Marguerite Preston is an editor covering kitchen gear. She has spent countless hours in the test kitchen and edited hundreds of guides since 2017.
After trying nine meal kit delivery services and cooking around 190 meals over the course of four months, we don’t think any kit is as life-changing as it sounds, nor is one service right for everyone. But some people who want to get better at cooking or need help planning dinner can benefit from a meal kit, and after enlisting seven Wirecutter staffers to help us try them at home, the way real subscribers would, we have four favorites to fit a wide variety of needs.
We think Blue Apron is best for beginners, and that Martha & Marley Spoon will appeal to somewhat more experienced cooks. People who want to follow a specific diet plan—from vegetarian to paleo—should try Sun Basket. We’ve also included our thoughts on what to consider before subscribing, with information on both the upsides and the downsides (like all the packaging) of meal kits.
Our pick
We found the recipes from this popular service particularly consistent and easy to follow. The ingredients are good-quality, and although the menu is limited, the meals have broad appeal.
Buying Options
Although the recipes are still easy to follow, Martha Stewart’s meal kit appealed most to testers with just a little more cooking knowledge. It also wins points for satisfying vegetarian options.
Buying Options
Almost all of Sun Basket’s ingredients are organic, and all of its meals are designed for people with various dietary restrictions. It offers easy recipes that took less time on average than meals from any other kit we tried.
Buying Options
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe research
Why you should trust us
I’m the senior editor of kitchen and appliance coverage for Wirecutter, so I spend my days thinking about how people cook at home. I’ve also been an avid home cook for much of my life, which I credit mostly to my mom (who got her good taste and talent in the kitchen from growing up in New Orleans) and to the many cookbooks I read cover to cover as a teenager. I’ve also tested and written about meal kit delivery services before: In 2016 I investigated which services were the most environmentally friendly for Rodale’s Organic Life (since defunct), testing meals from and conducting interviews with Blue Apron, Sun Basket, Green Chef, and Martha & Marley Spoon in the process.
In researching this guide, I spoke to the 25 or so people on staff at Wirecutter who use or have tried meal kits, to get their opinion on the pros and cons and the best and the worst of the different services. I also interviewed Liz Thomson, who has tried the vegetarian offerings from five different meal kits for her blog I Heart Vegetables, and Laurie Lauer, who has used meal kits regularly since December 2016 and covered them on her YouTube Channel, Jazzy Cat Reviews & More. (Note: Thomson received a complimentary box from each service, but no other compensation; Lauer purchased boxes from all of the kits we covered, but receives free boxes from HelloFresh and Every Plate through their referral programs. We looked to both bloggers for advice on using meal kits, rather than for specific brand recommendations). Besides all of that, I spent hours watching YouTube unboxing videos, reading reviews by bloggers and publications like Money, PCMag, and Forbes, and digging deep into the FAQ sections of every meal kit under consideration.
Finally, I asked seven of my colleagues at Wirecutter to help me test meal kits as actual subscribers, getting a box sent to their house each week for a total of six weeks. I also cooked many meals from nine different services in the Wirecutter test kitchen, enlisting even more of my colleagues to act as taste testers or to take a meal home to cook themselves. In all, we made 190 meals over the course of several months, taking copious notes on all of them. (See more on this topic in How we tested.)
Best for beginners: Blue Apron
Our pick
We found the recipes from this popular service particularly consistent and easy to follow. The ingredients are good-quality, and although the menu is limited, the meals have broad appeal.
Buying Options
Who it’s for: Inexperienced cooks will find Blue Apron particularly easy to use and reliable. Its straightforward recipes will appeal to a wide range of tastes (including kids) and it’s one of the more affordable services.
Why we like it: Though all meal kits are designed with less-experienced cooks in mind, we found Blue Apron to be one of the most approachable of all of the services. Our testers rated Blue Apron’s meals the highest on average, albeit by a very slim margin (the average rating for each kit ranged from 6.6 for now-discontinued Plated to 6.99 for Blue Apron). The recipes are simple to follow, and our testers noted fewer mistakes or confusing steps in Blue Apron recipes than in others. We also found the ingredients to be of consistently good quality, and appreciate Blue Apron’s commitment to sustainable sourcing.
In terms of taste, we’d describe Blue Apron’s meals as basics occasionally dressed up with a twist or two—think za’atar-spiced burgers, lemon-ginger salmon, or chipotle-lime chicken fajitas. One beginner cook among our testers noted that she found these simple recipes easier to follow than Marley Spoon’s. She especially appreciated small details like the check boxes next to each step, which make it easy to keep track of what you’ve done. We also like that Blue Apron will never require you to supply any ingredients other than salt, pepper, and oil, whereas some other services asked us to supply things like eggs and flour. And more often than with other kits, our testers noted that Blue Apron meals took them less time to clean up than a usual weeknight dinner.
Blue Apron is one of the best known and longest running meal-kit services in the US, and we thought that showed in the consistent accuracy of the recipes. The worst issue anyone encountered was rice that was too wet (which may have been user error, because no other tester ran into this problem), whereas some other kits had one or two recipes that seemed genuinely poorly conceived (like some Sun Basket chicken wings that were thickly caked in dried spices). And we found that, in general, Blue Apron’s time estimates for each recipe were more accurate than other kits’.
Though Blue Apron, like every kit we tested, occasionally sent some wilty herbs or a banged up zucchini, we were overall impressed with the quality of the ingredients. Blue Apron partners with sustainable farms to source many of its ingredients, and though it can’t say what percentage of its produce is sustainably or organically grown, it does guarantee that all ingredients are non-GMO. It also sources only fish that are certified either a Best Choice or a Good Alternative by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, and it is relatively transparent about its meat sourcing. However, we should note that a 2018 blog post by Blue Apron promised that “by 2019, 100% of our beef, pork and broiler chicken supply will come from sources that meet GAP Step 1, Certified Humane, or higher standards,” but as of February 2020 the company has not posted an update. A Blue Apron representative told us that an update is coming soon, and that “We are tracking toward much of our previously stated commitments.”
Like most meal kits, Blue Apron is continually adding new features to the service, and we liked the changes we saw during our testing. You can now order 20-minute meals, where before the fastest option was 30 minutes. And subscribers on a two-person plan can choose to switch to four-serving meals for a week any time they want, without altering their subscription—a great option if you’re having people over, or want leftovers.
Flaws but not dealbreakers: Blue Apron offers the fewest meal choices of any kit we tested (see the specs below). For some, this could be a good thing, because you don’t have to spend so much time sifting through options. But it does increase the likelihood that you might have trouble finding three meals you want to eat every week, especially if you’re picky.
On a related note, Blue Apron isn’t great for vegetarians, partly because it offers only three vegetarian options each week. This means you get what you get, and unfortunately what you get is a lot of variations on pizza, pasta, and sandwiches. For the most part the options are high in starch, low in protein, and not interesting enough to justify the $10 per serving price.
Blue Apron uses more plastic packaging than some other kits we tried, including padded mylar insulation and plastic bags instead of paper to separate the collection of small ingredients that go with each recipe. And although Blue Apron says that all of its packaging materials are recyclable, that depends a lot on where you live and how much effort you’re willing to put into recycling. In New York City, for example, you can recycle soft plastics like bags only by dropping them off at specific locations—something a busy meal kit subscriber isn’t likely to do. But again, no meal kit is great on the garbage front.
Specs:
- Price: $10 per serving for a two-person subscription; $7.50 to $9 per serving for a four-person subscription
- Meal choices per week: 11 with a two-person subscription, three of which are vegetarian; six with a four-person subscription, three of which are vegetarian
- Subscription sizes: two or three meals a week for two people; two, three, or four meals a week for four people
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTFor cooks with some experience: Martha & Marley Spoon
Our pick
Although the recipes are still easy to follow, Martha Stewart’s meal kit appealed most to testers with just a little more cooking knowledge. It also wins points for satisfying vegetarian options.
Buying Options
Who it’s for: Martha & Marley Spoon is best for already adept cooks. Although none of the recipes were wildly complicated, they assume a little more basic knowledge, and may involve tasks like dredging and frying food.
Why we like it: Our experienced cooks found more appealing recipes among Marley Spoon’s offerings than from any other service. The dishes are relatively simple and the recipes are usually easy to follow, but they sometimes require more advanced skills (like frying) or some of your own ingredients (like flour). Despite limited options, Marley Spoon is surprisingly good for vegetarians. It also lets you tack on lots of extra servings to your order if you like hosting dinner parties, or want leftovers.
Though our testers’ average numeric ratings for the meals from each kit were incredibly close, Marley Spoon meals generated some of the most enthusiasm in the comments. Based on what our testers wrote, 14 out of 50 Marley Spoon meals exceeded expectations, a few more than any other kit. This might have something to do with the fact that the Martha of Martha & Marley Spoon is Martha Stewart, who has partnered with the service in the US (it also exists in several European countries). The recipes—some of them developed by veterans of Martha Stewart Living—feel pulled from the pages of Everyday Food, her defunct home cooking magazine, although in actuality they’ve been written specifically for Marley Spoon.
Marley Spoon offers almost twice as many meal choices per week as Blue Apron, although (unlike with Blue Apron) some recipes repeat two weeks in a row. We don’t see that as a problem, though, given the number of new choices each week—it might even be a benefit if you find a recipe you love. Five of the options each week are vegetarian, and the choices feel more varied than those from Blue Apron. Though pasta still pops up frequently, it’s usually more filling stuffed pasta like ravioli, and it’s balanced with a wide array of other dishes like quinoa and lentil curry or cauliflower steaks with beans and almond-olive relish. If you're interested, they even have two smoothie options each week (not counted in our number of meal choices). Notably, the vegetarian tester who tried Marley Spoon enjoyed it enough to consider continuing the service on her own.
Although we don’t love all the packaging used by every meal kit, we do appreciate that Marley Spoon uses more paper, which is easier to recycle. The box’s insulation is made from recycled paper, and paper bags also keep the ingredients for each meal separate.
And one nice bonus feature from Marley Spoon is that you can choose to increase the number of servings for any individual meal or add extra meals to any box, up to 18 servings total per box. Blue Apron is less flexible, requiring you to order either all-two-person meals or all-four-person meals from separate menus.
Flaws but not dealbreakers: While Blue Apron and Sun Basket never require you to supply anything beyond salt, pepper, and oil, Marley Spoon recipes occasionally assume you have other ingredients on hand, like sugar, flour, or even eggs. At the very least, it’s annoying to have to use your own egg when you’ve already paid $20 for a meal for two. At worst, it can leave you unable to cook the meal without a trip to the store.
As noted above, Marley Spoon recipes sometimes require a bit more familiarity in the kitchen than those from other kits. The recipes are clear enough that a beginner will still do fine, but they might take longer. Our testers overall averaged 45 minutes per meal cooking Marley Spoon (equivalent to most other kits), but less-experienced testers tended to take 10 to 20 minutes longer than the recipe promised, whereas they came much closer to the cooking times provided by Blue Apron. The bigger issue is that those advanced techniques, like dredging shrimp in flour, then an egg wash, then breadcrumbs, then frying them, make a lot of mess. While the other kits we tested rarely required more cleanup than an average dinner for our testers, Marley Spoon was more work than usual about half the time.
Although we found Marley Spoon’s ingredients to be quite high-quality (some testers thought the quality surpassed that of other kits), the company is less clear about its sourcing than Blue Apron. The company uses grass-fed beef, antibiotic-free chicken, and Berkshire pork, which is great, but there’s nothing like Blue Apron’s animal welfare commitment statement to be found online. The website also doesn’t discuss fish or produce sourcing, but a representative told us: “The majority of our produce is conventionally grown,” although the company offers organic produce “when possible.” The seafood is wild-caught, but Marley Spoon offers only two types, shrimp and pollock, whereas other companies also offer things like salmon or catfish.
Specs:
- Price: $10.74 to $14.74 per serving for a two-person subscription; $8.11 to $10.73 per serving for a three- or four-person subscription
- Meal choices per week: 22, four of which are vegetarian
- Subscription sizes: two, three, or four meals a week for two to four people, with the option to add additional servings up to 18
Most customizable for dietary needs: Sun Basket
Our pick
Almost all of Sun Basket’s ingredients are organic, and all of its meals are designed for people with various dietary restrictions. It offers easy recipes that took less time on average than meals from any other kit we tried.
Buying Options
Who it’s for: Sun Basket offers meals for lots of special diets, from vegetarian to paleo. It’s the best option if you need to avoid certain things, like gluten or dairy; want help getting started on a particular diet; or just want to watch what you eat in general.
Why we like it: Unlike with any other kit we tried, Sun Basket lets you pick and choose from meals that meet a wide variety of needs. You’ll be able to find plenty of meals to add to your box each week whether you’re vegetarian, pescatarian, paleo, gluten-free, lactose intolerant, avoiding soy, or diabetic. As a result, the meals overall feel more healthful than those from other services, even if you’re not sticking to a specific diet. Plus, Sun Basket is one of two meal kits to be a USDA-certified organic handler (the other is Green Chef). We also noticed that Sun Basket sends more pre-prepared ingredients like sauces, which noticeably cut down on cook times for our testers.
We like that, as a certified organic service, Sun Basket promises that over 99 percent of its produce is organic and labeled as such. All of the seafood is deemed a Best Choice or Good Alternative by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch, and all of the meat and dairy comes from sustainably raised, hormone- and antibiotic-free animals. And unlike any other service we tried, Sun Basket will even let you change your protein for a lot of its meals. You can swap salmon for trout, for example, switch from chicken thighs to organic chicken breast, or upgrade from sirloin to organic rib eye (which costs extra).
While most of the other kits we tested provide very few premade ingredients beyond the occasional spice blend, Sun Basket frequently includes ready-made sauces like curry or pesto. Sometimes you can even get something like precooked braised pork shoulder. All of these prepared items make it easy to cook the meals faster. Our testers spent 45 minutes on average cooking meals from Blue Apron, Marley Spoon, and Plated, but only 35 minutes on average cooking Sun Basket meals. And since we finished testing, Sun Basket has even added some “super speedy” meals, which are supposed to cook in 10 to 15 minutes, to its menu. The downside, however, to the premade ingredients is that you have less ability to adjust a recipe to your tastes. If you like the sauce, great. If not, the whole meal might be ruined. Plus, as one of our testers noted, getting prepared sauces means you won’t learn how to make them, and won’t be able to re-create the recipe.
Sun Basket offers some flexibility in its subscription plans, but not as much as Marley Spoon. You can choose to order just two meals for a week or up your order from three to four meals, but you can’t get extra servings unless you change your subscription plan entirely.
Sun Basket was similar to Marley Spoon in that the packaging used a good mix of paper and plastic, at least by meal kit standards. We appreciated that the box insulation was made from recycled paper, and that the ingredients for each meal were organized into paper bags. There’s still plastic inside those bags, and it’s still a lot of garbage overall, but it was less plastic than Blue Apron used.
Flaws but not dealbreakers: Sun Basket is up there with the now-discontinued Plated as one of the most expensive meal kits per serving in our original testing, and unlike with other services, the price doesn’t go down that much if you order four servings instead of two. The price is understandable given Sun Basket’s focus on all-organic ingredients, but it still makes it a big expense if you’re ordering boxes weekly.
Perhaps also as a result of Sun Basket’s organic commitment, it seems to have more trouble sourcing enough of everything. In almost every box, we found that one or more vegetables had been swapped out for something different—broccoli instead of brussels sprouts, or chard instead of mustard greens. The swaps rarely had a negative effect on the meal, but they can be disappointing if you have your heart set on a certain vegetable.
Our vegetarian testers appreciated the variety of options Sun Basket offered them each week, and that more meals came with proteins like tofu and tempeh. But they also felt that sometimes Sun Basket was too health conscious. As one person put it, “Most of the vegetarian meals from Sun Basket were trying to check a bunch of other boxes: vegan, dairy-free, soy-free.” That’s fine if you like to eat that way, but disappointing if you are a vegetarian who likes cheese.
While all of the other kits we tested send you a single large recipe card for each meal, Sun Basket sends what looks like a small catalog filled with all of its recipes for the week, including those you didn’t order. This might not feel like such a waste of paper if you could use all of the recipes, but unfortunately, Sun Basket doesn’t include any measurements in its recipes, so you can’t cook them unless you have the premeasured ingredients from your box. In contrast, all of the other kits we recommend provide recipes with measurements like you’d find in a cookbook, so you can make them again and again.
Specs:
- Price: $11 to $13 per serving for two or four people
- Meal choices per week: 14, four of which are vegetarian with a two- or four-person subscription
- Subscription sizes: two, three, or four meals a week for a two- or four-person subscription
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTWhat to know before you subscribe
Meal kit delivery services (the best known of which are Blue Apron and HelloFresh) will ship you three recipes (or sometimes more), plus every ingredient you need, in the precise amount you need, every week. You can typically choose your meals from a limited menu or let the service choose for you, and every recipe is supposed to be easy and relatively quick to cook. In short, meal kits promise to help you make better dinners with less effort.
In our testing, we found that meal kits can be this helpful for some people, but for others they’re not worth the $10 to $12 per serving. Beyond that, our biggest takeaway from months of testing is that most kits aren’t all that different. Prices vary somewhat, as do the styles of food (some kits lean hippy organic, others are more meat and potatoes), but across the board we found that our overall ratings for each service were remarkably similar—ingredients consistently arrived fresh, recipes were reliably easy to follow, and most meals took between 30 and 45 minutes to cook.
So how much you like any meal kit will depend partly on your personal preferences, and largely on if meal kits, in general, fit your lifestyle. We don’t recommend them for everyone, and we don’t have a single top pick. With that in mind, here are the important things to consider before you subscribe:
Who can benefit from a subscription
You might find a meal kit useful for a number of reasons:
- If you want to learn to cook, most meal kit delivery services offer easy recipes with plenty of helpful pictures. The instructions also teach good cooking habits, like how to chop and prep all your ingredients first (chefs call that mise en place). And even though your box includes the exact quantities of everything you need to make a meal, most recipes still include measurements, so you can reuse the ones you like. You can learn similar skills from a cookbook, but choosing from just a handful of meal kit recipes each week is less overwhelming than scanning through dozens in a cookbook.
- If you’re too busy to plan dinner and shop for it, a meal kit allows you to figure out dinners for at least three nights of the week in 15 minutes or less (you can even let the service choose for you). On top of that you don’t have to translate the recipes to a grocery list or spend time searching the store for that one spice you’ll never use again, because the service ships you everything you need. Meal kits won’t save you entirely from grocery shopping (don’t forget about breakfast, lunch, and those other dinners), but they can make the process faster.
- If you want help breaking out of a cooking rut, a meal kit will again save you from the time-consuming task of reading through cookbooks or recipe sites, then stocking your pantry with new ingredients. All of the kits we recommend offer a new menu every week, so you never have to cook the same thing twice. Plus many of our testers noted that some recipes taught them new techniques and uses for ingredients.
- If you want help changing your eating habits, whether you’re interested in going paleo or trying to control portion sizes, meal kits can make the process a little easier. All of the kits we tested provide nutrition facts for each meal, and we found most of the meals we cooked to be well-balanced. Laurie Lauer, who has reviewed many meal kit services for her YouTube channel, told me: “I lost at least 40 pounds last year from doing meal kits, just because they’re pre-portioned.” Most kits offer vegetarian options (though some are just ok), and a few—like Sun Basket and Green Chef—offer plans for particular diets, like paleo or vegetarian.
Meal kits aren’t for everyone
The prospect of making fabulous meals on even the busiest weeknights sounds great, but we’ve talked to plenty of people who were disappointed by the meal kits they tried. It’s important to understand the many limitations of these services:
- They won’t save you time cooking. You’ll find some 20-minute meals among the offerings of most kits, but overall, cook times for our testers averaged around 45 minutes. Less-experienced cooks sometimes took over an hour, and even someone who knows what they’re doing will find it takes longer to keep track of a recipe’s steps than to, say, improvise a quick stir-fry.
- They (probably) won’t save you money. Most meal kits cost $10 to $12 per serving, which, depending on where you live and what you like to eat, is about as much as you’d pay for takeout. And unlike getting takeout, you have to do a lot of the work yourself. Meal kits charge a premium to give you just enough of an ingredient for one recipe. In comparison, shopping at the grocery store is like buying in bulk: You get a lot more for a lot less.
- The meals aren’t restaurant-quality. On average, our testers rated meals from every kit we tested around a seven out of 10, and we’d say that’s an accurate representation of how these meals taste overall. Most of them are fine to good, a few of them will disappoint you, and just as few will blow you away. Our testers who already enjoy cooking were more likely to be disappointed, too, and many experienced cooks we talked to said they quickly got bored of the meal kit offerings.
- Most meals will leave you full, but few will give you leftovers. For people who often end up throwing food away, that can be a good thing. But for those who rely on leftovers to spare them from cooking the next day, or from spending money on lunch, it can make meal kits even more of a drain on time and money (unless you’re willing to pay more for extra servings from a kit that offers them).
- They require some organization, because most meal kits will automatically deliver you a box every week unless you request otherwise. And though there’s no limit to how many boxes in a row you can skip, you usually can’t skip weeks more than a month or so out. It helps to put reminders in your calendar if you don’t want to get a box every week. It also helps to set a reminder to choose your meals for the week, because the deadline to do so is several days before the box arrives.
- They can’t accommodate serious food allergies (like nut allergies), because everything is packed in the same facility. One of our testers who’s allergic to alliums was fine with just leaving the onions and garlic provided out of her meals, but noted that it would have been a problem if she were more severely allergic, because many of the ingredients end up touching each other in the box. Even if you have non-life-threatening dietary restrictions (say you’re a vegetarian), your options from any given meal kit are much more limited—you may not have any choice at all in what you get.
- They all use a lot of packaging, putting everything from whole carrots to individual garlic cloves in their own bags. The amount of trash was a complaint we heard often from our testers and other reviewers, and although it’s all technically recyclable, much of it (like plastic bags and ice packs) is not easily recyclable in many places. Again, some kits are better than others, offering more paper over plastic. But the nature of both shipping fresh ingredients and providing very small quantities of things means you’ll find yourself with a mound of garbage every week. If that kind of waste bothers you, you’re probably best off avoiding meal kits altogether.
Tips on getting started
Although we can tell you generally what it’s like to cook from a kit and what sort of meals each offers, we can’t say how each meal will taste to you. More than once in our testing we saw a meal get panned by one tester, while receiving a glowing review from another. So you may have to try out a few kits to find the one that works. Here are our tips on getting started:
- You don’t have to make a big commitment. Most services default to sending you a box of meals every week when you subscribe, but you’re charged for a box only when it ships, and you can immediately skip as many weeks as you want. So you have to try only one box (with three meals) before deciding whether to cancel. Take advantage of this and follow the advice we got from Lauer, who tells people to go ahead and skip all but their first box as soon as they sign up. Otherwise, by the time you finish cooking your first three meals, the next box may already be on its way, whether you like it or not. Also, know that it’s usually very easy to cancel your subscription—most kits let you do it online at the click of a button (and because they save your credit card information, you can reactivate your subscription just as easily).
- Look for deals. Competition is fierce in the meal kit business, and this is to your advantage. Many companies offer discounts to first-time subscribers, and most will try to woo back lapsed subscribers (or those who signed up with an email address but never completed the subscription process) with offers of free meals. They also have referral programs, so friends who are subscribers may be able to get you a free box. The stakes are low when your first meals are cheap or free, so finding deals is an easy way to test the waters on one or more kits.
- Read the recipes before you order. Though it’s nice not to have to think about dinner at all, you can’t give a new meal kit a fair shot unless you get recipes that sound good to you—if you don’t like shrimp, no meal kit is going to change your mind. Also make sure to read recipes through in order to avoid any surprises like, say, the need to supply your own eggs, or a zester you don’t have.
- Keep in mind that the meal kit scene changes fast and often. In the six months or so that we spent working on this guide, we saw two meal kits (HelloFresh and Green Chef) merge, one (Chef’d) go under, one (Every Plate) start up, and others change their packaging, partner with celebrities, and offer new options—like meals with leftovers you can use for lunch the next day. We’ll do our best to keep this guide updated with significant changes, but don’t be surprised if your experience isn’t exactly like ours. Keep an eye out for new offerings the might make certain kits a better fit for you.
How we picked
The meal kit field is crowded and varied, so to narrow our options and make sure we weren’t comparing apples to oranges, we decided to focus exclusively on kits that offer a subscription and that require you to cook. These kits follow the Blue Apron model: by default each week they send you a box of three recipes and all of the ingredients you need to make those recipes. We did not test any of the meal kits you can buy in grocery stores, like Tyson Tastemakers, nor did we test services like Freshly, which send you a box of partially or fully prepared heat-and-eat meals each week.
In order to find a service that would work for the widest range of people, we considered only kits that were available nationwide (which really means the continental United States—sorry Alaska and Hawaii!). We also chose not to test kits designed exclusively for special diets, like Purple Carrot, which offers only vegan meals.
Applying those criteria left us with nine kits: Blue Apron, HelloFresh, Plated, Martha & Marley Spoon, Peach Dish, Sun Basket, Green Chef, Home Chef, and Chef’d. (Full disclosure: the New York Times, Wirecutter’s parent company, offered some recipes through Chef’d. We tested and would have dismissed Chef’d based on some consistency issues, but it ceased operations in July. Food product developer True Food Innovations bought its assets and is using them to create meal kits for in-store retail under the name True Chef.)
In our testing to find the best of those kits, we looked for those that met the following criteria:
- They provided good recipe variety each week, so you don’t get bored.
- They came with fresh, good-quality ingredients. When you’re paying the premium that these services charge, you don’t want to get wilted produce or mediocre meat.
- They offered clear, simple recipes that were well-tested and difficult to mess up.
- They had accurate cook time estimates, with meals rarely taking longer than an hour to cook.
- They produced filling, satisfying meals. Ideally the food should be delicious, and at the very least it should feel worth the $10 to $12 per serving.
- They didn’t require too much cleanup. No one wants to face a mountain of dirty pots and pans on a weeknight, so if a meal kit makes much more mess than you’d make on your own, it’s probably not worth the price.
As mentioned earlier, we ultimately found that most of the meal kits didn’t differ wildly on any of these criteria. But our testing did reveal some differences that pushed a handful to the head of the pack.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTHow we tested
In order to narrow our initial list of nine qualifying meal kit services, we ordered one box from each to our New York City test kitchen. Each box included three meals for two people, and we tried to choose meals that were both appealing to us and representative of the service’s weekly offerings—including one vegetarian dish. I cooked all of the meals, following the instructions to a T. I kept track of the quality of the ingredients, how long each meal took to make, and how many dishes I dirtied, then I had some of my colleagues help me taste the meals. (Kitchen staff writer Michael Sullivan, senior staff writer Lesley Stockton, and head of photo Michael Hession tried just about all of them, alongside other staff here and there).
Based on those first boxes, I narrowed the list of finalists to four: Blue Apron, Martha & Marley Spoon, Sun Basket, and Plated. For the next round of testing, I enlisted seven other Wirecutter staffers from across the country to help try out the services over a longer period of time. I tried to choose people with a variety of needs and preferences, including:
- two vegetarians
- two families (one with two adults and two elementary-aged children, another with three adults and two elementary-aged children)
- two people cooking primarily for one
- one person allergic to wheat and alliums
I also chose people with a range of experience in the kitchen. I assigned two kits to each tester, and asked them to test each kit for three consecutive weeks (six weeks in total).
For every one of the nine meals every tester cooked from each kit, I asked them to fill out a questionnaire. In it they noted the quality of the ingredients, the clarity of the recipe, how long the meal took to cook, how much cleanup it required, how filling it was, and how the meal tasted on a scale from one to 10, as well as any other takeaways.
We also continued testing the four services in New York City, with help from even more Wirecutter staffers. We ordered two kits at a time (first Sun Basket and Marley Spoon, then Blue Apron and Plated) for three consecutive weeks each. And to help us compare the two kits as directly as possible, we tried to order similar meals from each—salmon lettuce cups with chermoula from Sun Basket and Vietnamese fish lettuce wraps from Marley Spoon, for example. (It was surprisingly easy to find several comparable dishes from the kits, which supports our conclusion that they’re ultimately very similar). From the two meal kit boxes that arrived each week, we kept one pair of similar meals to make in our test kitchen, and gave the other two pairs to different Wirecutter staff members to cook at home. All of us filled out the same questionnaire that we gave to our long-term testers. In total, across all of our testers, we cooked around 190 meals.
What about meal planning services?
One cheaper, less packaging-heavy alternative to meal kit delivery services is meal planning services. For a marginal monthly or yearly fee, they provide you with weekly recipes and a shopping list, but not the ingredients themselves. In comparison with subscribing to a meal kit, using a meal planning service costs less (even including the cost of food), generates less plastic waste, and gives you more control over the ingredients you get and the quantity of food you can cook.
We haven’t tried any of those services, but several of our testers felt they might prefer that approach after experiencing the pros and cons of meal kits. One of the parents in our testing group told us that he liked the meal kits he tested because, “We’re eating a lot more variety, and the mental thing of not having to sit down each week and figure out what we’re going to make is a huge benefit.” But he also noted that because he still had to go to the store once or twice a week, he would get the same benefits from (and pay less money for) a service that simply provided recipes and told you what to buy. If that sounds like you too, some of the big names among meal planning services are eMeals and The Fresh 20, but you can find plenty of others if you do a little Googling. We’ll let you know if we try any down the road.
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We’re intrigued by the low price of meals from Dinnerly (part of Marley Spoon) and Every Plate. Both charge about $6.50 per serving for a two-person subscription (the meals are billed as $5 per serving, but you’ll also pay a $9 shipping fee). We didn’t test either service this time around because neither is currently available nationwide (and because Every Plate didn’t come into existence until after we started testing). We’re also wary of the limitations of these kits, which appear not to offer as much variety or as much food as other kits. But we know the cost might make them a much better option for some people, so we’ll try to test them if they become available throughout the continental US.
The competition
We previously recommended the Plated meal kit service from Albertsons as an option with extensive menu options. Although the service cost more per serving than kits with a narrower scope, it featured 20 meals to choose from each week and appealed to a wide variety of tastes. However, Albertsons discontinued this service in November 2019.
HelloFresh is right up there with Blue Apron as one of the biggest and best-known meal kit services, and the two are somewhat similar in price and the style of meals they offer. HelloFresh does offer more menu options, and unlike Blue Apron, organizes ingredients into paper bags. But a couple of recipes were genuine duds—like shrimp seasoned with an overwhelming quantity of dried herbs. We also found that the ground beef for the burger we ordered was flavorless and chewy, noticeably lower quality than, say, the grass-fed beef we got for burgers from Marley Spoon. That lines up with the fact that HelloFresh is rather vague about its sourcing compared with our picks. However, HelloFresh did recently buy Green Chef, a certified organic meal kit, and plans to eventually use those ingredient sources. When that happens, we may consider testing HelloFresh again.
Green Chef is certified organic as a company, and offers meals to fit specific diets, like paleo, gluten-free, vegan, and keto. What we liked about it more than anything was that the meals included a larger quantity and variety of vegetables than most of the other services we tried. But Green Chef got bought by HelloFresh halfway through our testing, and we can’t fully recommend it until we see what kinds of changes that entails.
We liked a handful of things about Home Chef. It’s one of the few services we found to offer meals for six people as well as two or four, making it a good option for large families. It offers 18 menu options each week. And the fact that the company sends you a binder to store all of your recipes was a surprisingly nice touch that all of the other kits lacked. But we didn’t love the selection of meals available week to week. Compared with Blue Apron’s meals, some dishes—like beef Wellington—felt a little dated. Others—like the goat cheese-crusted chicken, fried potatoes, and mashed carrots—lacked green vegetables. More often, they seemed like variations on the same thing week after week: salmon topped with a sauce with a side of vegetables, chicken breast crusted with something with a side of vegetables. And we thought other kits had better-quality ingredients, with more transparent sourcing. That said, we’ve heard from some people who really enjoy the meals from Home Chef. So if you like the look of the menu, you may be happy with the service.
Uniquely, Peach Dish doesn’t require you to have a subscription. Although you can subscribe for a weekly box of meals, you can also place a one-time order for as many meals as you want, as long as you meet a $45 minimum. Peach Dish uses high-quality ingredients, and sends you a list of every farm or producer who supplied ingredients for your box, which we liked. But the meals are expensive, starting at $12.50 a serving, and we found some of the recipes to be too fussy and time-consuming for inexperienced or busy cooks. We got bogged down, for example, blanching and then peeling fava beans, or making biscuits.
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Laurie Lauer, YouTube blogger of Jazzy Cat Reviews & More, phone interview, July 3, 2018
Liz Thomson, blogger at I Heart Vegetables, phone interview, July 3, 2018
MeganLeonhardt, This Is the Best MealKit Service on the Market Right Now, Money, September 19, 2018
Molly K. McLaughlin, The Best Meal-Kit Delivery Services of2018, PCMag, August 27, 2018
Katie Kelly Bell, The Ultimate Guide to the Best Meal Kit Delivery Services, Forbes, March 21, 2016
Joe Ray, Meal Kits Provide Tasty Dinners, With a Side of Landfill, Wired, July 19, 2017
Rheanna O'Neil Bellomo, Hannah Doolin, Candace Braun Davison, A Definitive Ranking of the Most Popular Meal Kit Delivery Services, Delish, June 29, 2017
Heather Haddon, Chef'd Is Sold to a Food Consultancy, The Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2018
Meet your guide
Marguerite Preston
Marguerite Preston is a senior editor covering kitchen gear and appliances at Wirecutter, and has written guides to baking equipment, meal kit delivery services, and more. She previously worked as an editor for Eater New York and as a freelance food writer. Before that, she learned her way around professional kitchens as a pastry cook in New York.
Further reading
The Best Options for Grocery Delivery During the Coronavirus Pandemic
by Lesley Stockton and Haley Sprankle
Here are some tips and resources for ordering groceries online at a time when delivery services are in high demand.
How a Meal Planning Service Made Me a Better Cook
by Thorin Klosowski
Recipe planners such as eMeals, PlateJoy, The Fresh 20, and Cook Smarts can wean you off prepared foods and teach you to love cooking.
When a Friend Is in Need, Show You Care With Food
by Anna Perling
If you want to give someone a food gift to show you care, consider cooking for them, ordering a gift basket or delivery, or organizing a meal train.
3 Ways to Thank and Support Essential Workers
by Ellen Airhart and Elissa Sanci
Show your appreciation by checking in, cooking (or ordering) delivery meals, and choosing gifts they can use right now.
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