Best Value
Winner
Best Variety
A balanced diet is important for staying healthy throughout our entire lives, but good nutrition becomes even more important as we age. Seniors need a healthy diet that is packed full of nutritious foods, including lean proteins, whole grains, and an abundance of fresh produce. The best meal delivery services for seniors can help with all of this.
For many seniors, the challenge comes with putting it all into practice. Retirees are living busy lives and might not like the idea of spending hours in the kitchen. For other seniors, limited mobility might make meal preparation difficult. Whether it’s due to choice or need, meal delivery for seniors is a great option for getting needed nutrition with little fuss.
Silver Cuisine by BistroMD
BEST MEAL DELIVERY SERVICE FOR SENIORS
For seniors who are looking for a variety, flexibility, and nutrition from their meal delivery service, Silver Cuisine gets high marks across the board. Silver Cuisine offers easy, nutritious meals that meet the special dietary requirements that many seniors require.
Silver Cuisine’s menu features more than 150 alternating meals for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. Each meal that meets special dietary requirements is clearly identified, and there are no minimum orders or commitments. Silver Cuisine is a great service for senior couples with different tastes or dietary needs.
Key Benefits
- The full menu consists of nutritionally balanced breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack options.
- A range of special diet options, including diabetic, heart-healthy, menopause, Mediterranean, and vegetarian meals
- Zero commitments, subscriptions, or requirements
- Meals cannot be personally customized at this time, but there is enough variety that most will find meals they’ll enjoy
- A flat shipping rate of $19.95 is applied for each order, regardless of order size.
Factor
BEST VALUE
There are a few things to consider when looking at value-filled meal delivery services for seniors, and it isn’t just priced alone. There are definitely cheap meal delivery services out there, but some don’t offer the quality, taste, and nutrition that seniors are looking for. Our choice for the best value meal delivery for seniors goes to Factor because they knock it out of the park on so many levels.
Factor offers prepared meals with great flavor and a menu that offers a little something for everyone. On the menu, you’ll find about 30-35 weekly meals that also appeal to seniors with specific dietary preferences.
The meal plans offered by Factor include Chef’s Choice, Keto, and Calorie Smart for calorie-focused meals, Vegan & Veggie for vegetarian meal options, and Protein Plus.
The cost depends on a combination of which meal plan you choose and how many senior meals per week you want to have delivered to your door. The more you order, the more you save — plus, you’re also saving yourself the trouble of grocery shopping!
Key Benefits
- Affordable price starts at $10.99 per serving.
- Complete meals, but some add-ons and breakfast options are available
- Ready-to-heat meals arrive fresh, never frozen
- Healthy meals with great flavor
Fresh N Lean
BEST VARIETY
Fresh N Lean is becoming one of the most well-recognized names in meal delivery, and the meal plans that have made them so popular are ideal for health-conscious seniors who are in search of great value.
Fresh N Lean offers a meal delivery option for seniors that’s a step above most other companies. While not the largest selection of meals, their entrees are varied, and they offer plans to meet the nutritional needs of special diets like Paleo, Keto, and vegetarian lifestyles.
Key Benefits
- Heat-and-eat meals increase independence in mobility-limited seniors
- Fresh N Lean meals are nutritionally balanced, well portioned, and reasonably priced
- Special diet plans for today’s popular dietary lifestyles
- Meals can be customized to accommodate food allergies and sensitivities
- Free shipping
Purple Carrot Prepared Meals
BEST VEGAN
Purple Carrot is one of the best meal delivery services for seniors that enjoy a plant-based lifestyle or lean toward wanting to eat more vegetarian-style meals. Purple Carrot is probably most well known among meal delivery services for their meal kits, but they also offer a tasty selection of healthy prepared meals.
Purple Carrot offers about eight plant-based, fully prepared meals per week. They also offer a great variety of flavors, so you don’t feel like you’re stuck with the same stir-fry vegetables and brown rice every night of the week.
What you’ll find on the menu aren’t what you would consider calorie-restricted meals, but the fully prepared meals mostly hover around 400-500 calories, so they definitely are calorie conscious.
Also, many grocery stores stock frozen Purple Carrot meals in their freezer section. If you have a grocery delivery service from your local store, you can have Purple Carrot home-delivered meals without signing up for a subscription service.
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Key Benefits
- Purple Carrot offers premade plant-based meals but also a selection of meal kits for those times when you feel like preparing meals instead.
- Heat-and-eat options are ideal for seniors who don’t want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen
- Meals are nutritionally balanced
- Single-serve portions are well suited for senior appetites
Tovala
What if you want super easy and convenient meals for your busy senior lifestyle but just don’t care much for the pre-made meals that other meal delivery services offer?
Meal kits are a great alternative, allowing you to indulge in your culinary side while streamlining the process with pre-portioned and pre-measured ingredients. Tovala is our top choice for senior meal kit delivery service.
One of the reasons we like Tovala so much for senior meals is that they take the typically simple meal kit process and make it even easier. Instead of dirtying a sink full of pots and pans, All Tovala’s meal kits are prepared in a special Tovala oven.
The oven is about the size of a small microwave, and all you do is scan the ingredients included for a complete meal, and the oven basically takes care of the rest. Tovala is fast and easy, and did we also mention that it is delicious?
There is a small investment with the Tovala oven, but you get a significant discount on it when you sign up with the Tovala meal delivery service.
Key Benefits
- A couple of dozen meal kits are offered each week
- Meals for one and meals for two are available
- Meals are fresh and nutritionally balanced
- Fresh meals offer wonderful flavor
- Quick and easy meal kits with minimal fuss and mess
- Prices start at $9.99 per serving
Magic Kitchen
Magic Kitchen prides itself on offering nutritious, restaurant-quality meals to its customers. One of the few companies that specifically offers a meal delivery service for seniors, Magic Kitchen features a menu of senior-friendly meals and also accommodates many different special diets.
Some of the special diets that Magic Kitchen caters to include low-sodium meals, renal-friendly meals for kidney disease, calorie-restricted meals, low-carb, gluten-free meals, dairy-free meals, and senior meals, among other dietitian-support meals.
Magic Kitchen is one of the most senior meal delivery services for seniors with dietary restrictions or needs senior meals that are tailored to specific health conditions.
They offer dietitian-designed meals, along with the option for complete meal bundles or a la carte offerings, such as a whole wheat dinner roll to go along with your meal or just as a little snack.
Overall, Magic Kitchen receives solid customer reviews, although the price point might be a little high for seniors on a tight budget.
Key Benefits
- Magic Kitchen offers nutritionally balanced meals specially designed for senior’s dietary needs
- Meal offerings for special diets, including diabetic, dialysis, renal, gluten-free, and low cholesterol
- frozen meals stay fresh and are easy to heat and eat
- The gift option makes it easy to choose meals and have them delivered to seniors
Buying Guide
Whether you’re considering a senior meal delivery service for yourself or as a gift for someone you care about, there are a few key details that are important when choosing the service that best meets your needs.
Here are a few important points to consider.
Minimal, If Any Meal Prep
For many seniors, the less meal prep involved, the better. Active seniors are living busy lives and love the convenience of restaurant meals or take out because it keeps them out of the kitchen. A meal delivery service that offers meals with minimal prep can be a healthy, economical mealtime option. This is one of the reasons we like easy meal kits, like the ones offered by Trovala, and services like Sliver Cuisine that offer most meals designed for senior needs, tastes, and lifestyles.
For other seniors, limited mobility and decreased motor skills can make even simple meal-prep challenging. For these seniors, meal delivery services offer an option to continue eating healthy, nourishing meals while maintaining their independence.
All of the companies listed here offer meals for seniors that are prepped, cooked, and only need to be heated before enjoying.
Accommodates Special Dietary Needs
It’s a fact of life that as we age, our dietary needs change. Certain health concerns like diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, and renal disease are more common in senior populations. Even seniors who are the picture of perfect health need to focus on eating to maintain their vitality with a focus on healthy options, such as Mediterranean diet meals.
Silver Cuisine by BistroMD is an excellent example of how a company can meet the nutritional challenges and dietary restrictions of seniors. From special diets that consider the nutritional needs of post-menopausal women, and those needing gluten-free meals to those following the heart-healthy Mediterranean diet, Silver Cuisine delivers.
Ingredients Quality
Any meal is only as good as the quality of the ingredients it contains. This is why it’s so important to consider the integrity of the ingredients a senior meal delivery service uses. One of the reasons Fresh N Lean is listed as a runner up is because of their commitment to using certified organic ingredients in their meals.
Other services are equally committed to using quality ingredients. Along with using organic ingredients whenever possible, they also work with local farmers in creating their whole-foods, plant-based dishes. This type of commitment is always evident in the final product a meal delivery service provides.
Meal Variety & Tastes
Nobody likes to eat the same thing day after day, which is a struggle with senior meal delivery services that offer little in terms of variety. There’s also the fact that some seniors have strong taste preferences or sensitivities to certain foods. The more options that are available, the more likely you’ll find meals you’ll enjoy.
Silver Cuisine, with more than 150 options, is the senior meal delivery service with the most variety.
Cost
Cost is an important factor for most people, but especially for seniors who are on a tight or fixed budget. Some meal delivery services can cost close to $20 per meal. That’s a price point that just doesn’t work for many senior budgets.
Often, there is a relationship between quality and price, so finding that sweet spot where great taste and value meet is important.
Bottom Line
At the end of the day, seniors want what everyone else does…great meals that are easy to prepare that don’t break the bank. These are the best options for meal delivery for seniors to meet these demands easily.
With companies like Silver Cuisine, which operates specifically with seniors in mind, and others like Fresh N Lean and Factor, that appeal to health-conscious, value-minded seniors, there are many delicious options to consider.