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Changing a diet—something as small as eating less red meat, or adopting an entirely new way of eating—can be excruciatingly difficult. Anyone whose tried to change their diet knows this to be true. It’s a challenge at the best of times, but especially so once you factor in getting drinks with friends after work, or that “dinner” you ate at 10 p.m. because you didn’t have a spare half-hour to make something better until then.
Keto, for instance, is one of the most popular non-standard diets in the world right now, but cooking keto eating keto friendly three times a day is no mean feat. One popular solution is delivery keto meal plans, which arrive at your door on a specified day on whatever cadence you want them to be delivered, and make adherence to your new keto diet significantly easier.
This is a guide to the best keto meal plans you can buy—tested, reviewed, compared, and ranked by The Edge team.
- Best Overall Keto Meal Plan: Fresh N’ Lean
- Best Keto Meal Plan for Athletes: Trifecta Nutrition
- Best Keto Meal Plan for Picky Eaters: Factor75
Keto-pedia
What We Looked for in a Keto Meal Plan
Affordability
The first and most important question when considering buying into a new subscription—keto meal plans in this instance—is obvious: how much will it cost me? The prices found in this guide are broken down on a per-meal basis. Each number includes the sticker price, taxes, and delivery costs.
If you’re interested in keto meal plans and wondering roughly what one might cost, here’s your answer: about $13 per meal. We surveyed more than a dozen companies, reviewed half of those, and all fell between $12 and $16 a meal, with most landing neatly on $13 or $14 per. Yes, some companies give you a better deal when you buy more meals or order more regularly, but you can still use these prices as a general guide.
Options
There are few things more choosey than food. If a meal plan didn’t offer at least some means of altering the meals—for food allergies, preference, etc.—we ignored them out of hand. Ultimately, if a meal plan provider isn’t willing to accommodate each person’s wants and needs (within the scope of whatever diet they’re pursuing), they shouldn’t be in the business. All our recommendations provide moderate to extremely flexible choices to the shopper. We’ll get into the specifics of that choice with each pick.
Customer service
There’s a good chance you’ll have to reach out to customer service at some point when ordering or managing your meal plan subscription. Whether it be a simple change or delivery cadence—for instance, my partner and I moved from a weekly delivery to a biweekly one—it seems inevitable. To that end, make it a point to reach out to the company’s customer service team before ordering. You don’t even have to ask a real question—just see if they respond to you, and if that response comes at a satisfactory pace. It may seem tedious, but it could save you a headache in the long run.
Food quality and taste
Perhaps the second most obvious subject matter after price, there really isn’t a way to know if what you’re ordering will be good before you spend money on it. We hope that’s part of the role this guide will play, as each recommended plan has been ordered, tested, and compared against the competition.
A few words on keto meal plan food, generally. We found most of the meals to be texturally lacking in some respect. This isn’t a huge surprise, given that reheating frozen food isn’t how you achieve wonder texture, but it was a consistent frustration. It may be worth having garnishes or toppings on hand like chopped almonds, green onions, or parsley—really anything to make the food feel better to eat. It’s not bad by any stretch, but each of our testers noted texture complaints in their reviews.
How We Tested Keto Meal Plans
No meal plan we will recommend in this guide is here based on reputation—we’ve tested and reviewed each one on the site. Getting the most out of your diet and doing so in an economical and enjoyable way are the guiding principles behind our reviews. We compared price, taste, options, and customer service responsiveness to come up with a short list of recommended plans. Have a keto meal plan you’re curious about? Email this guide’s editor, Will Price, and we’ll try it out.
The Best Keto Meal Plans for Your Money
Fresh N' Lean
Best Overall Keto Meal Plan
READ THE FULL REVIEW: Truth be told, when we pitted the meal plans we reviewed against each other, Fresh N’ Lean was the obvious winner. Generally, it is the most affordable, provides the most options to customers, and tastes pretty damn good. In the world of keto meal plans, that’s a tough combo to beat.
Our tester, Tracy Middleton, noted the selection of meals was a major highlight. She didn’t want salmon (a common protein for Keto dieters) and needed some of the meals to satisfy both parent and child—Fresh N’ Leans meal selection tool, which is unfortunately not a staple in the meal plan world yet, made this very simple. Our tester liked nearly every chicken dish on offer, but especially the Mediterranean chicken dish.
The price, at $12 a meal, was the lowest among keto meal plans we tested. Though still not what any sane person would call affordable, the pros are there: food comes together in a few minutes, you don’t have to track ingredients or macros, you know what you’re eating each day, etc.
- Excellent selection of meals
- Delivery was on time
- Add-ons like snacks and extra meals
- Easy to prepare
- Surprisingly family-friendly
- Cooking times were only from fresh, not frozen
- Taste was on the bland side
- Canceling was difficult
Trifecta Nutrition
Best Keto Meal Plan for Athletes
READ THE FULL REVIEW: Trifecta is a brand that wants you to know it’s for gym folk. Almost all its spokespeople and paid influencers and involved in either CrossFit or weightlifting, and they and their massive muscles are plastered all over the company site. The product follows suit, with high-protein meals built to rebuild your damaged muscles while preparing you for your next gym session.
The food is generally good, though the texture was a problem on some dishes—we recommend reheating the food in a skillet instead of the microwave as an easy solution—and customer choice was just OK. You can choose which meals you want—breakfast, lunch, dinner, and third entree are all options—and you can choose either a 5- or 7-day plan. You can also exclude some foods from your meals using a food allergy and preference drop-down on the shopping page, but—and this is a big but for us—you can’t select specific meals you want or don’t want.
Our reviewer loved the chili con carne, for example, but could’ve done without the chicken cordon bleu.On the subject of price: Trifecta is $16 per meal, or 25 percent more expensive, than Fresh N’ Lean, its best competition. Our reviews found that Trifecta meals were generally a bit more filling than Fresh N’ Lean, and the food was a little more varied, but it’s up to you whether that’s worth an extra $4 per meal.
- Very clear nutritional info
- Excellent customer service
- Taste is acceptable (and that's a good thing)
- Pricier per meal than most
- Texture turn-offs
- Lack of choice
Factor75
Best for Keto Meal Plan for Picky Eaters
READ THE FULL REVIEW: Factor75’s greatest strength is the food itself. Our reviewer, Brianna Lapolla, had only good things to say about the food quality in her review:
“You get all the makings of a homecooked meal without actually whipping out the cutting board and rifling through the spice rack. You know how food always tastes better when someone else prepares it? Factor 75 is no exception—I could tell that a real chef combined the flavors in each meal.”
Comparing Factor75 to other brands, we also liked that it, like Fresh N’ Lean, allowed shoppers to add and remove specific meals as they wished before checking out. I repeat this again: this should be standard practice.
The only negatives were the heavy use of dairy, somewhat short shelf life, and portion size on the smaller end. The overuse of dairy is a fairly common feature of the keto diet for many newly keto eaters (cheese especially), and a short shelf life was a small price to pay for meals that are delivered fresh. Portion size is definitely and issue, though, especially for those looking to pack on muscle on the keto diet.
- Nutritional transparency
- Delivered fresh, not frozen
- Tastes homecooked
- Upgrades available
- So much dairy
- Puny portion size
- One-week shelf life
