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Whether you’re eating at a restaurant or shopping for groceries, there’s typically no shortage of vegetarian and vegan options to choose from. Meal delivery services are no exception: Many popular meal kits and ready-made meals offer flexible plans to fit most dietary restrictions, including vegetarian, gluten-free and dairy-free diets. Meal delivery services that include vegetarian and vegan plans can provide easy-to-cook or ready-made meat-free meals and prevent you from having to sprint to the supermarket each week.
If you’re ready to sign up for a meal delivery plan but don’t know where to start, I spoke to nutritionists and recipe developers about services they think are worth considering and compiled their favorite ones that include vegetarian and vegan plans. I also rounded up meal delivery services I and other NBC Selected staffers have tried and love.
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“Nowadays, there are meal delivery services specifically catered towards more challenging dietary restrictions —[they] can make it easier to find meals you can safely tolerate when you can’t always rely on unfamiliar restaurants,” says Lisa Moskovitz, a registered dietitian and CEO of NY Nutrition Group.
Each of the following meal delivery services comes recommended by our food experts and/or NBC Selected editors who have tested them. All of them offer either completely plant-based vegetarian or vegan services, or they offer specific plans to fit one of these lifestyles. To make your browsing easier, I note the starting price, serving size and number of meals provided by each service.
Price is based on four meals per week for two people/servings with new member discount applied.
Sunbasket has both meal kits and pre-made, non-frozen meals (although you can freeze some of them to cook later, in line with the brand’s cooking instructions). NBC Selected reporter Zoe Malin tried Sunbasket for a week and loved how varied the options were for her gluten-free and pescatarian diet. “I can usually only eat one or two offerings off a meal delivery service’s weekly menu. But with Sunbasket, there were almost too many delicious dishes to choose from,” she says. Malin also loves the service’s pre-made meals, which taste like homemade meals without needing to put in the work, she says.
Sunbasket has a variety of options that you can, depending on whether you eat meat or strictly follow a plant-based diet, says Moskovitz. One of the service’s nine meal plans is the vegetarian plan, which comes with a variety of meal kits to choose from that are focused on protein, good fats and fiber, according to the brand. If you don’t feel like committing to just one type of plan, Sunbasket lets you mix and match its Fresh & Ready plan with over a dozen meal kits from its weekly rotating menu.
Price is based on four meals per week for two people/servings.
Blue Apron has a number of weekly menu items based on your selected meal plan. Its vegetarian plan offers nutritionist-approved recipes made with fruits, vegetables, grains, seeds and more, which can be created with or without dairy products, honey and eggs, according to the brand. The plan serves two people and includes two to five meat-free recipes per week (depending on your plan preferences), most of which you can prepare in 25 to 35 minutes, according to Blue Apron.
Price is based on four meals per week for two people/servings with new member discount applied.
“HelloFresh offers quick and easy chef-curated recipes, they use fresh, sustainably sourced ingredients and [they] offer vegan and vegetarian options,” says Lisa Young, adjunct professor of nutrition at New York University. I tested HelloFresh and it quickly became one of my favorite services — I love that the recipes are easy to follow (which, as a non-cook, is key for me) and the meal options are both tasty and varied.
The meal kit service has over 30 recipes to choose from each week, and you can customize your plan with protein-specific preferences: beef-free, pork-free, seafood-free and veggie. Though choosing the veggie preference doesn’t change the weekly rotating menu HelloFresh provides, it does ensure that you automatically receive meat-free meals for that given menu week.
The brand offers 10 veggie meals (including one vegan meal) within its Classic Plan each week — vegetarian recipes can also be made vegan by opting to remove certain ingredients like cheese or yogurt, according to the brand. The veggie and vegan meals are labeled under each recipe, so you can see which recipes fit your dietary needs when crafting your menu each week.
