The Best Meal Kit Delivery Services for 2024 (2024)

Eating is essential to our well-being, but cooking is another matter altogether. It requires grocery store visits, prep, cleanup, and making meals for yourself or an entire family. Thankfully, meal delivery services offer many nutritious options if you have little time (or desire) to put in much work in the kitchen.

But which meal delivery service is the best for you? We've eaten our way through all of the top contenders to help you decide. Read on for our top picks, followed by what to look for when selecting a service.

Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks

Buying Guide: The Best Meal Kit Delivery Services for 2024

Which Meal Delivery Service Is the Best?

Meal delivery (also known as meal kit delivery) is a 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 worth billions.

EveryPlate's pork poblano tacos (Credit: PCMag)

Cook-from-a-kit boxes, such as Green Chef and HelloFresh, are just one style of meal delivery. Some throw the "kit" element to the wind and instead provide heat-and-eat meals that require minimal effort. Sunbasket, for example, provides the ingredients for a family dinner already mixed and assembled in an oven-safe container.

Splendid Spoon specializes in ready-to-eat meals for one person, such as smoothies, soups, and bowls. It also has prepared plates that are more akin to a microwavable TV dinner. CookUnity, Factor, Balanced Bites, Fresh N Lean, and vegan services Mosaic and Veestro fall into this pre-made category. Conversely, Blue Apron is a service committed to helping you learn to cook.

The service diversity is remarkable. We haven't had an opportunity to test them all, but if their unique hooks sound appealing, consider doing more research. Sakara Life’s pricey subscription features a highly curated wellness plan that includes meals that purportedly improve whatever issues you have, such as making your skin clearer or increasing your energy. You can find kosher or halal meal kits.

Some services, such as Snap Kitchen or Vegetable and Butcher, only deliver to their local communities. However, most other services deliver anywhere in the United States, except for Alaska and Hawaii, in about one week.

Customize your Hungryroot order (Credit: Hungryroot)

How to Choose Food From a Meal Delivery Service

Before you sign up for a meal delivery service, you should preview the menu for the upcoming week and future weeks. In our experience, this is the most important part of choosing a service.

It's a little like choosing a restaurant. 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 HelloFresh's colorful plates brimming with warm meals and a scattering of fresh herbs or toasted breadcrumbs on top.

When previewing menus, 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 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 let you pick 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. Sunbasket sells snacks, breakfast items, and other standalone groceries. 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.

HelloFresh's fresh ingredients (Credit: PCMag)

How Many Meals Do You Get From a Meal Delivery Service?

Some meal delivery services offer a la carte purchases, but most require a subscription. When you sign up, you agree to regularly receive a shipment of meals or meal kits, 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.

All plans let you skip a week at any time or indefinitely pause your subscription. You 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 meal delivery service's site will typically ask for 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 only shows you the meals that meet your needs. Watch out, because not all companies do this. Some services require you to vet each meal as you choose your orders.

Sunbasket's packed meals (Credit: PCMag)

What Is the Cheapest Meal Kit Delivery Service?

The going rate for a meal delivery service is between $8.99 and $14.99 per serving. Delivery fees typically hang in the range of $9.99 per shipment, but you can often find better deals. Purple Carrot charges $0 in delivery fees for all but the smallest orders. The same goes for Hungryroot.

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. Prices can even vary within an individual service. Mosaic has options as cheap as $5.99 per serving.

Green Chef's paper and plastic packaging (Credit: PCMag)

Which Meal Kit Delivery Service Has the Best Packaging?

When you receive a meal kit order, you must deal with packaging, and sometimes a distressing amount of it. Some services (mostly in the prepared meals category) reduce the materials or have moved toward compostable materials (Daily Harvest does a good job). That said, no nationwide company 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 refreeze them, or let them thaw, 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 a 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 curious children and pets.

Can I Send a Meal Kit as a Gift?

If you want to convert your friends to the meal kit lifestyle (without sending them a mysterious box of raw food), you're in luck. Many services let you purchase gift cards. Referral programs often make your subscription costs cheaper if you get friends to sign up.

What Is the Healthiest Meal Delivery Service?

The main draw to any meal delivery service is convenience. Many meal kits also have a health angle, but most home-cooked meals are 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 you subscribe to WW (formerly Weight Watchers), you can find meal plans that tell you how many points your meals are worth. Blue Apron displays the menu options that are WW approved, and Splendid Spoon has a help page that highlights its meals' point values. Veestro offers a weight loss subscription plan. Trifecta pairs its healthy meals with a free fitness app and a food-logging database.

You might also consider a fitness tracker, fitness apps, and other helpful tools, such as a smart bathroom scale or a heart rate monitor.

Variety Is the Best Meal-Kit Spice

There are far more meal delivery services than these top picks, including choices for nearly every cuisine, specialized diet, or cooking skill level. We'll be looking at more services from time to time, too. For more information on meal delivery services, please visit our dedicated meal kits page, our guides to the best vegetarian and vegan meal kit delivery services, and the best prepared meal delivery services. Read our Blue Apron vs. HelloFresh comparison to see two of the best meal-kit delivery services face off.

For even more on improving your culinary life through tech, check out the best meal planning apps and best grocery delivery services.