Vegan Meal Kits — Is It Actually Possible?

Short answer: Yes, you can absolutely eat vegan from a meal kit in 2026 — and one UK provider, Grubby, is a fully vegan, 100% plant-based cook-yourself kit. Among the six major UK providers we've tested, that makes Grubby the exception rather than the rule. What most of the others offer instead is what we call vegan-possible: the menu includes meat, but you can pick the vegetarian and vegan dishes week by week.

That means the real question isn't really whether it's possible, but how good the selection is, and whether you end up with a properly balanced, nutrient-rich diet. The difference on the plate is significant: the most plant-forward cook-yourself kit, Green Chef, delivers 322 g of fruit & vegetables per portion, while the most budget-friendly, HelloFresh, comes in at 177 g — nearly half as much. In this guide, we walk honestly through the real options — Green Chef, HelloFresh, and Grubby — and look at selection, price, and nutrition, so you can choose the kit that fits your plant-based lifestyle. The figures come from our own benchmarking and official UK dietary guidance.

When people search for a "vegan meal kit," they often mean two very different things. One is a 100% vegan kit, where the entire lineup is plant-based — no meat, seafood, eggs, or dairy at all. The other is a vegan-possible kit: a standard, broad meal kit where you filter the menu yourself and pick only the plant-based dishes. That's the same distinction we use in our roundup of vegetarian meal kits and in our guide to meatless meal kits.

The difference matters because it determines how large your real selection actually is. In a 100% vegan kit, everything on the menu is relevant to you. In a vegan-possible kit, you're sharing the menu with meat-eaters, and the number of purely vegan dishes can swing from week to week. Some weeks there's plenty to choose from; other weeks, less. If you're flexitarian — mostly plant-based but eating meat occasionally — the vegan-possible model is actually ideal, and you can see the best picks on our flexitarian meal kits page.

Right now, a pure, dedicated vegan kit doesn't exist among the major national players. That said, several kits have become plant-forward enough that vegan-possible covers most people's needs in practice — if you choose wisely.

If you want to get as close as possible to a genuinely plant-forward cook-yourself kit, Green Chef is the obvious first choice. Its recipes are 100% Soil Association-certified organic, and it scores 48.7 out of 100 in our dietary-guidance benchmark — by far the highest of the cook-yourself kits. Concretely, that means 322 g of fruit & vegetables per portion (versus HelloFresh's 177 g) and just 47 g of meat/seafood per portion, where the meat-heavy kits run over 100 g. If you want to understand what that score covers, we've explained the methodology in plant score explained.

Green Chef, part of the HelloFresh family of brands, is the only major kit with a dedicated Plant-Based (vegan) plan, alongside Keto, Mediterranean, Protein, and Gluten-Free options — typically 3–4 recipes per week. Pricing starts at £6.30/portion, plus delivery of £4.99, and new customers get up to 40% off plus a free first box. It's one of the pricier options among the kits we cover, but that premium buys the organic certification and the dedicated diet plans — not the plant-based food itself. Want to dig into the details? We have a full Green Chef review, and if organic sourcing matters most to you, we round up the real organic options on organic meal kits.

HelloFresh isn't a plant-forward kit at its core, but it is vegan-possible thanks to a broad menu system with multiple meal plans — including a vegetarian plan — and a large weekly selection you can filter. You simply pick the plant-based and vegetarian dishes and build your own green week.

Its strength is price and flexibility: HelloFresh starts at £3.75/portion (dropping further for larger boxes), delivers UK-wide, and offers a welcome discount of up to 60% off your first box — making it one of the best options if you're after cheap meal kits. The weakness is nutrition: its plant score is only 25.3/100, with 177 g of fruit & vegetables and just 14 g of legumes per portion — the lowest in the field. You can eat plant-forward at HelloFresh, but you have to actively choose it, and the selection of purely vegan dishes is smaller than the vegetarian one. Its entry price is hard to beat, though. Our full HelloFresh review digs into both the menu and the complaints that come up most often (delivery and cancellation).

If you'd rather not filter a mixed menu every week, Grubby is the answer: it's a 100% plant-based, cook-yourself kit, so every recipe on the menu is vegan by default — no picking around meat dishes required. You still do the cooking, but the ingredient boxes arrive with everything pre-portioned. Delivery is £4.99 UK-wide, and your first box ships free.

Pricing starts at around £5.75/portion, and new customers get 25% off their first three boxes. On Trustpilot, Grubby scores 4.0/5 from around 1,900 reviews, with praise centred on the fully vegan menu and recipe variety. Keep in mind that, as with any all-plant kit, the meal plans lean heavily on the same core vegetables and pulses week to week, so it suits people happy to build variety themselves rather than expecting exotic recipes every time. Read our full Grubby review before you commit.

The three paths to plant-based eating differ mostly in how plant-forward the food is, how the diet plans work, and what it costs. Here are the key numbers side by side:

Here's how to read the table: Green Chef clearly wins on plant-forwardness and organic sourcing, but costs the most among these three. HelloFresh wins on price and selection, but is the weakest nutritionally — you do the work, and you choose the plant-based dishes yourself. Grubby wins on being the only genuinely 100% vegan menu, but wasn't included in the dietary-guidance benchmark, so we can't put a number on how plant-forward it is. If you're generally unsure how to weigh price against plant-forwardness, we have a step-by-step guide in how to choose a meal kit.

Most people in the UK eat far less produce than they think. NHS Eatwell Guide advice recommends at least 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day and several portions of beans, pulses or lentils a week — but the UK's National Diet and Nutrition Survey consistently finds that only a small share of the population meets the fruit and vegetable target, and pulse intake lags even further behind, with a large share of adults eating close to none in a typical week.

That's the gap a meal kit has to close if it's going to make a real difference. Both the NHS Eatwell Guide and the World Health Organization point towards a predominantly plant-based diet with limited red and processed meat. A vegan-possible kit, then, isn't just a niche option for vegans — it's a practical tool for shifting everyday eating in the direction the guidance actually recommends. But it only works if you actively choose the plant-based dishes, because the menu won't do it for you.

The real pitfall with plant-based meal-kit food isn't protein itself — it's pulses. Beans, lentils, and chickpeas are the backbone of a healthy vegan diet, and NHS guidance points to several portions a week. None of the cook-yourself kits come close per portion: Green Chef leads with the most legumes per portion, Mindful Chef and Riverford trail behind, and HelloFresh comes in lowest. The average across the benchmarked kits is modest at best.

That means two things. First: even the most plant-forward kit covers only a fraction of the recommended pulse intake — so you should plan to supplement yourself, for example with a tin of chickpeas or lentils in your own snacks and sides. Second: Green Chef gives you a noticeably better starting point than the meat-heavy kits, both on legumes and on the 322 g of fruit & vegetables that gets you more than halfway towards the daily produce target. If you choose a vegan-possible kit like HelloFresh, you need to be extra deliberate about building in protein and fibre yourself — otherwise you risk plant-based dishes that look healthier than they actually are. We go deeper on the general health question in are meal kits healthy?, and if health is your main goal, we round up the best picks on healthy meal kits.

One last, honest note on the numbers: nutrition figures for meal kits are typically calculated from the recipes — not lab-tested. That's true of most research in this space. Our plant score measures alignment with dietary guidance, not a precise nutrient-by-nutrient breakdown of your exact plate, so treat the figures as a solid directional guide rather than a definitive answer.

There's no single right answer, but there is a right answer for you. If you want the most plant-forward and organic food and don't mind cooking it yourself, Green Chef is the clear choice — just accept that you'll pay more than the other two, and that you'll need to supplement legumes yourself.

If price matters most, and you'd rather try plant-based without a big commitment, HelloFresh has the lowest entry price and a vegetarian plan to build on — but be aware that you're responsible for steering towards plant-forward choices yourself. If instead you want a menu that's vegan from top to bottom with no filtering required, Grubby's fully plant-based cook-yourself boxes are the easiest path — in exchange for a smaller, more repetitive recipe rotation than the bigger, meat-inclusive menus.

What all three have in common: there's no commitment. You can pause, skip, or cancel, so the cheapest way to find your favourite is to use a welcome discount on each and taste the difference yourself — see how on our page about meal kits with no commitment. Want to look beyond these three? Compare the full field on vegan meal kits.