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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Yes, it’s a supercar, but it’s also sold very much as a track and road car, one that accommodates a passenger, all of which means road trips and weekend-away stays are very much possible. Well, they would be if there were anywhere at all to store luggage. Lamborghini managed to find some luggage space in its Revuelto design, so there’s no excuse here, really.
The design department otherwise has had a field day. Top-mounted exhausts, dihedral doors, and even an F1-style roof snorkel to accompany that air-braking rear wing deliver an exterior that is nothing short of arresting. Somehow, none of this looks garish or out of place on the Valhalla in person. Everything has a purpose, and nothing seems to scream as flexing or showing off. There’s a cohesion to the Valhalla aesthetic that others might not manage.
Inside, it is much more comfortable than you would imagine. The one-piece carbon-fiber seats look like they are going to be tricky, but on my two-hour road drive, they were supportive and, yes, comfortable. Visibility is surprisingly good, but a camera system is required for the rear view mirror because there’s no rear window. The rest of the interior is minimal, but the steering wheel is excellent (which, as Jony Ive will tell you, is no mean feat) and neatly signals some motorsport cool.
Photograph: Jeremy White
The one gripe for the interior is the dash and center screens, which are clear and responsive, and offer up the usual smartphone mirroring options, but they aren’t luxurious. We’re seeing a lot more effort these days with screen design from Ferrari’s new Luce as well as BMW in the iX3 and i3, but here, Aston has decidedly functional, off-the-shelf-looking displays. If I were parting with a million dollars, I might want more consideration here.
Odin’s Beard
On the road and track is where the Valhalla excels. Impressive doesn’t come close, and, despite the delays, the patience shown by Aston has clearly paid dividends. The ride is superb, as well as being ridiculously quick. The chassis is exceptionally agile, making the car feel alert and light. There are enormous reserves of grip to match the formidable braking and acceleration, and as a result, this is a car that flatters you; it effortlessly seduces you into driving much harder and better than you think you can, all while giving you levels of confidence you wouldn’t think possible.
I’ve driven the Lamborghini Revuelto, and yes, it’s exciting, but also there’s a part of you that is wary—the part that knows that if you don’t keep your wits about you 100 percent of the time, things will go bad very quickly. The Valhalla offers up all of that fun and excitement, but almost none of the trepidation. It is gratifying and intuitive to drive. Anyone can fully enjoy this car, not merely those used to track days. Some will say the engine note is not as full-throated as might be expected in such a car, but others will be having so much fun they won’t care. Nor should they.
You may have noticed a drop of AI in your weather app lately. As companies race to infuse artificial intelligence into every product, the wave has come for the humble weather app.
The Weather Company, operator of the Weather Channel, today released a revamped version of its Storm Radar app, featuring an AI-powered Weather Assistant that lets users customize how they view forecasts and weather maps, toggling between layers like radar, temperature, and weather conditions like wind and lightning.
It can also sync with other apps, like your calendar, to send text notifications and weather summaries that tie info about the upcoming weather into your daily plans. You can stick a voice on it to talk like an old-timey radio weatherman, if you’re into that. Like most weather apps, it gets the data comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS).
The app costs $4 per month. It is available on iOS only for now, but the company says an Android version is coming eventually.
“We wanted to build an experience that would be a weather level-up for anybody, really, from a casual observer to a seasoned storm chaser,” says Joe Koval, a senior meteorologist at the Weather Company. “If you’re looking for advice on when the weather will be good to walk your dog tomorrow, you no longer have to look at a bunch of different disparate weather data elements and try to figure out the answer to that question yourself.”
You can find the weather on your phone already, of course. Android and iOS devices typically place the weather prominently beside the time. Google and Apple have both fused their weather apps into their smartphones directly. AI features have since been infused, offering insights and summaries about the day to come.
But there are third-party weather apps galore, like Storm Radar, Carrot Weather, Rain Viewer, and Acme Weather—an app from the former Dark Sky app creators. New weather apps like Rainbow Weather aim to be AI-first. Weather services are also being integrated directly into AI chatbots, like Accuweather, which recently launched an app directly in OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“Everyone has their idea of what they want in a weather app, what data they’re interested in, how they’re interested in it being presented,” says Adam Grossman, a founder of the DarkSky app. “How do you build a single weather app that works for everybody?”
DarkSky, one of the most popular iOS weather apps, was bought by Apple in 2020 and merged into its Apple Weather service. Grossman eventually left Apple to start Acme Weather, with the goal of making a weather prediction service that better telegraphs the uncertainty of forecasting.
“No matter how good your forecast is, you’re going to be wrong,” Grossman says. “That’s something that weather apps traditionally haven’t done a great job of doing. Our approach is trying to figure out how to add those pieces of context back in.”
Repositories of weather information usually come from government sources, like NOAA or other global weather services that collect data from weather satellites, radar, weather balloons, and on-the-ground instruments. All that data is fed into weather prediction models that simulate the physics of the atmosphere. Those predictions are often generated by resource-intensive supercomputers, but machine learning models have trimmed that processing down, making predictions quicker. (Though sometimes less accurate, which can be accounted for by comparing multiple models.)
Weather apps like Storm Radar and Acme Weather translate that bounty of information by corroborating and compiling the models, then helping to create high-resolution maps and a visual representation of the data, an area where AI can also be particularly useful.
Word documents, and even PDF files, aren’t necessarily safe. These normally innocuous files can be injected with malicious “poison” code or simple scripts of code that can be a serious security risk.
You probably already know it’s dangerous to open files from sources you can’t necessarily trust. If you’re an activist or journalist—or anyone who occasionally depends on anonymous tips to do their jobs—you might run into a situation where potentially useful information is inside a Microsoft Word document or PDF file that you can’t exactly vouch for. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could open those files and read them without exposing your device to potential security risks?
Dangerzone is a free and open source tool built for this purpose. Originally built by journalist and security engineer Micah Lee, this application opens files in a sandbox environment with no internet access, then converts the file to an image-based PDF with no scripting enabled. The resulting PDF has any malicious code stripped out and should be safe to open—at least, as safe as anything can be.
“You can think of it like printing a document and then rescanning it to remove anything sketchy, except all done in software,” explains the about page, which includes a lot of fascinating details about how the application works.
To get started, download and install Dangerzone. There are downloads for Windows, macOS, and various Linux systems. The first time you run it there will be a brief setup, after which you can simply drag files to the window.
Photograph: Justin Pot
The application can open and convert PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Open Office, EPUB, and image files. You can drag and drop multiple documents at once, if you’d like.
After adding documents you will be asked a few questions: where you’d like the resulting files to end up, whether they should open after the conversion is done, and whether you’d like to use optical character recognition (OCR) in order to make the document searchable. You can also move the original, potentially unsafe documents into a subfolder named “unsafe,” helping ensure you don’t confuse them with the newly made safe ones.
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Photograph: Justin Pot
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