No meal delivery service is packaging-free, because fresh food has to stay cold in transit. The most useful way to compare services is by what you can recycle where you live. Blue Apron ships meals in a cardboard box, and its boxes, inserts, paper cartons and recipe cards are curbside recyclable, while gel pack film and plastic bags have store drop-off options and a few items, such as plastic metallic bubble insulation and spice sachets, go in the trash.

A meal kit can fit a heart-healthy diet when you choose recipes built around vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, and fish, and keep an eye on sodium and saturated fat. Look for kits that list nutrition information, offer plenty of produce-forward recipes, and let you pick your own meals each week. Blue Apron lets you choose your recipes, so you can build a week that matches your goals.

The best vegan meal delivery service is the one that matches how you cook, what you eat and what your week looks like. Fully plant-based services offer the widest vegan menus. Mainstream meal kits with vegetarian or plant-forward recipes offer more variety for mixed households. Compare menu range, prep time, ingredient quality, flexibility and price per serving before you pick.

The best meal delivery services for new parents are the ones that fit how much energy you have this week. Ready-to-heat meals are the fastest when you are exhausted. Meal kits with pre-portioned ingredients and simple recipes work well once you have a little more room to cook. Look for flexible delivery, easy skips, and recipes you can finish in about 30 minutes. Many families use a mix of both.

Training hard is the easy part. Figuring out what to eat afterward, on a weeknight, with zero energy left, that's the real workout.

Here's the thing nobody puts on the box: the best meal kit in the world is useless if it shows up on a week you're not home. Flexibility isn't a nice-to-add feature — it's the thing that decides whether a subscription actually earns a permanent spot in your routine or gets cancelled in month two out of guilt.

Weeknights don't need a reservation, a recipe binder, or a grocery run that takes longer than the meal itself. You need something good, something fast, and something that doesn't wreck the budget. That's the job tonight.

Beginning with recipes shipping August 10, eggs are no longer automatically packed into your Meal Kits. We're always looking for ways to make Blue Apron work better for your kitchen. Earlier this year, we asked if you’d be open to using everyday ingredients you already have on hand if it meant paying less for your recipes — and 72% of you said yes. So we built something new.

Starting summer 2026, ingredients for each recipe will no longer be grouped together in individual recipe bags. Instead, ingredients will arrive loose in the box.

To make unpacking and cooking easier, we've updated our recipe cards with ingredient checklists so you can quickly confirm everything is there and gather what you need when it's time to cook.

Texas does things big — and that goes for the food, too. Inspired by the bold, diverse flavors that define the Lone Star State, these two recipes bring a little Texas to your table, with no travel required.