Best prepared meal delivery services for fresh eating at home

Paleo, keto, vegan, gluten free, organic, flexitarian, no matter what your eating habits or dietary restrictions might be, odds are there's a prepared meal delivery program that can meet your needs. And lucky for me, I get to try out some cnet's favorites. [MUSIC] I know this will come as a huge surprise to most of you but I live alone. And cooking for one has often been a challenge for me. I can cook but I get tired of eating leftovers for days on end. So meal kits and prepared meal plans sound like a dream come true. But how do you choose the right one? Seeing that contributor and chowhound editor David watsky, has had the enviable task of sampling many, many different services and meal plans to compile our best lists for meal kit and prepared meal services. Now if you really like to cook and we'd like it even better if all the ingredients showed up at your door, be sure to check out my friend Lexi's video comparing her favorite meal kits. They look delicious but also like a lot more work than I'm interested in doing just to feed myself. So I went the easy route and decided to try three different meal services that are delivered fully cooked and only need to be reheated. In this video I'm going to be sampling offerings from freshly trifecta and fresh and lean. The beauty of these prepared meal services and others like them is how easy the process is from start to finish. You go online, choose the food you won either as part of a plan or all the cart and a few days later a box shows up on your doorstep. To spot the meals in the refrigerator or freezer, and when you're hungry pick out a dish, heat it up [SOUND] and enjoy. Now you may be thinking these are basically just glorified TV dinners and in a way you're not wrong. However, most of these services cook the food just before it's shipped to your house, so the ingredients are as fresh as possible. The meals don't sit on store shelves, so they're not full of preservatives or tons of salt. And these companies specialize in catering to different dietary plans or preferences. So if you're on a keto diet, trying to go plant based or just looking for fresh, organic ingredients, there'll be a lot better off with one of these plans than a freezer full of hungry man. And personally, I'm not on any specific diet plan. I'm just tired of eating sandwiches and ordering from doordash all the time. So I'm looking for a variety of good tasting food that's hopefully also healthy and as easy to prepare. And that's where these big boxes of food come in. Just for the record, firstly and trifecta were kind enough to send me some samples of their meal. But I ended up buying the ones I got from fresh and lean. But rest assured I will not let those facts influence my opinions one way or the other. Let's start things off with freshly. [MUSIC] The first box that arrived at my house was from freshly. Freshly offers a variety of meals that one might consider comfort foods like meatloaf or shepherd's pie that makes them using less sugar less processing and more nutrient. There's a freshly fit plan to help support your workout regimen and all their meals are 100% gluten free pricing varies depending on how much you order. Four meals a week will cost you about 1149 each, but if you get 12 a week, it goes down to 849 a significant savings. So how do they taste? So they sent me cauliflower shelled beef bowl and AES steak peppercorn with saut��ed carrots and French green beans homestyle chicken with masterful mac and cheese. For my first meal I've decided to go with the tangy turmeric turkey bowl with sweet potato and shredded Brussels. Let's take a look looks about like Any other meal I'd expect to find in the frozen food section, but this is not frozen, it's fresh. We're gonna microwave for three minutes and then let's stand for two minutes. Here we go [BLANK_AUDIO] All right, meal number one looks pretty good. Got our grains. We've got our turkey. We've got our sweet potatoes and brussels sprouts in there somewhere. I have to say that was a pretty good dish to start with. The turkey was nice and tender. Everything tasted nice and fresh. The grains still had a little bit of a bite to them. They didn't taste all mushy like they might be if they were frozen. All at all. I'd call the first meal a success. See you tomorrow for the next one. It's lunchtime on Saturday. And today on the menu we have Kung Pao steak with basmati rice and toasted cashews. [SOUND] Not super appetizing presentation, but it's not any worse than a lot of the frozen dinners I have. Let's open this up and pop it in the microwave. [MUSIC] Sounds good [SOUND] .Okay,time to begin.This looks pretty good,we got a stake,we got a rice,some broccoli,some veges.This is very tasty,it's got a little bit of a kick to it,a bit of spice but not overly hot,stake is nice and tender.I like that a lot,very tasty. I'm gonna have to call that when I hit. My next selection was homestyle chicken with masterful mac and cheese and green beans. It looked very appetizing but it was kind of flavorless. And I finished out my sampling from freshly with cauliflower shell beef Bolognese. It was my first time trying pasta made from cauliflower. I was pleasantly surprised. Yeah, I like that one a lot way. Better than would have been if it was a frozen meal, this is the fourth me. I've had from freshly and overall, I've been pretty impressed if I had to rank them. I caught the steak dish, my favorite, then the pasta, then I go with the Turkey Bowl and finally the, I'd happily eat any of those again, but the chicken was a little bit lacking, but there's no time for that now, I've got a bunch of food from trifecta waiting for me and I'm gonna start digging into that at dinner tonight. [MUSIC] The next election across my threshold was a huge delivery from trifecta. just bringing them into the house was a workout. Yeah, it freshly emphasizes comfort food trifecta main goal appears to be good. Tasting food for fitness enthusiasts. The name refers what the website calls, the three fundamental areas of health. Mind, body, and social. The website offers a quiz to help. Help you find the right meal plan, to reach your goals. They include keto paleo, vegan and vegetarian options where you can pick an olive cart bundle, to help with meal prep. Trifecta uses mostly organic ingredients as well as humanely raised chicken and grass-fed beef. Trifecta has a minimum order of seven meals, which starts at $109, but you can skip an order any time. Also, they come on a weekly rotating menu. So you don't get to choose the meals. But I'm not here to take quizzes. I'm here to eat. [SOUND] What do we got here? Not gonna read through all these but we've got creamy tomato sauce pasta with salmon, Cajun shrimp and chicken sausage with brussel sprouts, mushroom Pasta with grass fed beef meatballs. I got such a big selection from trifecta for more than a clean and they're paleo lines. So I'm gonna try to from each First up is going to be sesame vegetables with braised beef, a paleo dish. There's a little bit less packaging than the freshly meals so you can see right away what you're getting. I wouldn't say it looks beautiful at this point, but it does look fresh. Another thing that's different is that they recommend heating on a skillet airfryer or oven and only using the microwave as a last resort. So I'm going to take their suggestion and heat this up in a pan. [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] Almost feels like I cooked it myself. We'll see how it tastes. I think it looks better than if it had come out of a microwave, Trifecta says all the veggies are organic, I'm not sure about the meat, the beef itself was very tender, very tasty and probably my favorite part. The greens were very crisp Carrots were maybe a little mushy, and I'm not a huge fan of cooked cabbage. So I think maybe that was affecting my enjoyment. I could have heated this up a little more and gotten the beef a little bit hotter. Everything tastes nice and clean. But we'll see what trifecta has in store for me tomorrow at lunch. [SOUND] Lunch the next day was mushroom pasta with grass fed beef meatballs. [MUSIC] This one had chickpea pasta another first for me. But I liked finding out about these pasta alternatives. That was followed by something called vegetales con pollo. This word is Spanish for vegetables. Not a typo, nor a reference to the VeggieTales cartoon series. I also tried out a new scheme for warming up the proteins from the dishes first. Then adding the rest of beans or grains towards the end. Browning the chicken breast first really good trick. Meal number four from trifecta today and I'm looking forward to this one, Cajun shrimp and chicken sausage with brussel sprouts. A lot of brussels sprouts and a lot of these dishes. I do like that the packaging can give you a good idea of what to expect before you even open it up. [BLANK_AUDIO] I'm looking forward to this. Very tasty I can sense a little bit of the spice. Not too bad, just the right amount so far, that sausage is really good. It doesn't taste over process or like it has a lot of extra ingredients. Well, the Cajun shrimp and sausage were definitely worth waiting for. Between the shrimp and the sausage and the chicken and all the vegetables and the rice and the sauce, all the flavors worked really well together. I was really impressed. Looking at the four dishes I tried from trifecta, we're gonna have to rank them in reverse order. My favorite was this one the Cajun shrimp and sausage, followed by the Mexican flavored vegetables and chicken, followed by the mushroom pasta and meatballs. And finally, the sesame vegetables with braised beef There was nothing really wrong with any of them. But these last couple were really anything. [MUSIC] My third delivery came from fresh and lean, which I was very excited about. The company is ranked as the best overall on our best list so I had to make sure to try it for myself. Fresh and lean offers the protein plus meal plan for all the gym rats out there, plus keto paleo two different vegan plans and bulk items for the meal peppers, fresh and lean promises organic vegetables and premium proteins free of antibiotics and added hormones. healthy snacks like flavored almonds and beef jerky are also available. The price per meal varies greatly depending on the plan you select and the number of meals per week. If you select lunch or dinner is only there around $15 per meal, but you can get it down to roughly 10 to $12. If you order 10 or more meals per week, it's not the cheapest but it's not the most expensive either. And I'm about to find out if these meals are worth the money. Fresh N Lean says on top of their right. Snack here. Cinnamon Maple recipe almonds. This packaging looks awfully familiar doesn't it? Looks like trifecta and fresh and lean is the same packaging equipment. So what do we got here we've got garlic coffee roasted sweet potatoes with salmon. Chipotle lime chicken with broccoli, beef chilli meat and mushrooms. We've got a selection here from the protein plus and paleo categories fresh and lean doesn't frown on microwaving, so I guess that's make prep a little easier. For lunch today I've decided to go with the Chipotle lime chicken with broccoli. Let's give it a shot. Didn't say anything about poking any holes in the plastic or anything so fingers crossed. [BLANK_AUDIO] Anything exciting going on. [BLANK_AUDIO] After hitting a sharp or serrated knife to cut the film along groove on the inner tree wall [BLANK_AUDIO] That sounds like one of the things you put in the microwave, they don't always come out looking as great as they did when they went in. It's not always about the looks though, so let's give it a try. Looks like a healthy dish. veggies, chicken sauce, not much else. It's a good size portion to without a ton of calories. Everything's in fresh. Everything's in lean. So I guess we're living up to the name so far. I wonder how it would have fared if I heated it up in a pain like I was with the traffic conditions. Well, alright, not too shabby. Not great, but not bad either. The flavors were subtle. I would certainly eat this again, but I probably wouldn't be dreaming about By the time it was back to the frying pan for the rest of the selections from professionally, I was getting better results even if it meant a little bit more cleaner. These Italian chicken sausage is browned up nicely and paired well with the pesto rice that came with them. I also enjoyed the garlic coffee roasted sweet potatoes with salmon, though I kind of made a mess out of this nice piece of fish while I was eating it up. It didn't affect the taste though. It's time to finish off our Fresh N Lean journey with a roasted pepper burger with kale. Another paleo dish. This burger is definitely going in the pan and get heated up. No bond and no cheese on the burger today, but I guess that's the paleo way of life, [BLANK_AUDIO] Because we're very ready to go [BLANK_AUDIO] I'll skip adding the rest of this grease. I would love to slap a piece of cheese on there, but we'll leave this as it is. Okay. So this is the roasted pepper burger with kale. It seems like it could really be promoting the potatoes over the kale, but to each their own. Got some good tasting beef. The burger patty on its own is a little dry but when you mix it all together it tastes pretty good. Maybe it's because I haven't had a burger in a while but this might be my favorite from fresh and lean. Everything tasted really good together. Sure, I would have liked to bond with my burger but it was fine the way it was. If I'm liking these right now I am going to put this burger and kale first followed by the Italian chicken sausage with pesto rice. I'd say the salmon with the garlic coffee. And finally the Nepali lime chicken with broccoli. Of course, I wouldn't say no to eating any of them again, but if someone asked me which one I wanted, I'd have to say this. [MUSIC] Well, I didn't set out to crown the ultimate prepared meal delivery service. I guess in my own way, I did end up picking a winner. Though firstly I'm trifecta delivered some meals that I really enjoyed and have meal plans that suit many different needs and appetites. I actually decided to sign up with fresh and lean on an ongoing basis. I actually just got my first weekly recurring delivery that I paid for with my money and see now it's not paying me back for it. I wouldn't call this an endorsement, though. I just found the fresh and lean, had the selection of meals that I thought I would like to eat on a regular basis at a cos that seemed fair. And like I said before, these are only three of so many different services that we have on our best list. So if none of these appeal to you, go check out the list and see if anything else strikes your fancy. But for now after eating all that food, I better go find our best list for home gym equipment. See you next time. [MUSIC]