypothesis will need to be retested. Green Chef's recipes are well-organized, and pre-portioned into individual bags. The prep times are maybe almost honest, even: I think I may have actually prepared a half-hour meal in a half hour. Green Chef's $14-per-meal price puts it among the more expensive kits: Organic goods, and separate gluten-free packing lines, do add expense.
And Green Chef especially shines on gluten-free options. Many gluten-free meal kit items from other services are a sad parade of gummy tapioca pancakes, sawdusty meatloaf, or limp zoodles; poor substitutes for wheat, on products most often made with wheat. Not Green Chef . After a week of testing its gluten-free meals, I actually didn't find myself missing gluten at all. Between trim bavette steaks in creamy red pepper sauce, a sweet-spicy honey-ginger shrimp rice bowl, and a kale-quinoa salad, the gluten-free meals and recipes from Green Chef were consistently among the most delicious I've tried from a meal kit claiming to offer gluten-free food. The secret to its success is no secret at all: None of the recipes ever needed gluten in the first place. Each was a fully realized meal, with nothing missing and nothing replaced.
According to everyone I know taking a GLP-1 medication for weight loss or diabetes management, the drive to seek out delicious food just isn't what it used to be. What has not changed is the utilitarian need to get enough protein, in a reasonable form, balanced against other health considerations. Does this not sound romantic? It mostly isn't. But if hunger doesn't move you like it used to, it's extra important for your food to taste good enough that you actually want to eat it.
Enter Tempo by Home Chef , a never-frozen, prepared meal service that offers a selection of around 30 meals each week. As many as two-thirds of these meals are marked “protein-packed,” with more than 30 grams of protein. And at least 10 of these are GLP-1-balanced, per a dietitian. What you'll get: sufficient proteins, not too many carbs, no other funny stuff.
Tempo's proteins are well-managed, if unexciting. But the meals were easy, nutritious, balanced, and comforting, without relying on a pile of unhealthy sodium and carbs to be palatable. At $12 a meal, Tempo is about par for the course for prepared meals.
WIRED reviewer Kat Merck, who tested the GLP-1-balanced meals, found the portions appropriate for those on the medication, and appreciated that the meals offered her the proteins she needs to maintain muscle mass even while chemically un-hungry. Just note: You may end up with a lot of chicken and a lot of fish. Both Merck and I were happy to see the occasional chicken thigh, and not just breast. Thighs are better, for the record.
Sunbasket (~$16 per serving) : Sunbasket focuses heavily on fresh, organic ingredients, and offers a whole lot of variety in its menus. Its recipes are attentive to saucing, and to basic good cooking techniques such as deglazing. Like Hungryroot, it also offers breakfasts and snacks to supplement meal options with little extras such as coconut yogurt and sous-vide egg bites. The meal kit also lets you filter out allergen-containing items. WIRED reviewer Louryn Strampe loved the flexibility and add-ons. During my most recent test, I enjoyed an excellent Greek chicken and orzo salad dish—and wonder of wonders, the advertised prep time was actually the actual prep time (about 30 minutes). The focus on organic ingredients does make Sunbasket one of the more expensive meal kit options, and the annual Thanksgiving meal kit was a lovely and welcome extravagance at $200 .
Gardencup ($11 to $15 a serving) : Gardencup is a little like having the whole menu of Sweetgreen sent to your house or office, except in cylindrical form. Basically, you pick out premade salads, soups, and snacks, and they come in little cups—fresh, lovely, crisp, and ready to eat. WIRED reviewer Louryn Strampe marveled that even in the winter, the produce somehow tastes wonderfully fresh. This is a great way to keep yourself eating healthy when you've got no time to cook at the office (or the home office), which is typically when DoorDash or freezer-meal temptations run wild. We've loved it in the past, and sourcing is often local. But amid a cyclospora parasite scare tied to lettuce in summer 2026, I’ve taken this salad delivery service out of our top picks until I’ve had the chance to test Gardencup again myself. (Gardencup reps have noted publicly that they do not source their lettuce from any named, suspected sources of the outbreak).
Factor (~$14 a serving) : Factor is a prepared-meal delivery plan run by HelloFresh, with ready-to-eat meals that look a lot like TV dinners. But there's a twist: The trays have never been frozen. They were made fresh in a commissary kitchen and were shipped out with cold packs, yielding a result that's kind of like restaurant leftovers. Proteins in particular often maintain their texture quite well, including a chimichurri filet mignon I couldn't believe I microwaved. Some meals, especially carb-avoidant or keto meals, are oddly mushy. (For what it's worth, my gluten-free colleague, Scott Gilbertson, wrote that he had the best luck with Factor's Mexican fare .) But meals centered on proteins and whole starches, like potatoes or rice, alongside veggies like green beans or brussels sprouts, tended to fare quite well. So did stir-fry-style meals. In fact, a recent test of Factor's high-protein plan was my favorite experience with the meal kit and included wild rice and excellent pork loin. I do wish Factor would shed its reliance on the microwave, however: When I went off-script and used a Ninja Crispi air fryer or convection oven, I had much better results than with the nuker. But non-air-fryer ovens do not seem to offer the same improvement. Like many ready-to-eat meals, it's a bit more expensive than the kits you cook yourself.
Fuel Meals ($8 to $9 a serving) : Fuel Meals have evolved into a quite economical option, upon last check-in. This befits a no-nonsense, no-fluff, no-added-ingredients, pure-protein-packed nutritive meal plan like this one. Some of Fuel's meals had as few as five ingredients, consisting of essentially the macronutrients themselves plus a modicum of oil and salt. A large percentage of meals are marked gluten-free or dairy-free. Does all this mean less flavor? It can. The meals are also often not beautiful, dominated by a large and no-nonsense serving of protein. But Fuel's meal service offers an admirable focus, especially for those bulking up or watching carbs. Meals are substantive, usually topping 600 calories and 40 grams of protein without added sugar or fatty dairy or carb-heavy filler. I feel like if I wore tank tops more often, this is what I'd eat.
Wildgrain ($13 to $17 per loaf or box of pastries) : This is less a meal delivery service than a way to step up a home meal. Wildgrain is a monthly delivery bread box: You receive par-baked bread and pastries from small bakeries all over the country. This is pretty much the same process that likely happens at local restaurants, when your warm bread basket comes out: It's not quite as high-quality as you'd get direct from an artisan bakery, if you live in places with artisan bakeries. But it's also as fresh as it gets, and I had a very good experience testing the box in October 2025, in particular, with sourdough breads perfect for large meals with houseguests. You finish the baking at home, so what you have at the end is ultra-fresh baked bread, biscuits, doughnuts, or scones that are still warm and crisp from the oven. A Wildgrain subscription arrives as a monthly box, filled with four, six, or 12 items that might range from a full sourdough loaf or fresh-made pasta to a pack of six doughnuts or four large croissants. Basically, you build your own box each month , choosing from among healthy sourdough or pasta and decadent pastries.
Thistle ($12 to $15 per meal) : A prior top pick for solo diners with individually prepared dishes that require little to no prep, Thistle is mostly a plant-based meal kit—but there's a $3 option to add sustainable meats to any otherwise vegan meal. It's also so local and seasonal that the West and East Coasts have different menus, and the whole middle of the country, except Chicago, gets none. ( You can check your zip code here to see if you can get delivery.) WIRED reviewer Adrienne So has used Thistle as a means to get herself to eat more vegetables, and thus avoid a life of rickets and/or scurvy. Portions are generous enough to split among meals, and in a nice turn for those who hate having to dispose of boxes, Thistle's drivers will pick up the cooler bag that housed last week's meal and replace it with a new one full of food. Vegan tester Molly Higgins's favorite meals from Thistle were a whirlwind of textures, including a Mexican-inspired corn and poblano chile salad with adobo pinto beans and a chilled lemongrass-accented rice noodle bowl that mixed spice, tang, crisply fresh veggies, and deep umami from mushrooms and seaweed. She still dreams about it sometimes. Breakfasts are available at a lower cost, as low as $9.
Tovala (~$13 a serving) : It's not every day you get to try something that feels super new. Tovala offers perhaps the most ambitious solution to ready-to-heat and prepared meal delivery I've seen: The meal kits come with an oven! In contrast to the sogginess of many prepared meals, Tovala's recipes come in little foil pans with recipes custom-designed for a little steam oven. The results are often delicious—as was the case during my testing with a sweet chili–glazed salmon with pickled veg and noodles—and the QR code scanning function makes each recipe seamless to cook. Stick with the meal plan for six weeks, and in the bargain you get a quite affordable and powerful little convection oven, toaster, and steamer. A previous flaw was that Tovala only offered single-serve meals. But as of early 2026, at least four or five meals a week offer two to four servings, making the meal delivery service much more useful to families and couples.
Gobble ($17 a serving) : Formerly the top pick for fast-cooked meals, Gobble previously wowed with speed-demon dishes that also offered interesting and worldly flavors. Indeed, the most recent test included Caribbean rondon, an Indonesian peanut curry stir-fry, and steak vierge. But while the flavors have stayed interesting, the focus on fast cooking appears to have waned since my colleague Louryn Strampe tested Gobble. Cook time estimates aren't printed on the recipe cards, but meals took as long as 30 minutes. For now, Hungryroot has taken the fast-cooking crown. For small households, Gobble is also among the most expensive kits. At most portions, prices approach $17 a serving plus shipping.
Nurture Life ($6 to $7 per serving) : Nurture Life is like a restaurant kids' menu, in ready-to-eat meal kit form. We loved the idea behind this fresh-made, never-frozen delivery meal plan when we tested it a few years back: a bunch of toddler- and slightly bigger kid-friendly meals, from mac and cheese to spaghetti and meatballs to myriad variations on the chicken nugget. The meal prices have dipped to reasonable levels of late, meaning it's likely due for a retest—and each plate contains vegetables alongside the greatest hits.
Veestro ($7 to $14 per serving) : WIRED reviewer Louryn Strampe enjoyed Veestro as a ready-to-eat vegan option, with premade meals delivered fresh, but with freezable options so you can have extra meals on hand in a pinch. The service offers a number of filters for other dietary requirements, and satisfying taste and texture—which is not always a guarantee on ready-to-eat meals. Veestro has updated its menu and offerings since the last time WIRED tested, including a number of snacky soup offerings. The online menu interface allowing you to sort by ingredients, and filter out unwanted ones, is among the best I've seen.
Splendid Spoon ($9 to $13 per serving) : Splendid Spoon is a nutrition delivery kit that offers a plethora of plant-based smoothies, soups, bowls, noodles, and shots. Everything here is natural, plant-based, and free of gluten or GMOs, including spaghetti and plant-based “meatballs.” WIRED reviewer Louryn Strampe has a big yen for the smoothies in particular ($10 apiece), but wasn't quite prepared for the intensity of a lemon juice shot that comes as part of a five-pack of dense 3-ounce superfoods.
ModifyHealth's Braised Beef (top) and Paprika Salmon (bottom)
ModifyHealth ($10 to $13 per serving) : The idea behind ModifyHealth is that food can be medicine. Sometimes, I'll admit, it tasted like it was designed purely for nutrition rather than flavor. ModifyHealth is a prepared meal delivery service tailored to people who need a heart-healthy, low-carb, or low-FODMAP diet to avoid dire digestive or health consequences. GLP-1 weight-loss plans are also available, for people with diabetes or others. Gluten-free meals are attested to be made in an entirely gluten-free facility. The meals were simple, benign, and low-sodium but also sometimes a little soggy—a common problem with prepared meals. The plastic top of the packaging was also difficult to disengage from the base of each meal tray—a problem when the plastic is hot after a turn in the microwave. But here's what I do like: The meals are carefully tailored with consultation from dietitians, to help people for whom food can be a source of fear or pain. An additional service, offering one-on-one dietitian consultation, can be covered by many insurance plans. ModifyHealth also offers a free consultation for those just trying to figure out which diet plan is right for them. For those with IBS in particular, this remains the most focused food plan I've seen.
Daily Harvest (prices vary) : Daily Harvest is another ready-to-eat meal delivery service specializing in dietary restrictions: plant-based, plus gluten- and dairy-free. Smoothies feature, as do harvest bowls, pastas, and grains. Calories are low. Ingredients are often inventive. The meal's a lifesaver for the solo vegan eater without time to prep a meal, and WIRED vegan reviewer Molly Higgins appreciated that the meals mostly relied on the natural flavors of the vegetables themselves, accented with flavors like curry and lemongrass. As with a lot of frozen meals, however, texture wasn't a strong suit on the ready-to-heat meals. The ready-to-blend smoothies are great, though.
Sakara Life ($30+ per serving) : Sakara Life offers plant-based weekly menus in fresh, prepared portions, with greens, flavorful sauces, all-organic ingredients, and textural add-ons like seeds or berries. But it's among the most expensive meal plans we've tested, and neither WIRED reviewer who tried it has really cottoned to the thing. Tester Louryn Strampe questioned the science on health claims for detoxes and cleanses , while calling Sakara “egregiously expensive” and full of “bitter veggies and tart fruits.” Vegan tester Molly Higgins, meanwhile, said Sakara Life's tinctures and metabolism supplements didn't agree with her system, and that the mostly raw-food plan made her long for “human food.”
If you're talking raw materials by the pound—meat, zucchini, rice, noodles—meal kits will of course cost more than buying food at grocery stores. It's a service, after all, with added value above simple ingredient cost. Unless you've got quite expensive taste, you'll easily be able to make delicious meals at home for less than the $7 to $14 a serving that a meal kit will cost. But this said, this doesn't necessarily mean that meal kits are expensive for what they offer. I conducted an experiment, trying to re-create four different meal-kit meals by going to my local grocery store —buying every ingredient provided by the meal kit. Turns out, if you don't have the right sauces and spices at home already, it's very difficult to recreate these tasty meals at grocery stores for less than they cost from a meal kit, in part because you'll most likely have to buy full containers of sauces and spice instead of pre-portioned ingredients,
So, is HelloFresh worth it compared to a grocery store? Caveats are in order: For staple ingredients and spices you'll use on multiple recipes, the grocery store is, of course, cheaper. Once you buy a container of paprika for an individual recipe, it'll also be there for future recipes, whereas meal-kit spices are portioned for the meal. So the real answer is that meal kits can be a quite economical way of trying out a new recipe, or a new style of cooking, without larding up your fridge with condiments you won't use again. For ingredients you'd use less commonly, a meal kit can reduce waste and spoilage, and maybe even compete on price for an individual meal.
If your comparison point is takeout, well, the best meal delivery services on this list will almost certainly be cheaper and more nutritious. I've found that a meal kit in the fridge tends to be a good motivator to cook a nutritive meal—and thus can save me both the money and the cholesterol.
To really save on cost, some people like to keep testing out the trial offers and discounts. Much like mattress-in-a-box companies, meal kit companies usually have a running promotion. Usually this takes the form of a trial discount price that'll drop your cost by half or more on the first box, in hopes you'll like the service enough to keep it on at full price.
For me, a meal kit a few times a week ends up balancing out well: It's a motivating factor to eat better, and it means that when I do go to the grocery store, I can do so less mindlessly and more purposefully, given that I've got a few meals' worth of ingredients in the fridge. It's also had the side effect of broadening my culinary toolkit, keeping me from getting stuck in the same ruts.
That said, it's a set grocery expense and not necessarily a small one. I do get tired of tossing or recycling cold packs and boxes. And depending on the time of year, I often prefer shopping in person for what's seasonal and local, when produce is at its peak—an experience you don't get from a meal kit, or from grocery delivery for that matter. If you're cooking for a bigger household, meal kits can also lose their utility quite quickly. A convenient option for two can become a much larger expense for a family of four or six.
Can I Pause a Meal Kit When I Go on Vacation?
Pretty much every meal kit I've tested has an option to pause subscriptions—and there's no particular limit to how often you can do this. The main thing is to be sure that you've canceled with enough lead time. Some services let you cancel or pause delivery as late as the Friday before a Monday delivery. HelloFresh requires five days' notice. Marley Spoon, at least where I live, required six days. Some, like Hungryroot, may lock in next week's order as early as the previous Monday, depending on where you live. Read your terms of service, and act accordingly.
For those with more variable schedules, the service I'd probably recommend is Blue Apron , which changed its model last year and no longer locks in delivery each week. You'll have to remember to order a box each week, which can be done where I am with four days' notice.
Don't order too many meals per week: You know the old John Lennon line: Life is what happens when you're busy, out eating a random burrito, then thinking guiltily about the meal kit at home in your fridge. Aspirations are great, but don't order more meals than you're likely to make, or you'll be sad. Err on the side of caution. Order just enough meals per week that making yourself a recipe from your HelloFresh or Home Chef box is still a delight and a convenience and an overall boon to your life—not an obligation. For me, a somewhat improvisational and impulsive person, three meals a week is the sweet spot. The prospect of a few easy meals usually saves me from an impulse weeknight DoorDash.
Make room in your fridge: Meal kits take the place of a lot of grocery shopping. But they're also a lot of food, and a lot to keep organized. What I like to do is clear a tall enough space in my fridge to put the whole meal kit box in the fridge, after pulling out the cold packs: This way, I'm not left worrying about which groceries belong to the meal kit, and I won't lose any ingredients. I can just pull the whole box out when I want to make a meal. That said, some plans like Home Chef, HelloFresh, and Green Chef are very good at organizing each meal into its own separate bag. An added bonus from these more organized plans is that you'll be able to use less space in your fridge. Over time, this will matter.
Check the recipe cards to make sure you have everything you need to make a recipe: Most meal kits expect that you'll have certain staple ingredients in your home, usually including oil and butter. Recipes also have requirements for cookware. Check this before you start a recipe. Nothing worse than realizing you need an absentee stick of butter on step 5, with carrots already browning in the toaster oven.
Remember, you owe nothing to the recipe: Meal kit services hire recipe developers, and on the best meal kits, these chefs have spent a lot of time optimizing each recipe. But you owe them nothing— nothing ! Add spices, change steps, season food when you want to season it. Meal kits can teach you a lot about how to make a good meal and shake you out of tired culinary routines. But it's your meal. Make it how you like. Have fun.
Chances are, wherever you are, whatever week it is, I'm testing a meal kit. I constantly cycle through various meal kits, testing and retesting each of my top picks at least once a year—and often multiple times per year.
Unlike other news sites that task many staffers with testing a different meal kit apiece—making direct comparisons difficult—I endeavor to test and retest all of WIRED's top picks at least once a year. I check in on other meal kits as relevant, especially when each meal delivery service changes its format or expands to new offerings.
I order at least four meals a week from each meal delivery service when possible. I prepare meals according to instructions, and see how well it goes. (Or, if I deviated from instructions out of horror or curiosity or a simple sense of culinary propriety, I note this and tell you why.)
I check my own prep times against the advertised prep times (rarely an exercise in honesty!), and take note of any inconsistencies, vagueness, or frustration in the recipe card instructions. If a meal kit needlessly recommends a nonstick pan, I like it less, especially if the recipe says I should heat said pan before adding food—or if it later makes mention of browned fond in the recipe. Nonstick isn't cast iron or carbon; there's no fond. If rice portions are too small, I also say so.
I check for the quality and freshness of the produce, and do the same for the meat. Where possible, I look into where the meat was sourced, and check on the reputation, safety, and standards of the meat suppliers. If a meal kit swears it's gluten-free, I check on this—calling certifying organizations where relevant.
I usually try to order as varied a menu as possible. When relevant, I might check in on gluten-free meals, a seafood item, a vegetarian item, and white and dark meat items. I might also test a Midwestern-style hot dish or Southern meat-and-two alongside meals that draw (or attempt to draw) from global inspirations. Sometimes I test the same meal kit multiple times for different dietary needs, or call in multiple testers to do so. WIRED's vegan tester, Molly Higgins , often tests the same meal kit I do but with a different focus.
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