Preparing a healthy meal doesn’t have to take a long time – Joe Wicks’s 15-minute recipes are proof of that – and the best recipe boxes can make pulling together a nutritious feast a whole lot easier. However, at the end of a long day, even 15 or 30 minutes of food preparation can seem like more effort than you can muster, especially when food delivery apps require just a couple of clicks.
It’s not that a takeaway now and then is necessarily a problem, but if you find you’re relying on a delivery most nights, it’s probably time to improve your diet – and you can do so with minimal effort thanks to ready meals. Not just any old ready meal, because some have hair-raising levels of salt, sugar and saturated fats. As long as you go for one that has slashed the numbers on those three unhealthy characters while keeping the calories down, you’ll be golden.
Like takeaways, we wouldn’t recommend living on them, but they’re certainly better than another pizza turning up on your doorstep. We’ve tested out some of the best ready meals you’ll find available in UK supermarkets, as well as including the best healthy meal prep services that can help ensure you always have a nutritious meal on hand in your fridge or freezer.
We’ve also been chowing down on the instant savoury meals that come in sacks from brands like Huel and The Protein Works, for another quick and easy option you make just by adding boiling water.
The Best Supermarket Ready Meals
Sainsbury’s Flourish range contains a wide variety of products that you can fit into a healthy diet, including soups, snacks, smoothies and sides alongside frozen and fresh main meals. We tried several of the fresh meals and they were all reliably tasty, if a little unadventurous, and showcased their healthiness with an array of green lights on the nutritional panel. There is a good portion of veg in each meal too, but the vegan options are very limited.
Myprotein’s frozen meals are designed to satisfy, with hearty servings of pasta and meat, and high salt contents common across the range. You get less veg than in other ready meals, so you need to add that on yourself for a well balanced meal. On the plus side, the larger meals in the range like the Meat Feast Pasta really hit the spot on active days.
You can get Myprotein’s frozen meals at Iceland, in-store and online, as well as from Iceland’s sub-brand The Food Warehouse. Note that most meals cost £4-£4.75, but the larger ones will set you back £6.
Morrisons’ fresh ready meals contain an excellent selection of healthy options. While a few of the meals might throw up an amber on the traffic light system for nutritional guidance, in general they offer a balanced option for your evening meals, coming in under 600 calories and including welcome amounts of protein and fibre. Each meal is clearly marked with how many portions of vegetables it contains – most have two. More importantly, the meals taste great: the chicken paella and chicken biriyani were the stand-outs from the selection we sampled.
We think £3.75 for a fresh meal represents great value, and there’s a two for £6.50 offer on at time of publication. We’d like to see some vegetarian and vegan options in the range though – all the meals currently contain meat or fish.
These are our go-to option in a dinner pinch, simply because Bol Pots are often available in even the smallest inner-city supermarkets and everything in the range is essentially a load of vegetables in a tasty sauce – an approach that’s so healthy the traffic light system shows green across the board. Each pot packs in at least a couple of your five-a-day, and they’re low in fat, salt, sugar and calories – the Thai Coconut Curry contains only 274 calories, for example. The only downside is they can be a little too small to satisfy bigger appetites, but a couple of wholemeal pittas on the side will sort that.
Healthy Frozen Ready Meal Delivery Services
Tastily is our favourite meal prep service, offering a wide range of tasty meals that follow sound nutritional principles – they are balanced, provide around 400-500 calories, and contain a good portion of veg. The website makes filtering and picking your meals easy, though we’d like to see more plant-based options.
One welcome feature of Tastily’s range is that you can order a large portion size, which is very helpful for active people who need the extra calories to support their training.
Plant-based meal delivery service Allplants has lunches, dinners and sides in its range, and all of them impressed us. The meals are tasty and satisfying, and pack in a variety of veg to help you towards your five-a-day. It’s not a cheap service, but Allplants is a great way to try a vegan diet if you’re considering switching permanently, or just for Veganuary, or even the occasional meat-free Monday.
Read more in our Allplants review
Recipe box company Mindful Chef’s frozen ready meals are gluten-free, dairy-free, high in protein and ready in around eight to 12 minutes. There’s a welcome mix of vegan and meaty options, and the calories and macronutrient info is on the site so you can pick meals that are lower in calories if you prefer, though even the most indulgent options come in under a sensible 600 calories per serving.
Stocked sells packets of eight frozen blocks of food, which allows you to heat up just the amount you need to make a meal. The range of meals is good and there are plenty of plant-based options, and there is something enjoyably futuristic about grabbing a couple of frozen cuboids for your dinner.
However, most of the blocks work best when combined with rice or pasta, since they are sauces like ragu or dal, which means you still have to do some cooking yourself. The suggested portion sizes are also a little small – we tended to use all eight blocks to make enough sauce for two people, even when adding in our rice and vegetables. Even if you buy six packs at once, at £1.10 a block Stocked doesn’t work out as a saving when compared with buying full ready meals from other brands.
Best Healthy Instant Meals
The Protein Works' answer to Pot Noodles surprised us in being more than merely acceptable when it comes to flavour: the Kickin’ Korean Noodle in particular was enjoyable enough to look forward to at meal times. After scooping the powder into a suitable heat proof container (an annoyingly hard process owing to the small opening on the sack, which means you cover your hand and wrist in powder), you just add boiling water and wait eight minutes. The meals don’t match the satisfaction of traditionally-made food, but they tick all the nutritional boxes and are suitable for vegans.
Huel’s savoury meals are an upgrade on the flavour, or lack thereof, in its meal replacement shakes, and some of the options in the range are positively tasty, like the Cajun pasta. The texture isn’t quite as enjoyable as The Protein Works’s instant meals, though, and we found that we tired of the flavour before the seven-serving sack ran out. However, it does the job it was designed for, remaining a pretty satisfying, nutritionally rounded and very easy option – we found these meals great for lunch.
Read more in our Huel Hot & Savoury review
