Prep Kitchen Review: Tasty, Balanced Meals For Active People

It’s sometimes easy to forget that, for most people, eating healthily simply involves balanced meals where you don’t skimp on the vegetables. You don’t have to cut out all flavour and only eat meagre amounts, just get your veg in and eat in line with how active you are.

With this in mind, Prep Kitchen’s meals are perfect. The range is tasty across the board, packed with flavour and well balanced so it’s easy to get the macronutrients and calories suited to your lifestyle. It’s undoubtedly one of the best healthy meal prep services.

Prep Kitchen: Price And Availability

The price of Prep Kitchen varies depending on your portion size and plan. If you opt for a Fat Loss plan it’s £6.25 per balanced meal and £7 per meal for low-carb meals. On the Muscle Gain plan it’s £7.50 per balanced meal and £8.25 for low-carb. 

Prep Kitchen delivers across mainland UK excluding the Highlands, with deliveries arriving weekly on Sundays via DPD.

Setting Up Your Plan

Your Prep Kitchen journey begins by choosing between the fat loss and muscle gain plans, which determines the overall calories in the meals available to you. You then select whether you want balanced meals or low-carb meals, with the latter containing more protein and veg to replace the carbs.

The actual meals are the same whatever choices you make – they are simply adjusted in line with your aims. You can see the nutritional breakdown for each meal adjusted for each plan choice by clicking on the main menu before you begin your order, with fat loss meals generally having 400-500 calories and muscle gain ones 500-700. The price per meal varies according to your plan, but once you’ve confirmed this the meals are always the same price, which keeps things simple.

After choosing your plan you select how many meals you want per week (from four to 100) and then take a look at the menus to choose your meals. There are week A and week B menus, which rotate but are both dominated by meaty meals – adding more veggie and fish options should be top of Prep Kitchen’s to-do list.

The final step of the process is choosing whether you want any breakfasts and snacks, such as chocolate pancakes, overnight oats or brownies. As a rule I found these to be less enjoyable than the main meals – I preferred toast or cereal, neither of which are exactly time-consuming to make yourself. I’d skip this option.

How I Tested This Meal Delivery Service

I tested two weeks of the Prep Kitchen service, trying a variety of meals across the different plans, including some of the breakfasts and snacks.

The Meals

All your meals arrive on Sunday each week in recyclable packaging. It takes three minutes to heat up a meal from fresh (with a 900W microwave) and you can also freeze them, in which case it takes around 4min 30sec to heat them up. It’s worth freezing a few meals because you’ll struggle to get through a big order before the “use by” dates, and I found they tasted no less delicious if heated from frozen rather than fresh.

The standout attraction of the Prep Kitchen meals is the flavour. There’s nothing bland about these meals – if anything some people might find them a bit too rich. Do take note of meals marked as spicy, because that label is not dished out lightly. There are generous amounts of sauces in most meals to ensure nothing gets too dry in the microwave, and while the meals don’t always look particularly delicious with meat, veg and carbs piled into the tray, I didn’t come across one I didn’t like.

Particular highlights were the Tex Mex burrito bowl with jalapeno rice, kung pao chicken, and the Christmas turkey dinner (with all the trimmings). But there were probably only one or two meals I wouldn’t order again, and even there I enjoyed them, just less than the others.

As someone who runs every day I preferred the higher-calorie portions of the muscle gain plan, but on my rest days the fat loss meals were satisfying. Across the plans the meals are built for people who are active, so the calorie count might be too high for those who are looking to lose weight while being largely sedentary, but it’s easy to fit the meals into a balanced, healthy lifestyle.

Is Prep Kitchen Worth It?

Even within the expensive world of meal delivery services, Prep Kitchen is a pricy option, though it doesn’t come in vastly dearer than some of my other favourite options like Tastily and Allplants. If the price doesn’t put you off it’s an excellent service with delicious meals, and active people will find it particularly good for providing the nutrition needed to support their training.

It doesn’t come across as a traditional “healthy” meal service because the meals seem so normal, which for me is a plus since they are still balanced healthy meals – just tastier and heartier than many others. However, those looking for very low-carb and calorie meals won’t really find them here, and as noted, the range is also lacking in veggie and fish options.

You can find meal services that will tailor plans even more closely to your fitness goals, like Fresh Fitness Food, which delivers daily. However, on overall convenience and flavour, it’s hard to top what Prep Kitchen offers, and it will suit the majority of people very well if the price isn’t off-putting.