The Best Healthy Meal Prep Services In The UK

The best healthy meal prep services can be huge time-savers. Your meals arrive pre-made and all you have to do is throw them in the microwave or oven. The most common approach is for companies to send out a selection of meals that can be stored in your freezer or fridge, while others offer a daily delivery service—some will even supply every meal and snack you eat each day. Daily deliveries mean the food is fresher, but these services tend to be more expensive.

I’ve tested a wide variety of meal prep services based in the UK, and all those that are still available are ranked below. Before getting into the details I’ve listed a quick guide to my pick of the best healthy meal prep services to suit a variety of different requirements, such as dietary preferences or health and fitness goals.

How I Test Healthy Meal Prep Services

A company will send me a package of meals that’s in line with one of its usual orders, whether that’s a box of two or three meals, or a week of daily deliveries covering breakfast to dinner plus snacks. Does this mean I only say nice things to keep the free food coming? No. Scroll to the bottom of this article to read about services I didn’t rate as highly.

I aim to try a range of meals that suit different dietary preferences, always including vegan and low-calorie meals in my reviews where possible. I’m looking for satisfying, tasty meals that don’t skimp on vegetables in particular, because if you can’t hit your five-a-day with a meal prep service, then when can you?

The Quick List

The Best Healthy Meal Prep Services

Best overall

This delivery service seriously impressed me on many counts, including the most important of all—the delicious flavors in each meal I tried. Standouts included the Beef Brisket Massaman Curry and the vegan Sheepless Shepherd’s Pie. The beef curry in particular was far tastier and more satisfying than a 490-calorie meal (690 calories for the large serving) has any right to be, though to be fair it was pretty high in saturated fat.

The principles Tastily lives by are sound and healthy. All the meals are between 400-500 calories (or 600-700 calories for large portions), and include a big serving of veg. There’s a good range of veg too, even within the same meal, so you’re getting a welcome variety of nutrients.

The large portion option is an excellent development and I wish more meal prep services employed it. If you’re very active you need more than the standard serving size you get with these services to stop you hitting the snack cupboard half an hour after finishing your meal.

It’s easy to see a full nutritional breakdown of each meal available on the Tastily website, in both regular and large portions, so you can pick those that suit your diet goals as well as your tastebuds. There’s a range of vegan options and you can filter the meals quickly to find the right ones for you; once you start an order a slider shows you how much you can save per meal by buying in bulk, with prices starting from £7 a meal for four meals down to £6 a meal for 12.

Flavor is foremost with any meal service, and Tastily also backs up its high score in that department with a range of options that’s large enough to satisfy all comers but not so large as to make picking your meals a chore—thanks partly to the impressively easy-to-use website. Top marks all round.

Best for weight loss

This delivery service is all about weight loss, with two low-calorie meal plans available—either 1,200 or 1,800 calories. Both involve three meals and two snacks, which are delivered to your door in a large box along with heating instructions and a nutritional breakdown for each meal.

There are four different menus to choose from—classic, vegetarian, pescatarian and plant-based; the latter is also gluten-free—and you can opt for a three- or four-day plan. The meals are tasty as well and surprisingly filling given the calorie restrictions in place—high amounts of protein and fiber no doubt help. However, it’s sometimes a little too clear you’re on a weight-loss plan. One meal I tried was just a box of crunchy vegetables with a small amount of dressing. I still enjoyed it, but low-calorie meals are capable of being more of a treat.

If you’re training hard to pack on muscle or set PBs in running events, you may want to look at something like Fresh Fitness Food instead, but if you’re trying to lose weight, Balance Box will take care of your diet for you. 

Read more in our Balance Box review

Best value

Muscle Food’s Prepped Pots are cheaper than most meal prep services I’ve tried, but you wouldn’t know it from the meals themselves, which are tasty, nourishing affairs. That’s especially true for meat eaters who have a bigger range of meals to pick from, though chicken is the meat that appears on the menu by far the most frequently. When I tested the service there were just five vegan meals available and only one fish option, so it would be good to see more on those fronts, particularly because you get more value if you order more meals at a time.

Picking between the meals is made easy by the labels and filtering system on the Muscle Food website, which means you can see options under a certain calorie count, or with more portions of vegetables in them (most are labeled “one of your five-a-day” although there are a handful with two—more high-veg options would be welcomed).

At 10 meals for £39.90 (with £5.99 delivery), the Prepped Pots are great value, and you also get £10 off your first order plus free delivery. You do have to subscribe to the service, opting for weekly, fortnightly or monthly deliveries, but can put your sub on hold easily at any time. There are also seven-meal, 14-meal and 20-meal boxes available, and it’s £49.80 for your first order of 20 meals—that works out at £2.49 a meal, which is outstanding value.

Best for athletes

Prep Kitchen splits its service into two fitness goals, fat loss and muscle gain, and these determine the portion size of the meals you order. You then select how to approach your macros, choosing between balanced and low-carb, which replaces some carbs with more protein and vegetables.

You get the same meals on all plans, and all those meals are delicious in my experience. The dishes were never dry even after being microwaved from frozen, and the flavors always packed a punch, especially the spicy dishes.

Athletes in particular will be well served by Prep Kitchen thanks to the focus on filling, balanced meals that support hard training days. One downside is the small number of vegetarian options, and I also wasn’t a big fan of the breakfasts and snacks from Prep Kitchen. They weren’t significantly better than toast or cereal, so I’d advise sticking to the main meals.

Read more in our Prep Kitchen review

Best for vegans and vegetarians

I’ve tried the dinners, lunches and sides from this plant-based service, and was hugely impressed by all of them. The meals are tasty and satisfying, and remarkably varied. The lunch bowls in particular livened up my midday meals immensely, each containing a variety of veg and grains alongside a non-traditional mash—the coconut and edamame mash was the best I tried.

The meals come frozen and take six to 10 minutes to heat up in the microwave. You can order boxes of either six or 12 meals, although the 12-meal option contains two lots of six meals rather than 12 different ones. You can also add sides, desserts and smoothies to your box, and the sides are a worthwhile addition if you’re a very active person, since you might want a bit more food than is provided by a single meal.

There are low-calorie options on the Allplants menu, but the meals are pretty low in calories anyway—all the ones I tested came in under 600. They are also high in fiber and contain at least two portions of your five-a-day, and tick the healthy box without ever making it seem like they’re aiming to, which is always the best way to do it. 

Most meal prep services now have good vegetarian and vegan options, but Allplants’ entirely plant-based menu makes it easier to pick meals that fit the bill, and I haven’t come across another service that uses plant-based ingredients in such a variety of interesting ways.

Read more in our Allplants review

Best for bodybuilding

Fresh Fitness Food’s delivery service is about as close as you can get to having a personal chef and nutritionist making your meals every day without, you know, actually having those things. It’s helpful to think of it that way too, because FFF is expensive, but the price does reflect what you’re getting.

What you’re getting is bulk deliveries every few days (or daily deliveries in London) of healthy meals tailored to your preference and goals. If you’re looking to bulk up in particular, there’s a plan for that, as well as plans for lean gains, fat loss and a balanced plan for general health. Within those plans you can choose the types of food you do and don’t want to get, including plant-based and low-carb options, or even set the exact macros you want to hit.

The meals take two to three minutes to warm up and are uniformly tasty and filling. If you’re a bodybuilder and opt for one of the more intense bulking plans you can expect a lot of protein, mostly from chicken and white fish in my experience, which is ideal for adding muscle. On the balanced plan I found you get more variety and acceptable amounts of veg (you can never have too much veg).

It’s a supremely convenient service that makes it easy to eat healthily and puts you in the best possible place to achieve your fitness goals. The price starts at £24.50 a day for three meals, but that’s if you order 100 days up front. Drop that to 10 days and it’s £27 a day.

Read more in our Fresh Fitness Food review

Best for gut health

I’ve become fascinated with gut health during my time here at Coach, and this frozen meals service won me over by including a stat for each meal that shows how many different plant types it contains, because eating 30 types a week helps to create a more diverse gut microbiome. Field Doctor also offers low-FODMAP meals, which are ideal for those with IBS who are following the low-FODMAP diet or endurance athletes who might be trying it to reduce exercise-related gastrointestinal problems.

There’s a pleasing focus on evidence-based nutrition underpinning the meals here, with a diversity of plant foods and wholegrains, plus a load of beans and legumes included wherever possible.

None of the above would matter if the meals didn’t taste good, so the great news is that they do, with a variety of enjoyable options on the menu. Vegans are well catered for as well, and you can use a filter to show options such as low-calorie, high-protein or low-FODMAP meals.

Best gluten free and dairy free

One my favorite recipe box services has branched out into selling healthy frozen meals as well. After a soft launch when the frozen meals were restricted to people ordering a recipe box, they’re now a standalone product so people who only know how to use a microwave can enjoy convenient, healthy ready meals too.

The meals are all gluten-free, dairy-free and mostly under 600 calories, and they take less than eight minutes to reheat. Currently there are 25 different meals on the menu including nine veggie options.

More Tried-And-Tested Recommendations

This frozen vegan meal delivery service has nailed it on pretty much every count. Planty uses 100% recyclable packaging and offers carbon-neutral deliveries. It also has an easy-to-navigate website that provides in-depth nutritional details for every meal, and those meals are very tasty indeed, which of course is the most important factor of all.

I ate 10 of the meals on the menu, and highlights were the butternut and mango madras and the shepherd-less pie. While some meals were less enjoyable than others—I often find that stir-fries and pasta dishes are more diminished by microwave reheating than curries and stews are—none of the meals were truly disappointing. They were all laden with plants, as you’d expect, and the variety of veg used was impressive.

You can buy a box of six, eight or 10 meals from Planty on a subscription or one-off basis, and they arrive frozen so you can pop them straight in your own freezer to save for when time is tight. They take 10 minutes or less to heat up in the microwave, and the portion sizes are enough to fill you up on a normal day, though when feeling ravenous I often added an extra side.

The Chefly meals I tested were some of the tastiest I’ve had from any delivery service, and while they’re not as overtly focused on fitness as some other services, each dish generally had a good balance of macros and was certainly loaded with enough protein to satisfy any keen exerciser. The calorie count for each sits somewhere between 400 and 600, which is easy to fit into a healthy, balanced diet, and I was impressed at the range and amount of vegetables included too.

There were no vegan or vegetarian options on the menu when I tested the service, but some have been added now. I’d have liked clearer nutritional information on the packaging—I had to go to the Chefly website to get any info.

The prices also tend to be higher than with other services. Chefly’s meals start at £6.99 per meal if you order 12 a week, rising to £7.50 per meal for six or nine meals or £9.99 if you just order four meals. The meals are delivered on Wednesdays, come in recyclable packaging and need just three minutes in the microwave.

These microwave meals provide balanced, delicious meals rather than cutting calories. Frankly it’s nothing short of ready meals at their finest.

I was impressed by the flavor of the meals, even the recipes containing large chunks of meat or fish. For my money chicken breast is normally a microwave meal no-no because it ends up being too dry, but the chipotle recipe from The Transformation Chef was on point.

Slightly larger portions and a few more vegetables in each meal would have been welcome, and I did come unstuck when I mistook lemons for potatoes in one meal, which is my fault for diving in while looking at my phone, but these meals are great to have on standby in your fridge in a pinch.

You can try The Transformation Chef’s service with a six-meal starter box, or go all-in on a complete plan which contains 12 meals and a couple of snacks. Both have vegan options too. The meals arrive on a Tuesday morning and stay fresh in the fridge for seven days.

The range of Persian frozen meals available from Shuro Shirin has a lot to recommend it. For one, I had no idea how to make Persian food so it brought something legitimately new to my table. And the range is laden with the kind of hearty, warming fare that’s perfect for the winter.

Lamb fans in particular will be pleased by the selection, since it is a staple of Persian cuisine, and there are few delicious lamb stews available elsewhere. In fact, all the stews and soups I tried were spectacularly good, rich and satisfying treats that I’d happily sub in for a takeaway, which despite the bonus of zero cooking would undoubtedly be less healthy and less delicious.

I must admit these are not truly health-focused meals. With flavor prioritized, the dishes are often quite high in saturated fat and salt, while the vegetable count is on the low side. However, they’re never so high in fat, salt or calories that it’s impossible to eat them as part of a balanced diet, while there are some dishes filled with pulses, as well as vegetarian and vegan options that naturally go heavier on the vegetables.

The rice you can order to eat with the stews suffered from oven or microwave reheating, which dried it out. You’d be better off making your own to have with the stews, which come out the other side of the reheating process as if they were freshly made.

The company behind No1 Bootcamp, which puts on European fitness and weight loss holidays, is now delivering healthy meals across the UK. The packages available come in three portion sizes—lite, balanced or max—and you can choose between meat and fish or plant-based meals.

However, what sets No1 Food Prep apart is that you’re not stuck to a limited list: You can also make your own meal combinations, picking the protein, veg side and carb from the extensive list of options. You can choose the portion size of each part of the meal, and also eschew carbs entirely in favor of a double helping of veg if you like.

The meals are delivered on Wednesdays and Sundays and come in microwaveable containers that have the basic nutritional info of the meal on the lid along with cooking instructions. I tried a variety of fish- and plant-based meals, and was consistently impressed by the flavors and also by how satisfying the portions were. I opted for the balanced portion size, rather than lite, which are 20% smaller for those looking to lose weight, or max, where the portions are ramped up for those looking to build mass or support a particularly intense training regime.

Après Food’s service looks fantastic. The packaging is appealing (and 100% recyclable), the meal descriptions are tantalizing, and the meals come in bundles that are directed toward certain situations or health goals. There’s a bundle of meals designed to help you sleep, one to help you recover from stress, and one for new parents (which is presumably a combo of the first two).

All the meals are balanced, with a varied range of ingredients and options including sides and desserts, though it would be good to have a few more plant-based options in the range. It’s a pretty well-priced service too, with a couple of meals available for £3.95 and the most expensive £6.95. The meals come frozen and take around 10 minutes to heat up in the microwave.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find all the meals that tasty. They were all fine, but there was nothing that stood out to put Après Food among the better meal prep services I’ve tried. Some were dry after cooking in the microwave, and some just weren’t that flavorsome, including the beef bourguignon which is usually a slam dunk.

Stocked takes an unusual approach to frozen meals, delivering packages of eight blocks that you can reheat and eat as a meal by themselves, or use as part of a meal alongside some carbs and other vegetables. The latter approach is the one that makes the most sense, because most of the meals are sauces that are best with rice or pasta. This means Stocked meals require more effort in the kitchen than others.

There are eight blocks in each pack, which Stocked suggests is enough for two to four meals, but I’d say you’d struggle to get more than three meals from that even when adding in your own carbs, unless you’re dishing out very small portions. The meals were a little bland in my experience, but they’re easy to spice up yourself, and the range includes several good plant-based options including a hearty ragu made with vegan sausage.

Stocked’s approach should make the meals substantially cheaper than with other prep services, but even if you order six packs at once it costs £1.10 a block, and you really need three for a meal plus other food on the plate. Stocked is cheaper than getting full meals delivered, but perhaps the saving isn’t big enough since there’s more work to do on your end.

Since the point of using a meal prep service is to make your life easier, that should start with the ordering process. The Good Prep absolutely nails this with a very easy-to-use website that guides you through selecting the breakfasts, lunches, dinners and extras (like juices and snacks) for your box, with clear nutritional information and prices.

The meal plans all contain three meals a day plus snacks and can be based on fitness goals, such as Trim & Slim for those looking to lose weight or Grow & Gain to bulk up. There’s also a vegan plan and a general balanced option.

I tested the Grow & Gain plan and while the meals weren’t outstandingly delicious or novel, they were all enjoyable and, for the most part, filling enough to sustain me during a demanding period of marathon training. The exception was after a long run of 22 miles, when I needed a lot more calories and carbs than the meal provided, but that’s fair enough.