If you’re considering a meal kit service, you probably have questions. How much do they cost? Which services have the quickest or easiest recipes? Maybe you have picky eaters and need plenty of family-friendly options, or a service that can be adjusted to accommodate preferences or the number of people you’re feeding. We consider all of this, and more, when testing meal kits for review.
While meal kit services mostly follow a similar formula — sending pre-portioned ingredients to help you easily execute home-cooked meals — there are differences that make some better suited for those with specific tastes, diets or culinary skill levels. And some are, well, just plain better than others.
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We lay out each meal kit before cooking to ensure all the ingredients are included.
At CNET, a handful of editors — including a self-proclaimed novice cook, a vegetarian and some who are experienced home cooks — personally tested every meal kit service we could get our oven mitts on, from the original that launched it all, Blue Apron, to one that is great for families, HelloFresh or Purple Carrot, a completely vegan meal kit service. All this testing is aimed at one thing: helping you find the best meal kit for your taste and budget. Here’s exactly what we do to suss it all out and a closer look at how meal kit services are evaluated at CNET.
Choosing meal plans and the ordering process
The first thing any meal kit subscriber does is choose a plan, so that’s where we start. Some services offer a variety of meal plans at different prices to accommodate larger groups or individuals who only want a few meal kits per week. Others have super-simple meal plan options with standard pricing.
We’ll always note how easy it is to select meals and change them from week to week.
If a meal kit has overly complicated plans and pricing, we’ll note that in the review. We’ll also download and play around with the meal kit’s app if it exists. The apps are most handy for changing the order for next week’s meals on the fly or pulling up a recipe if you’ve lost the recipe cards.
Pricing
Choosing a meal plan helps illuminate the overall cost of a meal kit. There are budget meal kits with recipes as cheap as $6 per serving and others with premium meals that can cost much more. Later in the process, after cooking (or re-heating if we are testing a prepared meal delivery service) and eating, we’ll determine if the meal kit service lived up to the billing and was worth the price.
We also include any special offers from the service, such as Blue Apron’s 5% discount when you sign up for autoship, and if a subscription is need or not needed to try out the service.
HelloFresh pricing (left) and Blue Apron’s pricing (right) for six servings as of November 2025. These prices include shipping and tax, plus the 5% discount for auto-ship built into the Blue Apron price.
Recipe offerings and selections
Marley Spoon offers a variety of recipes.
This is one of the biggest differentiators and something we always consider carefully. If meal kit menu selections and recipe options are too limited, it can be hard to find meals that you actually want to make. Conversely, if there are too many to choose from, that can be overwhelming. And beyond the sheer number is the quality of the recipes you’re choosing from. Is a wide range of cuisines represented, and do the recipes sound interesting and tempting?
Special diets and plant-based offerings
Most meal kit services make some attempt to accommodate folks with special diets, be it vegetarian, keto, low-carb, paleo, low-calorie or diabetic-friendly. Some have far more options for those diets, so we always consider if a meal kit service is a good fit for someone with dietary restrictions, and if it’s not, we will make a separate recommendation when possible.
Customizing your order and recipes
Certain services like Home Chef and HelloFresh allow you to change the protein, serving size and, in some cases, other components of the recipe, including side dishes or starch. We always note how customizable meal kit services are, which may be important to people with food allergies and families with young kids or picky eaters.
Some meal kit services are more customizable than others.
General healthiness
Speaking of which, the healthiness of any given meal kit service is always a top consideration, so we enlisted CNET’s wellness editor Anna Gragert to help out here. Most services offer a good number of healthy meals with lots of vegetables and lean proteins, but some put a bigger emphasis on it with lots of low-carb meals or plant-based offerings. There is also the quality of ingredients to consider. Meal kit services like Green Chef and Purple Carrot primarily use organic ingredients, while others are less particular about their sourcing.
Add-ons
Some services — HelloFresh to name one — have add-ons including breakfast foods and other groceries aimed at making your life easier. You can often just tack them on to your weekly delivery and save yourself a trip to the store.
Some services offer add-on groceries and pantry goods to make life easier.
After considering the meal plans and menu options, it’s time to place an order. We’ll always place an order for at least one week of meals — between three and five recipes. We make an effort to choose a variety of dishes in a few different cuisines or categories — pasta, chicken, beef dish and a plant-based recipe if it’s offered. We initially started testing meal kits years ago, but made it a priority this year to re-test the services to see what has changed. We’ve included all of that information in our updated reviews, too.
The meal kit arrived. What’s in the box, and how does it look?
Upon receiving meals, there are initial considerations. Did the box of meals show up when it was supposed to? This is important, especially for busy folks with hungry mouths to feed and a schedule to keep.
Once the package is inside and opened, we also consider the tidiness of the items inside. Some services excel at neatly packing and labeling the ingredients, while others are a bit more haphazard. It’s important that ingredients, especially the less common ones, are labeled correctly and clearly so you know what to grab when you need it. We also note the environmental friendliness of the packaging, although most services have become quite adept at this practice by 2025, utilizing less plastic and more recyclable materials.
We always consider quality and freshness.
This is also when we do an initial check on quality and freshness, especially produce, meat and fish. If anything is visibly past its prime or significantly damaged, we’ll make a note of it and relay that finding in the final review. If there are expiration dates on any items, we’ll always check to ensure the food is not beyond or too near those dates.
Food is almost always shipped fresh and not frozen, so it’s imperative that it arrives cold inside the insulated packaging or disposable cooler box. If any shipments of recipes ever arrive warm or at room temperature, they should not be cooked or eaten.
Time to cook the meals
All the ingredients for a healthy miso salmon with roasted veggies are included.
Now it’s time to for the main event: cooking the meals. For each meal kit recipe, we’ll meticulously account for every ingredient listed. In most cases, the service will assume the home chef has some essentials like olive oil, salt and pepper, but everything else should be accounted for and easily identified.
How easy is the recipe to execute
This is particularly important, especially if it’s a meal kit service that bills itself as one for new cooks and busy individuals seeking fuss-free dinners. Before starting, we’ll review the recipe to ensure all the wording is clear. Does this recipe use terms and techniques that the average new chef would know, or is it geared more toward someone with plenty of cooking experience? To dig into this in even further, during our most recent tests we enlisted an amateur cook along with more experienced home chefs to compare their experiences.
If the recipes are more complicated, that’s certainly OK, but we want to be clear about what you’re getting into before dropping money on a subscription. If the cooking instructions include highly technical terms and instructions, we expect them to be clearly outlined so that anyone can at least attempt the recipe. Many services include a small glossary with each recipe to help with those more advanced aspects.
Checking listed recipe time against the actual time
Green Chef offers dijon-walnut organic chicken and potatoes.
Recipes give a ballpark time the recipe should take to make so we’ll time the execution of the recipe to see how close it is.
Let’s eat. How does it look and, most importantly, taste?
This is surely the most subjective part of the evaluation but still an important one. When a recipe is finished you want it to look as close to the glamour shot on the website as possible and taste good, too.
For this part, you’ll have to put a little faith in our well-traveled tastebuds but we’ll always relay anything noteworthy about a dish — good or bad. Was it too salty? Was the sauce bland or bright and well-balanced? Was the piece of meat or fish not very fresh tasting? The success of the dish relies on several components working together and that’s not always the case with meal kit recipes.
I was eating Marley Spoon’s skillet chicken parmesan all week.
One reason to love meal kits is that they introduce you to new recipes, flavors, cuisines and ingredients. We’ll always note when something tastes unique or interesting. Some folks might be drawn to more familiar food and so if their recipes are more classic than inventive, we’ll note that as well.
Portion size
EveryPlate offers chicken sausage flatbread.
This is also when we get a sense of portion size. Is there just barely enough to feed the number of folks the recipe was intended to feed, or are there enough leftovers for lunch tomorrow? Large portions might not be the most important factor, but it’s certainly nice to know, especially if you’re looking for value in your meal kits.
Overall impression
Having gone through every phase of the meal kit process, it’s easier to weigh the experience against the cost, as well as compare to the rest of the category and competition. It also helps us determine who a particular meal kit might be best suited for: new cooks, more experienced home chefs, families or vegetarians, to name a few.
We factor in the entire experience, including the ordering process, website and app usability, delivery logistics, recipe execution, taste and overall value, before we make our final assessment and rating. Each meal kit service we test receives a score from 1 to 10. We hope it helps you find the perfect fit.
