Purple Carrot Meal Delivery Review

Purple Carrot Recipes, Menus & Meal Options

When you sign up for the Purple Carrot meal delivery service, you’re given a choice between meal kits or prepared meals. Meal kits include recipes and pre-portioned ingredients that you use to create your own entrees, and prepared meals come pre-made—just heat and eat.

Purple Carrot Meals

If you opt for the meal kits, you’ll be given a choice between two or four servings.

If you select the two serving plan, you’ll be asked to indicate a meal preference, which will help determine the meals you’ll be sent. The meal preference options include Gluten-Free, High-Protein, Quick & Easy or Chef’s Choice meals. 

Here’s what you can expect from each meal preference:

• Gluten-Free: You’ll receive only gluten-free meals. However, Purple Carrot facilities that process the meals are not certified to be gluten-free, so if you have a medical condition that requires eliminating gluten, use your discretion or consult with your healthcare provider before ordering.
• High Protein: You’ll receive entrees with at least 20 grams of protein per serving. The high-protein menu includes foods like tofu, tempeh, and beans in addition to veggies.
• Quick and Easy: These meals take 30 minutes or less to prepare.
• Chef’s Choice: These meals have been selected by the Purple Carrot culinary team. This is a great place to start if you’re new to Purple Carrot and want to see the meal variety.

Purple Carrot offers 12 recipe options per week, and the meals change every week—although there are some ‘fan favorites’ that repeat after a number of weeks. Here are just a few of the recipes on the Purple Carrot menu, organized by meal category:

Gluten-Free

• Loaded Cauliflower Steaks with Coconut Bacon & Chives
• Creamy Pasta Primavera with Asparagus & Pistachio Salsa
• Charred Broccoli Tacos with Garlicky Black Beans & Roasted Pepper Chimichurri
• Thai Jungle Curry with Jasmine Rice & Toasted Lime Cashews

High Protein

• Crispy Lemon Chik’n with Brown Rice & Gai Lan
• Green Veggie Burgers with Gochujang Mayo & Togarashi Fries
• Curried Lentil Tacos with Sweet Mango Slaw & Apple Cilantro Salsa
• BBQ Glazed Sweet Potatoes with Broccoli and Sweet Corn Salad

Quick & Easy

• Roasted Broccoli Quinoa Bowls with Pistachios & Fiery Caper Vinaigrette
• Maple Chile Soba Noodles with Crispy Sheet Pan Tempeh & Bok Choy
• Spicy Buffalo Tofu Bowls with Celery Carrot Slaw & Herbed Ranch
• Peanut Pad Thai Noodles with Charred Green Beans & Lime

Chef’s Choice

• Wild Rice Pilaf with Polenta Dusted Sweet Potatoes & Chipotle Scallion Aioli
• Mac N’ Cheese with Thyme Roasted Mushrooms & Tomato Cream
• Beet Burgers with Tangy Slaw & Smoky Tomato Aioli
• Kimchi Grilled Cheese Sandwiches with Charred Asparagus & Carrot Fries

You can also customize your own Purple Carrot box, mixing and matching the various offerings each week.

Purple Carrot Prepared Meals

There are eight prepared meals offered at a time, and they rotate frequently. You can also filter by gluten-free options.

With menu items like Thai Noodles with Peanut Sauce & Ginger Vegetable Stir-Fry, Roasted Vegetable Pilaf with Sizzled Turmeric Vinaigrette & Ras El Hanout Chickpeas, and Pesto Corn Skillet with Herbed Orzo & White Beans, you can be sure the prepared meals dish out just as much flavor as the meal kits.

Extras

Purple Carrot also offers a “Plantry” featuring plant-based grocery items like pesto and vegan sausage that you can add to your delivery. Breakfasts and lunches are also available add-ons for an additional fee.

Purple Carrot Nutrition & Serving Sizes

All of the Purple Carrot recipes and prepared meals are completely vegan, and many are naturally gluten-free. The recipes and meals average 500 to 800 calories per serving, and include complex carbohydrates from vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes, and fruits plus healthy fats and lean proteins. 

The following considerations can help with Purple Carrot meal selection:

• Nutritional information and ingredient lists for each recipe are available online, so you can see the exact nutrient content before you make your meal choices. The ingredient and allergens lists are especially helpful for those with dietary restrictions.
• The serving size for the meal kits is either two or four servings. For Prepared Meals, you will always receive one serving.

Purple Carrot ingredients aren’t 100 percent organic or completely non-GMO. However, most of their non-produce items like beans, nut milks, tofu, tempeh, vegan cheeses and yogurts are organic. The company is dedicated to offering as many organic and non-GMO products as possible.

Purple Carrot Cost

The cost of the Purple Carrot meal delivery service depends on what you add to your box.

There is no membership fee with Purple Carrot, and you can cancel any time. You can also skip deliveries and as long as you do so by the deadline, you won’t be charged for skipped weeks. 

Discounts, Coupons & Deals

Purple Carrot occasionally runs special promotions on their meal kits and prepared meals—especially for new customers.

Purple Carrot Benefits

Unlike other meal delivery services that hang their hat on the convenience factor, Purple Carrot has much more to offer. With Purple Carrot, not only do you get chef-crafted recipes that are delicious and 100 percent vegan, you also reap the benefits of eating a plant-based diet. Studies show that when you eat a plant-based diet, you may lower your risk of developing conditions like diabetes. Plus, in a 2020 clinical trial, researchers found that eating dinners from Purple Carrot’s meal kits was associated with a significant reduction in LDL cholesterol (the “bad” kind) and body weight compared to eating dinners by a nationally known non-plant-based meal kit company.

Purple Carrot isn’t just good for your body, it’s good for the planet, too: According to one study, on average, each Purple Carrot meal kit results in 72 percent less carbon being released into the atmosphere as compared to the standard American meal. Plus, it takes 51 percent less water to make each Purple Carrot meal kit then it takes to make a standard American meal.

Purple Carrot Customer Service & Company Info

The fastest way to connect with a Purple Carrot team member is via their online chat feature. They can also be reached by email at hello@purplecarrot.com or by phone—the Purple Carrot phone number is 1-857-703-8188. They have a customer service team that is available 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST.

Purple Carrot is owned by Tokyo-based Oisix ra daichi Inc. (Oisix), Japan’s largest meal kit and organic food delivery service. 

Price

At the time of this review, Competitors and Purple Carrot are all comparably priced.

Recipes

Given that Purple Carrot’s entire menu is vegan, they offer the largest quantity and greatest variety when it comes to plant-based recipes. Both Green Chef and Hungryroot offer a limited number of vegan dishes; HelloFresh offers vegetarian recipes that can be adapted to fit a vegan lifestyle however, you risk losing some of the flavor and satisfaction that comes with meals since you’re simply omitting ingredients. 

The Hungryroot recipes typically take less time to prepare—about 10 minutes compared to the 30 minutes most of the other brands’ recipes take. But we think the Purple Carrot meals are worth the extra time—they’re innovative, delicious and seriously satisfying.

Plan Options

All four of the meal delivery services offer a variety of serving size and meal quantity configurations, which makes any of them a great choice for singles or families. And each offers a variety of meal preferences, including gluten-free, vegetarian, etc. 

In addition to the standard meals that come with each plan, Purple Carrot, Hungryroot and HelloFresh also offer extras like breakfasts, lunches and pantry items that you can add to your order for an additional fee; GreenChef does not.

Customer Service

Of the four meal delivery services, Purple Carrot definitely has the best customer service. They are the only service that offers phone, email and live chat support. The most convenient and fastest way to get answers is to utilize their live chat feature. We used it several times while conducting research for this review, and were quite impressed with the speed and thoroughness of their agents’ responses. And the fact that you get to speak with actual people makes for a much better customer experience than entering a question into a chat box and getting a generic, pre-scripted response, which is how the HelloFresh chat option works.

In Sum…

Whether you’re a strict vegan looking for an innovative and convenient approach to meal time, or you’re a meat-lover on a mission to bump up your veggie intake, Purple Carrot is a great choice. With flavorful, plant-based meal plans to choose from, Purple Carrot dishes out a wide variety of healthy recipes and prepared meals that make meal time easy.

With Purple Carrot, you get more than just delicious, chef-crafted recipes and fresh ingredients delivered to your door. You get the major health benefits that come with a primarily plant-based diet. Good for your taste buds, good for your health and good for the planet—you can’t go wrong with Purple Carrot.