Looking for Canadian meal-prep/meal-kit recommendations that accommodate dairy allergies
Hey everyone! I’ve been struggling for quite some time trying to figure out what to do for meals, so I’m hoping someone here might have some recommendations.
I’m 29M and, honestly, I’m pretty terrible at cooking and don’t really enjoy it. My partner has also gotten pretty fed up with spending essentially an entire day every week meal prepping and trying to make food that works around my allergies.
I wanted to help out by taking over the meal-prepping/cooking myself, but finding a meal-kit service where I can actually eat the majority of the meals has been surprisingly difficult.
We tried HelloFresh, but there were usually only 1–2 meals per week that I could eat. I just signed up for Chefs Plate and unfortunately, it seems like dairy/milk is included in almost every recipe, so that doesn’t really work for me either.
I’m located in Canada, so I know there are some options I’ve seen recommended online that are US-only.
My biggest issue is dairy. I can usually pick around some of the other ingredients if they’re things like raw vegetables, but dairy is often incorporated directly into the recipe, which makes it much harder to avoid.
My allergies/restrictions are:
Carrots
Banana
Raw celery
Hazelnuts
Apple skins
Cucumbers
Cantaloupe
Almonds
Dairy
Does anyone in Canada have recommendations for meal-kit services, meal-prep services, or even another solution I should look into?
I’m really just trying to find something that makes meal prep easier for both of us, while still allowing me to actually eat the food. 😅
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Hey everyone,

I am looking to get a meal delivery service of some sort but unsure which one. I work full time and am in school full time. I am so busy and I'm trying to get into a healthy routine and hope doing this will help. I am single so the meals would be just for me and I'm not super rich lol so don't want to spend a ton. I also am not the greatest chef but feel like services such as Factor would be too expensive. I'm not a super picky eater and would really appreciate input. Thank you so much to you all in advance.

-Grateful reddit friend

To preface this, I am not a vegetarian. I eat meat and usually once a day. I am open to eating it less often.

I want to eat more vegetables but I don't really know how to cook them well. Additionally, as a South Asian a lot of our vegetable dishes are blasted with flavor and incredible, but also I think the vegetable nutrient content is decreased by how much we cook them. I also don't have lots of experience with many different veggies including zucchini, squash, carrots, broccoli, etc.

What meal kits would you recommend that have decent vegetable meals and vegetable sides to a meat main? I want more experience cooking flavorful veggie mains and sides. Looking for exciting recipes that I actually want to eat and can make even after I stop subscribing to a meal kit.

Recently, it seems like the per-step pictures have been removed from the recipe cards. this makes them much smaller, so i guess it's a cost-saving thing? Am I the only one that finds this a terrible downgrade? As far as I can tell, they didn't even adjust any of the text for the steps, just removed the pictures, which is seems extra-bad since it feels like a lot of the instructions relied on the pictures to really convey what you needed to do. And worse yet, if I'm mostly familiar with a recipe, previously I could just glance at the pictures and know what to do, now I'm stuck re-reading and trying to parse out all the text. Who could think it's a good (or even okay) idea to remove pictures from these sort of instructions? And you can't even see the old versions with pictures online or anything either? Boo! Am I off base being so disappointed and frustrated here? Rant complete. I'm planning to gather any support (or lack thereof) here, get some good comparison pictures, and complain over email/etc next. Sadly, at this point, it seems like reddit has to be my first stop for these complaints, I used to try going to company support first ...

Hi all. My wife and I have hit a point where we just do not have time to select recipes and grocery shop ourselves. We tried Hello fresh this week with their discount and absolutely love the convenience. it's exactly what we are looking for. enough time to cook something together without the hassle of everything else. We do not like the quality of their stuff though. Are there any companies that still have quality ingredients and good recipes?

to add - I used HF years ago and absolutely loved it, but the decline from then to now is astonishing!

Hi all, I need some help figuring out some kind of plan. My husband cannot cook at all, he literally lit pasta on fire. I have raging ADHD and don’t mind cooking but cannot handle the mental prep of it all, trust me I’ve tried. What’s the best option for someone lazy, but who also gets bored easily.

Hey I am new to this group. Living in Manhattan. Looking for advice on meal services and open to local or national. I recently tried CookUnity and am hoping to find something better. After filtering to healthy meals (good protein, low sodium, low sugar — you know, like generally regarded as healthy) there are rarely enough options for their minimum plan (8 meals). If you pay $4-$20 extra per meal, there are options. But at $12 a pop, that means meals quickly break the $20/meal mark and at that point I might as well meal prep or order Uber Eats from a healthy spot nearby. To make things worse they randomly cancelled an order one week and dont do a good job of updates (I got zero alerts or emails about the cancellation until I came looking for why I got no delivery).

So I am hoping to find something that is consistently <$16ish per meal. Healthy (wild caught not farmed salmon, not packed w sodium, not full of sugar, not full of saturated fat). The meals dont have to be too creative, just some basic meat/veg variety to where I’m not eating exactly the same thing every night.

And if they have good customer service or easy to use app thats a bonus.

Thanks!

I'm broke as hell and I really hate cooking. I often skip eating over all because of my hatred of cooking. I know that's pathetic of me, but it's really starting to affect my physical health. I was wondering if there were any meal delivery services that are less than $50 a week. They also have to have options for allergens. Even $50 a week is a bit pricey for me, as I usually spend $80 every two weeks on groceries for myself. This is probably a shot in the dark, but I figured I might as well ask anyways.

At least not at the prices that most of us are willing or able to pay.

The logistics and delivery parts of the business are just too expensive and complex to do cheaply. Marley Spoon and Blue Apron thought they had found a hack for these issues by dumping it on someone else, but it was just shuffling corporate entities to make the balance sheet look good and did not make the challenges disappear… only made them someone else’s problem.

I suggest that if you are getting good service with fresh food and reliable delivery, your meal kit provider is losing money. Once their investors decide enough is enough and it’s time to make a profit, it will turn sharply worse.

I know it’s a pessimistic take but I’ve been using these things for several years and in my experience they all go bad at some point.

Earlier this year, I tried hungry root and was disappointed with it. The meals were ok but I wasn’t crazy about them. I didn’t really know how to navigate the web page when I ordered the weekly meals. So I put the next orders on hold indefinitely. A couple months later, I tried Home Chef and loved it. I’ve been using Home Chef for months now but decided to retry Hungry Root because I read some good reviews and thought I didn’t give them a fair try the first time.

Well, the first order of my “retry” was supposed to arrive yesterday. When I was to receive the shipment, I rechecked the tracking but it had just recently been changed to “delivery exception - returned to the warehouse for inspection”. It arrived today just after lunch. The box was opened and soggy. The meat had leaked all over the order which is odd because the meat (very warm already) was at the bottom of the box. I looked on the app for a phone number for customer service. But it said there was no such number and I had to text them or fill out the form under “help” in the order confirmation.

I found the resolution process of filling out a checklist of “which items” were ruined to be rather unsatisfactory. Why don’t they have a helpline? I’m to receive an email in reply to my complaint. Home Chef had a person I could talk to when I had a complaint and they resolved any issues immediately with a refund for the order. The response I get from Hungry Root will determine whether I give up on them or give them another try. But I’m shocked at the poor packaging to preserve the refrigerated items (two ice packs for a cardboard box with meat inside) and the quality of the shipping service.

Anyone else experience this or is in anomaly?

I signed onto Home Chef just to see the meals and cost they offered. Next thing I knew, I had four meals picked for me and sent. I didn't know it was all automatic and not cancellable unless you call them. They said it was in the fine print, and the agent on chat basicaly said "tough." They must be desperate for business to run such a scam website.

Throwing this out there in the midst of apparently everything exploding.

I picked up Everyplate 10? ish years back because I wanted to try and learn how to cook. It was the "cheap" option and I figured I could live on the fact 90% of it's dishes were some sort of chicken/veg combo.

It's not really let me down since.

Yeah, for a very long time 90% of the options were some variant of chicken and veg. Occasionally they'd spice things up and you'd get one of the same three pasta, or tacos. None of the recipes had ever heard of a spice before, and even the spices they sent were usually incredibly bland. I get why it's got the reputation it does.

But it's also been consistent. I can count on one hand the amount of times I've had issues with a delivery or missing ingredients. I can tell they cut the veg quality a bit recently with inflation/the recession but it's not awful like I'm seeing out of other mealkits. And when I do have problems their support always just writes off the box entirely and pays it into my next week.

Ironically it holding firm like it has on the prices has made it roughly same price/cheaper then most grocery shopping here in Washington. It's hard to break away because buying my own groceries is almost always going to be more expensive.

Menu hasn't changed that much, but they've been putting up weirder and weirder things with every passing month. Lo Mein, the whitest bibimbap you've ever seen, pizza, sandwiches, gyros, and more now actually show up decently frequently. I rarely actually get the chicken and veg combo unless everything else looks awful.

And I've just gotten my own spices now. They last forever, so I can add whatever I want to my meals and it's still going to be way cheaper then basically any other meal service/grocery shopping in my city anyways.

I've no idea why I wrote this. Every time I see people talking mealkits Everyplate is always near the bottom, usually with a two line read of "tried it for two weeks, no spices, bland options" but you know what. I'm a cheap ass and I'd rather have a mealkit that actually sends me my stuff and I can fiddle with then apparently where every other mealkit is at right now. And so lo, I guess if you are unhappy with all the premium kits burning down around you, maybe it's time to try the weird cheap one that's somehow scaling up to newer/weirder meals.

Also the garlic bread addon is pretty good which is nice.

It’s pretty bad out here, but now they’ve messed up the meal-kit of the editor of CNET. Buyer Beware!

I keep seeing adds for them and I’m intrigued because I do love a crockpot meal. I just saw they’ve got a whole soup series. Has anyone tried them out of the state of Utah? Or even in Utah what did you think?

https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/the-meal-kit-industry-is-in-disarray-after-a-major-supplier-went-bust-17d7b97b?st=gPaLAS

(If you get the sign up/sign in page, look for a small down arrow or triangle on the upper right corner—click that and it will open the free gift article)

Tried Marly Spoon for the first time, I usually do Hello Fresh and actually really like it, but man this was such a disappointment. This is literally all of the ingredients in the box for two full meals. The box arrived opened with the tape on the bottom completely missing. And the coleslaw is nasty looking. I'm going to try for a full refund but reading others I'm not super hopeful.

I've been HelloFresh for most of the year, but getting a little tired of the options, so I switched it up.

• Last week I signed up for Home Chef, but after signing up there were only 2 or 3 veggie meal options, none of which sounded appealing. I cancelled my subscription (or just paused it, I guess?), but apparently didn't know that I had to cancel the first box. Just received a ton of meat meals, some of which do not match the recipe cards.
• When I cancelled Home Chef, I signed up for Marley Spoon. Of the box today, 8 items were missing and 3 damaged, including a pack of greek yogurt that spilled all over everything else.

I'm struggling here. Would love to know other options and experiences.