Three New and Local Healthy Meal Delivery Services to Try Now
There are a plethora of healthy meal delivery services available in the Boston area. But the days of flavorless, frozen “diet” food being delivered to your door are over. The latest batch of food delivery offers fresh, healthy ingredients with minimal processing and maximum flavor. Some companies deal with allergies, others with picky eaters, and some just want to provide healthy food. And while the list of offerings keeps growing, we found three new healthy meal delivery services worth knowing about.
A meal from Just Add Cooking. Photo provided to bostonmagazine.com
Cofounded by foodies Jan Leife and Anders Lindell, Just Add Cooking caters to those who enjoy cooking but just don’t have the time to shop, plan menus, and prep ingredients. “We feel that it is important for families to spend dinner time together and enjoy a delicious, healthy meal cooked at home,” Leife says. “We make it fun and easy to prepare dinner so that people who want to cook can take back the time they need to make home cooked meals—even after a long day of work.”
Users decide how many meals they want and for how many people, and then Just Add Cooking ships the ingredients on the same day it’s packaged to ensure quality. Leife says as many ingredients as possible are locally sourced. “We prefer to source locally grown and organic produce and engage local seafood and meat purveyors to promote the well-being of families and to help the communities they live in to thrive,” he says.
Pricing varies, but five meals for four people will cost around $139 per week. Delivery is available throughout the Greater Boston area; to see if your neighborhood qualifies, enter your zip code on the company’s website.
Butternut squash with quinoa from The Purple Carrot. Photo provided to bostonmagazine.com
When Andy Levitt and his wife watched the documentary Forks Over Knives earlier this year, they saw the positive impact a plant-based diet could have. “As I watched that documentary, I felt like there was a great opportunity to educate more people about the benefits that come from incorporating more of a plant-based diet into their lives,” Levitt says. “It seemed aligned to a great opportunity to introduce a concept that would allow for busy people who wish to eat a healthier type of diet.”
Everything The Purple Carrot delivers is plant-based, and is often organic and GMO-free as well. “We’re able to source our food from about 50 or 60 local farms around the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic to provide our customers with very fresh, very local produced ingredients,” Levitt says.
Each week, customers choose two dinner options that feed up to four people as well as one snack for $59. Delivery is currently available to people who live in New England the Mid-Atlantic region—but Levitt says their goal is to eventually go national.
A grocery delivery from Lighter. Photo provided to bostonmagazine.com
Lighter’s mission is all about moving people away from the Standard American Diet (appropriately abbreviated to SAD) and replacing it with whole foods. “Our mission is to empower people to resist that diet that is causing so many problems, both for our planet and for human health,” says cofounder Alexis Fox. “It’s not that people don’t want to eat differently—I think a lot of people do want to eat differently—it’s that the systems we have in place make it hard for people to eat whole food and real food, and it makes it really easy for people to eat heavily processed food.”
More a grocery delivery than a meal kit service, Fox explains that Lighter curates meal plans for its customers and delivers ingredients that have been customized to fit their health goals, time constraints, food preferences, cooking skill, and kitchen equipment.
Because Lighter outsources delivery, customers from all over the country can use the service. Pricing varies based on number of people in the household, but costs average out to between $4.30 and $5.70 per meal.
