Sometimes even the easiest recipe isn’t easy enough. That’s where the best meal delivery services come in. Yes, even people who are obsessed with food and cooking as much as we are like cooking from meal kits. We turn to meal kits to get some external recipe inspiration and to gain some tips for working smarter rather than harder in our home kitchens.
Our picks for the best meal kits…
- The Best for Family-Friendly 15-Minute Meals: Shop Home Chef ($10/serving)
- Another great option for quick meals: Gobble ($12/serving)
- The Best Plant-Based Meal Kit: Shop Purple Carrot ($14/serving)
- The Best Sustainable Meal Kit: Shop Green Chef ($13/serving)
- The Best Option for People Who Love to Cook: Shop Marley Spoon ($21–$26/serving)
- The Best Virtual Grocery Store: Shop Hungryroot ($8/serving)
- The Best Affordable Meal Kit: Shop Dinnerly ($5/serving)
When we say external inspiration, we mean curated grocery deliveries that come with recipes, preportioned ingredients, or even fully premade meals, if you’re into that. To help you narrow down your meal kit options—you have many—we tried some of the most popular services around. Here’s what we learned: While all of them have their pros and cons, there’s a meal delivery company for every kind of cook (and non-cook). So whether you’re looking for a subscription service that meets specific dietary needs, prioritizes high-quality ingredients and truly fresh meals, or offers a good selection of budget-friendly healthy meals, you’ll surely find your match below. Go directly to our top picks to order your weekly meals, or skip down to learn more about how our editors tested these kits. If you’re looking for more specific meal kit requirements, read our list of the best vegetarian meal kits, the best healthy meal kits, and the best prepared meal kits.
In this article…
The best for 15-minute meals: Home Chef
Home Chef has a nice variety of meals, and if you’ve got dietary restrictions, the customization opportunities here are many. There are oven-ready meals that come with their own tin and grill-ready meals that arrive in a foil bag. There are the more traditional preportioned 30-minute meal kits, prepped 15-minute meal kits, and the Fast & Fresh option, a fully prepared meal you just have to stick in the oven or microwave. I am not a mom to anyone besides two cats who eat out of cans, but if I were a parent to human children, I imagine these options would feel like blessings. For those with more time to spare, the “Culinary Collection” offers some more advanced recipes, like blackened mahi-mahi with lemon dill cream, sautéed asparagus, and Parmesan potato pressé—a dish that turned out to be a bit too advanced for yours truly because I don’t own a muffin tin. (But did the challenge of making do without make me a better home chef? Perhaps it did, reader. Perhaps it did.) They also have snack, dessert, and breakfast options like maple brown sugar oatmeal bites from GoOats, a product I will be buying again because who doesn’t want to eat oatmeal that tastes like doughnut holes? While none of the meals blew me away in terms of flavor, and the packaging was a bit gratuitous, if you’re looking for family-friendly meals to feed picky eaters, you will find a lot to appreciate here. —Hilary Cadigan, contributor
Another great option for quick meals: Gobble
While many food delivery services emphasize 30-minute home-cooked meals, Gobble advertises entrées that take half that amount of time to prepare from start to finish. And they make do on that 15-minute promise. With meals like Tuscan pork sugo with peppers and aloo matar with marble potatoes, I’d say this is the best meal kit service if you want hearty dishes with bigger portions. (In my experience with other meal kit services, portions tend to be small, so you really get your money’s worth here.) My favorite meal was the chicken burger with sriracha aioli and yuca fries. The recipe was easy to follow; the sauces, dressings, and spice blends were premade; and the burger was juicy with lots of flavor thanks to the Cajun seasoning, spicy aioli, and honey-Dijon slaw.
The weekly menu includes roughly 15 easy-to-make dinners, but what I especially appreciated were all the optional add-ons. Unlike other delivery services I’ve tested, the various à la carte salads, soups, and flatbreads made it easy to plan a meal with multiple courses. I recommend getting one of the soups to have on hand for a quick lunch—the chicken tortilla soup is a wonderful choice. They even have the option to add on breakfasts (like Belgium waffles and bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches) and desserts (like premade chocolate chip cookie dough and chocolate lava cake). While Gobble does offer meals for more specific diets—including low-calorie, dairy-free, plant-based, and vegan—that’s not the primary focus. This is the place to go when you’re just looking for tasty, satisfying meals that pretty much anyone would enjoy. —Tiffany Hopkins
When we tested Marley Spoon, we especially loved this cilantro lime rice bowl; it was balanced in flavor, full of vegetables, and easy to prepare.
Wilder DaviesThe best family-friendly meal kit: Marley Spoon
Meet Marley Spoon, a.k.a the easiest way to get Martha Stewart’s most beloved recipes onto your dinner table. This meal kit collaboration between the American lifestyle icon and the popular Berlin-based meal company offers a plethora of classic, family-friendly meals. With more than 100 dishes to choose from every week, they have one of the biggest menus I’ve seen from a traditional meal kit service. I enjoyed the red chili beef enchiladas, where all of the flavors from the tomatoes, bell peppers, and chorizo chili spice melded together deliciously. I was also a fan of the pastrami-spiced burger with homemade thousand island. I liked that all of the dishes came with pre-portioned ingredients and pre-made spice blends, but I should note that there’s still a lot of prepping you’ll have to do—whether that’s chopping zucchini, snipping herbs, cutting chicken breast into 1-inch cubes, or making a tomatoey caramelized onion sauce from scratch. These recipes take a little more time and effort, and they also require you to have some of your own pantry ingredients on deck. In many cases, you’ll need to have your own butter, garlic, and red wine vinegar to make the meals. These recipes aren’t a pour-and-stir situation, instead they actually require a good amount of attention. That said, Marley Spoon is a great option for people who want a meal kit that still allows them to cook, as opposed to one that does all of the cooking done for them. And for the days when you’re short on time or don’t want to clean a bunch of dishes, they offer some faster, “tray bake” meals (like this alfredo chicken and gnocchi) that don’t require as much prep. —T.H.
The best plant-based meal kit: Purple Carrot
I would summarize Purple Carrot as a plant-based meal kit for vegans and people who just want to eat more vegan meals (wannabe-gans?), who like to cook but prefer to skip picking out recipes and grocery shopping. Admittedly, the kits didn’t save me much time in the kitchen—there are plenty of vegetables to peel and chop, and in my experience, multiple pots and pans (and even a blender) to clean after the cooking is finished. But I like that I could skip the trip to the store and the endless scroll through recipes, and some of the dishes are intriguing, with ingredients I wouldn’t ever think to combine (crisped gnocchi with furikake and a miso-tomato sauce? Color me skeptical-curious). The flavors are bold and bright. I made a Thai tempeh khao soi that took about an hour but tasted like it took four—and I even learned a technique or two (like sprinkling tempeh with sugar for the last few minutes of cooking so that the crumbles caramelize) that I’ll use when I’m riffing in the kitchen without the friendly guidance of a meal kit. Don’t want to cook at all? Purple Carrot also sells fully prepared meals. —Sarah Jampel, contributor
The Best Meal Kit for Sustainability: Green Chef
If you’re interested in sustainability and cooking with organic ingredients, then you’ll appreciate Green Chef—the first certified organic meal kit. It offers a weekly menu of 30 meals to choose from and caters to a variety of diets, including Mediterranean, keto, vegan, and gluten-free. But what I like most about this meal delivery service is the variety of flavors within the menus. With options like salmon with creamy chimichurri, creamy mushroom and meatball soup, and Italian roasted carrots with barley and ricotta, I found it easy to stay satisfied without getting bored. One of the best meals I tried was the enchilada-spiced ground turkey bowl. Not only was it tasty—smoky and savory with a pleasant crunch thanks to toasted pepitas—but also the premade enchilada sauce and ready-to-use paprika-cumin blend helped keep the prep and cook time down to 25 minutes total. That said, I should note that while all of Green Chef’s recipes are simple and easy to follow, most of them require using multiple pots and pans (at times, too many for my liking). This isn’t the meal delivery service for one-pot recipes, but it is your best bet if you want high-quality, fresh ingredients from local farmers and eco-friendly packaging that’s made from recyclable, reusable, or compostable materials. —T.H.
The best meal kit for variety: Blue Apron
When I tested Blue Apron against other meal delivery services, I found that it offered way more variety, and some genuinely interesting recipe ideas that I wouldn’t have thought of myself. A lot of these kits can rely on the same ingredients and even produce (I’ve never eaten more green peppers than I did during the couple of months I spent testing meal kits) but Blue Apron changes up their ingredients and flavor profiles. There’s a downside there: The recipes take longer for this meal kit than the others I tried. This is not the meal kit you turn to when you’re looking for an easy dinner solution (might I suggest some of our top selections for the best prepared meal kits to solve that particular problem?). But it is the meal kit to turn to when you’re looking for genuine inspiration and variety in your diet—maybe you’re in a rut with the same five weeknight recipes.
Blue Apron is also a great option for people who want to learn new cooking techniques; their out recipe instructions are incredibly detailed, and they are laid out in a way that really sets you up for success. —Emily Johnson
The Best Virtual Grocery Store: Hungryroot
Hungryroot is essentially a virtual grocery store with hundreds of recipes built around the food on its digital shelves. If you’re interested in getting help with your meal planning, this meal delivery service is a great place to start. You get a weekly set of recipes based on special diets and dietary preferences (vegan,
