Vegan and vegetarian meal delivery services are plentiful these days. It seems as if a new plant-based subscription service launches every time I turn around and so finding the best vegetarian meal delivery service is not as simple as whatever pops up first on Google. To suss out the best-tasting meal subscriptions, you gotta taste test the best, and that is exactly what I have been up to so you can avoid the duds and go straight to the good stuff.
Blue Apron may have kick-started the meal-by-mail revolution, but it also opened the door for many different types of meal kits and prepared meal services. Many offer a sprawling menu of delicious plant-based meals and will send them to you on the regular. These vegetarian meal delivery services are perfect for those completely cutting out meat from the menu, but also for meat-eaters looking to add a few more healthy vegan dishes to the menu rotation or stock up on premade vegetarian food.
Table of Contents
- Purple Carrot
- Mosaic Foods
- Fresh n’ Lean
- HelloFresh
- Daily Harvest
- Sunbasket
- Sakara Life
- Veestro
- Green Chef
While Purple Carrot remains the only fully dedicated vegan meal-kit service — no animal products or animal byproducts used in any of its recipes — most other meal kit and meal-delivery services have integrated plant-based recipes, meals and snack options. Green Chef offers as many as nine vegan or vegetarian meal kit recipes per week, for instance, in addition to its lineup of meals that do have meat. HelloFresh has roughly six plant-based options per week and Sunbasket — my overall favorite meal kit service — offers three or four non-meat meals along with a full market of vegan-friendly grocery items and snacks you can add to your weekly order.
The same goes for prepared meal-delivery services, which require no cooking at all. There are a few strictly vegan meal services like Veestro, Mosaic and Daily Harvest to peruse, but even ones that do have meat, such as Fresh n’ Lean and Factor, offer vegan and vegetarian meal plans with as many as 12 plant-based options a week to keep you well-fed, even when there’s no time to cook.
You may be wondering, with all these players in the game, which is the best meal delivery service for vegans and vegetarians in 2021? The answer varies a bit depending on what you are looking for, and each meal kit or delivery operation takes a slightly different approach. For example, some vegetarian meal-kit companies use plant-based foods like Impossible Burger that imitate meat, while others emphasize whole foods in lunch and dinner recipes. There are also vegetarian meal kits that specialize in organic ingredients and produce, in case that is important to you, while others are not organic but are able to offer more budget-friendly meal plans. Some meal kits are also more complicated to execute, aimed at chefs with cooking experience looking to hone their skills, while others are quick to prepare and help you get a healthy, no-fuss dinner on the table sometimes in as little as 20 minutes.
Having personally tested as many of the plant-based meal kits and prepared meal services as I could get my hands on, I have settled on this list of the absolute best meal delivery for vegans and vegetarians in 2021. We will continue to update this list periodically as new players enter the arena.
Purple Carrot is the first, and to my knowledge, the only 100% plant-based meal kit service and this vegan food service option takes its recipes seriously too. Purple Carrot’s underlying vegan philosophy is not to imitate other foods using plant-based alternatives, but simply to create tasty and nourishing vegan dinners the old-fashioned way, using fresh vegetables, grains, legumes and other whole foods.
You will not find any of the newfangled lab-made alternative meats like Beyond Beef or Impossible Burger in Purple Carrot’s recipes but you will find lots of lentils, mushrooms, ancient grains and nutritious produce. I tested a week’s worth of Purple Carrot meal kits — which you can read about here — and really enjoyed everything I made via this vegan diet mealtime helper.
Out of all the vegan meal kits I’ve tried, Purple Carrot’s provided me with the best knowledge of and practice for cooking vegan cuisine and its ingredient mainstays like lentils and grains. Purple Carrot also introduced me to some interesting sauces and condiments great for a vegan diet like cashew cream and other nut-based “dairy” products.
Vegan meal kit options per week: 8
Sample menu: Lemon-braised chickpeas with rosemary and cashew cheese; green curry lentils with brown rice and vegetables; broccoli and cheddar soup with miso garlic croutons.
I tried about nine of Mosaic’s plant-based prepared meal offerings over the course of a few weeks and there was not a true miss in the bunch. Mosaic uses global flavors and creative meat substitutes such as jackfruit, tofu and vegan sausages to create satisfying meals (even for this omnivore) that are all tasty and fresh.
While everything I had from Mosaic was at least good, some standouts included the bean and jackfruit chili, tomato olive and feta ragout and tangy Thai noodles.
Mosaic plant-based meals are also simple to order from with a clear, concise website and no overly complicated plans. You simply choose the meals you want with a minimum order of $70 (about eight meals) and then decide how often you want them delivered — weekly, biweekly or monthly. You can change the meals, pause or cancel your subscription at any time.
Vegetarian meal kit options per week: 40
Sample menu: Mushroom and truffle risotto with fava beans; yellow dal curry with lentils, squash and brown rice; harissa jackfruit bowl with quinoa, red peppers and harissa tahini.
If it is a fully prepared meal delivery you are looking for, Fresh n’ Lean is my top pick for 2021. Every meal I tried from the service was good, and many of them were great, including the plant-based offerings. With Fresh n’ Lean you don’t have to go fully plant-based unless you want to but the nonmeat meal kits were just as good as any other, with fresh ingredients, all cooked to perfection with no mushy vegetables (a major problem I’ve encountered with prepared meals).
Fresh n’ Lean has as many as 12 vegan meals to choose from each week with plant-based meal options like cauliflower and squash with tofu, mushroom rice with lentils and teriyaki bowls with Beyond Beef crumbles. There are even some breakfast meals to tack on to your order, including pineapple coconut chia and banana oatmeal. There is even a low-carb vegan meal plan if you are going keto and plant-based in 2021. You can read my full Fresh n’ Lean review here.
Vegan meals per week: 12
Sample menu: Shawarma tofu with turmeric cauliflower rice; spinach pesto with garbanzo beans; red lentil pasta with roasted red pepper sauce.
Pound for pound, HelloFresh has the most vegetarian meals that will appeal to larger groups — in my opinion. Because HelloFresh is not confined by vegan rules, you will find plenty of plant-based “cheat meals” like cheesy bean enchiladas, hot honey brussels sprouts and ricotta flatbread and pasta dishes galore.
HelloFresh also has a ton of very crave-worthy meal kits that are not vegetarian, so if you still want the occasional steak with peppercorn sauce or Thai coconut chicken curry, this is a great choice.
I tried out HelloFresh myself and found it to be one of the most affordable, flexible and consistent meal kit services on the market. HelloFresh’s vegetarian meal kits were also some of the easiest to prepare, with many taking less than 25 minutes from start to finish.
Vegetarian meal kit options per week: 6
Sample menu: Apricot, almond and chickpea tagine; cheesy portobello mushroom cups over spaghetti.
Daily Harvest offers an enormous menu of frozen and ready-to-blend vegan smoothies, premade soups and hearty grain bowls to keep stocked in the freezer. You can order a one-time box to try them or keep these healthy, vegan meals coming monthly with a subscription.
Some of the bowls and soups could pass as dinner, but I like this vegetarian meal delivery service best for a quick vegan lunch or breakfast. Depending on the specific meal, you drop it into either a saucepan or skillet to heat and eat. Alternatively, add nut milk and blend it up with any of Daily Harvest’s protein-packed smoothies and lattes.
This is a completely plant-based meal delivery service and is great if you want to simplify your week and keep healthy vegetarian meals on hand. Daily Harvest uses lots of ancient grains, oats, nut milks and trendy superfoods like chia, avocado and kabocha squash in its recipe selection, which are satisfying and well-balanced in flavor. The brand recently expanded offerings to include vegan flatbreads (which I was not crazy about) as well as meat-free snacks and desserts such as low-calorie ice cream and protein bites.
Vegan meals per week: 25 smoothies, 17 harvest bowls, 7 flatbreads, 11 soups, 6 oat bowls and 3 chia bows.
Sample menu: Sweet potato and wild rice hash; ginger, avocado and banana smoothie; lentil and tomato bolognese.
Sunbasket is my pick if you are looking for vegan and vegetarian meal kits but not all vegan and vegetarian meal kits. Sunbasket has about three or four plant-based options per week, which is significantly fewer than Purple Carrot, Green Chef or HelloFresh. That said, Sunbasket’s meal kits, vegetarian included, are of a higher quality than any others I tried.
Sunbasket also has a great market of vegetarian grocery add-ons like fresh fish, cheese, prepared foods, snacks, bread and breakfast foods so you can essentially tack on an entire shopping list to your meal kit delivery if you choose.
Vegan meal kit options per week: 3-4
Sample menu: Spicy Sichuan mapo tofu with kale and jasmine rice; triple-mushroom quinoa with watercress, scallions and peas.
This organic plant-based meal delivery and vegan cleanse program is all fresh food that arrives just after having been prepared and is meant to be eaten as soon as possible. Sakara also happens to be a favorite meal delivery of some A-List celebs and more Victoria’s Secret models than can fit on one runway. I had tried it and would describe Sakara Life as high-end spa food that looks great on camera and it tastes good too. Note, this is the only meal delivery program in which freezing the food is not really a good option since you’re getting fresh salads, grain bowls and even breakfast bread that won’t handle it well
I really liked the variety of healthy, organic salads, noodle bowls, curries, breakfast noshes and snacks. You can order as many as three meals per day, five days a week — but beware, it gets expensive. Subscribing to three meals is about $70 per day, but you can order just lunch and dinner for $54 per day (shipping is included).
Expensive as it may be, this is definitely the freshest food of any meal delivery options on this list (meal kits excluded) and with the hefty price tag, it might be better suited for that pre- or post-vacation cleanse rather than an ongoing diet plan.
Vegan meals per week: 5 breakfasts, 5 lunches and 5 dinners.
Just to be clear, Veestro is a fully prepared vegan meal delivery service and not meal kits, so all you’ve got to do is heat and eat. I tried it and found the 100% plant-based food to be consistently fresh and tasty, and Veestro has a massive menu of ready-to-eat, meat-free meals to choose from each week.
Veestro’s vegan meals arrive frozen in shipments of 10, 20 or 30, so you can pop them into the fridge to defrost or into the freezer to keep for the days and weeks ahead. Having a few Veestro meals on hand is a good way to hold yourself to any plant-based nutrition goals you may have set in 2021 since you are far more likely to eat healthy vegan food you have on hand than go out of your way to track it down in the throes of hunger.
Veestro makes use of some alternative meat substitutes so you will see many meals that try to make you forget you are eating vegan food at all. Some meals are more successful than others are, but out of the 10 or so that I tried, most were solid. You also have a whopping 44 dinners to pick from each week and eight breakfast options to build your shipment from.
Vegan options per week: 44 dinners and eight breakfasts
Sample menu: BBQ chick’n pizza; carrot osso bucco; lentil meatloaf.
Green Chef has billed itself as one of the healthiest meal kit companies with a majority of organic produce, and features nine vegetarian meal kits per week, making it a solid choice if you are looking to eat less meat or go meatless in 2021.
I tried Green Chef for a week and you can read my full Green Chef review here. While it was not my favorite meal kit experience, the results were solid and it is certainly one of the healthiest meal kit options whether you are eating vegetarian or not. Green Chef actually offers more vegetarian meal kits per week than Purple Carrot, making it a clear contender for the best vegetarian meal kit service in 2021, especially if you want variety and eating organic is important to you. Green Chef’s veggie meals are also very hearty, with lots of chickpeas, cauliflower and lentils.
Vegetarian options per week: 9
Sample menu: Creamy mushroom penne with peas, sun-dried tomatoes and cashew cheese crostini; butternut squash chili; maple cauliflower power bowls.
Every vegetarian meal delivery service can help shave time off when it comes to getting a fresh, home-cooked meal on the table, but for variety, customization options, taste, and creativity.
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