Healthy Meals to Burn Weight
Just like anything else that’s inherently good for you, staying the course on the path to meeting healthful eating goals is hard work—researching, shopping for, and actually cooking nutritiously sound, from-scratch meals on the daily isn’t a realistic ask for most. The game-changing brilliance of meal delivery programs is that they make putting delicious healthy food on the table as easy as ordering takeout. The ones below have healthy, organic, local, and diet-specific menus, with many offering detox-friendly options, too.
Farmer’s Fridge
Farmer’s Fridge is famous for gorgeous, layered jar salads with dressing and solids on the bottom; flip them upside down and they become the perfect healthy meal. In honor of the New Year and the wave of healthy eating resolutions that come with it, they’ve teamed up with another Chicago favorite, Real Good Juice, to create a two-day cleanse that can be delivered to your door. The cleanse features solid food and juice (there are omnivore and vegetarian versions), and can be scheduled for delivery or pickup anytime.
Chef Made
The first thing that makes Chef Made stand apart is their gorgeous food photography, but the food itself is just as good. Recipe-wise, they excel at inventive spins on classic dishes, like ginger chicken noodle soup with lime and chili, turkey meatballs and lemony rice, and an edamame bowl with miso brown rice cakes. They also offer really good drinks, like cold-brew Intelligentsia coffee and homemade jasmine milk tea. The whole operation is one for one: For each meal purchased, Chef Made donates a meal to someone in need through a local food bank.
Eat Purely
Eat Purely’s 100% organic meals can all be ordered on-demand and delivered within 20 minutes via their easy-to-use app; a lifesaver on days when dinner plans aren’t top of mind until it's too late. The menu (which changes daily) is very vegetable-focused, with dishes like a kale and beet Caesar salad, vegetable meritage, coconut glazed salmon, and sweet potato gnocchi. All of their ingredients are GMO-free.
Kitch Fix
Kitch Fix is a favorite of the exercise community in Chicago because of its emphasis on a low-carb, high-fat, paleo style of cooking—favorite meals on the rotating menu include honey glazed chicken with bacon guacamole, herb-roasted grass-fed beef, bone broths, cashew yogurt, and their paleo granola, which is available at Whole Foods. The easy-to-navigate website allows you to customize sizes—a seriously convenient feature when one family member is training for a marathon and the other’s doing gentle yoga. Also cool: Many of the company’s employees are students in or graduates of the Cara Program, a Chicago nonprofit that provides job training for those living in homelessness and extreme poverty.
Radish
Head Chef David Yusefz left his gig as Executive Chef at Baffo to join Radish, and his background in fine dining (as opposed to catering, where most chefs in this space started out), definitely shines through in his food. The menu changes daily, offering meals that display restaurant-quality creativity, like Ancho skirt steak with cherry tomatoes and pickled onions, wild-caught shrimp and grits with lemon and hot sauce, or “unfried” rice with scrambled eggs. While Radish is only available at dinner hours right now, food can be ordered on-demand and delivered hot in less than 20 minutes.
Cooked
After Chef Jona Silva read Michael Pollan’s book Cooked, he cut out refined sugar and started eating healthier—basically re-inventing his style of cooking. His meal delivery company of the same name, which he started with his wife, is beloved in Chicago because it provides a huge variety of options, including breakfast, lunch, dinner, and kids meals (they even do great kids lunchboxes). The food is always local, organic whenever possible, and changes considerably with the seasons. In honor of the new year, they’ve put together a three-day cleanse program that comes with nine cold-pressed juices, three clean lunches, and three clean dinners.
Snap Kitchen
Snap Kitchen has revolved around grab-and-go meals since 2010, making them one of the older companies in the relatively new healthy-pre-made-meal space. There are convenient pickup locations in Austin, Houston, Dallas, and Chicago, and while they don’t technically do delivery, you could easily arrange one through TaskRabbit. Snap also offers a 21-day "commit" program, which offers healthy takes on hearty meals like gluten-free beef stroganoff, bison quinoa hash, chicken butternut squash macaroni, and fettucine and vegetable “alfredo.” The cooking style is relatively free from the niche health foods that turn some people off of clean eating, making it an easy transition for health-food rookies.
Sprig
This two-year-old startup is set up to offer meal delivery in 15 minutes. But that's where the corner cutting ends: All meals, which skew healthy but not diet, are chef-prepared (they’ve been known to invite local big-name chefs to guest star in Sprig kitchens) using strictly organic produce and sustainable meats and seafood. As of right now, deliveries are made throughout San Francisco, Palo Alto, and most recently, Chicago—but expansions are coming soon.