To create the perfect mise en place when cooking, you put in the effort to clean, chop, measure, and neatly display fresh ingredients on the counter and toss them into a hot pan. Or you may prefer less prep work. If you count yourself as a member of the second group, check out Daily Harvest.
The vegan meal delivery service sends soups, smoothies, bowls, and other ready-made items that take little more than adding heat or liquids before they’re edible. More importantly, Daily Harvest injects a huge dose of vegetables (which is undoubtedly beneficial) into your diet, particularly for breakfast and lunch. The menu options are hit and miss, so you must be open to exploring what’s on offer.
Splendid Spoon, a plant-focused competitor, is even more convenient, because its items come fully ready to consume. You don’t need to add your own water or oat milk, as you may with Daily Harvest. Still, Daily Harvest’s diverse ingredients and eco-friendly packaging make it a meal delivery service worth your time and money.
Daily Harvest’s Pricing
Daily Harvest’s items come in a variety of prices:
- Chia or oat bowls: $5.99
- Flatbread: $8.99
- Harvest bowls: $8.99
- Lattes: $7.99 (pack of 3)
- Smoothies: $7.99
- Snack bites: $7.99 (pack of 7)
- Soups: $7.99
Not counting the lattes and snack bites, the average meal costs $7.99.
Your can select 9, 12, or 24 items per weekly shipment, with the option to pause deliveries at any time. There’s also an option for a monthly shipment of 24 items. The subtotal depends on the items you choose, and everything is priced à la carte. You may end up paying tax or shipping. Daily Harvest waives the shipping fee on your first box, which is customary among meal delivery services. That said, we saw a $0 shipping fee for all other price estimates. There’s no guarantee that Daily Harvest won’t charge for shipping in the future, of course.
To give you a ballpark figure of the total cost, the largest-sized box that we filled with a variety of items chosen at random subtotaled $177. The smallest box came out to about $54. Again, the price varies depending on which items you choose. Splendid Spoon charges a flat rate for a box of items rather than a per-item price. Like Daily Harvest, Splendid Spoon doesn’t charge for shipping. The cost for Splendid Spoon works out to be between $9.50 and $13 per item, depending on how many items you order at once. So, Daily Harvest has a lower average per-item fee.
If you look at meal delivery services more generally, the per-serving price hovers between $7.99 and $11.99. Mind you, that’s for a dinner entrée, rather than a cup of soup. There are a few low-cost, meal kit services, including EveryPlate ($4.99 per serving) and Dinnerly (between $4.29 and $4.99 per serving). Blue Apron costs less than most others, too, charging between $7.49 and $9.99 per serving. It even offers free shipping for all but the smallest plan.
Daily Harvest’s Menu Options
As mentioned, all Daily Harvest’s meals are vegan, and light on carbohydrates. You’ll also find some “wellness” ingredients, such as murasaki (Japanese purple yam) and ashwagandha (also known as Indian ginseng, poison gooseberry, or winter cherry, and purportedly useful at reducing stress). Daily Harvest tags its items for the benefits they supposedly bring, such as energizing, cleansing, and beautifying. We can’t promise you’ll feel more beautiful after drinking any of the company’s smoothies, but if you’re into that sort of wellness (or the placebo effect), perhaps you’ll enjoy choosing meals based on which ones will reduce your inflammation, for example.
Daily Harvest’s offers a heavily plant-based menu. You’re not going to find noodles or dumplings anywhere in the ingredients list. Many items include an exotic ingredient or two that I would describe as popular in the health and wellness industry. You may need to look up chaga (a mushroom), lion’s mane (a kind of fungus), reishi (yet another mushroom), chlorella (single-celled algae), and cordyceps (a genus of parasitic fungi that grows on the larvae of caterpillars in the mountainous region of China).
Harvest bowls sometimes come with a “tastes like” tagline. The brussels sprouts and lime pad thai bowl tastes like all-veg pad thai (it narrowly meets the description, but could use some peanuts). The broccoli and cheeze [sic] bowl tastes like broccoli and cheese sauce, only this one is made with nutritional yeast and no dairy. Sweet potato and wild rice hash tastes like a breakfast burrito bowl.
For soups, smoothies, and oat or chia bowls, you must add your own liquid, such as water, broth, or nondairy milks. Soups range from slimming, low-calorie options, such as turmeric and lemongrass broth, to more hearty and filling ones, such as lentil-and-mesquite chili or sweet potato-and-miso soup. Oat bowls and chia bowls consist of oats or chia seeds, plus fruits, spices, and the occasional obscure (to me) superfood that I had to look up. Smoothie flavors can get a little weird. A black sesame and banana smoothie sounded better than it tasted and looked. It had no discernible flavor, just a jumble of blueberry, spinach, zucchini, pine pollen, banana, and black sesame. One smoothie has chickpeas in it, another cauliflower; you get the idea.
Lattes comes as little pods of frozen goop that are also BYOL—bring your own liquid. There are only four flavors: coffee and almond; chaga and chocolate; matcha and lemongrass; and ginger and turmeric. Each one has a nondairy ingredient, such as tahini or coconut cream, that makes it creamy and thick.
Flatbreads are a new addition, with seven varieties that include kale and coriander; tomato and cremini; and artichoke and spinach. Finally, Daily Harvest’s bites look like rolled balls of cookie dough, but they have no egg or butter. The flavors include espresso bean and tahini; hazelnut and chocolate; cacao nib and vanilla; and coconut and lemon.
As you search on the web or on the mobile app, you can focus on ingredients you like, and filter out ones you don’t or ones you’re allergic to. Each entry also includes useful customer reviews.
Daily Harvest’s Packaging
By their very nature, no meal delivery service has supremely environmentally-friendly packaging. Some are better than others, however.
Daily Harvest recently changed the materials and design of some of its containers so that its bowl-based food actually comes in bowls, rather than cups. More importantly, these bowls are 100 percent compostable or recyclable. The new streamlined packaging also reduces excess waste.
All the food contents ship frozen, and you’re meant to keep them frozen until you’re ready to consume them. Boxes arrive with your items packed inside a cooler bag with dry ice, which is much easier to dispose of than frozen gel packs because the dry ice simply evaporates. If the ice is still intact when you open the box, however, you have to be extremely careful not to touch it with bare hands or else risk burning your skin.
Compared to Splendid Spoon, Daily Harvest uses less plastic. Splendid Spoon’s items come in plastic containers that you can reuse for food storage. Daily Harvest’s plastics are limited to seals on the tops of cups and lids, which in many cases don’t seem necessary at all. The pods that hold the latte goop are all plastic, too, and these are perhaps unnecessarily packed inside yet another cup with yet another plastic lid.
Cooking and Eating With Daily Harvest
Your items arrive frozen, and you keep them frozen until you’re ready to consume them. When you open a smoothie, soup, or bowl, you see chunks of ingredients. They appear to have been frozen separately. When you pour the contents into a bowl, you get many frozen pieces rather than a block of ice-meal.
A mint and cacao smoothie was a highlight. It tasted like a mint chocolate chip milkshake, with crunchy cacao nibs instead of chocolate. Not being able to taste the heaping of spinach behind the minty flavor was probably for the best.
A mango and turmeric chia bowl tasted drab rather than sweet at breakfast, despite a healthy amount of diced pineapple and mango. Consider letting the concoction soak overnight in rice milk. The mild, fruity flavor went well with kale and brown rice after dumping leftovers on top of a rice bowl. The nutritional label indicated it had two servings, though, with the new changes in packaging, the container holds 25 percent less.
Daily Harvest’s bowls are unlike Splendid Spoon’s. Daily Harvest provides you with frozen vegetables, spices, and cubes of sauce that you microwave into a savory assortment. Be sure to give that sauce a good scraping to stir it back into the bowl once you take it out of the microwave. Splendid Spoon’s bowls arrive already in their final texture. In some cases, you get separate components, like black beans and plantains served over rice. Other bowls are more stew-like. In short, Splendid Spoon’s bowls are more varied.
When it came to eating Daily Harvest’s soups, you can leave them chunky and or blend them. For creamy soups, Daily Harvest’s instructions say to add water, then blend the frozen ingredients with the liquid and only then heat it. Blending first seemed backward. Wouldn’t you want the vegetables to be soft before pulverizing them? Frankly, the end result wasn’t as smooth as we hoped. For example, a sweet potato-and-miso soup tasted good, but lacked a silky, pureed texture. Adding herbs like freshly sliced scallions brightened it up.
Test coffee pods were better than expected. They’re sweet and have a milkshake-like quality. You can drink all three of them cold, or experiment and figure out the best way to prepare them. The directions say to take a sealed pod and run it under hot water for 10 seconds. Then pop the pod contents into a blender with 10 ounces of liquid (nondairy milk is recommended). Whirl it in the blender, pour into a cup, and enjoy. But you might have some issues.
First, running the pod under hot water doesn’t really release the goop. You need a small spatula to pry it out. Second, 10 ounces of liquid was way too much. Eight ounces still made a weak coffee. We recommended going with about half as much liquid. Third, a couple of ice cubes made this drink better. Either blend the ice or throw whole cubes into the glass to chill the final beverage. The second method had an ideal taste and temperature, although your opinion may vary. Coffee drinkers may end up enjoying these lattes more than anticipated. Even if your go-to coffee is a pour-over, black, you can still enjoy a sweet and slightly fatty pick-me-up from time-to-time.
Flatbreads come densely stacked with toppings and a flavorful sauce layer on the earthy plant-based bread. The tomato and basil come appetizingly close to pizza territory. However, even after baking them in the oven, the vegetables never fully shake off their frozen quality. Conversely, the snack bites taste wonderful straight from the freezer. The tahini creates a creamy texture with just a touch of grit and espresso flavor that feels like a fancy, high-end dessert.
Give Us Our Daily Harvest
If you struggle to eat enough vegetables, or rely on take-out more than you’d care to admit, Daily Harvest offers a superbly convenient way to eat better. We like its heavily plant-based selection, and the method of freezing ingredients separately for bowls and soups helps preserve their textures and flavors. Finding menu items that suit your taste could take some trial and error. We’d especially caution you to not let the exquisite marketing photos hypnotize you. The images in this review are much more representative of what you’ll receive with your delivery.
Splendid Spoon’s meals require less prep work, as you don’t need to bring your own liquid or blend ingredients. Its smoothies are ready to drink, and bowls and soups only need to be heated. That said, Daily Harvest offers a few additional types of foods you can’t get from Splendid Spoon—lattes, flatbreads, and snack bites. Head to head, we would say their food quality is about the same, but there are clear differences between the two services. Do you want meals that are ready to consume? If yes, go with Splendid Spoon. Do you want more options and the ability to customize soups and smoothies with a liquid of your choice? If so, Daily Harvest is better.
If you’re interested in a meal delivery service that encourages you to cook, check out our Editors’ Choice picks. Blue Apron teaches beginner chefs how to cook; Green Chef focuses on plant-focused meals; and HelloFresh caters to omnivores. Hungryroot, another recommended meal-kit delivery service, sends you a mix of groceries and recipe suggestions rather than standard meal kits. It caters well to every diet, from vegans to pescatarians to carnivores.
