Tech
Lord, I’ve Eaten So Many Meal Kits. These Are the Best Ones
Frequently Asked Questions
Are Meal Prep Kits Worth It?
If you’re talking raw materials by the pound—meat, zucchini, rice, noodles—meal kits will of course cost more than buying food at grocery stores. It’s a service, after all, with added value above simple ingredient cost. Unless you’ve got quite expensive taste, you’ll easily be able to make meals at home for less than the $7 to $14 a serving that a meal kit will cost. But this said, this doesn’t necessarily mean that meal kits are expensive for what they offer. I conducted an experiment, trying to re-create four different meal-kit meals by going to my local grocery store—buying every ingredient provided by the meal kit. Turns out, if you don’t have the right sauces and spices at home already, it’s very difficult to recreate these meals at grocery stores for less than they cost from a meal kit, in part because you’ll most likely have to buy full containers of sauces and spice instead of pre-portioned ingredients,
So, is HelloFresh worth it compared to a grocery store? Caveats are in order: For staple ingredients and spices you’ll use on multiple recipes, the grocery store is of course cheaper. Once you buy a container of paprika for an individual recipe, it’ll also be there for future recipes, whereas meal-kit spices are portioned for the meal. So the real answer is that meal kits can be a quite economical way of trying out a new recipe, or a new style of cooking, without larding up your fridge with condiments you won’t use again. For ingredients you’d use less commonly, a meal kit can reduce waste and spoilage, and maybe even compete on price for an individual meal.
If your comparison point is takeout, well, the best meal delivery services on this list will almost certainly be cheaper and more nutritious. I’ve found that a meal kit in the fridge tends to be a good motivator to cook a nutritive meal—and thus can save me both the money and the cholesterol.
To really save on cost, some people like to keep testing out the trial offers and discounts. Much like mattress-in-a-box companies, meal-kit companies usually have a running promotion. Usually this takes the form of a trial discount price that’ll drop your cost by half or more on the first box, in hopes you’ll like the service enough to keep it on at full price.
For me, a meal kit a few times a week ends up balancing out well: It’s a motivating factor to eat better, and it means that when I do go to the grocery store, I can do so less mindlessly and more purposefully, since I’ve always got a few meals’ worth of ingredients in the fridge. It’s also had the side effect of broadening my culinary toolkit, keeping me from getting stuck in the same ruts.
That said, you know: It’s a set grocery expense and not necessarily a small one. I do get tired of tossing or recycling cold packs and boxes. And depending on time of year, I often prefer shopping in person for what’s seasonal and local, when produce is at its peak—an experience you don’t get from a meal kit, or from grocery delivery for that matter. If you’re cooking for a bigger household, meal kits can also lose their utility quite quickly. A convenient option for two can become a much larger expense for a family of four or six.
What If I Take a Trip Out of Town?
Pretty much every meal kit I’ve tested has an option to pause subscriptions—and there’s no particular limit to how often you can do this. The main thing is to be sure that you’ve canceled with enough lead time. Some services let you cancel or pause delivery as late as the Friday before a Monday delivery. HelloFresh requires five days’ notice. Some, like Hungryroot, may lock in next week’s order as early as the previous Monday, depending on where you live. Read your terms of service, and act accordingly.
How to Optimize Meal Kits
Don’t order too many meals per week: You know the old John Lennon line: Life is what happens when you’re busy out eating a random burrito, then thinking guiltily about the meal kit at home in your fridge. Aspirations are great, but don’t order more meals than you’re likely to make, or you’ll be sad. Err on the side of caution. Order just enough meals per week that making yourself a recipe from your HelloFresh or Home Chef box is still a delight and a convenience and an overall boon to your life—not an obligation. For me, a somewhat improvisational and impulsive person, three meals a week is the sweet spot. The prospect of a few easy meals usually saves me from an impulse weeknight DoorDash.”
Make room in your fridge: Meal kits take the place of a lot of grocery shopping. But they’re also a lot of food, and a lot to keep organized. What I like to do is clear a tall enough space in my fridge to put the whole meal kit box in the fridge, after pulling out the cold packs: This way, I’m not left worrying about which groceries belong to the meal kit, and I won’t lose any ingredients. I can just pull the whole box out when I want to make a meal. That said, some plans like Home Chef, HelloFresh, and Green Chef are very good at organizing each meal into its own separate bag. An added bonus from these more organized plans is that you’ll be able to use less space in your fridge. Over time, this will matter.
Check the recipe cards to make sure you have everything you need to make a recipe: Most meal kits expect that you’ll have certain staple ingredients in your home, usually including oil and butter. Recipes also have requirements for cookware. Check this before you start a recipe. Nothing worse than realizing you need an absentee stick of butter on step 5, with carrots already browning in the toaster oven.
Remember, you owe nothing to the recipe: Meal kit services hire lovely recipe developers, of course. And on the best meal kits, these chefs have spent a lot of time optimizing each recipe. But you owe them nothing—nothing! Add spices, change steps, season food when you want to season it. Meal kits can teach you a lot about how to make a good meal, and shake you out of tired culinary routines. But it’s your meal. Make it how you like. Have fun.
How Do We Test Meal Kits?
Chances are, wherever you are, whatever week it is, I’m testing a meal kit right now. I constantly cycle among various meal kits, testing and retesting each of my top picks at least once a year—and often multiple times per year.
I order at least four meals from each, and prepare meals according to instructions and see how well it goes. I check my own prep times against the advertised prep times (rarely an exercise in honesty!), and take note of any inconsistencies, vagueness, or frustration in the recipe card instructions. If you needlessly recommend a nonstick pan, I like you less, especially if you tell me I should heat said pan before adding food—or you later make mention of browned fond in the recipe. Nonstick isn’t cast iron or carbon, there’s no fond.
I check for the quality and freshness of the produce, and do the same for the meat. Where possible, I also look into where the meat was sourced, and check on the reputation, safety, and standards of the meat suppliers. If a meal kit swears it’s gluten-free, I check on this—calling certifying organizations where relevant.
I usually try to order as varied a menu a possible, checking in on gluten-free meals, a seafood item, a vegetarian item, and white and dark meat item—as well as meals that draw (or attempt to draw) from onspirations all over the globe. Sometimes, I test the same meal kit multiple times for different dietary needs, and our vegan tester, Molly Higgins, often tests the same meal kit I do but with a different focus.
More Meal Kits We Liked
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Sunbasket ($12 to $14 per serving): Sunbasket is a plan that focuses heavily on fresh, organic ingredients, and offers a whole lot of variety and good cooking techniques, including deglazing and attentiveness to saucing. And like Hungryroot, it also offers breakfasts and snacks to supplement meal options with little extras like coconut yogurt and sous-vide egg bites. The meal kit also lets you filter out allergen-containing items. My colleague Louryn Strampe loved the flexibility and add-ons (and even some crickets!) On my most recent test, I enjoyed in particular an excellent Greek chicken and orzo salad dish—and wonder of wonders, the advertised prep time was actually the actual prep time (about 30 minutes). The focus on organic ingredients does make Sunbasket one of the more expensive meal kit options.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage; Getty Images
Dinnerly ($8 to $9 per serving): Marley Spoon’s lower-cost meal kit, Dinnerly was long WIRED’s budget pick. Frankly, it’s still a good affordable pick. It’s also a stolidly meat-and-potatoes pick, and often straightforwardly Midwestern in its recipes. The proteins are generous and of excellent quality, and the produce is fresh. The meals are balanced. But the recipe development and instructions weren’t quite up to Marley Spoon standards on my most recent test of the kit, though I did love the middle-American trashiness and hold-my-beer inventiveness of a “Reuben meatloaf” stuffed with sauerkraut and caraway seeds. This year I ended up preferring the meals I tried from EveryPlate, which has the further merit of being a buck cheaper a meal.
Photograph: Molly Higgins
Thistle ($13 to $16 per serving): A prior top pick for solo diners, Thistle is mostly a plant-based meal kit—but there’s a $3 option to add sustainable meats to any otherwise vegan meal. It’s also so local and seasonal that the West and East coasts have different menus, and the whole middle of the country except Chicago gets none. (You can check your zip code here to see if you can get delivery.) WIRED reviewer Adrienne So has used Thistle as a means to get herself to eat more vegetables, and thus avoid a life of rickets and/or scurvy. But especially, it’s friendly to the solo diner, with individually prepared meals with low to no prep. Portions are generous enough to split among meals, and in a nice turn for those who hate having to dispose of boxes, Thistle’s drivers will pick up the cooler bag that housed last week’s meal and replace it with a new one full of food. Vegan tester Molly Higgins‘ favorite meals from Thistle were a whirlwind of textures, including a Mexican-inspired corn and poblano chile salad with adobo pinto beans and a chilled lemongrass-accented rice noodle bowl that mixed spice, tang, crisply fresh veggies, and deep umami from mushrooms and seaweed. She still dreams about it sometimes.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Tovala ($13 a serving): It’s not every day you get to try something that feels so new. Tovala offers perhaps the most ambitious solution to ready-to-heat and prepared meal delivery I’ve seen: The meal kits come with an oven! In contrast to the sogginess of many prepared meals, Tovala’s recipes come in little foil pans with recipes custom-designed for a little steam oven. The results are often delicious, especially a recent sweet chili-glazed salmon with pickled veg and noodles, and the QR code scanning function makes each recipe seamless to cook. Stick with the meal plan for six weeks, and in the bargain you get a quite affordable and powerful little convection oven, toaster, and steamer. Tovala is best as a solution for the solo diner: Meals aren’t big enough for couples, and servings are one at a time.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Gobble ($12 to $17 a serving): Gobble was our prior top pick for fast-cooked meals, in part because its speed-demon meals also offered interesting and worldly flavors. Indeed, our most recent test included Caribbean rondon, Indonesian peanut curry, and steak vierge. But while the flavors have stayed interesting, the focus on fast cooking appears to have waned since my colleague Louryn Strampe tested Gobble—and cook time estimates aren’t printed on the recipe cards. I’m still in the process of re-testing this kit, but for now Hungryroot has taken the fast-cooking crown. For small households, Gobble is also among the most expensive kits. Ordering fewer than 8 meals a week costs $15+ per serving.
Nurture Life ($8 to $10 per serving): Nurture Life is like a restaurant kids’ menu, in ready-to-eat meal kit form. We loved the idea behind this fresh-made, never-frozen delivery meal plan when we tested it a few years back: a bunch of toddler- and slightly bigger kid-friendly meals, from mac and cheese to spaghetti and meatballs to myriad variations on the chicken nugget. The meals are priced about the same as kid menu items, and each contains vegetables alongside the greatest hits.
Veestro ($13+ per serving): WIRED reviewer Louryn Strampe enjoyed Veestro as a ready-to-eat vegan option, with premade meals delivered fresh, but with freezable options so you can have extra meals on hand in a pinch. The service offers a number of filters for other dietary requirements, and satisfying taste and texture—not always a guarantee on ready-to-eat meals.
Splendid Spoon ($9 to $13 per serving): Splendid Spoon is a nutrition delivery kit that offers a plethora of plant-based smoothies, soups, bowls, noodles, and shots. Everything here is natural, plant-based, and free of gluten or GMOs, including spaghetti and plant-based “meatballs.” WIRED reviewer Louryn Strampe has a big yen for the smoothies in particular ($10 apiece), but wasn’t quite prepared for the intensity of a lemon juice shot that comes as part of a five-pack of dense 3-ounce superfoods.
Daily Harvest (prices vary): Daily Harvest is another ready-to-eat meal delivery service specializing in dietary restrictions plant-based, gluten- and dairy-free. Smoothies feature, as do harvest bowls, pastas, and grains. Calories are low. Ingredients are often inventive. The meal’s a lifesaver for the solo vegan eater without time to prep a meal, and WIRED vegan reviewer Molly Higgins appreciated that the meals mostly relied on the natural flavors of the vegetables themselves, accented with flavors like curry and lemongrass. As with a lot of frozen meals, however, texture wasn’t a strong suit.
Factor ($12 to $15 a serving): Factor is a delivery meal plan run by HelloFresh with ready-to-eat meals that look a lot like TV dinners. But there’s a twist: They’ve never been frozen. They were made fresh in a commissary kitchen, and shipped out with cold packs. It’s kinda like restaurant leftovers. This means that proteins in particular often maintain their texture quite well, including a chimichurri filet mignon I couldn’t believe I microwaved. Some meals, especially carb-avoidant or keto meals, are oddly mushy. But meals centered on proteins and whole starches like potatoes or rice tended to fare quite well. In fact, a recent test of Factor’s high protein plan was my favorite experience with the meal kit, and included wild rice and excellent pork loin. I do wish they’d shed their reliance on the microwave, however: When I went off-script and used a toaster oven or the Ninja Crispi air fryer, I had much better results than with the nuker. Like many ready-to-eat meals, it’s a bit more expensive than the kits you cook yourself.
Meal Kits We Didn’t Like
Sakara Life ($28+ per serving), Sakara Life offers plant-based weekly menus in fresh, prepared portions, with greens, flavorful sauces, all-organic ingredients, and textural add-ons like seeds or berries. But it’s among the most expensive meal plans we’ve tested, and neither WIRED reviewer who tried it has really cottoned to the thing. Tester Louryn Strampe questioned the science on health claims for detoxes and cleanses, while calling Sakara “egregiously expensive” and full of “bitter veggies and tart fruits.” Vegan tester Molly Higgins, meanwhile, said Sakara Life’s tinctures and metabolism supplements didn’t agree with her system, and that the mostly raw-food plan made her long for “human food.”
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage; Getty Images
Diet-to-Go ($10 to $13 per serving, plus shipping): Diet-to-Go predates the modern meal kit. Founded more than 30 years ago in Virginia, it’s a diet plan much in the tradition of Jenny Craig, offering low-calorie microwaveable meals meant to act as total meal replacement. Keto and diabetes-friendly options exist, though the most popular “Balance” plan is geared toward weight loss, with calories limited to 1,600 a day for men and a mere 1,200 for women. Anyway, as is often true with microwaved meals that may or may not arrive frozen (it depends on the season, and where you are), proteins and starches fared better than veggies, which tended to be limp and soggy. Meals were healthy, but not always flavorful, and there were a few real misses.
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After a long time of resisting significant price drops, the Asus Zenbook S 16 has finally dropped down to $1,000, which is $500 off its retail price.
It’s normal for laptops to dip in price toward the end of their lifespan, close to when an update comes out. But the Asus Zenbook S 16 has held on. To be fair, it’s an extremely high-end Windows laptop, one of the prettiest to come out last year. It’s sleek, portable, and has a striking design. It even gets fantastic battery life, on par with a MacBook. Speaking of MacBooks, this Zenbook is the laptop I saw tech journalists traveling with more than anything else. Given how much tech they review, that’s quite an endorsement.
But the S 16 has always been hard for me to recommend when the cheapest model available was $1,500. I was always on the lookout for a more significant price cut, but it never dropped more than a couple hundred bucks. And even though it always came with 24 GB of RAM and a terabyte of storage, the price was a hard pill to swallow. Well, the day has finally come. It’s now down to $1,000 over at Best Buy as part of the store’s Presidents’ Day sale. That’s an incredible price for this much laptop.
The previously mentioned memory and storage still apply here, along with the 2880 x 1800 OLED display with a 120-Hz refresh rate. This laptop basically has every high-end feature you could imagine, but one of my favorite aspects is the ports. Despite the thin profile, the S 16 keeps all the legacy ports you might want, including HDMI, USB-A, and even a full-size SD card slot.
There is also a smaller, 14-inch model, but its discount is not as strong as the 16-inch model. It comes in at $1,300 right now, which is still a solid price for this configuration.
I should say that Asus has an update in the works for 2026 with the latest Intel chips, but it’s only coming to the 14-inch model. I won’t lie: Based on my testing, these CPUs will make a significant difference in performance—especially on the graphics front. But I have a feeling Asus will be selling this device for an even higher price for much longer, especially with the recent development around memory shortage.
While the Zenbook S 16 is certainly the best deal at Best Buy for its Presidents’ Day sale, I would also recommend the Asus Zephyrus G14, which is also $500 off. This configuration comes with a powerful RTX 5070 Ti graphics card and is one of our favorite gaming laptops.
Tech
‘Uncanny Valley’: ICE’s Secret Expansion Plans, Palantir Workers’ Ethical Concerns, and AI Assistants
Brian Barrett: They’ve got 80 billion or so to spend 75 billion of that I think they have to spend in the next four years. So yeah, they’re going to keep expanding. And when you think of how much of an impact 3000 agents officers had in Minneapolis alone, that’s like an eighth of the, they can repeat some version of that in a lot of different spots.
Leah Feiger: And I’ve been fielding, honestly, shout out to the many local reporters around the country who’ve been contacting me in the last day or so, just to ask questions about the locations that we named that are near them or in their states or cities. And the thing to me that keeps coming up is that in addition to new buildings, they’re getting put into preexisting government buildings, preexisting leases, or that that appears to be the plan. And then we’ve also found that a bunch of these ICE offices are being located near plans for giant immigration detention warehouses, and we’re looking at offices being set up, say 20 minutes, an hour and 20 minutes away for these. Yeah. So we’re looking at different, the triangulation of this around you have to have your lawyers, your agents, have a place to get their orders and put their computers and do in some ways very mundane things that are required of an operation like this one.
Brian Barrett: Well, Leah, that’s a good point. I think when people hear ICE offices or when I do just instinctively, I think of ICE as guys with guns and masks and all that, but that’s not exactly what we’re saying here. Do you mind talking through what these offices seem to be queued up to be used for and by whom? Because ICE is not just the masked guys with bad tattoos.
Leah Feiger: Yes, absolutely. So what we reported in this story as well was some of the specific parts of ICE that actually reached out to GSA and asked them to expedite the process of getting new leases, et cetera, included in that, for example, where representatives from Ola, Ola is ICE’s office of the principal legal advisor. So that’s the lawyers, those are the ICE lawyers that are working with the courts and arguing back or deportation orders saying yes, no, et cetera, signing the documents, putting everything in front of judges. This is a really important part of this entire operation that we’re not talking about a ton. There’s a lot of focus on the DOJ. There’s a lot of focus. There was an excellent article this week in Politico talking about all of these federal judges that are really, really upset that DHS and ICE are ignoring their requests for immigrants to not be detained anymore.
The missing level of that is the lawyers that are part of this that are representing ICE to the US government here, and that’s ola. So they’ve reached out to GSA extensively as we report to get these leasing locations, specifically with the OLA legal request. I just want to get across how big this is. How massive is this ICE repeatedly outlined its expansion to cities around the us And this one piece of memorandum that we got from Ola stated that ICE will be expanding its legal operations into Birmingham, Alabama, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Jacksonville, and Tampa, Des Moines, Iowa, Boise, Idaho, Louisville, Kentucky, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, grand Rapids, Michigan, St. Louis, Missouri, rally, North Carolina, long Island, New York, Columbus, Ohio, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina, Nashville, Tennessee, Richmond, Virginia, Spokane, Washington and Cord Delaine, Idaho and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We have other locations as well throughout the rest of the article, but those are the requests from OLA.
Waymo needs some help, according to an email message the self-driving developer sent to residents of Washington, DC, on Thursday.
For more than a year, Waymo has been pushing city officials to pass new regulations allowing its robotaxis to operate in the district. So far, self-driving cars can test in the city with humans behind the wheel, but cannot operate in driver-free mode. The Alphabet subsidiary—and its lobbyists—have asked local lawmakers, including Mayor Muriel Bower and members of the city council, to create new rules allowing the tech to go truly driverless on its public roads. The company has previously said it will begin offering driverless rides in DC this year.
But Waymo’s efforts to sway officials have stalled, so the company is now asking residents to apply some pressure. “We are nearly ready to provide public Waymo rides to everyone in DC,” says an email sent to those who have signed up for Waymo’s DC service. “However, despite significant support, District leadership has not yet provided the necessary approvals for us to launch.”
The email directs recipients to contact DC officials via a form letter that says, in part: “Over the past year, I have observed Waymo vehicles operating throughout our local areas, and I am thrilled about the potential advantages this service could provide, including enhanced accessibility and a decline in traffic-related incidents.” The communication urges DC residents to edit the letter to “use your own words,” because personalized messages “have a higher impact.” Only DC residents or those with DC addresses can participate, Waymo says.
In a written statement, Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher says, “We’ll be ready to serve Washingtonians this year, and urge the Mayor, the District Department of Transportation, and the City Council to act.” The company says that 1,500 people contacted district leaders through its email in the first 90 minutes after it was sent.
Generally, self-driving vehicle developers have only launched service in places where regulations clearly outline how the tech might hit the roads. Other US cities with Waymo service, including ones in California, Florida, and Texas, already had those rules in place before the company entered their markets. But as Waymo’s ambitions have grown larger, it has begun to target large blue-state cities where autonomous vehicle tech doesn’t yet have a “driver’s license.” Earlier this month, the company said it would begin testing in Boston, where city lawmakers pushed last year for an ordinance that would ban self-driving taxis from operating without a human behind the wheel. Waymo has said that it needs Massachusetts lawmakers to “legalize fully autonomous vehicles” before it can launch service in Boston.
Eventually, self-driving-vehicle developers hope that the US Congress will pass a law allowing the broader testing and operation of their tech across the US. On Tuesday, a House committee advanced a bill that would direct the federal government to create safety standards for autonomous vehicles, and prevent states from passing their own laws prohibiting the sale or use of the tech, or from requiring companies to submit information on crashes.
Waymo’s new DC pressure campaign echoes the ones launched by transportation disrupters, including ride-hailing giant Uber and bike- and scooter-share company Bird, nearly a decade ago. Like self-driving tech developers, those companies wanted to launch their new services in places where the rules didn’t align with their business ambitions. Ultimately, Uber and Lyft generally succeeded in getting laws passed in US statehouses allowing their services to operate on public roads—and preventing cities from creating their own laws.
Today, Waymo operates in six US metro areas—Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area—and plans to launch in more than 10 this year. Three other companies, including Nuro and Amazon-owned Zoox, have permits to test self-driving tech in Washington, DC.
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