We’ve come a long way since the days of bland, frozen TV dinners. A growing subset of meal kit delivery services focus on sending fully prepared meals you simply heat and eat. These meals are easy to make, but that doesn’t mean they skimp on quality. Balanced Bites offers a variety of robust and delicious dishes, including ones that cater to paleo and keto diets. However, it’s relatively expensive, and not recommended for vegans or vegetarians.
Balanced Bites’ Plans and Pricing
In several ways, Balanced Bites is the counterpart to fellow frozen meal kit service Veestro, starting with its a la carte models. You don’t need to lock yourself into a subscription; you can just order one box. However, each box must contain 10 meals, and meals cost $16.99 which is pretty expensive for this category. So you still make a significant commitment, even if you don’t subscribe. Repeat customers earn Bite Bucks that they can spend on later purchases. You can also buy gift cards.
Beyond building your own box, you can select prefab options, such as “Seasonal Meals” or “Pork-Free.” You can subscribe to receive one of these $169 boxes every week, every month, or somewhere in between. However, you can’t subscribe to regularly receive custom boxes; you must order those manually. The shipping time and price depend on your region, but free shipping is a possibility. Balanced Bites delivers nationwide, including Alaska and Hawaii, if you’re willing to pay an extra fee.
The Menu
Despite sounding fairly innocuous, the term “balanced” actually has a specific meaning when it comes to food. It refers to an ideal ratio between key food groups, such as vegetables, grains and proteins. It’s become somewhat synonymous with keto and paleo diets, which are the diets Balanced Bites targets.
Menu items highlight their meat and the complementary vegetables. Slow-cooked orange beef with sweet potatoes and carrots. Beef picadillo with mashed potatoes and broccoli. Pork shoulder carnitas over green cauliflower rice with pickles onions. Heavy on protein, light on carbs. Meals hover around 500 calories each. Some dishes even come from social media specialty chefs, such as Laney Schwartz and Mary Shenouda.
Although Balanced Bites sells meals with vegetables, the company doesn’t sell meals that only contain vegetables. In accordance with keto and paleo diets, every meal I saw contains at least some kind of meat. Along with filtering out allergens, you can limit your search to only one type of meat. For example, I can’t eat nuts and don’t eat pork. But there’s no way to avoid meat entirely. You can’t even get seafood.
For vegetarians and vegans, try Green Chef, an Editors’ Choice pick with wonderful vegetable-based meal kits alongside many great options for meat eaters. Veestro is a fully vegan service that sells fully prepared frozen meals, just like Balanced Bites.
Alongside its prepared meals, Balanced Bites sells snacks and other add-ons. You can buy spice packets, granola mixes, chicken broth, and just some straight-up bacon. It’s not a full-on grocery service like Editors’ Choice pick Hungryroot, but it is a nice bonus, and the only way to buy food with no meat in it. The website also shares recipes for meals that use some of these ingredients.
Efficient Packaging
One advantage pre-made meal delivery services have over their traditional meal kit counterparts is that their packaging is a lot more efficient. I receive my 10 meals tightly packed together in one modest box. Editors’ Choice pick HelloFresh can only fit three meal kits in a similarly sized package.
All my meals came frozen, thanks to the dry ice and frozen gel. Food should last a few months in the freezer. Balanced Bites says all packaging material is recyclable, aside from gel packs and plastic film scraps. You can eat the food out of its own container.
Cooking and Eating With Balanced Bites
According to the service, meals are cooked and shipped within just a few days, so by the time they get to you they haven’t been frozen for that long. In fact, if you order on some days you may need to wait an extra week so your food is aligned with the schedule. This all ensures meals retain a freshness you don’t typically associate with frozen meals.
And it works! The different components are visually distinct, not just unappetizing mush. Defrost meals, warm them up in the microwave, and finish them off on the stovetop. I tasted awesome, and oftentimes international, flavors that hadn’t suffered at all from being in the freezer just a few minutes beforehand. I tasted meals better and more complex than fresh meals I’ve prepared myself using other competing meal kits.
The creamy butter chicken with yellow cauliflower rice, while a bit mild, had a rich Indian aroma that left my kitchen smelling fantastic all day. The BBQ beef with brussels sprouts and mashed parsnips dish used a really fascinating blueberry sauce for a totally different kind of sweetness than I expected. Meanwhile, the green sauce on another shredded beef dish had an incredibly potent tang that I loved. I just wanted to stuff the beef, plantains, and cilantro rice into a taco shell, but Balanced Bites isn’t big on bread. Because the meat is all tender chunks, it warms up quickly and thoroughly.
Although prepared meals like this are very convenient, they won’t teach you how to cook. If you’re willing to put in the work to get some education alongside your eating, consider Editors’ Choice pick Blue Apron.
Perfectly Balanced?
Trying to stick to a specific diet requires much thought and preparation. It’s why some people never pull it off. Balanced Bites is expensive, but the convenience it offers may be more than worth it for anyone seeking quick and easy access to keto and paleo meals. If you don’t care about those fads, you’ll still appreciate eating fantastic food, the closest thing to fresh we’ve tasted from something frozen. You just need to be excited to eat a lot of meat.
Our Editors’ Choice picks for meal kit delivery services are cheaper overall and have more flexible menus. They also have their own specialties. HelloFresh is for omnivores, Blue Apron teaches aspiring home chefs, Green Chef excels at vegetable-based meals, and Hungryroot’s handles grocery shopping.
