The Best Meal Delivery Services for 2020

How to Choose the Right Meal Kit

Meal Delivery Is for Everyone

You wish you loved to cook, but can’t stand the
prep and cleanup. Or: You can’t go to the grocery store (thanks, COVID-19), but
still want to eat inventive meals. Or: You’re learning to cook but feel a pang
of anxiety at having to buy a $9 jar of berbere for just one recipe. Or: You
have zero time to shop, prep, or make meals (we see you, healthcare workers),
but you still want nutritious options. Meal delivery services are the answer to
these dilemmas and many others.

What Is A Meal Delivery Service?

Meal delivery (also referred to as meal-kit delivery) is a type of subscription
service in which a company sends you a box of fresh ingredients in the right
amounts for a few recipes that you can make at home. It’s a rapidly growing
sector of the food industry, with one report projecting the global market for
meal delivery to be worth $8.94 billion by 2025.

Cook-from-a-kit boxes are just one style of meal
delivery, however. Some throw the “kit” element to the wind and
instead provide heat-and-eat ready meals or those requiring minimal effort. You
might get all the ingredients for a family dinner already mixed and assembled
in an oven-safe container, as you can with Sun Basket. Others, such as Splendid Spoon) specialize in
ready-to-eat meals for one, like smoothies, soups, and bowls or a heat-and-eat plate that’s more akin to a TV dinner. Freshly, which PCMag
has not yet reviewed, falls into this latter category. Blue Apron is a service committed to helping you learn
to cook—to the degree that it also sells chef’s knives, meat thermometers, and
other equipment you might need as your skills progress.

The diversity of services is remarkable, and we
haven’t had an opportunity to test them all, including Yumble, which
specializes in kid-friendly foods in kiddie portion sizes. Or Sakaralife; this
company sets you up with a wellness plan and includes meals that purportedly
improve whatever issues you have, such as making your skin clearer or
increasing your energy. There’s even a ramen delivery service, called Ramen Hero,
that sends premeasured ingredients in heat-safe pouches that you warm in
boiling water to make your own Japanese noodle soup. And while we tested a few
vegan services, we haven’t gotten to Veestro, which sells single-serve vegan
entrees and main ingredients.

Do I Get to Choose the Food?

Before you sign up for a meal delivery service,
you can preview the menu for the upcoming week and future weeks. In our
experience, this is the most important part of choosing a service. Looking at
the weekly menus for a few services and comparing them tells you a lot about what
makes each one unique.

It’s a little like choosing a restaurant. Both
the menu and presentation, including pictures of the food and how the company
describes it, determine whether it speaks to your taste buds. Just look at the
difference between Daily Harvest’s stark images of vegetables in a bowl, compared to Hello Fresh’s colorful plates brimming with warm meals and a
scattering of fresh herbs or toasted breadcrumbs on top.

When previewing menus, be sure to check two
things. 1) Are there enough menu options each week that meet your dietary
requirements, including allergen concerns? 2) Can you see the recipe and
instructions, and do they line up with how much work you’re willing to do? The
recipes indicate what equipment and ingredients you need. It might be nothing
more than a skillet, wooden spoon, and salt and pepper. It helps to have olive
oil, vegetable oil, and sometimes butter on hand, too. Depending on the
service, you might see recipes that call for a slow cooker, though it’s easy to
avoid them if you don’t have one.

In a few rare cases, companies make it hard to
see the detailed recipes until after you pay. We like companies that show you
everything in advance so there are no surprises after payment.

Once you sign up, you choose which meals you
want each week from a rotating selection. If you forget to pick meals, the
company automatically selects some for you.

A few companies allow substitutions or offer
add-ons and upgrades. Some Home Chef meals let you substitute, say, chicken for
shrimp, or pay extra for organic or antibiotic-free meat. Sun Basket sells
snacks, breakfast items, and other standalone groceries that you can add to
your order. Hungryroot is a slightly unusual meal delivery service that’s part
online grocery store and part meal kit service, letting you choose both kits
and groceries in every order. Gobble sells add-ons, too, like a two-pack of cookie dough or an extra container of
marinara sauce.

How Many Meals Do I Get?

Most meal delivery services require a
subscription. All the companies on this list do. When you sign up, you agree to
receive a shipment of meals or meal kits regularly, usually weekly. On average,
you must commit to a minimum of three meals per week that serve two people each, or six
servings total. A few companies let you scale down to as few as two meals for two
people per week.

With all of the plans, you can skip a week at
any time or pause your subscription indefinitely. You also
typically have the option to skip multiple weeks at a time. The best companies
let you do this directly from your account.

When you first sign up, the site typically asks
a few details about you and your food needs. How many people will be eating
with you? Do you have allergies or dietary restrictions? A top-notch service will only show you the meals that meet
your needs. Watch out, because not all companies do this. For some services, you’ll need to vet each meal as you choose your orders. 

How Much Do Meal Kit Services
Cost?

The going rate for a meal delivery service is
between $8.99 and $12.99 per serving. Delivery fees typically hang in the range
of $7.99 per shipment.

Note that meals are priced per serving. Most (but not all) companies calculate the price of
your kits on a sliding scale, based on how many servings you order. It’s the
old “the more you buy, the more you save,” idea. A box of three meals
per week with two servings each has a higher per-serving price than a box
containing four meals per week with four servings each—even though the larger box has
a final higher cost.

Two notably low-cost services are EveryPlate and
Dinnerly. We have not yet reviewed Dinnerly. Both charge $4.99 per serving, and
Dinnerly’s prices dip down by another $0.50 per serving if you order a very
large box of meals.

For shipping, $7.99 is the standard rate, but
you can often find better deals. Blue Apron charges $0 in delivery fees for all
but the smallest orders. Hungryroot’s shipping is free if you qualify for
ground delivery from its New York City location; air shipments cost $10. Purple
Carrot charges more for big boxes (up to $11.99) and less for small ones
($5.99).

I Heard Packaging Is a Problem…

You heard right. When you receive a meal kit
order, you have to deal with the packaging, and sometimes there’s a distressing amount of it. Some services reduce
the amount of material used (EveryPlate does a fair job) or are moving toward
compostable materials (Daily Harvest), but none is a paragon of
environmentalism.

In our testing, we noticed two options for
keeping the shipment cold. The most common is a gel pack. It’s a frozen block
of non-toxic liquid wrapped in heavy-duty plastic. They are a pain to
dispose of properly. You can reuse them by refreezing them, or you can let them
thaw out, snip a corner of the plastic, and then dump the watery contents into
the trash. The gel is not suitable for your plumbing. Then, you must thoroughly
rinse the remaining plastic and hope that your recycling center accepts it.

Option two is dry ice. Dry ice works well with
fully frozen items, but not fresh produce. If it evaporates before you open the
box, that’s ideal. If the ice is still intact, you must be extremely careful
not to touch it, as dry ice can burn your skin. You might not want to risk it
around nosy children and pets.

Total Health

The main draw to any meal delivery service is
convenience. Many meal kits also have a health angle, however, and most home-cooked meals are going to be better for you than the average delivery meal, if only because you can control the amount of salt that goes into them. Certainly you can use them to get more
plant-based meals into your diet, too, if that’s a goal. If you subscribe to WW
(formerly Weight Watchers), you can even find some meal plans that tell you how
many points your meals are. Blue Apron has a tag showing which menu options are
WW approved, and Splendid Spoon has a help page with the point value of some of
its items.

If you’re looking toward meal delivery for
health reasons, you might also consider a fitness tracker, fitness apps, and other helpful
tools, like a smart bathroom scale or a heart rate monitor to steer your
workouts to be more effective.

There are far, far more meal delivery services than these top choices, including choices for every sort of cuisine, every kind of specialized diet, and every cooking skill level. We’ve already reviewed more services than we can fit in this roundup, and we’ll be looking at more services from time to time, too. For additional reviews beyond what’s here and news about the meal delivery services,  please visit our dedicated meal-kits page. 

More Inside PCMag.com

About the Author

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital formats. She is also the creator and author of ProductivityReport.org.

Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for computer scientists and students. She also spent five years as a writer and managing editor of Game Developer magazine, … See Full Bio