Coming up with, shopping for, and cooking delicious dinners for the entire family is definitely not an easy thing to do every day during the week. Work, school, chores, and other duties can seriously get in the way of a family’s need to sit around the table and enjoy a delicious meal. Luckily, in the age of endless apps and services that exist solely to make families a little less stressed, there are some pretty great alternatives to traditional meal prep out there. Whether those alternatives come in the form of a subscription box or simple meal prep service is totally up to you! Here are a few of our favorite weeknight meal saviors.
1. Blue Apron
Blue Apron is a great tool for two parents of infants who aren’t yet ready to eat real food yet and larger families alike. The subscription box service partners up with great chefs and awesome farmers to give customers some pretty amazing food options. The entire process is pretty simple: for around $8.75 per plate, Blue Apron will send you everything you need to make the dinner of your dreams. Ingredients, Instructions, and all. This service offers 2-4 meals a week and is more than enough to keep the entire family satisfied. Blue Apron not only helps cut down on time spent in the grocery store, but time spent finding meals to prepare, and actually cooking them as well. All of those extra hours can be spent enjoying the company of your amazing family instead!.
Head over to Blue Apron to get more information on the service.
2. Dream Dinners
Frozen meals made outside of the home don’t always have the best reputation. They have a tendency to be a little bland and less than satisfying but Dream Dinners has seriously changed all that. For an $80 introductory fee, you can get 6 different meals (or 18 servings) that are all perfectly freezer-friendly, specific to your families’ tastes, and prepared by you at one of their many locations. All of Dream Dinners’ meals are delicious, healthy, and quick to prepare once you get them home. You can easily choose and pay for your meals online, take a couple hours to go into one of the stores to actually prepare them, and go home with your stress levels down and your belly rumbling for some great grub.
Tip: If you don’t have Dream Dinners in your area, try searching for some of the other popular meal prep services like this one all over the country.
Visit Dream Dinners to learn more about the process.
3. HelloFresh
HelloFresh is the perfect dinner option for busy families who prefer their meals on the healthier side. With a family plan that averages at about $8.75 per meal, families can get three hand-picked healthy meals per week delivered to their door. One recipe a week is curated by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and all three take 30 minutes and under to prepare. HelloFresh is an awesome, simple choice for healthy families who want to seriously simplify their dinners without sacrificing taste or quality.
Learn more about the service at Hellofresh.
4. Postmates
Available in most major US cities, Postmates is a service that provides people with “the best of your city delivered in minutes.” Available all day every day, Postmates will deliver food from the restaurant of your choosing straight to your door for around a 9% service fee of your entire order. Postmates definitely isn’t an affordable (or healthy) option for every night of the week, but it will do in a pinch if you’re too tired to cook and looking to treat the entire family to a nice dinner without leaving the house.
Find great restaurants in your city at Postmates.
5. Amazon Fresh
If you’re a big fan of Amazon and you live in one of the 12 select cities, you’ve probably heard of Amazon Fresh. For an extra fee of about $15 a month, Amazon will deliver groceries to Prime members straight from local supermarkets. All you do is choose what you need on Amazon, check out as normal, and wait for your delivery to show up. The list of items available includes everything from milk to ready-made freezer meals. While this selection isn’t as in-depth as some of the others on this list, it definitely saves tons of time when it comes to grocery shopping.
See if you qualify for this service on Amazon.
6. Local Private Catering Services
Unless you’re a superstar or a millionaire, the mere thought of hiring a private chef probably sends you into a fit of giggles, but the notion isn’t as ridiculous as it seems. While it is probably exceedingly pricey to hire a chef to come into your home and cook for you, the price of using local catering services to do your meal prep isn’t so exorbitant. Wherever you live, odds are there is at least one business or company that offers family meal-prep services on a week-by-week basis. Not only will partaking in these services make things easier for your family, but it will also give you a great opportunity to support local businesses.