The 6 Best Meal Delivery Services for Families

If you’re willing to cook but just don’t have the time for regular meal planning, meal kit services can take the pressure off figuring out what to make yourself for dinner. But if you’re feeding a family, you know the culinary demands of occasionally tyrannical five-year-olds and the requirement to fit all your cooking into a window small enough to fit a single episode of Paw Patrol ups that pressure quite a bit. So while we’ve tested just about every meal kit imaginable, our editors and contributors with kids have also kept an eye out for which are the best meal delivery services for families.

• Best meal kit for families overall: HelloFresh
• Best meal kits for big families: HomeChef
• Best meal kit for particularly busy families: Blue Apron
• Best for snacks and super-quick prep: Hungryroot
• Best for vegetarian families: Dinnerly
• Best organic meal kits: Green Chef
• Best for babies and toddlers: Little Spoon

Of course, every family is different, so we’ve broken down our picks into categories that take into account the size, age, and certain dietary restrictions or preferences of many families. 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 work of mealtime. Heck, it may even help keep your pantry stocked with snacks between meals too.

HelloFresh

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HelloFresh

About HelloFresh: HelloFresh, one of the first meal kit delivery services to hit the market, has an impressively large weekly menu. It’s aimed at a wide audience but allows you to choose plans geared toward different requirements: meat and veggie/carb-conscious meals, veggie and plant-based meals, quick-and-easy meals, family-friendly meals, and pescatarian meals. Unless you’re focused on specific dietary needs, it’s a great go-to.

Why it's great for families: Every week, you can choose your family meals from more than 100 options—which means that no matter what your household does or doesn’t like to eat, there’s almost sure to be a recipe or three you can all agree on. And, importantly for our considerations here, HelloFresh offers family-friendly meals, which are “kid-tested” and “picky eater approved” (citations to which kids and picky eaters are testing and approving not included). Additionally, HelloFresh offers “Big Batch” dinners (with an upcharge), which offer double portions for up to eight people or the option of leftovers.

What we love: Multiple Bon Appétit staff and contributors have tried HelloFresh over the years, and our testers have all been happy with the large portion sizes, fresh ingredients, and the add-on options, which include stand-alone proteins (chicken breasts, steaks, etc), smoothies, snacks, and desserts. Most recently, we tried Hello Fresh in a home with two adults and two kids, including some Big Batch options for families. The recipes were crowd-pleasing and satisfying for every age.

What we’d leave: Our one flag had to do with preparation and cooking time with the larger meals, which was often noted around 45 minutes on the recipe card and took even longer in practice, especially when batch cooking was necessary.

Home Chef

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Home Chef

About Home Chef: Home Chef is a traditional meal kit service that sends pre-portioned ingredients and easy-to-follow, family-friendly recipes that make it easy to get a fresh meal on the table in 15 to 30 minutes. Meals are available in four categories: classic meal kits, Express kits that take 30 minutes or less, oven-ready Chopped & Ready options that you assemble in a provided tin and then pop in the oven, and Fast & Fresh microwavable recipes. You can pick a mix of all types for your weekly box. Home Chef also offers a selection of add-ons like extra protein, soups, salads, snacks, and desserts.

Why it's great for families: If you have a lot of mouths to feed, Home Chef is a great option, because the more meals you order, the more budget-friendly it becomes—especially if you order from the Family Menu. Home Chef’s standard meals are two servings each and, on average, cost $7.99 to $9.99 per serving; but when you order from the Family Menu, meals are just $6.99 per serving, no matter how many you get (customizations like swapping your protein may come with an upcharge).

What we love: The portion sizes are large, the meal plans are customizable, and you can select your meal kits based on dietary needs and preferences. We found the recipes simple and kid-friendly enough to please young critics. Meals weren’t too complex, but they were hearty and filling. Many of the recipes had a nostalgic feel (think meat wrapped in puff pastry) that reminded us of the dinners we ate as kids. We also liked the specific Family Plan option with categories like Express and Chopped & Ready which are designed to get food on the table in 30 minutes and under 20 minutes, respectively, along with traditional and oven-ready meal kits.

The flexibility of Home Chef can also come in clutch if your family has a busy schedule one week and a relaxing schedule the next. It’s easy to customize how many meals you want in each shipment; if you select three meals one week, you can still order five for the following.

What we’d leave: There’s quite a bit of plastic in each Home Chef kit. Contributor Alexis Berger acknowledged that this may be the norm for meal kits, but thinks there’s room for improvement. “Home Chef divides each meal into its own plastic bag and then within that bag, you’ll find individually bagged ingredients for each recipe. This organizational structure is great for knowing what items go with which meal, but the literal added layer is just more disposable packaging,” she says.

Blue Apron

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Blue Apron

About Blue Apron: Blue Apron is a veteran of the cook-it-yourself food delivery business, having started shipping way back in 2012. While initially offering a relatively involved “you’re the chef” selection of fancy-ish recipes, the menu has expanded to over 100 weekly options, including heat-and-eat meals to meet all kinds of customers and constraints.

Why it's great for families: In 2025, Blue Apron turned the meal kit subscription service model on its head a bit by doing away with the whole “subscription” part. Now, you can simply go shopping for the meals you want and have them shipped, no commitment or recurring deliveries necessary (unless you want that). For that reason alone, we recommend Blue Apron for both the meal kit-curious family to test out how meal kits might work into your lifestyle, families whose schedules shift from week to week, as well as for the forgetful family who may not remember to curate or pause the upcoming autoshipped boxes from a different service.

What we love: When contributor Lizzy Briskin tested Blue Apron’s new model, she found the meal kits to be satisfying and delicious overall, and a great option for filling out a week of meals when you simply don’t have the time to plan or prep yourself.

What we’d leave: Despite its large menu, filters for food types and dietary restrictions leave a bit to be desired. And unless you opt for the pre-made, single-portion Dish meals or low-lift Assemble and Bake options to replace your convenient takeout, you still need to allow time to cook the kits, which, in our experience, did take more time and concentration, especially when cooking for four.

Hungryroot

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Hungryroot

About Hungryroot: More of a grocery delivery service store than a traditional meal kit service, Hungryroot offers a large selection of ingredients (often semi- or fully-cooked) and packaged items that can be thrown together for super-quick, satisfying dinners for two or four people. In addition to the ingredients intended for meals, you can also get many 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. Then, you can narrow down your options by using Hungryroot’s massive 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. In recent years, Hungryroot has also leaned into its AI and algorithmic capabilities to recommend products and autofill your shopping cart.

Why it's great for families: Hungryroot replaces an essential and often hassle-filled experience (when done with kids in tow): grocery shopping. But unlike other online grocers, the convenience extends to its meal prep options as well. It’s not uncommon to enjoy your first bite within 10 or 15 minutes of beginning your cook thanks to simple recipes, often with pre-trimmed and washed produce or precooked ingredients.

What we love: The ingredients are high-quality and many of the condiments, salad mixes, and other packaged foods are Hungryroot’s own brand (we liked their unique offerings such as chickpea-based edible cookie dough). But you’ll also find brands you see in the grocery store, too, blending the best of shopping at, say, Trader Joe’s or Aldi with a trip to Whole Foods.

What we’d leave: Setting your preferences and selecting your groceries is a little tedious at first, but once you get rolling with this service, it’s great.

Dinnerly

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Dinnerly

About Dinnerly: 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 fewer (albeit delicious) meals to choose from each week.

Why it's great for families: In addition to the usual categories like low-calorie, quick-and-easy, and low-carb, Dinnerly gives you the option of setting your preferred menu to vegetarian and “picky eater approved.” According to the website, these 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.

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.

What we love: When making Dinnerly meals for kids, we’ve found they enjoyed not only eating, but also helping prepare the family-friendly kit. And even when meals are not vegetarian, we appreciated that you can replace the protein in many of the meat-heavy recipes with Impossible Foods’ plant-based proteins.

What we’d leave: We did find that there were inconsistent expectations for effort, cleanup, and cookware, so you may need to budget more time than what the recipe card recommends.

Green Chef

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Green Chef

About Green Chef: Eating “clean” might mean something different depending on who you ask, but according to its website, Green Chef is the first CCOF (California Certified Organic) meal kit company and, as of 2026, is also the first to offer select recipes that are “Certified Clean” by Clean Label Project. That means that, in addition to organic produce and locally and sustainably sourced ingredients, certain Green Chef recipes are free of many toxins and contaminants as well as an overall ban on things like artificial colors and flavors. Green Chef also caters to a variety of special diets—including keto, gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian, Mediterranean, low-calorie, and high-protein—and when you sign up, you can set your preference to “healthy meal kits for families.”

Why it's great for families: Green Chef is a high-end meal kit service that prioritizes sustainability and quality ingredients. So if your goal is to feed your family organic home-cooked meals—but you don’t want to spend hours in the kitchen every weeknight—this is a great option. Another plus is that you’ll likely also save money by subscribing to Green Chef over shopping the grocery store for organic ingredients. When contributor Lizzy Briskin tested Green Chef, she found that the cost per serving for a Green Chef meal was up to half the cost of shopping for the same organic ingredients.

What we love: The selection is impressive, and the recipes are reliable and flavorful. Briskin enjoyed the shrimp in her Southwestern Shrimp Tacos With Corn Slaw recipe, noting that, “often, frozen shrimp can be rubbery and flavorless, but these were juicy and sweet. There was plenty of fajita seasoning to coat every crustacean, and the tacos were fully loaded.” We also appreciated that the ingredients were organized by recipe and that the instructions were easy to follow, thanks in part to pictures on the recipe cards.

What we’d leave: In repeat testing, many Bon Appétit staff and contributors find that these meals do take a little more work and time—and produce more dirty dishes—than other kits on this list.

Little Spoon

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Little Spoon

About Little Spoon: 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. Meals are selected with guidance from registered dietitians, pediatric nutritionists, and other feeding experts. 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 more premium organic ingredients. And yes: There are noodles, too.

Why it's great for families: 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.

What we love: If you’re tired of the constant requests for the same sandwich or processed snacks over and over again, Little Spoon is a great way to introduce new flavors and cuisines into your home in a decidedly kid-friendly way. Senior commerce writer Emily Farris tested the service, saying that “everyone in my home (including me) really loved every element of the Sunny-Butter Chicken, a limited-time collaboration with Brooklyn Delhi—especially after I put the veggie turmeric poppers in the air fryer to crisp them up.”

What we’d leave: Packaged snacks aside, this meal service is really best for babies and toddlers, because the simpler preparations are what Little Spoon does best. We felt that some of the big-kid entrées are trying to do too much, and there’s a chance older, pickier kids will find at least one thing on the plate to hate.

We test and retest meal kits on an ongoing process, relying on our methodical Bon Appétit editors and writers to cook them in real life situations at home, on weeknights, and for their partners and children when possible.

Our reviewers subscribed or were sent meal kits for two to four weeks, and in some cases we tested the same kit multiple times over the course of a few years as menus and services changed or developed. We not only review and judge the cooking and food itself, but also the ordering and delivery process, the packaging and ingredient quality, diversity of menu options, and the reliability of the recipes (including their promised start-to-finish times!).

Using all of that information, we selected the best available options to cater to specific household needs: bigger families, little kids, organic meals, lots of vegan and vegetarian options, and flexibility for home cook involvement (i.e., little to no prep). Like all our meal kit tests, this list of the best meal kits for families is regularly updated based on feedback from our ongoing testing.

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