Healthy food subscriptions and delivery boxes – are they really worth forking out for?
Mindful Chef, which delivers the ingredients to cook your own “healthy, low-carb recipes in under 30 minutes,” has reported soaring new customer sign-ups of over 730 per cent. Phwoar.
Its burgeoning popularity suggests that – what with the pandemic pressures of working from home plus extra childcare responsibilities – we want convenience without sacrificing health when it comes to cooking dinner. After all, who among us isn’t sick of washing up?
But isn’t there an extortionate spend when ordering meal kits compared to just buying your own carrots and broccoli? Are healthy meal subscriptions and deliveries really worth it, and as nutritious as they purport to be? They promise to be a meal-prep solution, especially handy for people with niche diets, crossing the headache of a supermarket shop off the to-list.
Those with dietary requirements might feel inclined to pay above the odds if they know the boxes will conveniently comply with their needs and are also nutritionally sound. So – are they simply well-marketed, or worth splashing out on? We put them to the test to find out.
Natural Ketosis
Fat-burning ready-prepared meals with plant-based and meaty options available, available across the UK mainland, sampled by vegan guinea pig and keto fan Tom Ough
The first tedious and inconvenient thing about my diet is that I like to eat vegan. The second tedious and inconvenient thing about my diet is that I like to eat keto. The Venn diagram overlap between those two stipulations is so vanishingly small that it is known by mathematicians as the zone of “Well, what DO you eat?”
To me the combination makes sense. If you don’t want to endorse the way animals are treated in our food system, but you feel (as I do) that your body and mind run better on a diet high in fat and low in carbs, vegan keto is the diet you’re left with.
You’ll need to avoid not only meat, egg, fish and milk, but also bread, starchy vegetables, sugar and legumes. I eat avocado-based salads, spicy golden stews made of turmeric, coconut milk and aubergine, burrito mixes with mushrooms, peppers and Quorn, Thai curries, and a few other staples. Vegan keto suits me well, but – bizarrely – the world has not yet caught up with me.
So I welcome Natural Ketosis’ offering of a vegan keto meal plan. They sent me coconut and seed porridge; high-fat snack bars; packeted ready-made meals of jackfruit curry, jackfruit & butternut squash tagine, mushroom stroganoff and mushroom katsu curry.
All of it was enjoyable. The curries, tagine and stroganoff were rich and flavoursome, while the porridge was surprisingly creamy. The main meals had 8-15g of fat, no more than 2g net carbs, and 3-5g of protein.
The only problem was the quantity: the portions were less than half the size they’d have needed to be for me to be remotely satisfied. I suppose this plan is designed for people seeking to lose weight rather than active young men with lusty appetites, but be warned nevertheless. The four-week plan works out to about a tenner a day, but you might have to buy more food to eat alongside it.
£289 for a 28-day plan; naturalketosis.co.uk
Mindful Chef
Meal box titan Mindful Chef promises to provide all the ingredients you need to prepare healthy, easy dishes. Available nationwide, it caters to gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan, flexitarian, vegetarian and pescatarian diets. Vegetarian Boudicca Fox-Leonard considers whether or not it lives up to the hype
Chickpeas, tin of. Tomatoes, tin of. Sweet potato, on the small side. When I open my first brown paper parcel from Mindful Chef, I can't help but feel underwhelmed. As a vegetarian I'm used to having a cupboard full of pulses. I buy bunches of parsley, not cellophane samples. When it comes to fresh, simple meals, I've surely already got this: a disposable sachet of turmeric when I've got a whole jar of it in the spice drawer seems anti-Mindful...
The proof though is in the pudding/lunch/dinner. For a quick working lunch I make Meal 8 in the weekly recipe magazine provided; spicy peanut and chickpea curry. As I follow the easy recipe there are enough surprising twists –west Indian spices, black rice, sumac – to lift me out of my quotidian. The portions are actually huge. The sweet potato works impressively hard for its size.
Next up, Meal 13; herby falafel shakshuka and turmeric drizzle. I doubt the 30 minute cook time. There's a lot to do and my boyfriend and I have to split tasks, working as a team to comfortably make the finish line. I associate falafels with dry balls of dust, but these are moist and joyful. And that drizzle! So easy to do, but would I ever have done it otherwise? I doubt it.
Mindful Chef meals cost from £8 per portion for a meal box for one. Or from £5.50 per portion if you order for two people, making that £11 meal, which seems rather a lot for a few tins and a couple of vegetables. Bulk buying many of the ingredients would make better sense financially for a family. Yet, if you're trying to learn how to make delicious, fresh and healthy food, whatever your diet, then this is a great starting point. And if you're a jaded, tired veggie like me, the odd delivery might just shake up the store cupboard. Chickpeas included.
From £4 per portion; mindfulchef.com
Balance Box
Chef-prepped ready-made meals designed by nutritionists: Balance Box caters to classic, pescatarian, vegetarian and free-from diets. Madeleine Howell signed up for a three-day pescatarian plan
I don’t want to lose weight: I want to eat a more nourishing diet. The recommended daily calorie intake for a woman is 2,000 calories a day, but my usual intake consists mostly of chocolate. So, given a choice between a lighter Balance Box plan of 1200-1300 calories a day and a “market plan” of 1700-1800 calories a day, I plumped for the latter.
My three day-menu consisted of three meals and two snacks (fruit, homemade nut bars) a day, detailing precise ingredients and a breakdown of calories, carbs, protein, fat, saturated fats, sodium and sugars in each meal. My aim was to find a healthier approach to convenience eating, steering clear of starvation. Dinners included a microwaveable roasted cod with vegetable ratatouille and a spicy bean chilli. A lunch of tuna niçoise with radish, green beans and baby gem benefitted from a scattering of chives and parsley.
Breakfasts ranged from filling blueberry bircher with seeds to boiled eggs with avocado, smoked salmon and rice cakes. They might not have been decadent meals but they were fresh, varied and functional. My energy levels remained on an even keel, and I certainly didn’t go hungry: when I got to a leek and edamame bean risotto, I was almost too full.
When a more hectic pace of life resumes, there’s no doubt this subscription service trumps lunches on the go and Sunday night meal prep in terms of value for money, ease and nutrition. All packaging is recyclable, too. Still, for two or more people, it would make more sense economically to batch cook food instead.
£103.92 for a one-off three day pescatarian plan (£32.99 per day), including three meals per day and snacks, plus £4.95 nationwide delivery; balancebox.com
Grubby
Nutritionally balanced plant-based vegan recipe kits, available nationwide, attempted by would-be vegan Tomé Morrissy-Swan
During a mid-Veganuary slump, I decided to give a recipe box a go, stumbling across Grubby. With impeccable ethical credentials (less plastic; British produce; meals donated to hungry children), I was impressed by the range of vegan meals.
Each is designed for two to three people, and contains little brown paper bags filled with the right amount of each ingredient. I enjoy food shopping, and leftovers, but sometimes having everything planned out for you is a blessing. As a nice touch, each recipe comes with a Spotify playlist of mostly fine songs to enjoy while cooking, though some will have you scrambling for the skip button.
First up to cook was a butternut and lentil green curry, a little thick, but impressive nonetheless. At 718 calories, 30.4g of fat and 80 percent of my daily sodium, it was substantial. Nothing, however, compared with the next evening’s avocado and cashew pesto pasta, with a robust 1075 calories and over half my daily fat. It was good, the nutritional yeast adding necessary umami, and a pleasing saltiness from chopped sundried tomatoes. My third and final dish of broccoli and peanut stir fry appeared the healthiest. At 347 calories per serving, it was low in fat and salt, too – this made it a little bland; nothing a drop of soy sauce couldn’t solve. Overall, I was impressed. The dishes were easy, inventive, good value, (mostly) tasty and (mostly) healthy.
From £5.75 per meal for a three recipe box; getgrubby.co.uk
Kurami
Billed as “inventive, personally tailored meal programmes fusing ancient ingredients with super foods”, Kurami’s nutritionist-approved ready-to-eat meals (available to select London postcodes) are all dairy and gluten-free, suited to coeliacs and the lactose-intolerant. Assistant food editor Pip Sloan gives it a whirl
My first impression of my Kurami meal box, including breakfasts, lunch, dinner, a snack and a drink, was that I certainly wouldn’t go hungry. The meals, each portioned up in individual (recyclable) trays, were of a decent size, all including some form of protein and carb – requiring nothing more than a quick blast in the microwave to heat through. Nutritional information was labelled on each item, in the style of a supermarket-ready product.
For breakfast, a ‘golden smoothie bowl’. There was no description of its contents; instead, a lengthy list of ingredients written in smallprint revealed that it consisted of some form of dairy-free coconut yogurt (which, sadly, closely resembled wallpaper paste), a fruit puree and a sandy seed-and-nut topping.
Lunch, a ‘Kurami rainbow’ burger, was even more puzzling, owing to a pink, green and yellow gluten-free bun, sandwiching an unidentifiable veg-based patty and pickles. There was no information, on the box, in my menu card or online, about what made the bun technicolour. A ‘nut boost yogurt’ (much the same as breakfast) and a huge pot of watery chicken and fennel tagine later, and I am none-the-wiser to what I’ve actually consumed today.
Have I eaten my five-a-day? Have I reached my daily fibre intake? I couldn’t say. What I can say is that I’ve had precisely 1,600 calories for one day, and paid £41.50 for the privilege. For this amount of money for just a day’s food (a weekly subscription pushes the price down to £39.50 per box per day), I would expect a fuller nutritional breakdown of the food, much clearer labelling, and, if I’m honest, better food.
£41.50 for one day (three meals, a snack and a drink); kurami.co.uk
MuscleFood
This healthy food plan delivery service available across the UK promises it can help you attain weight loss and muscle-tone building goals. Jack Rear puts it to the test.
I was once told that when it comes to maintaining statuesque rippling abs and bulging biceps, diet is more important than exercise. But what the hell are these people eating? This week I’ve discovered the secret: they’ve all been getting meal prep boxes from Muscle Food. Having lost five pounds with Joe Wicks recently, I was determined to join their ranks.
My box arrived containing enough food to last a week, including everything I needed for three meals per day plus snacks in between. I’ve scoffed pancakes, porridge and bagels for breakfast; microwavable sausage and chips and chicken tikka for lunch; and tucked into freshly made piri-piri chicken, steak stuffed sweet potato, and various curries for dinner. Plus chocolate and caramel flavour protein bars for a hit of sweetness.
It’s been surprisingly great, despite each meal barely containing more than about 400kcal. The piri piri chicken was a highlight and only took 10 minutes to prepare. It wasn’t all amazing. The lunchtime microwaveable pots were sometimes flavourless. The recipe kits weren't flawless: sometimes ingredients would appear on the recipe card but never end up being used in the instructions.
But overall it made the process of eating healthily easy. Every craving I had found its match within the box, and there was no laborious calorie counting, or strenuous cooking techniques. If eating healthily can be this easy - and such good value - why have I never done it before?
£69 for the 6-day Super Slimmer plan, with a delivery fee of £5.99; musclefood.com
Sold on the idea of healthy meal deliveries, diet plans and subscriptions? Here are a few more to try
LoveYourself
Offers a choice between a calorie-controlled balanced diet, keto diet, vegan diet, vegetarian diet and “performance” diet, with pre-made meals made fresh daily. Available in London and Greater London; £115 for a one-off five day “balanced” plan; loveyourself.co.uk
The Brook
Vegan ready meals, with next day delivery - expect San Francisco-inspired vegan “seafood stew”, infused with nori and sweetcorn; subscribe to build-a-box of eight dishes for £45 (£5.62 a meal); the-brook.co.uk
AllPlants
Healthy frozen vegan meals by chefs and nutritionists. Dishes include spicy szechuan noodles and tofu massaman curry. Delivered nationwide; £40.50 for six meals; allplants.com
Field Doctor
Each Field Doctor frozen meal by Michelin-trained chef Matt Williamson and dietician Sasha Watkins, is packed with nutrients to give you specific health benefits. Mostly adhering to Mediterranean dietary principles, some meals adhere to a FODMAP diet. fielddoctor.co.uk
