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Some meal plans offer fully prepared foods
If you enjoy cooking but don't want to spend a lot of time on it or spend time shopping, you can pay for a meal plan that will deliver ingredients rather than fully prepared foods to your door. However, many seniors prefer fully prepared meals to meal kits.
Most meal delivery services offer fully prepared meals; meal kits are less common. With fully prepared meals, all you have to do is heat them up.
What are the best meal delivery services for seniors in 2020?
Some meal delivery services are better than others. The food is not always equal in taste, nutrition, or price. There are many good services that offer great food and great service at fair prices.
1) Magic kitchen
Magic KitchenIs very good at offering meals that take people's various health needs into account. People with kidney problems can find a variety of meals that are good for those with impaired kidneys. You can also find diets for those who have diabetes and other conditions.
Because Magic Kitchen offers different diets for different health issues, it is well suited to seniors. Nutritionists review all of the meals offered by Magic Kitchen to ensure that everything you can order is nutritionally valuable.
Magic Kitchen allows you to choose between 7, 14, and 21 meals a week but does not allow you to choose less than 7, so it is not for people who want only a few meals a week.
Magic Kitchen both offers complete meals and allows you to create your own meals by mixing different dishes. Meals can be gluten-free, low carb, low fat, low sodium, vegetarian, and dairy-free depending on your dietary needs. Magic Kitchen does not use preservatives in any of the meals it prepares.
Magic stands out for the renal diets it offers. Diets can do more than a little good for those who have kidney problems, and Magic Kitchen can help you if you have difficulty preparing this food yourself.
A renal diet may include blueberries, bell peppers, strawberries, and onions, as all of these foods benefit your kidneys. These foods are high in vitamins that are good for renal health and low in sodium that can worsen kidney problems. The Magic kitchen company's renal diet meals are also low in potentially harmful potassium, low-quality protein, and phosphorus.
2) Mom's meals
While meals from most delivery services are frozen, the mom's meals service offers refrigerated food. Refrigerated food is easier to heat up and tastier.
Mom's meals offers meal plans for different health conditions. There is a cancer diet with more calories and more protein to prevent weight loss and muscle loss.
There is also a good selection of pureed foods for those who have difficulty swallowing. Meals can be diabetes-friendly, kidney-friendly, gluten-free, heart-friendly, and more.
Mom's meals are designed specifically for seniors and can help older people avoid malnutrition. One can become malnourished without noticing it if they eat an inadequate diet.
Mental and physical health can rapidly worsen if you are malnourished, and you may not know the cause of your worsening health. Mom's meals are designed by dieticians to provide adequate nutrition and prevent malnourishment.
3) Home chef
If you do not have difficulty cooking and prefer to cook meals yourself, Home Chef can help you out with meal kits. You can have ingredients delivered to your home and then cook a healthy meal from these ingredients in less than 30 minutes.
Home chef is a good choice if you enjoy cooking but find shopping and planning out meals to be more of a hassle than it used to be. Meal kits are available for people of different skill levels, so you do not have to be a great cook to order kids from Home Chef. Home Chef has low carb, vegetarian, and low-calorie options.
For those of you who eat fish but not red meat, there are pescatarian options. On the Home Chef website, you can choose to exclude certain foods - pork, red meat, milk, mushrooms, shellfish, nuts - and view a list of meals that do not include those foods.
If a 30 minute meal prep time sounds too much, you can get meals that take only 15 minutes to prepare. Home Chef is also very flexible about how many meal kits you want to order each week.
4) Snap Kitchen
You can count on Snap Kitchen to take nutrition seriously. Dieticians design their meal plans and pack them with nutrients. A vitamin deficiency can reduce your health and quality of life very fast, and with Snap Kitchen, you are sure to get all the vitamins you need from their meals.
You can prepare and eat a meal with minimal effort if it comes from Snap Kitchen. Like most but not all delivery services, they send you complete meals rather than ingredients. You can simply heat up your meals and then eat them in only a few minutes.
While some of the less impressive meal plans we have tried don't offer much variety, the variety you can get with snap kitchen is much better. You can get many different options for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You can also customize your meals to some extent by adding extras.
Snap Kitchen is an excellent choice with no real disadvantages, but it is unfortunately not available everywhere. The service may become available all over America in the future, but for now, it is only available in some states.
5) Freshly
While many meal delivery services require you to buy a minimum of 6 or more meals per week, Freshly does not. Freshly will let you sign up for only four meals per week if that is all you want to be delivered.
As well as being ready to eat after you heat them for only a few minutes, freshly's meals can be kept in the fridge for at least five days and last even longer if you freeze them.
Freshly offers different meal plans for people on different diets. If you are aiming for either low calories or low carb, Freshly offers many meals with less than 500 calories or less than 35 grams of carbohydrates.
There are also many dairy-free meals available if you want them. Meals from Freshly are always peanut-free and gluten-free.
Freshly is always adding new meals, so you may never run out of meals to try from the company. There are always a few dozen meals available, and there are weekly changes to what meals you can order.
Freshly is also cheaper than most other services, with the prices starting at just $8.49 per meal. Snap Kitchen's prices start at $11.67 per meal, and most companies' prices tend to be comparable to Snap Kitchen's prices.
6) Sun basket
If you strongly prefer organic food, all of the meal kits from Sun Basket are certified organic. 99% of the food that Sun Basket ships to its customers is organic.
Meat from Sun Basket is also ethically raised, without the use of antibiotics or hormones. While not all of the beef is grass-fed, you can specifically order grass-fed and grass-finished beef. All of the yogurt, milk, and eggs from Sun Basket are organic.
Like Home Chef, Sun Basket is for those who want to cook meals themselves. You will get ingredients for meals you can prepare in a short time, not complete meals you can heat up and eat immediately.
7) Personal chef to go
If you are looking for fresh rather than frozen meals, Personal Chef to go will deliver ready to eat meals to your door. While Personal Chef to go is a bit more expensive than most other services ($13.80 to $15.60 per meal), the food is excellent.
While Personal Chef is always changing its menu, there are only twelve meals available at a time. If you are a picky eater, you might find this selection to be too restrictive.
The company adds new meals every week, so there is no shortage of variety, but you can't always order what you want. Most companies have more meals available at one time than Personal Chef does.
Even though the price is a bit higher than usual, Personal Chef can sometimes save you money. Depending on your location, Personal Chef may offer free shipping.
8) Silver Cuisine
Silver Cuisine is also specifically for seniors. The selection of meals is excellent - there are always 150 meals available at a time, so there will always be something new to try.
Silver Cusine's meals are designed by medical doctors. Dr. Caroline Cederquist, who founded the company, is an expert in how the body breaks down and uses food. Meals from Silver Cuisine are designed to be healthy specifically for seniors, and not only for people in general.
Silver Cusine's website is unusually good, both rich in information and easy to use. Their website is a genuinely useful place to get your questions answered.
Like other meal delivery services, Silver Cuisine offers far better food quality than frozen meals you can buy in stores. You can get much healthier and more nutritious meals with a delivery service.
Another great thing about Silver Cuisine is that there is no minimum number of meals you have to order each week. You can order as few meals as you want, even only a single meal if you prefer. Recurring payments are also not the default, although you can set up recurring payments if you want.
A meal delivery service can also help you or someone you help stay independent longer. Older people sometimes move out of their own homes when shopping for and cooking food becomes difficult. With Silver Cuisine, you may be able to remain in your own home longer.
Other options
Instead of a typical meal delivery service, you might try having food delivered to you by local restaurants. You can order from a company that will send a driver to order food and deliver it to your residence.
The downside of delivery from local restaurants is that the food may not be healthy. Most or at least many restaurant meals are unhealthy. On the other hand, meal delivery services use healthy food as a selling point; therefore, they will send you mostly healthy food.
Some restaurants offer much healthier food than others, and if your favorite restaurant does not deliver, you can hire a company to pick up the food for you. Companies such as Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Postmates may be available in your area.
What to look for in a good meal delivery service
The food should be tasty and nutritious. If the food is not good, then you should not bother with that delivery service.
If you have difficulty cooking or finding the time and energy to cook and shop, the meals you order should only require heating up and no other preparation.
Meal delivery services should offer food that is good for people on specific diets. Some companies are better about offering food for custom diets than others. You might need food that is friendly to people with diabetes, kidney problems, or any other issues.
Some meal delivery services offer companionship as well as food. You can receive a visit as well as a meal with some delivery services.
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