Purple Carrot Meal Delivery Review: What’s on the Menu, Costs & More
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The price varies depending on the number of meals, servings, and extras (breakfasts, lunches, snacks or fresh grocery items) you select. That said, Purple Carrot is comparably priced to competitors like HelloFresh, HungryRoot, and Green Chef.
Plus, Purple Carrot lets you customize your order so that you always get exactly what you want. Whether you’re looking for breakfasts, lunches, dinners or snacks, they’ve got you covered. And with new recipes being added all the time, you’ll never get bored.
Yes, Purple Carrot meals are 100 percent vegan. Each week, they offer a variety of meals to choose from, as well as add-on items.
Most of Purple Carrot’s non-produce items (like beans, nut milks, tofu, tempeh, vegan cheeses and yogurts) are organic. However, due to constraints with sourcing, shipping locations and the ingredients required to provide unique culinary experiences, Purple Carrot is sometimes limited in its options for organic and non-GMO products.
Purple Carrot has committed to exploring how to increase the number of organic products used in their meal kits and prepared foods.
Purple Carrot is located at 460 Hillside Ave in Needham, Mass., and can be reached by phone at 1-857-703-8188 and email at hello@purplecarrot.com.
At this time, Purple Carrot does not offer an app. But they include nutritional information with each recipe so if you’re tracking your intake, you have access to all the information you need.
Methodology
Behind Our Best Meal Delivery Service Ratings
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Here’s the methodology behind our ratings: