As the fitness industry continues to boom, goods and services related to diet and exercise continue to grow as well. One such service is meal prep delivery.
Meal prep delivery services cook meals onsite and deliver them straight to your door, usually packaged in temperature controlled boxes to keep them fresh. These services are so comprehensive that they sometimes offer full customization of meals.
They may also categorize meals on their website by diet type; like vegan, keto, or high protein. You may even be able to input specific macros to get individualized meals. Even if this isn’t an option, the macros are often labeled on each container.
In any case, you are almost guaranteed to find something that fits your needs.
The main benefit of this service is convenience. You literally don’t have to do a thing besides pick the meals you want and click order. Meals often arrive in less than 24 hours. Once they arrive, all you have to do is heat it up in the microwave. There is no additional cooking required.
The drawback is price. On average, you save 52.6% per meal by cooking at home rather than ordering from a meal prep service. The price of a meal often rivals what a restaurant would charge for something similar.
Whether or not a meal prep service is worth it is based on what the consumer values. Someone who values convenience, is not a good cook, or does not like to cook will benefit immensely. If they are serious about their fitness goals but diet is holding them back, they should be willing to pay a premium to have meals delivered.
This decision requires an honest assessment of your own psychology and motivations. Are you the type of person to buy $50 worth of produce only for it to remain unchopped and uncooked in the same plastic bags it came in?
Are you the type of person to waste packs of meat because you didn’t cook it or freeze it before expiration?
The hardest part of any diet is compliance, which is the ability to stay on the diet itself. It’s hard to get excited about your 4 day old Tupperware full of bland chicken when you could easily DoorDash some KFC with just a few taps.
Unfortunately diet is a major component of fitness goals, whether they are physique related or performance related. Whether it’s cooking at home or ordering from one of these companies, it’s a necessity to dial it in one way or another.
Meal prep services stay in business for a reason; they’re usually pretty good at cooking healthy meals. If you’re a bad cook then you really won’t want that unseasoned, unsalted ground turkey sitting in the fridge.
Many meal prep companies offer a ton of variety, so you won’t have to eat the same thing over and over. Even if you select an option of purchasing just a few meals per week, they usually allow you to pick whatever you want.
How Much Do Meal Prep Services Cost?
Naturally, the more meals you buy the greater the deal will be. But most people who buy from meal prep services use it for one meal per day.
After analyzing the most popular meal prep companies, with the assumption that you’re buying 6-7 meals per week, each meal will cost you about $11.23. By contrast, the average cost of a meal prepared at home is $5.32.
To calculate the cost of a meal cooked at home, let’s use the example of a basic chicken, rice and broccoli meal.
Chicken breast is about $4.99 per pound. Let’s say you want 6oz. of chicken in a meal. It’s important to note that when you cook chicken, it loses some of its retained water. So in reality, the chicken is actually $4.99 per roughly 12 oz.
12 oz. divided by 2 gives us 6oz. so the chicken portion of this meal is about $2.50.
We’ll use microwavable cups of rice to make things easy, and because bulk cooked rice doesn’t hold up too long when refrigerated. A cup of microwavable rice is $1.14.
A head of broccoli is about $1.33, which is a lot but sufficient for this exercise. Finally, since we’re not going to eat this dry, we’ll add $0.35 for a serving of some sort of condiment.
$2.50 + $1.14 + $1.33 + $0.35 totals $5.32 per meal cooked at home.
The one thing that must be taken into consideration when comparing meal prep delivery services and meals cooked at home is variety. You can’t go into a supermarket and ask for one serving of chicken, one serving of salmon, one serving of turkey, and one serving of steak. If you did it would greatly aggravate your butcher.
Meal prep companies have this food in bulk, so they don’t care that you mix up meals in a certain way. If you’re someone that can’t eat the same thing every day, you might be willing to pay up for some diversity.
The prices below reflect meal prep services in which the meals are fully prepared and ready to heat in the microwave. They do not include companies that send you the portioned ingredients and require you to cook them.
| Meal Prep Service | Cost Per Meal |
|---|---|
| Freshly | $9.99 |
| Fresh N Lean | $15.20 |
| Eat Clean Bro | $11.49 |
| Spartan Meal Prep | $11.49 |
| Real Eats | $8.99 |
| Metabolic Meals | $10.25 |
Summary
Meal prep services are most applicable to individuals who have the discretionary income to purchase meals, enjoy variety in their meals, don’t like to cook, or aren’t skilled at cooking.
While the cost is about 2x greater, sometimes you can’t put a price on convenience. If hashtag meal prep isn’t your thing, there’s nothing wrong with paying up to have meals delivered.
When you take into consideration the ability to customize by meal type or macros, coupled with the fact that the meals are prepared by a professional cook, it’s hard to say no. It’s not as if you are sacrificing nutritional value in the process.
Depending on your location, there may be an array of different options. Don’t assume that all meals from all companies taste the same. From personal experience with clients, there is a huge discrepancy of opinion when it comes to one service compared to another.