Are you tired of the daily dinner struggle, juggling recipes and meal prep? Meal delivery services might be your answer. These services deliver pre-made meals or perfectly portioned ingredients with easy-to-follow recipes right to your doorstep. Experts agree they can reduce grocery costs, simplify meal planning, improve your cooking skills, and cater to dietary needs like pescatarian or gluten-free diets.
This article explores the best and cheapest healthy meal delivery services available, drawing on expert opinions, editor reviews, and hands-on testing.
How to Choose the Best Meal Delivery Service
Before diving into specific recommendations, here are crucial factors to consider when selecting a meal kit delivery service:
- Serving Size: Determine how many people you need to feed. Single-serve pre-prepared meals are ideal for individuals, while families or couples should seek customizable plans with multiple serving sizes (typically two to eight servings).
- Dietary Restrictions: If you have dietary restrictions like gluten-free, vegetarian, or vegan, choose services offering diverse options to match your needs.
- Customizability: If you're a picky eater or crave variety, opt for services with weekly rotating menus and customizable features like portion size and protein type.
- Pricing: Meal kit prices depend on meal and ingredient quality, delivery frequency, the number of people you're cooking for, and the specific meal plan. Budget-friendly services may have limited options for dietary restrictions, while specialized options usually cost more.
- Delivery Dates and Times: Ensure you're available to receive deliveries to prevent food waste. Most services offer customizable delivery plans and allow you to pause or skip weeks as needed.
Top Meal Delivery Services of 2025
Here's a look at some of the best meal delivery services of 2025, including both meal kit services (offering individual ingredients) and pre-made meal services:
Best Prepared Meal Delivery Service Overall: CookUnity
CookUnity is a favorite among many. It offers multiple plans based on the number of weekly meals you want, ranging from four to 16. The service provides a rotating menu of ready-made options weekly, or you can let CookUnity choose based on your preferences (protein choice) or dietary restrictions like vegetarian, vegan, low-carb, and gluten-free. You can also flag allergies or disliked foods, and the service will notify you if they appear in the menu.
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CookUnity's pre-made meals are varied, delicious, and accommodate several dietary restrictions. The convenience is unbeatable - the meals show up at your door at the beginning of the week, and knowing all you need to do to cook dinner is pull the wrapper off a meal and warm it up makes your evenings totally stress-free. The meals also come in a small reusable bag that you can send back to the company instead of having to break down boxes every week. The meals come fresh and have a refrigerated shelf life of about four to seven days.
Best Meal Kit Overall: Home Chef
Home Chef's rotating weekly menu includes over 30 meals. You can also select from various options tailored to your preferences, including 15-minute meal kits, grill- and oven-ready kits, and special occasion meals. Before ordering, you'll take a quiz that personalizes your menu based on your tastes, serving size, and delivery preferences. Each meal shows the estimated preparation time. The customizability makes this a standout service.
Best for Beginners: Blue Apron
Blue Apron offers weekly menu items based on your selected meal plan. Options include a signature plan with top chef-favorite recipes, a vegetarian plan, and a wellness plan with nutritionist-approved, carb-conscious recipes. While Blue Apron requires some cooking skills based on the difficulty level of its recipes, it's recommended for beginner cooks who hope to "learn from the beginning and hone their basic skills."
If you're strapped for time, Blue Apron also offers over 30 pre-made meal options per week. The meals are ready in under five minutes when heated in the microwave. However, the brand doesn’t cater to many dietary restrictions or specific dietary plans like gluten-free and keto.
Best for Healthy Eaters: Splendid Spoon
Splendid Spoon offers over 50 healthy ready-made meals and snacks, including smoothies, soups, noodle bowls, and dishes - and everything is gluten-free. Your cart automatically fills with the service’s bestsellers, or you can manually swap in your favorites.
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Although you can’t pick the number of meals you get per plan like most other delivery services, Splendid Spoon lets you customize the frequency of your meal deliveries: weekly, every other week or once a month.
Best for Families: HelloFresh
HelloFresh offers a great mix of dishes in its weekly rotating menu, which can appeal to everyone in the family (including kids). You can customize your weekly meal settings by selecting from six preferences: Quick & Easy, Pescatarian, Family-Friendly, Fit & Wholesome, Veggie, and Chef’s Choice/Meat & Veggie. The service appeals to several dietary restrictions. You can also swap proteins and sides if the weekly recipes don’t quite fit your preferences. The service also offers 14 veggie meals (including up to two vegan meals) in its Classic Plan each week.
Best Gluten-Free: Sunbasket
Sunbasket offers both ingredient-based meal kits and pre-made meals, all of which consist of high-quality ingredients and organic produce. You can choose from 10 meal plans, including chef’s choice recipes and pre-made Fresh & Ready meals, as well as paleo, gluten-free, vegetarian, and diabetes-friendly options. The Fresh & Ready option lets you receive single-serve meals to heat in the oven or microwave in just a few minutes. If you don’t feel like committing to a single plan, the service lets you mix and match with over a dozen meals from its weekly rotating menu.
Best Vegan: Purple Carrot
Purple Carrot’s meal kits are a “wonderful blend of familiar and innovative.” Because the meals are fully plant-based, the service can be an easy way for people to “add more plant foods into their diets without having to fully convert to veganism."
Cheapest Meal Delivery Services
Finding the cheapest meal delivery service isn’t always straightforward. Some advertised prices are misleading or based on minimum weekly orders.
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Here are some of the cheapest meal delivery services:
- Lowest price per serving: EveryPlate, $5.99/serving
- Best for intermediate cooks: Dinnerly, $7.99/serving
- Best for families: HomeChef, $7.99-$9.99/serving
- Best selection: Hello Fresh, $9.99/serving
- Best for snackers and grazers: Hungryroot, $9-$11/serving
Even if they end up being a bit more than the grocery store, meal kits and prepared meal delivery services will still be cheaper than takeout, even after the introductory offer has expired. They also cater to a variety of dietary needs and restrictions to make meal planning around those factors simpler. Many are very generous with substitutions too.
EveryPlate
EveryPlate offers filling, budget-friendly meal kits for busy, budget-minded home cooks and couples without too many dietary restrictions. With meals priced at just $5.99 a serving, it's the best cheap meal delivery service.
While EveryPlate doesn’t cater to specific dietary restrictions or preferences, allergen and nutritional information is included with every recipe, so you’ll know exactly what ingredients are in each kit before you set your weekly order.
Dinnerly
Dinnerly is the affordable sister brand to Marley Spoon. It's the best cheap meal kit for intermediate home cooks who don’t mind chopping and prep, couples, and small households. Dinnerly allows you to filter recipes by cuisine or dietary preference, and you can also view the attributes of each (low-calorie, kid-friendly, keto-friendly, low-carb, under 30 minutes, vegetarian, dairy-free, etc.) before clicking through to the recipe. Dinnerly subscribers can also choose from a wide variety of add-ons, which offer the same great variety as the Marley Spoon Market and include proteins, produce, pastries, pizza dough, shortcut meal kits, premade meals you can heat and eat, desserts, and goodies from brands like Roberta’s Pizza, Spicewalla, Mike’s Hot Honey, and more.
Home Chef
Cooking for a crowd and looking for a variety of meals including traditional meal kits and fully prepared meals? Then Home Chef’s Family Menu might be the best affordable meal delivery service for you. With a price of $6.99 per serving, this is a great cheap meal delivery service for families or households of 4 who want a kit a few nights a week, as well as for beginner home cooks. The standard meal kits can often be prepared in 15 or 30 minutes and include preportioned ingredients. You can also choose from fully cooked meal options that are oven-ready and grill-ready, and add-ons include proteins, snacks, soups, salad kits, desserts, and more.
HelloFresh
HelloFresh is one of the OG meal delivery services, and though its price tag is on the higher end of what I consider “cheap,” it offers far more meal options than its comparably priced competitors. It's good for smaller households who want at least three kits a week. And in addition to the different meal kits, you can order a variety of add-ons like proteins, snacks, desserts, and smoothies from the HelloFresh Market.
Hungryroot
If you don’t like grocery shopping and don’t want to do much in the way of meal prep, Hungryroot may be the meal delivery service for you. Well, except for the fact that it isn’t technically a meal delivery service; it’s more of a high-end grocery delivery service that comes with suggestions for how to easily combine its items into quick-and-easy meals.
Because it’s an online grocery store, Hungryroot has plenty of options for your dietary restrictions (dairy-free, gluten-free, soy-free, tree-nut-free, peanut-free, egg-free, shellfish-free, vegan meals, vegetarian meals, pescatarian meals, high-protein and paleo options, diabetes-friendly meals, etc.) and dietary preferences. Even if you don’t end up making the suggested recipes, you’ll still be stocking your kitchen with a variety of prepared foods, packaged staples, nutritious snacks, produce, and fresh meat (if you choose-there are plenty of meatless options too).
Other Affordable Meal Delivery Services
- EveryPlate: With meal kits as low as $6 a serving, EveryPlate offers 27 recipes per week, typically featuring chicken or ground beef, a few pork chop recipes, and some plant-based meals. It's suitable for beginner cooks and those new to meal kits.
- Blue Apron: Starting at $8 a serving, Blue Apron offers a wide range of excellent recipes and is known for its eco-friendliness. It's great for families and novice cooks.
- CookUnity: Offering over 100 meals starting at $11, CookUnity is a prepared meal service with diverse options, including low-carb, vegan, and paleo choices. It's ideal for those who don't have time for meal prep.
- Factor: With over 35 meals starting at $12.50, Factor is a prepared meal service that targets the health, fitness, and diet crowds. It's a good option for specific diets like keto and paleo.
- Mosaic Foods: With over 50 meals starting at $6, Mosaic Foods is a plant-based meal delivery service with healthy prepared meals. It's great for vegetarians, vegans, and those wanting to incorporate more plant-based meals into their diet.
How Meal Kits are Tested
When considering any meal kit company, testers look at the menu and dietary preference variety, quality of the ingredients inside the boxes and their sourcing, portion sizes, the clarity of the instructions, the overall value, and, of course, the taste of the meals.
What Makes a Meal Kit "Cheap"?
For meal kits, the average price per serving is the key factor, with options available for $10 or less per serving being considered "cheap."
Meal Kit vs. Prepared Meal Delivery
The first big decision you'll make is whether you want meal kits, which require some prep work and cooking, or a prepared meal service that sends fully cooked meals ready to heat and eat. Meal kits will demand more of your time and energy but they'll also cost a little less per serving. Prepared meals require almost no time and energy, other than what it takes to actually eat the food, but typically run a few dollars more per serving.
Healthiness
While most meal delivery services have healthy options, some are healthier. Specific meal kits and delivery services are better than others if you want to eat low-calorie, low-carb, plant-based, or pescatarian food.
Number of Meals Per Week
With almost every service, the more meals or servings you order per delivery, the cheaper it becomes per meal. Ideally, you'll want to determine precisely how much food makes sense for your household. 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 prepared meals either arrive frozen or can be frozen after unboxing.
Benefits of Meal Delivery Services
- Cost Savings: Cooking at home is generally cheaper than eating out or ordering takeout. Meal delivery services can help you save money by providing pre-portioned ingredients and reducing food waste.
- Time Savings: Meal kits and prepared meals can save you time on meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking.
- Healthier Eating: Meal delivery services offer a variety of healthy meal options, including vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and low-calorie meals.
- Reduced Food Waste: Meal kits provide pre-portioned ingredients, which reduces food waste and saves you money.
- Improved Cooking Skills: Meal kits come with easy-to-follow recipes, which can help you improve your cooking skills.
- Variety: Meal delivery services offer a wide variety of meal options, so you can try new foods and cuisines.