At its core, building a lean, strong, healthy body comes down to two things: consistently eating the right amounts of the right types of foods and consistently doing the right amounts of the right types of exercises at the right intensities.
That’s it.
Now, on paper this is straightforward, but as we all know, there is a big difference between “on paper” and “in reality.”
Especially when it comes to food.
When it comes to food, the reality is that eating healthy is hard.
Cooking, while the most effective and least costly way to eat healthy simply takes too much time and energy to be a practical option for so many of us. Especially when you factor in the shopping, food prep, and cleaning that accompanies it.
Eating at restaurants is easy and relaxing (and delicious) but between the bread, the butter, the oils, the portion sizes, the alcohol, and the deserts even the “healthiest” meals are often far from ideal.
And while eating at any of the healthy fast food options that now exist (like Dig Inn, Roast Kitchen, Fresh & Co, and Just Salad, just to name a few) can be a strong compromise, the reality is that doing so still takes planning, time, and energy, that many of us need to invest elsewhere. (Like our families or staying late at work.)
All this is why over the last ten years there has been an explosion in companies delivering pre cooked, healthy, nutrient dense, and calorically light meals straight to your door.
Meals that are made from locally sourced meats, grains, and produce, meals that fit dietary approaches ranging from gluten free to paleo to vegan, and meals that need to be heated in the oven for just a few minutes before they are ready to eat.
(And meals that are now being delivered in biodegradable bags and containers, meaning no long term pollution and plastic filled landfills. Awesome!)
All this means you now have a tool that enables you to eat genuinely healthy and satisfying meals with the bare minimum investment of your, energy, effort, and time.
Ironically, now the problem isn’t that we wished a pre cooked home meal delivery service existed in the first place. Now the problem is there are so many to choose from. (And as we all know from first hand experience, in every field not all companies are created equal…)
So to help you wade through the options and help you find the best pre cooked home meal delivery services, we dove into every pre made meal home delivery service we could find and are pumped to present you with those that met and exceeded our standards in five key areas.
- Menu Quality: For us to select a company it had to use ingredients of the highest quality sourced from the best providers to produce meals that are both highly nutritious and taste great. (No cardboard tasting meals thank you very much!) And for us to select a company it has to offer a wide variety of regularly rotating meals for you to choose from.
- Cost: For us to select a company the average cost of its meal could not exceed $16.
- Ordering Flexibility & User Friendliness: For us to select a company it had to allow you to order your own meals, order breakfast, lunch and dinner options independently, and could not force you into a weekly subscription model.
- Delivery Schedule: For us to select a company it had to provide flexible delivery options and deliver at least multiple times a week.
- First Hand Reviews: For us to select a company it had to have at least a cumulative 4.5 out of 5 stars from their yelp and Google reviews and have shown to provide their customers with a consistently excellent overall experience.
So without further ado here is the one (yes one!) company that met and exceeded our expectations in our five key areas and we feel truly confident in recommending to you…
Eat Clean Bro
Now again, you may be thinking, “One! That’s it?”
Yup. That’s it.
It may seem like we are being overly picky here, but the reality was after pouring over the websites, menus, user interfaces, user experiences, and first hand reviews of the over twenty five pre cooked home meal delivery services that service New York City, Eat Clean Bro was the only one that consistently scored high enough for us to be willing to recommend them to you.
Unfortunately every other company simply had too many issues ranging from confusing websites, subpar meal quality, poor ordering processes, delivery issues, and bad customer services issues for us to be willing to stand behind.
But, the good news is given how demanding we were you can take comfort in knowing that Eat Clean Bro is going to provide you with great tasting healthy meals delivered to you in an easy and user friendly fashion.
And if anything does go wrong you can rest assured you will be dealing with a company with great customer service that genuinely cares about you, values your experience, and will go the extra mile to fix the issue. (It’s always nice to be cared about right!)
Now, the best thing for you to do from here is to head to Eat Clean Bro’s website and explore Eat Clean Bro’s menu, nutritional content, ordering options, and delivery options for yourself.
But first, to help you get a lay of the land before you do, we have done a quick summary on how Eat Clean Bro scored in each of the five areas we examined.
So take a second, jump in with us as we cover the basics of Eat Clean Bro, then get ready to have a great new tool in your healthy eating tool box!
EAT CLEAN BRO
MENU
When it comes to Eat Clean Bro everything we found about their menu was positive.
The quality of their food is excellent, their meals taste great, and their menu is extensive with over sixty main and side dishes offered at once and over twenty weekly special items available.
Eat Clean Bro offers a number of highly nutritious yet particularly low calorie meals consisting of just a lean protein and non-starchy vegetable that are great if you are trying to lose weight.
Eat Clean Bro offers a number of more balanced meals containing a lean protein, non starchy vegetables, and a starchy vegetable (or rice option) which are great if you are more focused on maintaining your weight and eating a more balanced diet.
For a number of their meals Eat Clean Bro lets you choose your protein source (chicken, beef, fish, shrimp) non starchy vegetable side (broccoli, asparagus, spinach, string beans,) and your starchy vegetable side (white rice, brown rice, sliced sweet potato, or you can exclude this option) which is awesome as it gives you maximum flexibility when trying to build your own weekly menu.
And finally, Eat Clean Bro offers bulk order options which means if you simply want to order, let’s say, two pounds of grilled chicken, a pound of broccoli, and a pound of string beans and then divvy up your meals for your upcoming week yourself, you have that option. (We love this option, but one important caveat here, we only found this option while going through their FAQ section and could not find a link to it in their main menu. We are not sure why. It’s weird.)
COST
One of Eat Clean Bro’s biggest positives is its cost per meal.
On average their main dishes cost between about $9.00 and $13.00 with the majority of the low carb / weight loss geared dishes coming in on the lower end. (Extra nice.)
Yes, this is more expensive than cooking, but these are great prices when compared to the average cost per meal offered by the majority of other pre cooked home meal delivery services.
Now, one important note here is that Eat Clean Bro does charge a $10 delivery fee for delivery’s further than 15 miles from the 07728 zip code and a $5 fee for their cooler bags. That’s a bit of a pain, but in our eyes those are small prices to pay for such great food and excellent service.
ORDERING FLEXIBILITY & USER FRIENDLINESS
When it comes to actually ordering your meals from Eat Clean Bro their website makes it very clear, very easy, and overall very user friendly.
Simply pick the meals you want to add to your cart, press add, and there you go.
The only downside of Eat Clean Bro’s ordering process is that there is a five meal minimum to order.
This can become a bit of a pain if you are only looking to order dinners as the five meal minimum means you are going to have one dinner sitting in the fridge or freezer for five days before you are ready to eat it.
However, the work around here is to order the minimum five meals and then eat one or two for lunch. Or try ordering one or more of Eat Clean Bro’s breakfast options. Either way you’ll end up finishing all your Eat Clean Bro meals within three days of their arrival and well within the “nice and fresh” window.
One major positive of Eat Clean Bro’s ordering experience though is that you can order your meals as late as 11:59 PM the night before delivery and still have your delivery filled.
This is in stark contrast to many of the other services we looked into with the majority requiring you to fill your order days (or even a week!) in advance.
DELIVERY SCHEDULE
Besides the five meal minimum, the only other somewhat negative aspect of Eat Clean Bro is that they only deliver three days a week: Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday and only between 2:00 PM and 10:00 PM.
In our experience a three-day a week delivery schedule has always been fine, but it does limit flexibility somewhat. In addition a few of the reviews we read mentioned that when their meals arrived past 8:00 PM it threw off their dinner plans for that evening.
FIRST HAND REVIEWS
As we dove into Eat Clean Bro’s first hand reviews, four words kept coming up: excellent, awesome, and thank you!.
Time after time users raved about Eat Clean Bro’s food, how easy they were to use, their customer service, and their response to any issues that did arise.
And all of this showed in Eat Clean Bro’s cumulative 5 star rating among 120 Google reviews and cumulative 5 star rating among 68 yelp reviews.
(To add a bit of context here, Eat Clean Bro was the most reviewed of the services we researched and only one other company, Get Fed, cumulatively scored over a 4.5 in their first hand reviews. In our opinion, these reviews are extremely impressive.)
OVERALL TAKE AWAY
As we said, at the end of the day building a lean, strong, healthy body comes down to two things, eating the right amounts of the right types of foods and consistently doing the right amounts of the right types of exercises at the right intensities.
But as we also said, eating right is easy on paper, but tough in reality. Between the shopping, the meal prep, the cooking, and the cleaning, who has time to cook every one of their meals now a day?
We know we don’t!
And that is why using a pre cooked home meal delivery service like Eat Clean Bro can be such a powerful tool to help you nail your diet.
Imagine coming home and simply throwing a healthy, nutritious, and calorically light meal right in your oven (or microwave) waiting a few minutes and then sitting down to eat.
No friction, no fuss.
Sounds pretty great right?
So take some time, head to Eat Clean Bro’s website, explore their menu and ordering options, read their awesome first hand reviews, and give Eat Clean Bro a try.
We promise you’ll be happy to you did!
(And remember, we reviewed over twenty-five companies servicing New York City, and Eat Clean Bro was the only one that met our expectations!)
Zach
Founder & Director of Zach Moore Training.