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Diet Delivery Comparison: Taste and Cost

By T. Kallmyer

With the hectic lifestyle that most Americans live, how does one have time to count calories and prepare healthy meals, let alone finding time to do smart shopping. Then there's the pitfall of binging on all the unhealthy food that's on display everywhere in the grocery store.

This is exactly what the 70+ Diet Food Meal Delivery Companies are banking on as they hope dieters will let them do all the work for them. There is tough competition out there and companies are looking for ways to make their plan the most appealing to the potential dieters.

We recently sampled 4 such companies' services and here is how they stack up.

Overview

NOTE that a full and extensive review of each of these diets (including a gallery of photos) has also been written (links below). We did not choose a particular service as being "the best". Each service had a multitude of options (depending on your goals) and had both pros and cons.

Bistro MD - Of the four companies tested, they would get the second best tasting service in my opinion. If they would allow for all of their food to be heated apart from the microwave, they would be top notch. You can read my extensive review of Bistro MD here.
Diet-to-Go - Ninety percent of Diet-to-Go customers pick up their food at locations close to them and the food isn't frozen. Unfortunately, I was too far away and I sampled the frozen food. The heating instructions were generic and a lot of the food ended up over-cooked by the microwave. You can read my extensive review of Diet-to-Go here.
Nu-Kitchen - If I lived in New York and had the money to spend, I would subscribe to this service even if I wasn't dieting. Their food is top notch and gets the best tasting award as even their snacks and desserts were made from scratch. You can read my extensive review of Nu-Kitchen here.
eDiets - This is the least expensive of the four and probably the lesser in quality as well. Don't get me wrong, the food for the most part was good, but compared to the others, just a tad behind Diet-to-Go. They get kudos for allowing plenty of room in their plan for fresh serves of fruit and vegetables. You can read my extensive review of eDiets here.

Overall, these companies offer a good service for those who have trouble sticking to diets because of all the effort involved and who stumble when tempted at the grocery store. Besides, with most of these services you will end up with enough Styrofoam to float you to Hawaii where you can show off your new body.

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11 Comments

Jody - Fit at 52

Pretty expensive for stuff you can cook yourself for less BUT I guess if you have the money & it works for you. If I had the money, I might hire a chef since I am such a bad cook.. but I still try & eat my own food!

I also wonder if since many of these plans are not a lot of food, calories wise, do people eat other stuff on top of that & maybe sabotage themselves...

Katie

"Then there's the pitfall of binging on all the unhealthy food that's on display everywhere in the grocery store."

Once again, there is an enormous difference between giving into temptation or exhaustion and just using whatever is easiest, and binging. Binging would be more likely to involve eating anything and everything in your pantry, including even the best of these delivery diets. With as many articles as Diet Blog has run on eating disorders, I'm surprised that binging is still conflated with "overeating" when the two are entirely different things.

Jim F.

Yes binging (bingeing?) and overeating are two completely different things. In popular vernacular however binging tends to imply overeating.

Anyways, the point of this piece is that - yes - there are some great diet delivery services out there if you're willing to pay. What concerns me is all the potential package wastage - which is why it was good to see that Nu-Kitchen do pick up their packaging for recycling.

Katie

I'm aware of the point of the piece, however a mistruth repeated time and again becomes the truth and as someone who suffers with binging and purging, I am truly bothered every time I see people conflating the two and claiming that having an enormous snack in the afternoon because you ate a bad lunch is a binge.

And I understand the worry about packaging, but that's a worry with anything beyond just buying produce and meat/dairy in reusable packaging, because it's difficult to produce anything else that way.

ippert

Wow. $45/person.. yikes! I can create a huge feast for that. Although, i dont think im in their target demographic.

Kellie - My Health Software

I had no idea those diets were so expensive! The companies must be making a lot of money to survive in a competitive market and advertise constantly. Plenty of people must be ordering and eating their food.

I'm not a great cook, like Jody, but I still prefer my own cooking to mass produced foods.

Kat

Wow, that is pricey. I would rather be given a shopping list each week with healthy food items so I can prepare my own small meals. Honestly, the only weight loss program that worked for me was www.5minimeals.com. I swear by it.

Spectra

Whoa, $20-$45 a day for food? Wow, that's pretty crazy. I probably spend something like $100 or less per week for food for two people. I guess some people need someone to premake their food for them, but that doesn't teach you how to eat/cook properly once you stop getting the diet food. My mom does the Jenny Craig program and she lost weight initially, but now she's stopped losing...the reason is that in addition to the prepackaged meals, she eats other food because she claims she's STARVING. I wonder how many people would just eat extra food in addition to these mail order foods if they didn't get filled up enough. I also don't agree with programs that don't allow you to have any fresh vegetables or fruit...doesn't that seem a TAD bit counterintuitive? Fruits and veggies are like nature's diet food...you almost can't eat too much of them.

Robin

I loved doing the e-diets delivery but it was just too expensive. Maybe someday if we get a handle on our finances again but that's a long way off.

Justin Smith

Thanks for the DTG mention on this post.

Just a quick note on DTG prices, since we offer so many options that has to be taken into account. The most inexpensive 7 day plan is only $17 per day, and the most expensive is $21... so I'm not exactly sure where the figures came from.

I'd love to see some more features like this about diet delivery products. Alot of people are trying them these days and there are constantly new options popping up. For example, I'd like to see some of the diabetic delivery services reviewed like the new nutrisystemD, vs. other meals that claim to adhere to the American Diabetes Association. Would be an interesting article...

T. Kallmyer

The figures included the delivery charge factored in...