A meal from the Martha Stewart's & Marley Spoon box that took roughly 25 minutes to create.

Meal kits have exploded in popularity these past few years, with many newcomers entering the market, and original go-tos expanding their offerings to include vegan meal kits, pescetarian options and more. But how do you find the best service when there are only so many free trials to go around and some meal kits turn out to be disappointing? That lofty task becomes all the more difficult when cooking for one, since you don’t want to be left with sad, wilted spinach and mushrooms because you can’t get to all the meals before they go bad.

Thankfully, I happen to be a trained chef and have done the grunt work for you. Below are seven meal-kit delivery services that get a major thumbs-up from my humble home test kitchen. Some are simply heat-and-eat while others are DIY cooking adventures, but they all offer serving sizes ideal for one individual, or, in some cases, two-person servings, which allow for an extra serving of leftovers.

For each review, I tested the meals for a minimum of two weeks (most were tested for a month) and prepared several of the options alongside a casual home cook to make sure lay people can ace these recipes, too. Note that we’ve listed prices for each service but that shipping costs may add additional fees.

A pioneer in the meal-kit sector, HelloFresh’s recipes were easy to make, very palate-pleasing and have options that appeal to a diverse range of eaters. Recipe cards are laid out clearly, and you can also view them online. Personally, I found the company’s pescatarian dishes most delightful (still dreaming about the shrimp spaghetti with a kick with garlic herb butter and zucchini), but the vegetarian dishes were surprisingly flavorful, too.

The chickpea fattoush with grape tomatoes, cucumber, toasted pita and feta, for example, only took about five minutes of prep and is the kind of springtime or summer dish you’ll want to return to again and again. 

Hello Fresh chickpea fattoush ingredients.

When I was in the mood for a breakfast-for-dinner situation, the cheesy fried eggs over nacho potato hash with pico de gallo and smoky red pepper crema knocked it (and a hangover) out of the park.

HelloFresh cheesy fried eggs over nacho potato hash.

On the company’s website you can easily schedule and modify your order, which comes packed in recyclable materials with many ingredients pre-measured. It offers meals across categories like 20-minute meals (hallelujah!), gourmet, oven-ready, carb smart and more. Veggie and pescatarian options are available and a plan for two people (or two servings) starts at $3.99 per serving.

One thing worth highlighting is the richness of these recipes: If you’re typically a healthier eater, you might want to consider halving or omitting the sour cream, butter and cream cheese to cut some of the meal’s richness. 

How does chili-spiced tofu biryani with cauliflower, brown rice and raisins sound to you? White bean turkey chili? Korean sweet and sour chicken bowl with brown rice, kale and carrots? Does it sound even better if you don’t have to do any prep work? 

Sunbasket’s Fresh & Ready line makes meals for one that you can microwave or heat up in the oven or stove in minutes. 

Sunbasket Fresh & Ready delivery arrives cold-packed but not frozen.

FYI: The company also offers meal kits with two servings per recipe if you do feel like cooking. While you shop, you can also load up on pantry staples like oatmeal, granola, snacks and more.

But back to those dinners. On nights when you don’t feel like cooking, but also don’t want to dine out or wait for takeout delivery to arrive, Fresh & Ready gets my seal of approval. Sunbasket is also a brand you can feel good about ordering from as it aims to use 100% organic produce, works with top-notch ranchers and fishermen, and has other impressive ingredient standards. On top of that, the company is aiming to get its packaging 100% recyclable or compostable, and donates food to underserved communities across the country.

Sunbasket’s Fresh & Ready meals begin at $9.99 per serving with the meal kits starting at $11.49 per serving and weekly menus that provide options for “paleo, vegetarian and everything in between.” My deliveries arrived cold-packed and customers can feel free to skip a week or cancel their subscription at any time. The website notes that meals can be frozen if you end up not eating what you've ordered, which is a nice plus.

It’s the weekend, treat yourself. Semi-homemade gourmet feasts await with this prepared meal-kit company we previously reviewed that delivers recipes that are table-ready in 15 minutes or less. Best of all, Gobble’s sous chefs handle all the dicing, chopping and marinating before food arrives at your door, so the “prep” work involved are the more enjoyable tasks like seasoning and watching things get crispy in your oven. Everything can also be made in a single pot or pan, which I definitely appreciate for those nights where doing more than that makes my hand inch closer towards the “order” button on GrubHub or Seamless. 

Options include meat, fish and vegetarian dishes, and you don’t have to make a long-term commitment should you decide to cancel the service at any time.

I loved the private chef element of this service. You’ll definitely feel like you treated yourself to a meal out with hits like creamy lemon fettuccine with shrimp and sugar snap peas, herb-grilled vegetables with pita bread and Tuscan white bean purée, and feta and spinach hand pies with Greek salad. 

Gobble gemelli pasta arrabiata with asparagus Caprese.

My most memorable meals? The gemelli pasta arrabiata with asparagus caprese salad that rivaled my favorite local Italian restaurant go-to, and the shrimp tacos with avocado, cabbage slaw and chimichurri. Premium offerings up the artisanal ante included recipes like squid ink pasta with scallops and shrimp in arrabiata sauce and grilled lamb chops with romaine salad and Italian salsa verde.

Gobblers have the choice of choosing their meals or having their meals automatically assigned based on taste preferences, while “Lean & Clean” dinners are also on offer. It’s a little on the pricey side, with meals costing upwards of $11.99 per serving, but if you compare that to what you might spend on takeout, you’ll certainly save plenty of money over the course of a week, and probably discover a new favorite supper or two along the way.

Whether the mood strikes for Korean fried chicken with edamame rice or huli huli chicken rice bowl with charred pineapple, Home Chef wowed us with its wide array of selections for people who want to think outside the meal-kit box.  

Home Chef meal kits can be customized to have more or less protein.

Standard quesadillas, for instance, became elevated with the addition of Oaxacan cheese, jalapeno and shrimp, and the brand’s mahi-mahi offering dazzled with an easy-to-execute macadamia nut crust and sweet chili sauce. 

Recipe cards from Home Chef are a breeze to follow.

Recipe cards from Home Chef are easy to follow (if you’ve lost your recipe cards, you can view them online), and ordering is equally simple thanks to a brief questionnaire where you fill out your serving size (order for two, and you’ll have plenty of leftovers), how many recipes per week you desire, and more. The Home Chef app is user-friendly if you prefer planning your meals from your phone. You can edit or change your choices before the menu window closes each week. 

There’s also the option to customize your recipes by upgrading, substituting or doubling up on proteins (the latter of which is a neat feature; especially for gym rats with large appetites). If you don’t feel like cooking, you can also choose from the oven-ready or “Fast & Fresh” categories, and, if semi-cooking is your thing, opt for the 15-minute meal kits. Home Chef is part of Kroger, so you can also buy its pre-made meals and boxed kits at Kroger supermarkets. Home Chef meals are priced from $8.99 per serving. 

Need a break from all that decadent fettuccine? Recharge and reset with this plant-based delivery service that doles out soups, stews, juices, smoothies and more. From the brand’s collection of meals, recent favorites include the vegan meatballs and marinara noodles with spinach and vegan Parmesan, the kimchi fried quinoa grain bowl with turmeric and edamame, and the garden minestrone soup with zucchini and basil. 

I especially enjoyed the service’s cold-pressed green juice assortment (Green Dream Juice with pineapple and spirulina is a great way to start your day) and new smoothies: Pineapple Passion Fruit and Blue Majik, just to name a couple. To give yourself an extra boost, try Splendid Spoon’s wellness shots, like the Immunity Shot with elderberry and camu camu, and the Recovery Shot with watermelon and cherry juice.

Splendid Spoon has a non-GMO policy for its products

Whatever you try, rest assured you’re getting high-quality ingredients with a non-GMO policy for all Splendid Spoon products, and 95% of the company’s smoothies and wellness shots being organic. When developing its grain and noodle bowls, the company prioritizes avoiding the “Dirty Dozen” produce ingredients while sourcing. 

Customers can choose how frequently they receive deliveries — weekly, every other week or once a month — and can cancel at their leisure. Since the overarching goal here is to commit to your health, you’ll likely be ordering plans, which run from $70 to $145 a week, or as low as $6 per meal. Since Splendid Spoon’s meals arrive frozen, if you know you’re going to space out your meals over the course of a few weeks, you don’t need to worry about food spoilage as much as with other delivery services. 

Hungryroot is like supermarket shopping, but fun. And you can stay in your PJs! Marketing itself as “your personal grocery,” this artificial intelligence-powered platform works by having the user fill out a simple questionnaire and letting its algorithms take it from there.

Each week, it creates a curated list of groceries and pre-made food for you that you can edit before a designated cut-off time. The online portal outlines any “recipes” you’ve ordered, like the “balsamic beet crunch salad,” in which they sent me a balsamic pink bean salad, organic cooked beets, a pack of mini cucumbers, and baby spinach, and provided basic instructions for assembling. That particular meal went from fridge to plate in about three minutes.

Another week, I enjoyed the recipe for “red-sauce ravioli with broccoli” recipe, which was as simple as heating up spinach ricotta ravioli from Kite Hill and mixing it with broccoli and Hungryroot’s superfood tomato sauce. 

Hungryroot fills your cart with groceries and prepared foods based on recipes you select on the website.

In addition to these basic recipe templates, you can use Hungryroot to stock your pantry with snacks, breakfast staples like bagels and muffins, pastas, proteins, produce, beverages and more. The site is easy to navigate, the food arrives fresh, the pre-made dishes are yummy, and you can also knock off your shopping list in one fell swoop. 

One thing to keep in mind: If you forget to edit the version of your cart that the algorithmic powers land on, you may find part of your order to consist of things you may not need or even find palatable. Plans start at $65.

Just because you’re dining solo doesn’t mean your grub has to be boring. For my month of testing Blue Apron, winning meals ran the gamut from steelhead trout with creamy romesco to pesto pasta. I particularly loved Blue Apron’s “premium” offerings, like the aforementioned trout. 

On nights when I was particularly ravenous, I had the two-serving recipes in one sitting (smoked Gouda plant-based burgers with roasted Parmesan and pistachio potatoes, I’m looking at you), but otherwise it was a cinch to pack up leftovers to save for another day. The sheet pan miso-ginger salmon with spicy sweet potatoes and snap peas, for instance, took about 30 minutes to prep and gave me one delicious dinner followed by lunch the next day, served over some leftover brown rice I had in the fridge with a swizzle of hot sauce.

While there was the occasional meal that wasn’t for me — the Premium sesame-crusted yellowtail rice bowls took too much prep time and left too much cleanup even though the result was tasty.

In addition to easy-to-scan recipe cards with hunger-stirring photos, I also appreciate the online recipe option Blue Apron offers, which even has some handy cooking videos showing essentials like how to peel and mince ginger or how to hold a chef’s knife, ideal for college students cooking for themselves, recent grads or anyone who wants to learn some culinary basics.

Worth noting: Make sure you search your Blue Apron deliveries thoroughly upon arrival, as proteins may be hiding under ice packs and cardboard, which can appear to be the bottom of the box. 

The service’s two-serving signature plan starts at $9.49 per serving for four recipes per week. Blue Apron works with 100 family-run farms in sourcing its ingredients, which are non-GMO. Customers can manage their deliveries by selecting recipes each week, along with the quantity. You can also skip weeks as desired.

Along with its regular lineup of meal kits, which includes categories like Premium, Wellness, Craft, “Fast and Easy” and more, Blue Apron also sells single-serve trays (two per order) of heat-and-eat meals like coconut korma chicken with chickpeas and rice and four-cheese enchiladas with rice and veggies for $12.99 per serving. 

It all started with Manhattan fish chowder with crusty ciabatta garlic bread. Surely, I wouldn’t have time to cook such an epicurean feast on a Tuesday night? Boy, was I wrong. Not only did I pull off whipping up a batch of this dreamy soup in about 25 minutes, but I learned a new cooking tip: Sauté strained, chopped tomatoes to concentrate the flavor. 

Martha Stewart & Marley Spoon Manhattan fish chowder with ciabatta garlic bread.

Throughout the course of my Martha Stewart & Marley Spoon trial, a brand that delivers pre-portioned ingredients for Stewart’s best recipes right to your doorstep, I didn’t meet a single meal I didn’t like. Crispy Parmesan penne with smoked salmon, spinach and capers? Yum. Tomato-poached fish? I’ll have seconds, please.

Martha Stewart & Marley Spoon tomato-poached fish.

The only lackluster meal was a crispy parmesan chicken with roasted broccoli, but I’ll count that to personal taste preferences and my fiancé being broccoli-ed out by week’s end. Of particular note here are the 20-minute recipes, such as tomato tortellini soup and creamy skillet Tuscan shrimp, which stayed true to their timing promise and didn’t compromise flavor.

The brand is passionate about sustainability efforts, from carbon offset projects to recyclable packaging and reusable ice packs. Choose from a wide range of weekly recipes across categories like vegetarian and vegan, health and diet, and under-30 minutes, and schedule your deliveries as desired. All recipes come with recipe cards with plenty of visual and written instructions, which feel like reading your favorite Martha Stewart cookbook in minimalist form. Pricing starts at $8.69 per portion and goes up to $12.99 depending on the plan chosen and the number of meals ordered.