There are many good reasons to start a vegan or vegetarian diet. It can improve your health. If enough of us, as a society, reduce the amount of meat we eat, we can lessen the damage done by climate change and cruel factory farms. Plus, if you prepare them right, vegetables can taste fantastic. But starting any diet presents a challenge, especially one that takes entire categories off the table. A great, convenient way to begin your vegan or vegetarian diet is with a meal kit delivery service.
What Is a Meal Kit Delivery Service?
A meal kit delivery service is a subscription that sends you food via the mail. These packages take much of the hassle out of planning your own meals by giving you all the ingredients and instructions needed to make the breakfasts, lunches, and dinners that you’ve chosen to receive.
Some services send you fresh ingredients, and motivate you to learn how to cook yourself. Other services ship what are essentially frozen dinners that you heat and eat within minutes. Pricing options also differ between services. Some lock you into a subscription that rotates meals on a weekly basis. Others let you buy the exact meals you want, whenever you want, a la carte. Average prices per meal hover around $12, but portion sizes may vary.
In general, meal services aim to make their packaging as easy to recycle as possible, but vegan and vegetarian services especially feel an obligation to be kind to the earth. Meals come cold and preserved, typically thanks to packed-in dry ice. While fresh ingredients are always ideal, these vegetable-based services ensure that you won’t need to worry about raw meat potentially spoiling.
Does My Diet Limit My Options?
As meal delivery services explode in popularity, more and more competitors spring up to fill more and more niche categories. The biggest services, Editors’ Choice picks like HelloFresh and Blue Apron, offer vegan and vegetarian options. But this roundup covers subscriptions singularly dedicated to vegetable-based meal kits.
Still, you’ll find plenty of variety. Like choosing between restaurants, each of the subscriptions highlighted here stand out in their own way. Editors’ Choice pick Green Chef offers the flat-out best vegetable-based meals, while also being the only service with meat options that we included here. Purple Carrot helps you improve your cooking skills with its animal-free recipes. Veestro’s frozen, pre-made meals are a breeze to prepare. Daily Harvest’s smoothies, snacks, and soups make it ideal for a quick breakfast or lunch, and the same is true for Splendid Spoon.
As the category expands, you may encounter vegan and vegetarian meal delivery services that we haven’t covered yet. One notable example is Sakara Life. Not just a meal kit provider, Sakara Life offers holistic wellness products in the vein of Gwenyth Paltrow’s Goop. That said, without consulting a nutritionist we can’t vouch for the service’s usefulness. It’s also expensive, particularly when trying to substitute meals for, say, allergy reasons.
Speaking of allergies, my peanut allergy makes it personally difficult for me to fully adopt a more plant-based diet. Fortunately, meal delivery services at the very least offer allergy information for their recipes, and many let you filter out specific allergens while you search.
Chef’s Kiss
Taste is subjective, but vegan and vegetarian meal kits are no less tasty than their omnivore counterparts. Whether its mushroom fajitas, tomato-and-basil flatbreads, or a vegan take on chicken shawarma, you’ll find a delicious meal without meat. Check out our top picks for vegan and vegetarian meal delivery services, and start receiving great, green food.
If you’re looking for some more ways to get healthier, check out our Ultimate Guide to Health and Fitness Tech.
