Cooking a meal from scratch for your family can instantly create a good vibe in your vibe. When your loved ones go gaga over your culinary skills, your day becomes brighter. However, cooking sumptuous dishes requires herculean patience, which may become time-consuming and monotonous at times. If you have a super-busy daily schedule, it can be difficult to juggle work and home.
Though getting innovative recipes online is easy, coming up with new recipes every day can take a lot of time and effort. You have to keep looking for them on cookbooks or spend hours on Pinterest. Now, to prepare those recipes, you need to make several rounds at your neighborhood grocery store to buy ingredients. The entire process requires impeccable time management, which may be challenging to do at your erratically busy schedule.
Healthy family meal delivery services are the best solution for busy individuals. Family meal kits are priced reasonably lower than standard meal kits and are easy on your pocket. You can enjoy new and lip-smacking recipes every week. Getting family meal kits delivered right at your doorstep saves you valuable time, effort, and money. The meal plans are designed, keeping in mind specific nutritional requirements, dietary restrictions, and food allergies.
Some of the meal kits allow you to toggle “number of persons,” while others may let you tweak the “servings.” Typically, you need a couple of weeks to gauge the perfect portions. However, if there is any leftover, you can save it for lunch and dinner for the next day or supplement it with a mouth-watering dessert. Mix it up to understand which combination works best for your family.
But there will hardly be any leftovers after feeding two adults and kids. The meal kits are portioned to match the appetite of a family correctly. We have curated a list of the 5 best meal delivery services for big families:
Sun Basket
Sun Basket has joined hands with celebrity dad and master chef Tyler Florence to launch Family Meal Plan with a wide range of healthy recipes. Once you sign up with their Family meal option with either 2 or 4 recipes to be delivered every week, you typically select from five family recipes of Sun Basket. Each meal is sufficient to feed 4 people.
You get useful tips with every meal box on how your kids can help you in preparing meals. To make things more interesting, they came up with weekly themes like taco or pasta night. Sun Basket offers gluten-free, vegetarian, paleo, and breakfast options in their classic meal plan.
Julia Dennison loved the dishes she prepared using Sun Basket recipes. She was impressed by the high-quality meals with all organic and sustainable ingredients. She says it felt good to do something good for the plant and herself. Overall, she found the meal kit quality to be excellent and value for money.
Popular meals include Chicken Teriyaki with Coconut Brown Rice and Broccoli, Fully-loaded Ground Beef Tacos, and Pan-Roasted Salmon with Orange-Jicama salads on the sides.
HelloFresh
HelloFresh delivers 100% organic and farm-fresh ingredients with menus developed by famous chefs. Their recipe card is fun to follow and will make you grasp every step with ease. If you are a subscriber of HelloFresh Family Box, you get to select from 2 or 3 meals in every box, enough to feed 4 people. HelloFresh also offers Classic Box and a Veggie Box, which are sufficient to feed 2 or 4 people. Once signed up, you will be delivered with pre-portioned and top-quality ingredients with easy-to-follow recipes.
A highly satisfied customer Kathleen Krems said that all HelloFresh recipes were tasty, and ingredients were high quality and fresh. She also mentioned that some recipes take more time and are complicated to cook during weeknights. Tracy Odell – another customer of HelloFresh believes that few recipes truly expanded her cooking repertoire. Tracy learned some new and handy tricks like making a sauce. She was a bit disappointed when she didn’t have any leftovers after putting in so much effort to prepare these dinners.
Overall, we found the prices to be reasonable for the quality and quantity as compared to other meal delivery services.
HelloFresh popular meals include Perfect Penne Bake, Mustard Breaded Chicken, and Pork and Apple Burgers.
Purple Carrot
Purple Carrot makes you stay healthy by helping you cook plant-based meals at home. Their meal kits include recipes pre-decided by the company and its chefs. You do not have the option to choose recipes, but you can still select the number of meals you want for your family. Purple Carrot typically makes 2-3 meals depending on the plan you choose. All meal kits are delivered along with pre-portioned ingredients for vegan meals. You need to have some basic ingredients at home like salt, pepper, and olive oil to cook their meal kits. Purple Carrot uses ethically sourced 100% organic, and GMO-free ingredients.
Lifestyle Director Laura Fenton tried her hand with Purple Carrot and was pleasantly surprised by the level of improvisation required to cook Purple Carrot meals. She went out of her comfort zone but learned new and exciting stuff. Purple Carrot recipes were full of ideas and steps which changed her perspective. Laura also mentioned that if someone aspires to cook more vegetarian and vegan meals, Purple Carrot’s innovative recipes are an excellent motivator. She felt highly inspired.
She tried to make a Berber Platter and faux crab cakes. As she went on with the actual cooking process, it was time-consuming to prepare all the recipes. She tried twice to prepare meals using Purple Carrot recipes and felt it was not at all a time saver. Laura said that she thoroughly enjoyed the food, but it’s pricier given the effort required in preparing the meals.
Popular meals include Edamame Dumplings and Mustard Green with Ginger Fried Rice, Tortilla Espanola with Spinach Salad, and Spicy Tomato Sauce on the sides and Garlicky Breadcrumbs and Butternut Mac’ n’ Cheese.
Green Chef
Green Chef is the first organic meal kit service certified by USDA covering growth hormones, antibiotics, GMOs, and synthetic pesticides. You will get fully natural and super-healthy recipes after you sign up with Green Chef. You have the options to choose from 5 types of menu – omnivore, gluten-free, paleo, carnivore, and vegetarian. Every Green Chef meal kit contains 3 recipes and ingredients for 2 to 4 people. You can easily identify the ingredients with their distinct color-coded packaging.
Let’s hear what Julia Edelstein, Parents Executive Editor, had to say about her Green Chef experience. Green Chef delivered delicious recipes backed by high-quality ingredients allowing her to cook healthy meals for herself and her family. She was relieved when she saw that the ingredients were largely prepared, marinades mixed, and vegetables were chopped. She had a hassle-free cooking experience with Green Chef.
She chose Green Chef family recipes but found the recipes not well-suited for the taste buds of young kids in her family. The portions were also smaller compared to the price paid. She found Green Chef to be expensive overall, even with the high-quality ingredients and convenience offered by them.
Popular meals include Greek Veggie Pitas, Lemon Pesto Fusilli, and Thyme-Roasted Chicken.
Home Chef
Home Chef is an excellent option for families as their offering doesn’t include too traditional or cultural foods disliked by a lot of kids. While other meal kit services offer you global cuisines from Asia, Africa, and other places across the world, Home Chef sticks to familiar tastes and ll-time favorites.
However, none of their recipes are boring. When we tested their meals, we found their shrimp lo mein and pork chops with pine nut compound butter with parmesan and kale to be lip-smacking.
The minimum you can get is 2 meals per week. You can stretch it up to 6 meals for 6 people, which is perfect for a large family or families with insatiable appetites.
$20 for every meal falls in the mid-range for prices. Home Chef doesn’t offer you a hefty discount even if you order in bulk. The brand works well for a busy person with a healthy lifestyle who can spare no more than 2 days a week. Are your kids not particularly a global cuisine fan, but like more than plain spaghetti? Then Home Chef is the brand to consider.
You will have fun experimenting with Home Chef’s family meal kits. It gives you an excellent opportunity to spend quality time with your loved ones and teach your kids basic and handy life skills. Irrespective of where you live or who you are, you have to eat daily to survive. If you know how to put up delicious meals together every single day, you will be loved and admired by your family members.
It’s an excellent way to increase the bond with your loved ones and gradually help them take over some home responsibilities. Just imagine, every day, a new person is learning or sharpening culinary skills by cooking their favorite meals. It can be fun and free you up from some of your valuable time.
We recommend you to try Home Chef for at least a week or a month to see the reaction of your family. Once they start liking it, convincing them for long-term commitment will be super easy.
