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Vegan Meal Kits vs. Ready-Made Meals: Which Should You Choose?
Purple Carrot is one of the few meal boxes that are completely plant-based.
The first choice you’ll have to make is between meal kits and meal delivery. Vegan meal kits still save time and effort compared to starting a recipe from scratch, but they do require some cooking. If you’re looking to hone your plant-based cooking skills or learn new vegan or vegetarian recipes, a meal kit service is the way to go.
Prepared meals are the other option, and it doesn’t get any easier than this. These services send freshly cooked individual meals packed in coolers so you can eat them or freeze them for later. There’s usually no cooking involved, so you get all the benefits of a plant-based diet without any of the effort.
Types of meals: vegan vs. vegetarian
HelloFresh has a mix of vegan and vegetarian meals.
Purple Carrot, Daily Harvest, and Veestro are a few of the services that offer only vegan food (no animal products at all), while HelloFresh and Mosaic Food offer both vegan and vegetarian meals each week. If you’re going fully plant-based, a vegan specialty service will give you more choices and won’t require you to wade through the vegetarian meals to make your selections.
Go completely meatless or give yourself the option for meat-based meals
Mosaic Foods is the best plant-based meal service for people who don’t want to cook.
Some meal delivery services, like Purple Carrot and Mosaic Foods, specialize in plant-based foods only. Most other services have vegan options mixed in with their weekly menus of meat-based recipes. Decide if you want to go all-out plant-based or give yourself the occasional chicken or salmon option.
Costs and prices
Most vegan meal delivery services range from around $9 to $13 per serving. If you want the most bang for your buck, opting for a budget-friendly meal kit like EveryPlate or Blue Apron and selecting plant-based recipes is your best bet. Mosaic Foods also has family-sized meals that cost just $6 per serving, making it the most affordable vegan meal subscription service we’ve tried.
Number of meals and portions
A range of plant-based ready meals from Mosaic’d.
Most vegetarian and vegan meal services have a minimum number of meals you need to order per week, but some are higher than others. For meal kits, you only want to order the number of servings you know you’ll cook and eat in a week, since most of the ingredients can’t be frozen. Prepared meals offer more flexibility, since you can usually freeze them and thaw and eat them later.
