After years of heavily relying on cooking, I recently decided to give Factor meals a try. It’s not that I dislike cooking, but the process of planning meals, buying groceries, cooking food, and cleaning up after became extremely tedious from week to week. Furthermore, because I moved to a new place with a smaller kitchen not too long ago, it also became apparent that doing that much cooking just wouldn’t be practical anymore. Yet, because I still needed to preserve my physique and continue building muscle, I couldn’t just resort to fast food and takeout. I needed a more convenient approach that would still allow me to eat nutritious, high-protein meals.
Factor is a subsidiary of the HelloFresh Group. However, unlike HelloFresh, which is a meal kit service that provides you with ingredients and recipes to make your own food, Factor is a meal delivery service that provides ready-made meals so you don’t have to prepare, cook, or clean anything. Using a meal kit service can be nice if you want to learn how to cook nutritious and tasty meals, but at this point I was looking for something a bit more hands-off.
You may have seen many ads for Factor on social media. I certainly did, and as a result, it was a service that I heavily considered and ultimately chose to go with. Now that I’ve been using it for some time, I want to share my thoughts on whether or not it’s actually any good.
Overview
Service: meal delivery
Price per meal: $11-$14 excluding shipping
Meal options: choose between plans of 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, or 18 ready-to-eat meals per week from the following categories:
- Chef’s Choice
- Keto (15 grams of net carbs or fewer per meal)
- Calorie Smart (550 calories or fewer per meal)
- Flexitarian (balanced meals with protein and veggies)
- Vegan and Veggie
- Protein Plus (30 grams of protein or more per meal)
Preparation style: all meals are microwaveable and ready to eat in 2 minutes
Features
- Menu rotates and changes from week to week
- Meals of your choosing are delivered fresh to your doorstep weekly
- Meals come individually portioned and packaged
- Additional snacks, desserts, juices, and smoothies available for extra charge
| pros | cons |
|---|---|
| Chef-prepared meals are cooked well with lots of variety and flavor | More expensive than cooking |
| Meals are quick and easy to prepare | Lower-calorie meals may not fill you up |
| Nutrition facts are included on the packaging of every meal | Limited Vegan & Veggie options |
| Easy to select meals, change meal plans, pause/cancel subscription | Manually selecting meals every week can be a bit tedious and easy to forget |
Overall Rating: 8.5/10
Review
The Food
Obviously, the most important thing is the food itself. Based on the general reputation of ready-made meals and my prior experiences with them, I was definitely skeptical about how good the food would be.
Fortunately, I was quite impressed from the start. First of all, the quality of the food is very good. Factor uses high-quality ingredients like grass-fed meat and antibiotic-free poultry. All of their ingredients are non-GMO and all of their meals are free of preservatives. Plus, Factor meals are never frozen. As a result, the food is cleaner, much less processed, and much more nutritious than frozen meals you buy at the grocery store.
Since I choose the Protein Plus option, I also get the benefit of having at least 30 grams of protein in every meal, although in reality, many meals contain over 40 grams of protein.
Secondly, the meals are surprisingly tasty. I’m definitely someone who cares about the taste of my food, and although the meals aren’t quite restaurant-level, they’re genuinely enjoyable. I’ve maybe come across a couple meals that were rather bland or didn’t taste all that great, but most of the food is pretty good. Even pork chops and salmon, which can easily be overcooked or under seasoned, are done pretty well most of the time.
There are also meals that definitely stand out from the rest. Some of my favorites include the pesto salmon, sun-dried tomato chicken, and garlic pork tenderloin. These are very delicious in my opinion, and I think that if they were served fresh off the stove and plated nicely, they would actually be restaurant-worthy.
Despite all the positives, however, the one major downside is the cost. It’s nice that there are often generous promo codes when you first sign up, but once those run out, the meals can be a bit pricey. Even with the larger meal plans, each meal still comes out to about $11 each before shipping. If you’re on the smaller plans, each meal is more like $14, at which point cooking your own food or even getting takeout become very enticing alternatives. I’ve already decreased my meals from eight to six per week, which is enough to cover a week’s worth of lunch, but I’ve gone back to consistently making my own meal prep for dinner.
Even then, I still struggle with the fact that I could save a significant amount of money if I fully reverted back to cooking all my meals. However, as the saying goes, time is money, and for me, being able to get so much variety and quality with such ease makes Factor worth it, at least to some degree.
Meal Selection
Another highlight of Factor is the huge variety. You can select from 35 meals every week, with a large majority of them meeting the criteria for a Protein Plus meal (although the options are admittedly limited for Vegan & Veggie). The menu also changes every week, with meals being offered on a rotating basis and new meals being introduced all the time.
Even though there are meals that I willingly go for whenever they’re available, like the ones I mentioned earlier, I never have to repeat meals week after week if I don’t want to. Unlike some other meal delivery services, Factor does a good job of demonstrating that high-protein meals can be more than just a choice of protein paired with brown rice and broccoli.
Selecting your meals is simple; you just need to go onto their website or log into their app, both of which are pretty easy to navigate. From there, you can choose the meals you want for the week, as well as change your plan and meal category.
This is something I haven’t quite figured out how to do in the app, but on the website you also have the option to pause upcoming deliveries. If you’re going to be out of town, this feature can be helpful so you don’t need to change any of your plan settings or cancel your plan outright.
When choosing your meals, I also appreciate the fact that you have access to all the nutrition facts and ingredients in each meal. For me, this really helps when it comes to portion size, which was another initial concern of mine when I first signed up. Factor meals range from 350-900 calories, but I find that I’m still hungry if I have anything with less than 500 calories. Therefore, having access to the calorie content of each meal ensures that I choose meals that’ll actually fill me up.
The Delivery System
My Factor boxes are delivered every Monday, although you can also choose to have deliveries occur on Tuesdays or Wednesdays. However, I’m required to select my meals for each box by the Wednesday before. In my opinion, that’s quite in advance. There have been several times when I’ve forgotten to choose my meals, as it can be hard to remember to put together your next box when you’ve only just gotten your last one a couple days ago.
If you do forget to select your meals, Factor will automatically choose meals for you based on your meal plan and preferred category. Luckily, this means you won’t accidentally end up without food for the week, but you also won’t have any control over the kinds of portions you get, which as I mentioned earlier, can be an issue if you have a big appetite like me.
One last thing to mention is the overall packaging of the meals, which is pretty convenient. All the meals come in individual plastic containers that are meant to be directly heated in the microwave and tossed out after your meal. This means no cleanup is required, except for the utensils you eat with.
The box that your meals come in are also packed with insulation and gel packs to keep the meals cold for an extended period of time. This means that even though the meals arrive fresh to your doorstep, you don’t need to worry about being there to immediately put them in the fridge. The insulation and gel packs can then be easily disposed of since they’re all meant to be recycled or thrown out.
My Final Thoughts
Having used Factor for a bit now, I can say that I’m quite satisfied. In my opinion, it actually is what it’s advertised to be, which isn’t easy to come by these days. The food tastes good, has lots of variety, is nutritious and high in protein, and is very easy to prepare. It’s easy to choose the meals I want, and they’re delivered reliably and without any hassle.
That being said, Factor isn’t going to be for everyone. If you’re vegan or vegetarian, I wouldn’t recommend it due to the limited selection available to you. Even for everyone else, though, it really depends on what you prioritize. You could stick with ordering fast food and takeout, which would save time and cost less than Factor; however, you’d mostly be filling up on processed foods that are high in calories and low in nutritional value. You could do your own cooking, which would certainly be the cheaper option for eating healthy, but that would take up a lot of your already limited amount of free time.
If, however, you want access to nutritious, high-quality meals without having to sacrifice your time, and are OK with spending a bit more for it, it’s definitely worth giving Factor a try.
