Hungryroot holds a unique category within our meal kit reviews. Imagine it as an online grocery store focused on semi-prepared foods, where Hungryroot lets you mix and match them to build a lineup of simple meals. What we love: Hungryroot offers the highest level of customization among these services, ideal for those who enjoy grocery shopping in concept but dread the actual trip to the store. Rather than subscribing to a fixed number of meals, you’ll enroll in a plan that provides a specific number of weekly credits, then add items to your cart until you hit your limit (though you can always add extras for an additional fee). You can browse the Recipes or Groceries sections, where the key distinction is that Recipes offers meal kits composed of select grocery items (like Green Chile Chicken Enchiladas using premade green chile sauce, fully cooked seasoned chicken, tortillas, and sour cream), while Groceries lets you add a wide array of individual items to your cart, including those featured in the recipes. Hungryroot provides an impressive variety of options for boosting protein intake. It’s simple to filter for high-protein meals (which Hungryroot defines as 25+ grams per serving) and choose your preferred protein from choices such as chicken, bison, or tempeh. I especially enjoyed every one of Hungryroot’s fully prepared chicken selections. The sous vide chicken packs were ideal for boosting protein in salads or wraps, while the sous vide half chicken offered a simple weeknight meal that just needed a brief oven stint to heat and crisp. These sous vide packages also promised to stay fresh when unopened and refrigerated for much longer than a piece of chicken I’d cooked myself, so I wasn’t worried about using everything up in just one week. What we’d leave: If you struggle with decision paralysis, beware: Hungryroot’s Recipes section is basically a list of every possible ingredient combo from its grocery options, meaning thousands of choices to scroll through, many of them nearly identical. I found this overwhelming, and if I continued using Hungryroot, I’d lean toward treating the recipes as mere inspiration while adding my own chosen individual grocery items to my cart each week. Although Hungryroot’s recipes are highly beginner-friendly, some cooking intuition goes a long way toward simplifying and improving every meal.
