Hey, it’s not like I didn’t want to. But with work, family, exercise, volunteer obligations, and a dog to walk, my husband and I were always getting home late and starving—a setup for take-out or flung-together sandwiches. Getting a healthy meal on the table is a major challenge for most people these days. Maybe that’s why there has been a boom in new food delivery services—companies that deliver groceries to you, storefronts where you assemble a meal to bring home, and everything in between. Online grocery shopping alone was a $2.4 billion industry in 2004—and is expected to grow to $6.5 billion by 2008. More from Prevention: 26 Best Packaged Foods For Your Shopping Cart Anything that promises dinner in record time sounds good to me. But how fast, tasty, and healthy are these food delivery services, really? We were just the guinea pigs to find out—my daughter, Lily; my 44-year-old husband, Bill; and me, an active, harried 42-year-old. So for 6 weeks we explored the world of convenience meals, trying an option each week in our Richmond, VA, home. Here’s how well these food delivery services delivered—flavor, nutrition, convenience, and cost. Food Delivery: Groceries Delivered How it worked When we lived in Boston a few years ago, we saved a couple of hours a week by using Peapod for grocery deliveries from the nearby Stop & Shop. The service chose fresher produce and meats than we did and charged just $7 to $10 for next-day delivery. It was lovely to get groceries without dragging a cranky toddler to the store. Still, I was able to do some quick and easy menu planning: pasta and organic jarred tomato sauce (which I would supplement with salad or other fresh vegetables), and soup and grilled cheese sandwiches (ditto). The delivery fee was an obvious negative, but I put in the plus column the fact that I made fewer impulse buys when shopping online. (With no sample tastings, you can even save on calories.) Probably because I was shopping from my desk instead of in a crowded store with a chattering child, I suddenly remembered a simple recipe for a corn tortilla and black bean casserole I hadn’t made in years. How convenient, I thought—until the delivery arrived without the beans (“temporarily out of stock”). That reminded me: Peapod asks you when you place your order if substitutions are okay. [pagebreak] Meal Prep Places The service When I heard about My Girlfriend’s Kitchen, the very name gave me multilevel marketing jitters. I envisioned being dragged to a meal-assembly “party” and forced to sign up for a year’s worth of prepackaged food. Wrong. MGFK and similar companies, such as Let’s Do Dinner and Let’s Dish!, consist of storefronts where you assemble prechopped and premixed ingredients in the pans or bags they provide. Then you take your stack of ready-to-cook meals home to store in the freezer. This trend is taking off like crazy: Nearly 1,100 meal-assembly kitchens have popped up in the United States and Canada in recent years. How it worked On the MGFK Web site, I found a nutritionally detailed list of 14 meals and selected 6. A few days later, my friend Monica and I took our daughters to the shop, where we found a dozen different food stations, each stocked with bins of ingredients—mostly frozen but appetizing, with brightly colored veggies; good-looking chicken and fish; and lean, red beef. We went from station to station, following posted instructions to scoop precise amounts into a foil pan or plastic bag: a scoop of ground turkey plus smaller scoops of grated carrots, celery, walnuts, and herbs for Little Meatloaf on the Prairie, for instance. It was fast, taking just over an hour, and easy (really easy, because the girls ended up elbowing us aside). We arrived home with instructions on each package and a handy reference list detailing how to cook each meal we loaded into the freezer. You have to check that list each morning—as I discovered a few days later, when I realized just before dinner that I hadn’t defrosted Inga’s Traditional Swedish Meatballs. That dish required sautJing, but plenty go from the freezer straight into the slow cooker or oven. You also have to cook the pasta or rice that comes with many of the meals, and supplement the entrJes with side dishes or salad, if you’re so inclined. The food is family friendly (read: accommodating to picky pint-size eaters) and good—better than you get at many casual restaurants, especially because you can add or subtract ingredients according to your taste. Exotic it’s not, but we’ve been back three times. “I call it halfway homemade,” says Sass. “The food is pretty much guaranteed to be tasty, but you don’t have to go buy a cookbook. On the flip side, some of the dishes can be high in fat and calories.” Detailed nutritional info on many of these services’ Web sites can help you avoid those pitfalls. Elisa Zied, RD, another ADA spokesperson, also recommends boosting the vegetable content of many of the one-dish meals. “Eyeball the vegetable serving,” she suggests. “If it’s under half a cup, add to it with bagged baby carrots or low-sodium canned vegetables.” Because people get most of their veggies at dinner, she says, “it’s a good idea to get at least a cup per person.” [pagebreak] Dinner From Aisle Six The service The salad bar and ready-to-eat sections in supermarkets are growing like weeds: Profits grew 10% each year between 2000 and 2005, industry analysts say. And the offerings are getting ever more elaborate: not just salad makings but soup, pizza, hot panini, and sushi—sometimes made to order. And, of course, the ubiquitous roasted chicken. How it worked On a busy night when Bill was out of town, Lily and I headed to our local market. I told her she could get whatever she wanted, as long as it was loosely based on the food pyramid. She chose three hard-boiled eggs, a cup of green peas, several chunks of watermelon, and a roll (not a traditional mix, but hey, she ate it all). I took small portions of various exotic salads, such as Asian chicken, quinoa, and black bean and corn. Salad bar items are sold by weight, so the dense eggs and heavy watermelon Lily chose really added up; in fact, the meal was slightly more expensive than the one we got later in the week from the sushi bar. Another night, our budget dinner included roasted chicken and raw broccoli, which I cooked at home along with rice to round out the meal. Pricey or not, a salad bar can be a fast way to a healthy dinner. “You can usually find all kinds and colors of veggies, which means more nutrients and phytochemicals,” Sass says. “Buying 10 different vegetables to make a salad at home would get pretty expensive, and they’d probably go bad before you used them up.” But keep an eye on the sodium—and calories, warns Zied. A salad bar’s crunchy croutons, creamy dressings, and mayo-drenched mÂnges are obvious disasters, but you don’t want to go overboard even on healthy options like chickpeas or raisins; stick to about 1/2 cup of the beans and no more than 2 tablespoons of dried fruit. What’s more, if you’re trying to lose weight, it’s a good idea to pick just one or two salads, Zied adds—save other tantalizing choices for your next visit. “Research shows that you eat less when there aren’t too many tastes competing with each other,” she says. [pagebreak] Chef on Call The service This “someone else cooks it” category is stocked with gifted (and not so gifted) amateurs and professionals who have tired of interminable restaurant hours. These aren’t personal chef services; dishes aren’t made to order. Instead, the companies offer daily or weekly menus of fresh-cooked meals delivered to your home, where you pile them into the fridge or freezer. How it worked Our local service, Personal Chef To Go, allowed no substitutions, but we didn’t mind. We got family-style containers of Zesty Whole Wheat Pasta Bake, Shrimp Scampi over Six-Grain Rice Pilaf, and Oven-Roasted Sliced Lean Filet of Beef, among other entrJes—and all of it tasted gourmet. Bonus: There were lots of interesting ingredients, such as roasted red peppers, pesto, and orzo. Zied was ready to place an order herself. But because companies like this vary widely, she recommends looking for one that posts nutrient analyses. “Otherwise, who knows how much butter the chef is throwing in?” she asks. And even when the info is on the Web site, look for what isn’t there—like sodium (it wasn’t listed on our nutritional information). “Just call up and talk to the chef,” she advises. [pagebreak] Diet Food by Mail The service Plenty of online companies ship fresh meals, most of them to people who want to lose weight. Typically, these outfits aren’t simply dinner providers; they send you food for the whole day. Some give you a choice of entrJes, but generally a weekly prix fixe menu is much less pricey. How it worked My idea of heaven is to pop a plate of something nutritious and delicious into the microwave and sit down to dinner 3 minutes later. So I was charmed when I heard about eDiets Express, which promised to let me choose a week’s worth of breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and snacks for delivery. But when I ordered, a message popped up: The first week of meals was preselected, no changes allowed. We received stuffed peppers with a side of vegetables, boneless baked chicken with beets, and turkey meat loaf with chickpea salad, among other dishes. We also got muffins. A lot of muffins. In fact, that was all we got for breakfast 2 out of the 7 days we used the service. Zied was not impressed. “What’s with the muffins? A blueberry muffin is not a meal. Breakfast is your best opportunity to get four key elements: whole grains, fiber, dairy, and fruit. This skimps on all of them, and the rest of the day looks just as bad.” I loved the convenience, but that was about all eDiets had going for it. The stuffed peppers tasted okay, but the chicken breast was flavorless and rubbery, and we had to douse the turkey meat loaf in ketchup. Plus, the portions were too small. The meal plan will work for weight loss and maintenance, according to eDiets, but the maximum calories offered are a mere 1,400 per day. That’s not enough for a 220-pound man; even a reasonably active woman of my height (5-foot-6) should be getting about 1,800 calories, Zied says. By the second day, Bill and I were starving. The eDiets dietitian told us that we should each add 800 to 1,000 calories per day in snacks—which we had to provide. “This isn’t really helpful for a dieter,” Zied says. “You could pick junk food for those 800 calories—you wouldn’t get the nutrients you need, and you’d probably still end up hungry. Basically, you have to become your own dietitian.” [pagebreak] Cost and convenience: We rate the fast food To see how the new options measured up, we tracked the time and money we spent cooking meals at home for a week; later, we did the same for takeout. Then we ran the numbers. Options: The Standard Home CookingCost: $3Time Required: 12 1/2 hours (2 in the market and 1 1/2 per day in the kitchen)Our RD Comments: Zied gave our meals a thumbs-up. But then, who wouldn’t cook nutritious meals with an RD checking the menu? Option: Salad BarCost*: $2.50 to $8Saved: About 10 1/4 hours per weekOur RD Comments: “Salad bars can be more expensive,” Sass says, “but if you choose wisely, you can get five servings of produce in a single meal.“For more info: Whole Foods (store locator); Wild Oats (store locator); your local market Option: Meal AssemblyCost*: $4Saved: 6 1/2 hours per weekOur RD Comments: “This is just as good as homemade, without all the work,” says Sass. But watch the fat and calories, and supplement with bagged carrots, salad greens, or microwaved frozen veggies. For more info: My Girlfriend’s Kitchen; Let’s Do Dinner; Dinner By Design; Super Suppers Option: Diet Delivery Cost*: $6 to $8 Saved: About 12 hours per weekOur RD Comments: “There are better ways to lose weight,” says Zied.For more info: eDiets; *per serving
