The 6 Best Meal Delivery Services for Families (2024)

Getting home-cooked meals on the table is often a challenge for parents and caregivers, but the best meal delivery services for families can make the process a whole lot easier. Because whatever your household’s dietary restrictions or preferences—and no matter how much or how little cooking you actually want to do—a family-friendly meal kit subscription will lighten your load by taking the thought, grocery shopping, and some or all of the prep out of making dinner. Depending on the meal service you choose, you can get hella snacks too.

• Best meal kits for big families → HomeChef
• Best selection → HelloFresh
• Best for vegetarian families → Dinnerly
• Best organic meal kits → Green Chef
• Best for snacks and super-quick prep → Hungryroot
• Best for babies and toddlers → LittleSpoon
• How we tested the best meal kits for families

• The Best Meal Delivery Services, Tested By BA Editors
• The Cheapest Meal Delivery Services
• The Best Prepared Meal Delivery Service

As a working mom who struggles to make dinner happen by 6 most school nights, I’ve tried a lot of meal kits. In doing so, I’ve found that the best meal delivery services for my family of three keep the prep and the flavors pretty simple (I can always season my own serving as needed). That said, my kids are generally willing to try anything at least once, and we don’t follow any special diets or have any major food allergies, and I’m well aware that what works for us won’t necessarily work for every family. So when selecting the best meal delivery services for families from Bon Appétit’s list of the overall best meal delivery services, I also included editor- and contributor-tested options for bigger families, organic meals, and vegetarian households.

Below, find more information on the 6 best meal delivery services for families, including what kind of prep is involved and the average price per serving.

Home Chef is a traditional meal kit service that sends preportioned ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes that make it easy to get a family meal on the table in 15 to 30 minutes. The portion sizes are large, the meal plans are customizable, and you can select your meal kits based on dietary needs and preferences.

Though it isn’t the most affordable meal kit on the market (that would be EveryPlate), it comes pretty close if you’re feeding a big family. Home Chef’s pricing model is set up so that the more you order, the more budget-friendly it becomes. And it doesn’t take much—just four servings of two standard meals per delivery—to hit the pricing sweet spot, which is $6.99 per serving. Bon Appétit and Epicurious contributor Adam Campbell-Schmitt tried Home Chef and found the recipes to be very kid-friendly and simple enough for his own picky eaters.

In addition to the meal kits, Home Chef offers oven-ready meals and other fully cooked meal options, plus add-ons like extra protein, soups, salads, snacks, and desserts.

HelloFresh was one of the first meal kit delivery services to hit the market (it’s actually been around longer than BlueApron and Sunbasket), which probably has something to do with its vast weekly meal selection.

Every week, you can pick your family meals from more than 100 meal options—which means that no matter what your household does or doesn’t like to eat, there’s sure to be at least a meal kit or three you can all agree on. Once you’re signed up, it’s easy to make your weekly selections by filtering the menu options by category: meat and veggie/carb-conscious meals, veggie and plant-based meals, quick-and-easy meals, and pescatarian meals. And, of course, there’s also a category for family-friendly meals, which are “kid-tested” and “picky eater approved.”

A few Bon Appétit staffers have tried HelloFresh and our testers have all been happy with the large portion sizes, fresh ingredients, and the add-on options, which include proteins, smoothies, snacks, and desserts.

Dinnerly is Martha & Marley Spoon’s more affordable sister meal kit service, and while it doesn’t have Martha Stewart’s name attached to it, it does have more than 100 meals on its weekly menu, including a variety of tasty family-friendly vegetarian and vegan meals. Dinnerly is also comparatively more affordable than the popular plant-based meal delivery service Purple Carrot, which offers only 12 delicious meals a week.

In addition to the usual categories like low-calorie, quick-and-easy, and low-carb, at sign-up you can set your preferred menu to vegetarian and “picky eater approved” which, according to the website, are “crowd-pleasing recipes for eaters who avoid spicy food and prefer familiar ingredients.” The kind of recipes that might live in the middle of this Venn diagram are cheesy baked pastas, veggie burgers, vegetarian burrito bowls, quesadillas, and pizza.

I’m not a vegetarian, but every time I’ve tried Dinnerly, my kids have enjoyed not only eating, but helping to prepare the family-friendly meal kits. And for what it’s worth, many of the meat-heavy recipes also allow you to substitute the animal protein with Impossible Foods’ plant-based proteins.

In addition to the meal kits, you can also order from Dinnerly’s impressive add-on market for extras like Roberta’s pizza, heat-and-eat breakfast items, microwavable vegetarian meals, produce, plant-based proteins, sides, desserts, and some kid-friendly snacks.

If your goal is getting organic family meals on the table, and you don’t mind spending some time on prep, Green Chef is a high-end meal delivery service that prioritizes sustainability.

According to its website, Green Chef is the first CCOF (California Certified Organic) meal kit company, and the service offers a variety of meal types with organic as well as locally and sustainably sourced ingredients. Green Chef also caters to a variety of special diets, including keto, gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian, Mediterranean, low-calorie, and high-protein. When you sign up, you can also set your preference to “healthy meal kits for families.”

In our testing, we found that these meals do take a little more work and time—and produce more dirty dishes—than comparable kits, but Green Chef does offer a selection of quick-and-easy recipes every week too.

There are few things I dislike more than grocery shopping with my two young kids—which is one of the many reasons I love Hungryroot.

More of a grocery delivery service store than a traditional meal kit service, Hungryroot offers a large selection of high-quality ingredients (often semi- or fully cooked) and packaged groceries that can be thrown together for super-quick, satisfying dinners for two or four people. It’s not uncommon to cook and then start to eat meals within 10 or 15 minutes—which is cheaper, faster, and seemingly healthier than takeout, and far less stressful than taking small kids to the grocery store. For example, this kid-friendly chicken quesadilla recipe uses precooked, seasoned chicken and takes just 10 minutes start to finish. When I don’t want to think about dinner, I can go by the recipe card, and if I’m feeling creative, I can use the ingredients to make something else.

In addition to the ingredients intended for meals, you can also get most of your other groceries from Hungryroot, including meat, fish, eggs, dairy, poultry, pantry staples and snacks—so many great snacks! There’s a pretty lengthy survey at sign-up to help the system learn your preferences, and Hungryroot has an impressive number of filters for cuisines and dietary restrictions, including pescatarian, high-protein, carb-conscious, dairy-free, tree nut–free, and even diabetes-friendly. And if you or your kids hate something, you can add it to your “never send” list.

There seems to be a meal service for nearly every diet and wellness trend (paleo, keto, smoothies, grain bowls, etc.). And if you simply want to outsource wholesome food for your small children and want to do absolutely no meal prep, there’s a service for that too! Yes, Little Spoon is a fully prepared meal delivery service exclusively for babies and toddlers.

With guidance from registered dietitians, pediatric nutritionists, and other feeding experts, Little Spoon offers snacks and nutritious meals for kids of all ages, starting with organic purées, baby cereal, and puffs for the earliest solids stage. As your littles get bigger, you can introduce new flavors and textures through healthy meals like kid-friendly smoothies (in a pouch, of course!) and three-course finger-food dinners made with whole, organic ingredients. There are even premade meals for bigger kids; think Lunchables, but made with premium organic ingredients.

Like meal kits for adults, you can personalize your kids-only subscription to fit your family’s dietary preferences, and you can filter different meal options based on common kid allergens like tree nuts, shellfish, and gluten. Little Spoon also makes it easy to pause or skip your subscription and to adjust the quantity and frequency as needed.