Best Cheap Meal Delivery Services, Tested and Reviewed – CNET
With a slew of affordable meal delivery services, you can satisfy both your appetite and your budget. At around $5 or $6 a serving, EveryPlate remains the cheapest meal kit service you’ll find. As a bonus, we loved just about every recipe we tried during several rounds of testing.
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Budget-friendly certainly doesn’t have to mean bad — and that includes cheap meal kits and meal delivery services. If you’re looking to eliminate a few weekly tasks — grocery shopping, meal planning, cooking — without going broke and have stores of tasty, heathy meals delivered each week, we tested all the top affordable services to find the very best cheap meal subscriptions for 2023.
Read more: Are Meal Kits More Expensive Than Buying the Groceries? I Did the Math
Best cheap prepared meal delivery
It’s no secret that the best meal kit or prepared meal services reduce your workload in the kitchen and your time spent dealing with the drudgery of grocery shopping. Prepared meal delivery services offer oven-ready and microwave meals, and require no cooking at all, delivering the ultimate hack for your busy week. Luckily, all this convenience doesn’t have to break the bank and some of the best meal delivery services are also the most affordable. For vegans and vegetarians, Mosaic Foods has family meals as cheap as $6 a serving and $10 for single-serve meals, and Daily Harvest has excellent smoothies, soups, bowls and flatbreads, also mostly under $10. And it doesn’t have to be boring — most of these cheap meal delivery services offer an ever-changing weekly menu of delicious meals for you to choose from.
Mosaic Foods is one of the best and cheapest meal delivery services we’ve tried.
Best cheap meal kits
Meal kits have seen a serious uptick in customers during the pandemic. Subscriptions for meal kits from companies such Green Chef and Sunbasket are great but can be on the pricey side, with recipes costing as much as $15 per serving. Dinnerly and EveryPlate, both of which clock in at around $6 a serving, are the most budget-friendly outfits.
There are also some midrange options to consider such as Blue Apron, HelloFresh and Home Chef. These may cost $9 or $10 bucks per serving but allow more customization and have more recipes to choose from. Most of these meal delivery services also offer vegetarian options or customization for those who don’t eat meat. There are meal kits that cater to a specialized diet, such as keto, paleo, low-calorie or gluten-free.
No matter your budget, tastes or schedule, there are affordable and tasty meal delivery services to make cooking for you or the family easier. We tested all the cheapest meal kits and prepared meal services on this list to help you decide which one is best.
Best cheap meal delivery services for 2023
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Sample Menu: Chicken pot pie; Hosin meatloaf with mashed potatoes; Sweet potato quesadilla
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Pricing Starts at $5/servingType Meal kitsRecipes per week 25+Good for Healthy, family-friendly, comfort food, picky eaters, quick and easy
The bottom line: EveryPlate’s meal kits were all solid and easy to make. This is also the cheapest meal kit, with plans as low as $5 a serving.
Pricing Starting at $5/servingType Meal kitRegional Availability Continental United StatesNumber of Meal Options per Week 45+Menu Options/ Diet Types Vegetarian
The bottom line: Dinnerly has an enormous selection of easy recipes, more than 60 in a given week, and plans starting at under $6 a serving. This is the perfect service for families with picky eaters trying to eat well on a budget.
Blue Apron is one of the original meal kit services and it’s also one of the best. In fact, Blue Apron topped our list of best meal delivery services for 2023 with a wide range of excellent recipes, all for an affordable price. It’s true, you can order bistro steaks and roasted trout dinners with Blue Apron’s standard plan, where many services charge extra for those premium proteins. In addition to solid meal kits, Blue Apron is the most eco-friendly service of the major players, according to a recent study.
Pricing Starts at $9/servingType Meal kitsRecipes per week 50+Number of Meal Options per Week 30+Good for Vegan, vegetarian, keto, gluten-free, low-calorie, Whole30, families, picky eaters
The bottom line: It doesn’t get much easier than HelloFresh. This service has tons of cheap meal kit options, more than 50 per week, and allows you to add proteins or extra servings to keep the whole crew fed and happy.
