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Can meal kits work for one person?
Living alone has its perks — mainly, the freedom to browse online deals for as long as you want without any judgmental looks from a roommate (or is that just us?). One thing that’s harder to romanticize when living alone is finding the time (and motivations, let’s be honest) to cook healthy meals night after night. Meal delivery services like Blue Apron can be great for couples or large families looking to solve the dinner problem, but do meal kits work just as well for people who live alone?
The short answer is yes, the right meal kit subscription can be beneficial for people who live alone. It will take a bit of planning, but there is the potential for big savings if you sign up for the right meal delivery service. Plus, meal kits cut down on cook times and leave you with fewer dishes to clean, no matter your household size.
Let’s break down how the right meal delivery plan can make a subscription worth your money.
Can meal kits work for one person?
Some of the best meal delivery services that you can sign up for today are just as good for a busy home as they are for people who live alone. Single people, pay attention: Here are all the tips and suggestions you need to make meal kits work for your lifestyle.
Meal kits are a step up from home cooking — even if you live alone
Many budget-friendly meal delivery services offer prices that are too good to pass up, even if you live alone. EveryPlate is one of the most affordable meal kit services out there today, with first time subscribers paying as low as $1.49 per serving. EveryPlate also currently offers a $1 add-on menu for active subscriptions, including $1 ranch steak, $1 garlic bread, and $1 roasted potato add-ons. This means you can yell “nearly free steak!” when your weekly meal kit box arrives and no one can stop you. We consider that a win. Thanks, meal kits.
Are you a foodie at heart? If you enjoy cooking, then you might be ok with paying a bit more for high-quality, chef-approved meals that are as fun to prepare as they are nutritious. For our review of Blue Apron, we found their recipes to be the most rewarding for the aspiring chef. Steak tips with truffle fettuccine? Spinach and mushroom gnocchi? Blue Apron’s dinner menu is one of the best out there in our book, making it a great fit if motivation is the missing piece when it comes to you and avoiding the sense of defeat that comes with ordering takeout or delivery on a weeknight.
How to save money on meal kits when you live along
Most meal kits cost between $8 and $12 per serving, with the cost per serving going down the more you order. This might give you pause if you live alone and want to switch to meal kit delivery without overpaying. The key to making meal kits work when it’s just you and your shadow is to get a bit creative.
If you want to build the perfect meal delivery plan for solo living, here are three important tips to keep in mind:
- Don’t be afraid to order more meals per week to capitalize on lower costs per serving. Don your meal prep extraordinaire hat to make one dinner last several days by storing leftovers for lunch or dinner later in the week. Tossing ready-to-heat meals and marketplace products and ingredients into a meal delivery order can help to balance out fresh ingredients with shorter lifespans.
- Don’t gloss over those breakfast and lunch add-ons. These days, meal kits offer more than just dinner options, with single-serving breakfast and lunch dishes that make for great meal plan additions for anyone that lives alone. HelloFresh takes this one step further by offering free breakfast items for life with every new subscription — but anyone interested should act fast as HelloFresh’s breakfast offer ends soon.
- Find even more savings by referring friends and family. Don’t be afraid to share the convenience and affordability of meal kits with others. Many meal delivery services offer decent savings for referrals. Green Chef goes above and beyond by offering a $35 discount to anyone you send an invite to and sends you a $35 credit for use on future orders.
- Don’t shrug off grocery add-ons. Do you tend to overlook your pantry items? Do you even have a pantry? If not, you’re missing out; meal delivery services like Hungryroot offer a wide selection of individual grocery items and add-ons alongside their meal kit offerings (sometimes in a separate category labeled “marketplace” or “grocery add-ons.”). Savvy shoppers can make two meals out of one by mixing and matching meals with add-ons. Hungryroot aims to cut out grocery trips altogether by offering grocery items such as fresh produce, individually packaged proteins (including plant-based options), snacks, beverages and more. Prices start at $9 per serving, with grocery add-ons ranging from $7 to $10 apiece.
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It’s been said the best meals come from the heart, not from a recipe book. But at this USDA kitchen, there’s no pinch of this, dash of that, no dollops or smidgens of anything. Here, nutritionists in white coats painstakingly measure every single ingredient, down to the tenth of a gram.
Sheryn Stover is expected to eat every crumb of her pizza; any tiny morsels she does miss go back to the kitchen, where they’re scrutinized like evidence of some dietary crime.
Stover (or participant #8180, as she’s known) is one of some 10,000 volunteers enrolled in a $170 million nutrition study run by the National Institutes of Health. “At 78, not many people get to do studies that are going to affect a great amount of people, and I thought this was a great opportunity to do that,” she said.
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It’s called the Nutrition for Precision Health Study. “When I tell people about the study, the reaction usually is, ‘Oh, that’s so cool, can I do it?'” said coordinator Holly Nicastro.
She explained just what “precise” precisely means: “Precision nutrition means tailoring nutrition or dietary guidance to the individual.”
The government has long offered guidelines to help us eat better. In the 1940s we had the “Basic 7.” In the ’50s, the “Basic 4.” We’ve had the “Food Wheel,” the “Food Pyramid,” and currently, “My Plate.”
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They’re all well-intentioned, except they’re all based on averages – what works best for most people, most of the time. But according to Nicastro, there is no one best way to eat. “We know from virtually every nutrition study ever conducted, we have inner individual variability,” she said. “That means we have some people that are going to respond, and some people that aren’t. There’s no one-size-fits-all.”
The study’s participants, like Stover, are all being drawn from another NIH study program called All Of Us, a massive undertaking to create a database of at least a million people who are volunteering everything from their electronic health records to their DNA. It was from that All of Us research that Stover discovered she has the gene that makes some foods taste bitter, which could explain why she ate more of one kind of food than another.
Professor Sai Das, who oversees the study at Tufts University, says the goal of precision nutrition is to drill down even deeper into those individual differences. “We’re moving away from just saying everybody go do this, to being able to say, ‘Okay, if you have X, Y and Z characteristics, then you’re more likely to respond to a diet, and somebody else that has A, B and C characteristics will be responding to the diet differently,'” Das said.
It’s a big commitment for Stover, who is one of 150 people being paid to live at a handful of test sites around the country for six weeks – two weeks at a time. It’s so precise she can’t even go for a walk without a dietary chaperone. “Well, you could stop and buy candy … God forbid, you can’t do that!” she laughed.
While she’s here, everything from her resting metabolic rate, her body fat percentage, her bone mineral content, even the microbes in her gut (digested by a machine that essentially is a smart toilet paper reading device) are being analyzed for how hers may differ from someone else’s.
Nicastro said, “We really think that what’s going on in your poop is going to tell us a lot of information about your health and how you respond to food.”
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Stover says she doesn’t mind, except for the odd sounds the machine makes. While she is a live-in participant, thousands of others are participating from their homes, where electronic wearables track all kinds of health data, including special glasses that record everything they eat, activated when someone starts chewing. Artificial intelligence can then be used to determine not only which foods the person is eating, but how many calories are consumed.
This study is expected to be wrapped up by 2027, and because of it, we may indeed know not only to eat more fruits and vegetables, but what combination of foods is really best for us. The question that even Holly Nicastro can’t answer is, will we listen? “You can lead a horse to water; you can’t make them drink,” she said. “We can tailor the interventions all day. But one hypothesis I have is that if the guidance is tailored to the individual, it’s going to make that individual more likely to follow it, because this is for me, this was designed for me.”
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Story produced by Mark Hudspeth. Editor: Ed Givnish.
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