Best Vegan & Plant-Based Meal Kits 2026

A vegan meal kit delivers ingredients or ready-to-eat meals made entirely without animal products — no meat, fish, dairy, or eggs. Among the major US meal kit services, none currently ships a fully dedicated 100% vegan box; most are "vegan-friendly," meaning you select plant-based recipes from a wider weekly menu yourself. That's an important distinction to understand before you order, because price, ingredient quality, and recipe variety vary a lot by provider. If you're fine with the occasional egg or dairy, also check out our roundup of vegetarian meal kits or the flexitarian kits.

This guide is for anyone who wants to eat more plant-based without spending hours on meal planning — whether you're fully vegan, flexitarian, or just curious. We compared the relevant providers on price, plant-based recipe availability, and Trustpilot ratings; how we test explains the method behind these numbers. Our overall top pick for plant-based eating is Green Chef, which is USDA-certified organic and offers a dedicated Vegetarian plan with vegan-friendly recipes each week — read our full Green Chef review before you decide.

Start by deciding how strictly plant-based you actually want to eat. If you're fully vegan, a service with the strongest plant-forward menu (like Green Chef's Vegetarian plan) makes the most sense, since more of the weekly options are built around plant-based ingredients from the start. If you're flexitarian or just want to cut back on meat, a broader kit with vegan-friendly recipes to opt into can be cheaper and more flexible — and if you want to avoid meat without necessarily going 100% vegan, we have a separate guide to meatless meal kits.

Next comes the format: do you want to cook from scratch with ingredients and recipes, or would you rather have prepared meals that just need heating? HelloFresh and Green Chef ship ingredients plus recipe cards, while Sunbasket also offers ready-to-heat meals alongside its kits.

Finally, weigh three things: price per serving, how clearly plant-based recipes are labeled, and Trustpilot score. Together these give an honest picture — a cheap kit with a thin vegan selection isn't necessarily a good plant-based choice if your goal is variety and nutrition. To see how these providers stack up against the whole market, compare with our overall pick for the best meal kit.

This is the trap most people fall into. A service marketed with "vegan recipes" is not the same as a fully vegan service. Among the mainstream US providers, none currently ships a dedicated, all-vegan weekly menu — Green Chef, Sunbasket, and HelloFresh all require you to select the plant-based recipes yourself from a broader menu that also includes meat and dairy options. Purple Carrot is the closest thing on the market to a truly dedicated vegan kit, built as 100% plant-based from the ground up, though it isn't featured in our detailed comparison here because its Trustpilot score trails the group at around 2.1/5.

At HelloFresh it's vegan-friendly: among its weekly menus you'll find vegetarian and some vegan recipes, but you have to actively pick them each week, and the rest of the lineup is mixed — see the details in our HelloFresh review. Green Chef sits closer to the plant-forward end with its dedicated Vegetarian plan, and Sunbasket falls in between — a mix of recipe kits and ready-to-heat meals with vegetarian and vegan-friendly options, which we cover in the Sunbasket review.

The practical consequence: with a truly dedicated vegan service there's no risk of an animal product sneaking into your order by accident. With vegan-friendly, you get more flexibility and often a lower price, but you need to double-check every order yourself.

The price range is wide. HelloFresh is cheapest with plans from $10.99/serving, dropping to around $7.49/serving on larger family plans, plus $10.99 shipping. Sunbasket starts around $11.49/serving with shipping around $9.99, reflecting its premium organic ingredients. Green Chef is priciest at $13.99/serving plus $10.99 shipping, reflecting its USDA-organic ingredients and diet-plan structure. If you want to push the price down further, we round up the lowest starting prices across the market under cheap meal kits.

Price matters more than people often admit: cost is consistently one of the top reasons subscribers cancel a meal kit service, according to industry surveys, even though convenience and inspiration — not saving money — are usually the main reasons people sign up in the first place.

Keep in mind that the lowest prices you'll see advertised are almost always welcome-period pricing. HelloFresh offers up to 50% off your first box, while Green Chef and Sunbasket both run first-box and multi-box discounts — check our HelloFresh coupon code page for current codes. After the intro period, prices return to the standard rate, so budget for the full price when weighing the long-term cost; we've collected more concrete tips in our guide to saving money on meal kits. None of the three require a subscription commitment, so you can pause or cancel at any time.

Not every provider publishes detailed nutrition breakdowns for their plant-based recipes, so it's worth checking a service's own nutrition info before you subscribe if that matters to you. Green Chef stands out for offering a dedicated Vegetarian diet plan built around vegetables, legumes, and whole grains, and its USDA-organic certification means the produce itself meets a consistent standard. What "organic certified" actually covers, and why it matters for a plant-based diet, is worth understanding before you compare providers on price alone.

HelloFresh's vegan-friendly recipes are drawn from a broader, non-organic menu, so the produce and protein sourcing will vary week to week depending on which recipes you pick. Weighed against the USDA's general dietary guidance — which recommends building meals around vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and a variety of protein sources including legumes — a dedicated plant-based plan like Green Chef's makes it easier to hit those targets consistently than picking single vegan recipes out of a mixed menu.

Sunbasket doesn't publish a single standardized "plant score," which makes it harder to compare its nutritional content directly against the others. If your goal in eating more plant-based is health — more fiber, more legumes, less saturated fat from animal products — the clearest signal you have as a shopper is which provider builds its plan around plant-based ingredients by default, rather than offering a handful of vegan options within an omnivore menu. Dig deeper into the broader health question in are meal kits healthy? and our roundup of the healthiest meal kits.

The most common worry about vegan eating is protein — but it's easier to solve than most people expect. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans already point toward more plant-forward eating: more vegetables, fruits, and legumes, and a variety of protein sources that don't have to include meat. On a plant-based diet, protein comes mainly from legumes (beans, lentils, chickpeas), tofu, tempeh, and whole grains.

In practice, it's the kits that lean more heavily on legumes and whole plant proteins in their recipes that make it easiest to hit your protein targets over a week — which is one more reason a dedicated plant-based plan like Green Chef's Vegetarian menu has an edge over picking individual vegan recipes out of a mixed weekly lineup. Keep in mind that the nutrition figures published by meal kit companies are typically calculated from recipes rather than lab-tested, so treat them as a guide rather than an exact figure. As a vegan, you should also pay attention to vitamin B12, iron, and vitamin D, which a meal kit alone won't guarantee — those usually require deliberate food choices or a supplement regardless of which service you use.

The format determines how much work you put into the meal yourself. With ingredients and recipes — the model at HelloFresh and Green Chef — you get fresh ingredients and a step-by-step guide and cook the dish from scratch. That gives you the freshest food, the most hands-on cooking experience, and typically the lowest price per serving, but it costs you 25–40 minutes of cooking per night.

Ready-to-heat meals, which Sunbasket also offers alongside its kits, flip that equation: a couple of minutes of prep and a short stint in the oven or microwave, and dinner is served. It's hard to beat on busy weeknights, and Sunbasket's strong 4.4/5 Trustpilot score reflects how many customers value exactly that convenience. On the other hand, reviews note that taste and portion size can vary, and you pay a premium for the prep work being done for you. If pure convenience is your top priority, our full category of prepared meal delivery services — including brands built entirely around ready-to-eat meals — is worth a look; just note those are a different category from recipe kits.

Choose based on your routine: if you love cooking and want the most plant-forward menu, that points toward the recipe kits. If you need to save time, the ready-to-heat option is worth the extra cost. If organic ingredients matter to you as well, cross-check our list of organic meal kits, where Green Chef also leads.

Three things come up repeatedly in reviews across providers. First, delivery: both HelloFresh and Green Chef get some criticism for missing items or substitutions, and delivery issues are among the most common complaints for HelloFresh. Confirm your address is covered, and be prepared for the occasional missing ingredient.

Second, cancellation. Even though none of these services require a subscription commitment, some customers find the cancel button harder to locate than they'd like. Get familiar with how to pause or stop your subscription when you sign up — we have a step-by-step guide on how to cancel a meal kit subscription, and a roundup of kits with no commitment.

Third, the price after your intro offer ends. The welcome discounts are real — up to 50% off at HelloFresh, and first-box and multi-box savings at Green Chef and Sunbasket — but they only apply to your first few boxes. After that it's full price, and Green Chef in particular is seen as pricier in reviews. Calculate the total cost including shipping, and take advantage of the lack of commitment to test a couple of weeks before deciding.