Best Healthy Meal Delivery Services of 2024, Tested and Reviewed

David Watsky Senior Editor / Home and Kitchen

See at Green Chef

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See at Blue Apron

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See at Daily Harvest

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While it's pricier than some other services, Green Chef has a massive selection of meat- and plant-based recipes using mostly organic ingredients.

Green Chef is a healthy organic meal kit service that will tailor your plan to maintain a paleo, keto, vegetarian (plant-powered) or just a steady balanced diet. Roughly 90% of the fresh ingredients included in Green Chef's meal kits are certified organic and its meats are sustainably fished, farmed and raised without hormones or antibiotics. In addition to organic meals, you'll find lots of healthy grains, lean proteins and fresh greens making it the healthiest meal delivery service for 2024.

Some meal kit services on this list have more total options each week, but Green Chef scores major points for quality and overall healthiness. My favorite Green Chef meal was the artichoke crab cakes with quinoa and zucchini, but everything I made was light, fresh and delicious.

Read my full review of Green Chef.

This is simply the best prepared plant-based meal service I've tried and it's one of the most affordable, too.

I tested a week's worth of Mosaic inventive meatless meals (full review here) and for plant-based meal delivery, it doesn't get any better than this. Mosaic is new on the scene and, to date, is the best 100% plant-based meal delivery service I've tried. Of the nine Mosaic meals I tried, none were bad and I enjoyed nearly all of them.

Personal favorites included the tender jackfruit chili and the olive, pepper and feta ragout, but there were plenty more that hit the spot. There were also no mushy vegetables -- a plague in meal delivery -- and the meat stand-ins like jackfruit, tofu and vegan sausage were used in creative ways and cooked extremely well.

Daily Harvest is one of the elders of the healthy meal delivery set, and the service has fine-tuned its recipes. I tried the latest version of the Daily Harvest and loved its new line of family-style pasta and rice dishes that clock in under $10 a serving.

While the family meals represent the best value, most Daily Harvest smoothies, soups, grain bowls and flatbreads range from $7 to $10 per serving. The food is all vegan and gluten-free and is packed with healthy superfoods such as acai, kale, spinach, flaxseed, nuts, berries and beans.

Daily Harvest meals arrive frozen and ready to be popped in the freezer and then thawed quickly to serve. Food is partially prepared, meaning you'll have to add nut milk to frozen smoothie ingredients and blend, or add broth or water to soup before serving.

Your weekly order cost depends on which items you choose, but plans require a minimum of nine items per order. There's an extra $10 for shipping per box, so you'll get a better value if you order more in one shot. The subscription can be paused or canceled easily and at any time.

Read our full review of Daily Harvest here.

Purple Carrot is easily the best meal kit service for eating plant-based. The recipes, although limited per week, are interesting and unique and use high-quality ingredients. 

Purple Carrot (full review here) is the original plant-based meal kit service and this healthy food delivery service has a loyal and growing customer base. The 100% vegan meal kit service scores points for its inventive and interesting fresh meat-free ingredients and meal prep options like cauliflower and quinoa kofta or sticky apricot seitan stir fry. 

Purple Carrot makes it easy to sort its offerings into high-protein or gluten-free meals that satisfy even nonvegetarians. Be aware that some of the Purple Carrot meals take a bit of time and some skill to prepare but if quality, homemade vegan meal kits are a priority for you (and extra trips to the store are not), this is probably the best meal kit for you. In addition to the tasty vegan meals, you can add extras like banana chia pudding or overnight oats with apricot, goji berries and cashew butter to your weekly delivery.

Hungryroot is for anyone who seeks online grocery delivery and healthy recipe suggestions with all the ingredients to make them but doesn't want to commit to the rigor of a meal kit subscription.

Hungryroot is part meal kit company and part healthy grocery delivery service. Unlike traditional meal kits, Hungryroot tailors a delivery of groceries with simple recipe suggestions that can be created from them. While services like Blue Apron and Sunbasket lock you into recipes with rather specific ingredients portioned for that particular meal.

Plans start at $4 a serving or $69 a week. Hungryroot gives you the option to add more servings in increments of two to four, with a flat increase of $10. The cost per serving decreases the more you order. Shipping is free for any plan over $70 a week.

Blue Apron offers steak and healthy seafood recipes starting at $8 a serving. It's also the most sustainable meal kit service when it comes to packaging.

Probably the most recognizable of the meal kit services, Blue Apron has a lot of healthy, fresh options on the menu -- and just a lot of options, in general. Blue Apron teamed up with Weight Watchers for easy-to-cook healthy recipes like sheet pan tandoori-style chicken and tilapia in lemon caper sauce. These recipes align with its point system, making it easy for those in the program to have a healthy diet meal plan and keep track. Blue Apron offers customers roughly four to 10 delicious meals to choose from per week including more than one vegetarian recipe option as well as a few that were created for the Weight Watchers Freestyle program. 

Separate from Weight Watchers meals, its vegetarian options get high marks in the reviews I read, but if you're full-on vegan or vegetarian, there are likely better vegetarian specialty meal kits and meal delivery services with more daily or weekly plant-based options and ingredients. Blue Apron also has one of the most user-friendly meal plan interfaces of all the meal kit services and optional wine pairings, too. 

• BistroMD: This health-focused service is intended to help with weight loss and has dozens of weekly menu options that are 400 calories or less.
• Veestro: This vegan meal delivery service had some hits and misses. It's also on the expensive side with most plant-based meals costing $15.
• Territory Foods: This service relies on partnerships with local chefs to curate menus that are specific to each region. The food was excellent and there were plenty of healthy options. It's also expensive at between $14 and $18 per meal. 
• Sakara Life: This fresh food service was tasty and good for a cleanse, but it's also one of the most expensive meal subscriptions I tried. 
• Snap Kitchen: Snap Kitchen has solid prepared meals, mostly under 450 calories. The portions were a bit small, and some meals were underwhelming.
• FlexPro Meals: These frozen keto meals were some of the worst I tried.
• Nutrisystem: Although it's affordable, I disliked most of the meals I tried from this frozen meal subscription.
• Sunbasket: This service has high-end meal kits, but the bloated cost keeps it off our list.
• Thistle: This is a fresh food service much like Sakara Life. It's significantly cheaper than Sakara but the salads and bowls are fairly simple considering the cost.

To test each meal delivery service, I tried at least five and sometimes as many as 10 meals from any given service. I tried to choose a range of meals from the various menus and meal plan offerings. For instance, if a service offers plant-based meals I was sure to try at least one. I also mixed up the meal types to include rice bowls, meat dishes, plant-based offerings and other various styles offered by the brand. Further, I made sure to test a variety of cuisines -- Italian, Indian, Thai, Mexican -- if they were offered.

Because healthy food is subjective and people have varying nutrition needs and goals, I tried to approach this list from all angles and determine which meal services were healthiest for different types of eaters. Folks keeping to the keto diet, for instance, may consider low-carb meal delivery "healthiest." Others who deem vegan and plant-based food healthier than meals with meat will be looking for a service that provides more meatless options. 

I also took careful note of each meal delivery service's website, including what information was provided (ingredients, nutritional info), how well the menu was organized and how simple it was to pick a healthy meal plan and order meals. When they arrived, I noted how well they were packaged and checked whether each meal was still chilled or frozen.

To reheat meals, I took a twofold approach. For some, I meticulously followed the heating instructions on the label. Since these are suggestions, I reheated other meals the way I would if left to my own devices. Often that meant warming gently in a nonstick skillet or reheating in an air fryer. Many of the meal delivery services offer a microwave heating option, but I almost always found that produced worse results.

Testing meal kits requires cooking and thus a different stand of practices and procedures for evaluation. Here's more on how we test meal kits at CNET.

Your nutrition goals

The first thing you'll want to consider is what your nutrition goals are, ideally with the help of a health professional, since some services are better suited to specific diets or health conditions. If it's eliminating some or all meat from your diet, there are vegan meal plans that will make it easy. If you're trying to cut carbs or calories from your weekly intake, other services specialize in keto, paleo and low-calorie foods. Others have meal plans specifically for diabetics in case you are carefully managing your blood sugar. 

Type of meal delivery: Meal kits or prepared meals

You'll also want to decide if a meal kit service or prepared meal subscription is best. If you like the idea of cooking, but don't want to do the shopping and prep, a service such as Blue Apron or Sunbasket will take the legwork out of dinner a few nights each week. If you'd rather not cook at all, prepared meal delivery is the obvious choice. They'll send ready-to-eat meals to be stored in the fridge or freezer for whoever needs them.

Cost of meals

The price you're willing to pay is another important consideration. Meal delivery can make life much easier but not if it adds financial stress. Some meal services such as Mosaic Foods have plans that start as low as $6 a serving while others are as pricey as $15 per meal or more. Use our comparison chart to help determine which meal services best fit your budget and go from there. 

Most health experts will tell you that eating a healthy, balanced diet is just about the best thing you can do to improve your health. While strict diets aren't necessarily at the top of the list for doctors and dieticians, consuming more whole foods, protein and vitamin-rich vegetables as well as eating less sodium, unhealthy fats and sugar will drastically improve health outcomes over time. Heart health, bone health, cardiovascular health and even mental health are all tied directly to diet, and choosing a healthy meal service or subscription is one way to kick a healthy new nutritional regimen into gear.