Meal kit vs. prepared meal delivery
Your first major choice is between meal kits and prepared meal services. Meal kits arrive with fresh ingredients and recipes, so you’ll need to do some cooking — but they tend to cost less per serving and can sometimes undercut your regular grocery bill. Prepared meals show up fully cooked and ready to heat, making them almost entirely hands-off, though you’ll usually pay a bit more for that convenience.
Cost
After you’ve chosen between meal kits and meal delivery, you’ll want to find a service that fits your budget. There are meal kits with recipes as cheap as $5 per serving, featuring basic menus and no-frills recipes. More expensive services include recipes with more exotic ingredients, high-end cuts of meat and organic produce, but can cost as much as $15 a serving. Here we’ve outlined all the best cheap meal delivery services.
Healthiness
Most meal delivery services have healthy options, and some are much healthier than others. If you’re keen on eating low-calorie, low-carb, plant-based or pescatarian food, certain meal kits and meal delivery services will be better than others. Our list of the healthiest meal delivery services, curated by our wellness editor, is a good place to find all the most nutritious options.
Number of meals per week
Lastly, you’ll have to decide exactly how much food you’ll want sent to you per week. If you can’t imagine yourself cooking more than twice per week, don’t order more than two meal kits because they typically won’t last more than a week in the fridge. Most meal kit services offer plans as small as two meals per week and as many as six.
Most prepared meals either arrive frozen or can be frozen after unboxing. That means it’s less of an issue if you order too many meals on your first go around. However, some fresh food delivery services, including Gardencup, Thistle and Sakara Life, are not meant to be frozen.
Most services allow you to change the number of meals or servings in your plan even after you’ve started. With nearly every service, the more meals you order per delivery, the cheaper it is per meal.
Read the full article here