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Purple Carrot Meal Kit Review: Tastier Than Meal Kits With Meat
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The meals I made with vegan meal kit Purple Carrot include some of the best-tasting food I've made with any meal delivery service. This is no small statement. I'm an omnivore and longtime food critic who’s tested pretty much every meal delivery service in existence over the past two years.
And so when I say Purple Carrot offers good cooking, I'm not grading on a curve. Purple Carrot's pecan-topped, five-spice butternut squash dumplings I prepped this July were among the most extravagant meals I made for myself during that entire month. The prep was extensive, more than I'd usually attempt on any but a weekend evening, but the results were both healthful and a rival to excellent bistro fare.
Purple Carrot achieves this on its meal kit recipes while avoiding the pitfalls endemic to vegan fare—namely, an over-reliance on soy or cashew substitutes. Purple Carrot, thank God, loves a vegetable. It loves a fruit. And it loves an herb. While Purple doesn't offer a huge menu each week, and I was less enthralled by microwave meal options that resorted more often to hunks of seitan, the meal kit choices are both broad and appetizing.
Purple Carrot manages to deliver the classic promise of a meal kit—sweet relief from the same staid recipes I bore myself with when I'm out of ideas. It does so better than most meal kits that cater to meat-eaters. It was my colleague Molly Higgins' favorite plant-based meal kit of the dozen or so she tested last year. After testing five meals and a number of market add-ons this year, I rank it among my favorites overall.
Purple Carrot is among the older meal delivery services in the United States, founded in 2014 in Massachusetts but later acquired by Japanese sustainable-focused food delivery company Oisix. Purple Carrot is indeed packaged more sustainably than most kits: cardboard insulation, recyclable paper containers for microwavable meals. One could also argue that plant-based food is sustainable by its nature. But there's still the usual battery of plastic baggies housing the various ingredients.
Though it's a subscription service, Purple Carrot's subscription is unusually flexible. Meals are priced individually, from $13 to $15 a serving, and can be mixed and matched among solo ready-to-heat meals and meal prep recipes for two or four. (Introductory plans lop half off your first week's order up to $100.) While you can cancel a week, each week does have a $65 minimum order—amounting to five or six servings.
Note also that Purple Carrot does not add a lot of fats and sugar to its meals, nor load up lots of carbs. Servings tend to range between 550 and 750 calories. That's a large lunch, and filling enough for medium appetites—but unlikely to stuff you if you're used to more heaping portions at dinner. In a trashmonster mood, I could hoover two servings and save my guilt for later.
Recipe ingredients are organized nicely into individual bags, and the foldout recipe cards are charmingly well designed and easy to save if you plan to replicate them in the future with or without Purple Carrot. The kits offer a mix of fresh produce and prepackaged ingredients that might include tofu, instant rice, or spice pouches.
Although produce isn’t guaranteed organic, most of the ingredients were (and of course, they were all vegan). The only ingredients you need to provide are salt, pepper, and cooking oil. Though note that at least one recipe—those excellent butternut squash dumplings—required a food processor, a rarity among meal kits loath to make such assumptions about anyone's home kitchen.
Purple Carrot's strength lies with the recipes and the freshness of the ingredients. Some sourcing is local where possible, according to Purple Carrot. And the produce I received did seem a step above most of the bigger meal kits. In my box, the poblanos were crisp, and the herbs were fragrant. In July, my corn came seasonably still on its cob, waiting to be sliced off into kernels. Avocado, a real worry for a delive