How meal delivery services save you time is a common topic among those of us sick of the constant struggle to keep up with putting healthy meals on the table.
Especially while trying to control your grocery shopping budget, keeping up with this task is easier said than done.
These various delivery services make sure you are able to have a few nights off from the grind, all the while trying new recipes, new foods, and having a blast while you’re at it.
Various Ways Kits Save You Time
So how exactly do these kits save time?
There are a lot of components that come into play to put meals on the table at home.
We’ll go through some common areas in which you could see some time-saving relief thanks to these delivery companies, starting with your weekly food planning.
Meal Planning
Creating a meal plan, especially if you have a large family and/or picky family members, can actually require a lot of your attention.
Coming up with ideas can sometimes mean scouring the internet or cookbooks for recipes, trying to find ones that everyone will like, and that will salvage your time and money as much as possible.
Also, a common problem with the planning process is that people tend to plan an entire week at once, then don’t end up using all of the ingredients and ending up with a lot of food waste (guilty as charged!).
Meal delivery services such as meal kits and prepared meals alleviate so much of this stress!
It depends on which service you choose, of course.
If you choose a standard 3-dinner meal kit, that’s half the week right there that you don’t have to plan dinner.
The same goes for other similar options that can cut time in other areas, such as smoothie boxes, snack boxes, lunch services, services specifically for kid food, and more.
You could even mix & match to really keep it short.
Grocery Shopping
Once you finally finish your planning process, you have to go to the grocery store (or at the very least put together a pickup order) to get the ingredients needed for your particular plan.
The grocery shopping difficulty increases drastically if you must do this with kids in tow, of course.
Having a meal delivery service subscription that’s delivered every week is something that could prevent a lot of stressful effort when it comes to shopping.
For those meals that are covered by the kit, you don’t need to worry about buying any ingredients.
On top of that, you won’t have to worry about how you’ll use up the remainder of the ingredients once the recipe is finished, because your meal kit ingredients are perfectly prepared already with portion control measures.
This allows you to save money on your overall grocery shopping budget.
Prep
No matter what you decide to make, there is always some type of prep work involved, and you’ll have less of that with meal kits on your side.
Whether it’s chopping onions, making sauces, dicing potatoes, or even just measuring ingredients, that all adds up.
Meal kits do the prep work for you, although the kit you choose will determine how much of that is pre-prepped.
For example, there are services such as Gobble that will prep everything for you to the point that putting your dinner together will only take 15 minutes or less.
There are some services such as Blue Apron, HelloFresh, and Home Chef that focus more on the freshness factor, therefore don’t prep quite as much, although they do prep most of what you need and pre-measure most of the rest.
There are some options such as Every Plate that focus on providing meals with fewer steps involved, so those recipes will naturally require less prep.
There are many options, although any of these meal kits will save you money and time when it comes to prepping.
Skip the Cooking with Prepared Meal Delivery Services
If you want to take it a step even further, you could opt for a prepared meal delivery service such as Freshly, which is the ultimate in convenience when it comes to meal delivery services.
These meals are already cooked, so all you need to do when you’re ready to eat is reheat them.
It’s the convenience of a home-cooked dinner that will save time beyond measure.
There are some of these meal delivery services that arrive frozen, and some that arrive fresh, so you can choose whichever works for your particular needs.
Less Cleanup
One of the worst parts about making dinner involves the clean up afterward, right?
Here is where meal kits come to the rescue.
Most of these meal delivery services focus on using just a couple of pans, and of course, prepared meals will take it a step further and involve just a simple utensil.
This means you’ll be cleaning up less after dinner and relaxing more, spending time with your family, or whatever else needs catching up.
Easier to Stick to Dietary Preferences
There are so many widely recognized dietary preferences out there these days.
From vegetarian and vegan to gluten-free, non-GMO, keto, and paleo, there are many meal delivery services that offer these options as whole plans to keep you on track.
There are low-calorie plans, plans to help you gain weight (great for bodybuilders), organic options, and so much more.
When you have the food already prepped, or maybe even cooked already, it’s a lot easier to stick to your plan than if you have to go through the entire process yourself.
