Don’t Have Time to Meal Prep? Try Meal Delivery

It’s 5:47 on a Tuesday evening. You just walked in the door; you’re starving, and the only thing thawed is a questionable pound of ground turkey you’ve been meaning to deal with since Sunday.

Sound familiar?

I’ve been there more times than I’ll admit. I love a good meal prep system as much as the next person, but some weeks, the system just doesn’t happen. The calendar fills up, everyone needs to be somewhere, and cooking from scratch is the first thing to fall off the list.

So I did the thing you probably don’t have time to do. I signed up for a bunch of meal delivery services, the ones that actually show up here in Anne Arundel County, and I ate my way through them so you’d have a head start.

Hi! I’m Chrissy Rey with Pongos Interactive. Quick backstory on why I’m the one writing this post: I help Susie with the behind-the-scenes stuff on her website, including figuring out which topics land on this blog. When meal planning came up as an idea, I jumped on meal delivery services as an angle, partly because they’re genuinely useful for the busy families Susie works with, and partly because, well, it meant I got to try a month’s worth of dinners in the name of research. Everybody wins!

Here are the services I tried, so you know who we’re talking about:

• Farm to Temple is a local Baltimore operation: fresh, never frozen, no subscription.
• CookUnity is the big national one, a whole marketplace of chefs with a menu a mile long.
• Feast & Fettle is the premium, family-style pick, and it recently started cooking right here in Maryland.
• Vegetable + Butcher, based up in Upper Marlboro, makes every single meal gluten-free and dairy-free.

There’s also a bonus option at the end that isn’t delivery at all, but more on that later.

Quick heads-up before we get into it: Farm to Temple and CookUnity both gave me free meals to try. The CookUnity links in this post also earn Systems by Susie a small commission if you use them; the Farm to Temple code just gets you a discount, and Susie doesn’t make a dime on it. I paid for the meals from Feast and Fettle and Vegetable + Butcher out of my own pocket. For what it’s worth, I told every company up front that I’d order and review them whether they partnered with us or not, and I did. Either way, nobody bought a nicer review. If a meal was a miss, or a service did something that bugged me, I’m telling you.

First, a Little About Me

You should know who’s doing the tasting, because “this food is good” depends a lot on who’s saying it.

I run my own web development/SEO business, I work long hours, and my husband works second shift, so our weeknight dinner situation is already a little chaotic before anyone’s even hungry. I’m also on a GLP-1, so I’m hunting for higher-protein, lower-calorie meals, and my portions have shrunk enough that a lot of these single servings turned into two meals for me.

And I’m a little picky. Not toddler-picky, but no lamb, seafood, mushrooms, or chicken thighs. Textures can get me, and mushrooms and chicken thighs are repeat offenders, so I steered clear of those whenever I could.

One more thing you should know: I’ve done hardcore meal prep before. Once, my mom and I spent about six hours making a full month of freezer meals in a single day. Six. Hours. The food was great while it lasted, but I have sworn on everything I own that I will never, ever do that again. (EVER!!!)

These days, I try to keep cooking low-effort. I buy the pre-cut vegetables, I lean on shortcuts, and I do like to cook when I have the time for it, especially Cuban food. But “when I have the time” is the problem, and that’s why I jumped at the chance to do this research.

For the record, I tested these for two adults. My husband eats anything and does a lot of our cooking (he’s great about making my recipes when I hand them off). My 20-year-old still lives at home but doesn’t usually eat dinner with us, which is probably for the best, since as far as I can tell he runs entirely on Diet Dr. Pepper, dino nuggets, ramen, and pizza rolls.

Also, an important note: except for Feast & Fettle, each of these services delivers individual servings, so if you’re ordering for the whole family, make sure you order enough meals.

What I Actually Looked For

Before the food even shows up, there are a few things worth knowing about any service:

• Does it deliver to you, and how? Some of these are truly local. Some are national and just ship to your door. That changes how fresh the food feels when it lands.
• Is it a subscription that charges you automatically? This is the big one. A couple of these will keep sending food (and charging you) every week unless you go in and actively pause or skip. I found this out the hard way.
• Single meals or family-style? Most of these are single servings, one adult, one meal. One of them is family-style. That’s either exactly what you want or way too much food, depending on your house. And these are all portioned for adults, though most let you bolt on extras à la carte, including kids’ add-ons at CookUnity and Feast & Fettle if you’ve got littles to feed.
• Do they tell you the nutrition info? If you count calories or macros, or you’re on a GLP-1 like me, you’ll want this. Most list it. One doesn’t.

Okay. On to the food.

The Quick Comparison

Here’s everything side by side. I based the “cost for 8 servings” on two full dinners for a family of four, so you’re comparing the same amount of food across all of them, delivery included.

A couple of things jump out. At volume, Farm to Temple and CookUnity land around $12 to $15 a serving, making them the value picks once you order enough to spread out the delivery fee. Feast and Fettle and Vegetable + Butcher sit at the premium end, though with Feast and Fettle you’re getting a fuller, plated-dinner situation, not a single tray, so that number’s doing more work than it looks.

One nice surprise across the board: none of these rely on artificial preservatives, and none is the sad frozen dinner of years past. They’re all cooked fresh and delivered chilled. They differ in how far your food travels to reach you, and how picky each kitchen is about what goes into it.

Now the actual reviews.

Farm to Temple: Best for Keeping It Local (and Not Committing to Anything)

Farm to Temple is the true hometown pick. They cook everything in a Baltimore kitchen, source a lot of it from around here, and deliver on Sundays. The ingredients are organic, mostly from local farms and distributors, and the menu’s designed by a nutritionist, so it’s real food, not just something fast. That last part isn’t an accident: founder Raven Temple started the company back in 2015 after her own health issues sent her deep into food and nutrition (she went and got a master’s in it), with the goal of making healthy, local food more accessible around Baltimore. The food is fresh and never frozen. There’s no subscription.

Ordering was simple. You select how many meals you want (5, 6, 7, 10, 14, or 20), then choose which of the five meals from that week’s menu you want to fill that number with. You must place your order by 11:59 PM on Friday for Sunday delivery.

Now, the delivery. This is the one hiccup. A driver pulled up in a regular car and left my order on my front porch in a brown paper bag. There were a couple of ice packs, but they weren’t cold, and neither was the food. Everything was room temperature. I got a little nervous and messaged them, and they told me everything had been made fresh a few hours earlier, so it hadn’t been sitting. I ate it, I was fine, and I’d order again. 

My box had Lemon Pepper Salmon, Smoked Chicken (Sausage) Italian Pasta, Turkey Chili, Honey Garlic Chicken, and Teriyaki Beef and Broccoli. All of the meals were in the 400-600ish calorie range with 19+ grams of protein, which are my target ranges for dinners, so that’s when I enjoyed them, except the salmon, which my husband took to work for dinner since I’m not a fan of seafood. He said it was very tasty. I especially liked the Turkey Chili, served over rice and with delicious cornbread. That was the first thing I tried from this delivery, and I would definitely order it again. The Honey Garlic Chicken and Teriyaki Beef were also tasty and very filling. I enjoyed the Smoked Chicken Italian Pasta, but it was basically pasta with cut-up sausage and some spinach, so not sure I’d order it again for delivery since I can throw that together in a few minutes myself. Overall, the meals were good, and perfect for convenience when I needed to grab something for lunch or dinner.

Here’s what I love about Farm to Temple: there’s no subscription and no commitment. You just go in each week, look at what they’ve got, and order if something looks good. Nobody’s auto-charging you. Nobody’s shipping you a surprise box because you forgot to log in. For me, that’s a big deal, because I will forget.

The catch is variety. They run about five complete meals each week, and there’s usually a fish option, so my actual options were slimmer than the number suggests. The minimum order is 5 meals.

Cost: $11.90 to $12.40 a meal, plus $7 for delivery (or free if you pick up in Baltimore). Use code SUSIE15 for 15% off.

CookUnity: Best for Variety, and It’s Not Even Close

If Farm to Temple is the cozy local spot, CookUnity is the giant food hall with a hundred stalls. It’s a national service built around a rotating collective of chefs, and the variety is genuinely a little overwhelming (in a good way). I counted more than 100 meal options in a single week! It got started in Brooklyn about a decade ago, when founder Mateo Marietti set out to give independent chefs a way to cook for people directly, without the overhead of opening a restaurant. That’s why the menu feels like a bunch of different cooks doing their own thing rather than one corporate kitchen cranking out the same ten dishes.

The menu filtering on their website is extensive, and with this many options, you kind of need it. You can filter by vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, keto, Mediterranean, GLP-1 Balance, Fiber Boost, whatever fits how you eat. You can also set calorie and macro ranges, which was huge for me since I’m chasing more protein and fewer calories. You can even filter by protein type, so I was able to banish dark-meat chicken and seafood from my life for the CookUnity week; you can also filter by cuisine and specific chefs, then sort what’s left by calories, fat, or carbs. It’s the only one that lets me build a menu around exactly what I needed. And for anyone eating plant-based: when I filtered for Meals plus Vegan, I still had 20-plus options.

As for what’s in it: no artificial preservatives, and nothing’s frozen. The one thing to know, if eating local matters to you, is that CookUnity cooks in regional kitchens around the country and ships from the nearest one. For us in Anne Arundel County, that’s not exactly down the road, so your food travels farther than the homegrown options do.

I should note that I placed a few CookUnity orders before writing this blog post, so I’d already tried it a few times and enjoyed it, but I placed an order specifically for this post so I could document the whole process.

Delivery was smooth. They sent text updates with an exact delivery time and dropped off my order in a branded cooler bag with cold ice packs.

This CookUnity order included four meals: Chicken Satay Quinoa Bowl, Fettuccine Bolognese, Cuban Pork with Mojo de Ajo, and Chicken and Pearl Couscous. I enjoyed the Chicken Satay before we left for a 10-day RV trip to Maine. It was the only meal that was served on a plate, and it was a lot of food, but very tasty. We ate the rest of the meals in the RV. I was getting a little hangry before we made it to our first stop, so I microwaved the Fettuccine Bolognese as we pulled into the campground in Mystic, CT, while our dog, Bingo, supervised. It was really good and very filling. I heated up the Cuban Pork for my husband while he hooked up the water and electric. Of course, I took advantage of the cook tax (hey, microwaving still counts) and tasted a little of the pork, black beans, and plantains. Everything was delicious. I ate the Chicken and Pearl Couscous for lunch at our second stop in Greenville, ME, when we took a break between hiking and an evening of moose-watching (sadly, we saw no moose). 

One thing to watch with CookUnity: it auto-ships. If you don’t go in and skip your week, it’s coming, and you’re paying. (Their order screen literally says “you’ve skipped this order, unskip before Wednesday” so at least they’re clear about it.) 

On price, CookUnity’s per-meal cost drops the more you order: it starts at $15.29 per meal for a 4-meal week and drops to $11.89 at 16 meals. Delivery is a flat $9.99, and their UnityPass membership ($23.99 a month) covers it, so it’s worth adding if you order more than once each month. CookUnity often has introductory offers, and I got a significant discount for my first two weeks.

Cost: $11.89 to $15.29 a meal depending on how many you order, plus $9.99 delivery. New customers can get 30% off their first week through this link.

Feast & Fettle: Best for Feeding a Whole Family

Feast and Fettle feels less like “meal delivery” and more like a personal chef quietly stocking your fridge. Which tracks, because it was started in 2016 by Maggie Pearson, an actual former personal chef, and grew out of that private-chef work. It’s based in Rhode Island and only recently began delivering in Maryland, and it’s the most premium of the bunch. It’s also the only family-style option, which completely changes how you use it. Instead of individual meals, you get full entrees that each serve multiple people, plus sides.

Everything’s made from scratch, with no preservatives and no seed oils (they cook with avocado oil), and the meat and eggs are antibiotic- and hormone-free. They’re a New England company at heart, but here’s the local twist: they recently opened a production kitchen in Elkridge, MD (Howard County), so meals for our area are now made in Maryland and hand-delivered by their own team rather than boxed and shipped. That’s part of why it shows up tasting as if someone plated it by hand.

Ordering on the website was simple. For the plan I selected, I could choose three entrees and five sides. There were a lot of options, and they gave recommendations on what went well together. On delivery day, I received text updates letting me know the food was on its way, and another when it was delivered. The food arrived at my front door in branded bags plastic with freezer packs.

The first box I ordered had Homestyle Lasagna, Adobo Steak Tips with herb butter, and Grilled Chicken Souvlaki, along with a spread of sides like lemon roasted potatoes, herb quinoa, and an arugula salad. Another week brought a Classic Chicken Pot Pie, Parmesan-Crusted Chicken, and Grilled Steak Tips, plus a free order of New England Lobster Rolls they threw in (my husband was thrilled; I don’t do seafood, so, you know, teamwork). The food was excellent. It was genuinely the most “somebody cooked this in my kitchen, and it wasn’t me” of everything I tried.

Two honest notes. One, it’s a LOT of food. We’re a family of three, with only two of us eating most of these meals, and three family-size meals (for four people) over five days beat us, badly. Like, we tried eating leftovers for lunch, and still ended up wasting food. If your crew is smaller, order fewer entrees than you think you need. Two, it’s the only service that doesn’t list nutrition info, so if you track macros or you’re on a GLP-1, you’re guessing.

One more small heads-up: they give you reheating options for the microwave, stove, and/or oven, depending on the dish. I appreciated that for the things that are better crisped than steamed, like the Chicken Pot Pie. But the instructions aren’t foolproof. One of our meals swore it’d be hot in a few minutes and took easily three times that to actually heat through, so trust your own eyes over the card.

The subscription here is the friendly kind, and I want to give them credit: it does not auto-ship. If you don’t actively go place an order, you don’t get charged. After my run-ins with the auto-shippers, that felt like a small act of kindness. But they do have a membership that covers your shipping, and that renews automatically.

Cost: family-style, around $270 a week for the tier I got (three entrees that each serve four, plus sides), which works out to roughly $22.50 a serving. Delivery is covered by a $10/month membership. New customers often get 50% off the first week. Ordering runs about three days ahead: you order by noon Thursday for a Sunday delivery, Friday for Monday, Saturday for Tuesday, or Sunday for Wednesday.

Vegetable + Butcher: Best for Premium “Healthy” Meals

Vegetable + Butcher is local (they’re in Upper Marlboro, about 30 minutes from me), and their meals are high-protein, fiber-rich, and plant-forward. Their food makes me think of MOM’s Organic Market or Whole Foods, which is why I say they’re best for premium “healthy” meals. (And this is not a dig! I shop at MOM’s!) Their website promises “high-protein, plant-diverse, anti-inflammatory meals help steady blood sugar, ease bloat, and keep your energy and focus in a healthier lane.”

The company goes back to 2016, when a couple, Turner Hoff and Ariane Valle, started it after getting tired of losing every weekend to meal prep. So they built what they wished existed. She’s the plant-based “vegetable,” he’s the “butcher,” which is where the name comes from, and they split the food into two tracks accordingly.

Ingredient-wise, they take it seriously: no seed oils, no refined sugar, and a long list of banned additives. They source locally when they can, and they’re refreshingly upfront that some things (avocados, lemons, that kind of thing) just can’t be. They make everything fresh the day before delivery at their Upper Marlboro facility, and the packaging’s compostable, which is a nice touch.

They offer some filtering when selecting meals on their website: a vegan-only view plus advanced nutritional filters like Low Carb, High Fiber, High Protein, Low Calorie, and Low Sodium, so if you’re eating toward certain numbers, you can narrow it down. It’s just a much smaller pool to filter through than CookUnity’s.

The delivery was a little weird. Even though they’re in the next county and only half an hour away, they ship it like it’s coming from across the country. My first box was fine. My second box clearly tipped over somewhere in transit, and stuff leaked all over everything, with food shoved to one side of each container. Not appetizing.

The food was very good. They market it as “Michelin quality,” which could be accurate, but I’m not a Michelin restaurant kinda gal, so I wouldn’t know. For my first order, I had a Local Mixed Greens salad with flat iron steak, a Chilaquiles Brunch Bowl, a Loaded Sweet Potato Nacho Salad, and their “Butter Chicken,” plus some vegan overnight oats for breakfast. Another order brought Dan Dan Noodles, a Roasted Cauliflower Burrito Bowl, and a Satay chicken salad, among others. The one miss was the salad, which had fennel in it, and, okay, I have strong feelings about fennel (it tastes like black licorice, which should be a crime), so I picked it out, and the rest was delicious. That’s on me, not them.

They also auto-ship. I forgot to skip a week and got a surprise box I didn’t mean to order (oops). And when I went to cancel, they offered me 40% off my next two orders to stay. Great deal if you were on the fence, but also, you know, a lot of hoops.

One more thing: I reached out to them directly, since they’re practically neighbors, and never heard back. What I did get was added to their email list without ever opting in. Not a great first impression, and also not a good practice for any company.

On price, their meals put this on the premium end. Vegan lunches and dinners run $16.50, the meat ones are $19.49 (a little less if you order more), and vegan breakfasts (the only breakfast option) are $12.50. Shipping is $14.99 per delivery, and heads up: they’ll offer you both a Tuesday and a Thursday drop, which is nice for freshness but doubles your shipping if you take both. There’s an intro discount for new customers, and mine quietly carried over to my second order too.

Cost: $16.50 (vegan) to $19.49 (meat) a meal, plus $14.99 per delivery.

A Quick Word on Add-Ons

Most of these services let you pad an order beyond the main meals, which is handy when you want a little more than dinner. Here’s what I ran into:

• CookUnity: desserts, snacks, protein-only options, and à la carte items you can drop into any order.
• Feast & Fettle: single-serving kids’ meals, lunch add-ons (most ran $14 to $18 a serving), desserts, and à la carte entrees or sides if you just want one more of something.
• Vegetable + Butcher: vegan “boosters” à la carte, including juice tonics, energy bites, hard-boiled eggs, and chicken breasts.
• Farm to Temple: snack add-ons for $5.50 each. When I checked, that meant Protein Blueberry Muffins (270 cal, 17g protein), a Fruit Cup (80 cal), and Overnight Oats (307 cal, 16g protein), though those rotate with the menu.

Bonus: The Fresh Market “Little Big Meal” (For When You Actually Want to Cook)

This one isn’t delivery, so it doesn’t really belong in the lineup, but I loved it too much to leave out.

The Fresh Market does a weekly “Little Big Meal” that feeds a family of four for $25 (or $20 on weekends if you’re a loyalty club member). It’s not heat-and-eat. They do the annoying part, the chopping, the portioning, the sauces, and you actually cook it at home. So you get the “I made dinner” feeling without the planning or the prep.

For somewhere around $5 to $6 a serving, it’s easily the budget champ here. If you like cooking and just hate deciding, this is a sneaky-good option. You grab it in-store, so you don’t have to worry about delivery.

But Isn’t This Just Expensive Takeout?

Fair question, and one I asked myself before I started. This is where I landed after a few weeks of eating this way.

On price, meal delivery usually wins. A single restaurant entree delivered is easily $18 to $25, and then you stack on a delivery fee, a service fee, and a tip, so you’re realistically at $30 for one dinner. Most of these ran from about $13 a serving to the mid-$20s for the premium family-style pick, all in, because you’re buying a week at once instead of paying the fees-and-tip tax on every order.

But honestly, the money isn’t even the main thing. The real difference is that the food is already in your fridge. Takeout is a decision you make at 5:47 when you’re starving and irritable, and everything sounds either too heavy or too far away. Meal delivery is a decision you made last week, when you had a clear head, so future-you just heats something up. No app, no 45-minute wait, no “did I remember to tip?” For me, that’s the whole ballgame.

And you actually know what you’re eating. None of these use artificial preservatives, most list the calories and macros right on the label, and a couple skip seed oils entirely. Is your favorite takeout spot doing all of that?

Now, the honest other side, because I’m not here to pretend takeout is dead: nothing beats a hot, fresh meal handed to you right now, and nothing beats ordering from a restaurant you love on a Friday night just because you want to. These services are batch-and-reheat by design. If you want a fresh, crispy, someone-else-made-it-five-minutes-ago dinner tonight, order takeout and enjoy every bite. Meal delivery isn’t trying to win that fight. It’s trying to win the other five nights, the ones where you’d otherwise be standing in front of the fridge at 5:47 with no plan.

So Which One Should You Actually Pick?

How I’d sort it out if you’re staring at all four:

If you want to keep it local and hate being locked in, Farm to Temple. You order only when you want, you see the menu first, and you’re supporting a Baltimore kitchen. Just make peace with the room-temp delivery.

If you want the most choices, CookUnity, no contest, especially if your household never agrees on dinner or someone’s eating plant-based. Just set a reminder to skip the weeks you don’t want.

If you’re feeding a family and want it to feel homemade, Feast and Fettle is a great option, and you’ll appreciate that they won’t charge you unless you actually order.

If you shop at MOM’s (or Whole Foods) and want some delicious meals without having to go to the store, Vegetable + Butcher takes that worry off the table entirely; just keep an eye on that auto-renew.

And if you like to cook but hate the mental load, go grab a Little Big Meal from The Fresh Market and call it a night.

One Last Thing

Meal delivery didn’t replace cooking for me, and it wasn’t meant to. What it will do is take the pressure off on weeks that are already too full, which, let’s be honest, is a lot of them.

That’s really the same idea behind everything Susie preaches: you don’t have to do it all yourself. If you want your kitchen to work better so meal prep feels less daunting in the first place, start with Susie’s meal prep system. And if the real problem is that your whole house feels like that 5:47 dinner scramble, that’s exactly what Systems by Susie does for a living. The Membership Program keeps it that way.

Oh, and this is just round one. I’m already working my way through a few more meal delivery services for a part two, so if there’s one you’ve been curious about (or one you swear by), send it our way over on Systems by Susie’s social media, and I’ll add it to the list!