Purple Carrot is an exclusively vegan meal kit subscription service that sends you recipes and ingredients every week to make plant-based meals. You choose the recipes from a creative menu, where sometimes vegetables are the star (stuffed sweet potatoes) and sometimes there's a twist on an old meat-based favorite (General Tso's tofu). Purple Carrot is a wonderful service for getting more plants in your diet and learning how to cook and eat well as a vegan. However, Editors' Choice winner Green Chef has fantastic, vegetable-heavy meals that offer greater dietary flexibility.
Pricing
When you sign up for a Purple Carrot subscription, you can opt for recipes that serve two to four people. If you select two servings per recipe, you can receive either three or four recipes per week. If you get four servings per recipe, you can receive two or three meals per week. Purple Carrot's fully prepared meals, as opposed to the meal kits you cook yourself, are single-serving offerings that cost $13.
All in, Purple Carrot dinner cost between $11 and $14 per serving. The more servings you order per box, the lower the cost per serving. If you go for the smallest box, three meals with two servings each, you'll pay about $80. Max out your box and expect to pay around $132.
Most meal-kit subscription services cost between $10 and $15 per serving, including HelloFresh and Fresh N Lean. That makes Purple Carrot's prices about average. A delivery fee tacks on an additional $10 if your total order is less than $100. Otherwise, shipping is free.
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You can also add breakfasts and lunches to any shipment. The options there are limited, however. There are vegan snacks, too—cookies, granola, mushroom-based jerky—with à la carte pricing. The optional add-ons are a great perk you won't find with all meal kit services. Hungryroot sells full-on groceries, though.
Menu
Vegan food has come a long way since the days of putting an entire portobello cap on a dry bun and calling it a burger. Purple Carrot offers thoughtful, modern vegan entrees. It's 100% plant-based, unlike Green Chef, which includes some meat options alongside vegetable-forward meals.
As you browse the recipes, you'll see recipe cards with photos and tags indicating whether the meals are high protein, quick and easy, gluten-free, soy-free, nut-free, and so forth. It also shows prep time, calories, and complete nutritional information. You can see all these details without creating an account, which is helpful if you have food allergies.
Vegetables shine in Purple Carrot's meals and are done up with care. Dishes often have multiple components, such as sauces, greens, or flavorful rice. Purple Carrot uses a variety of non-meat proteins, such as tempeh, seitan, and tofu, although you can always find meals that leave them out if you prefer more veggies.
Some meal kits send premade sauces, but Purple Carrot does not. Here, you make what you eat. There are two big advantages to making sauces. One, you know what's in them and won't get caught off guard by stabilizers and other unnecessary ingredients. Two, making sauces helps you learn to cook. If you're invested, you can peruse Purple Carrot's video tutorials to learn more advanced kitchen skills (like how to supreme citrus or season a cast-iron skillet). Blue Apron also offers many video tutorials, but it focuses more on basic skills, such as how to dice an onion.
Purple Carrot teaches you to make a spicy cashew salsa to drizzle onto mushroom tacos, provided you have a blender. You can whip up a sticky apricot sauce with a handful of ingredients and a hot pan. Even a falafel dish on Purple Carrot's menu requires making it from scratch. (The recipe uses canned chickpeas, whereas dried chickpeas, soaked in water but not cooked, worked better.) This is real cooking, not some heat-and-eat assembly, although Purple Carrot has those options.
Packaging
If you buy into a meal subscription service, you must consider packaging. How much of it will you receive? How much of it can you reuse or recycle? No meal delivery company is a beacon of environmentalism in this regard, though some do better than others to minimize their impact.
Purple Carrot seems to generate a little more waste than is necessary, but most of its pieces are recyclable. There's an insulating liner made of post-consumer waste, which resembles dryer lint. The ingredients are, for the most part, grouped into plastic bags, one for each meal. Purple Carrot uses gel freezer packs, which are commonly used in meal delivery. To dispose of them, you must let them thaw, which takes a day or two, and then pour the plasma-like substance into a trash can—not down the drain.
Some companies that ship frozen meals (such as Daily Harvest or Splendid Spoon) use dry ice instead of gel packs. Dry ice evaporates, but it has downsides compared with gel packs. Dry ice burns skin, so you have to be extremely careful with it.
Purple Carrot has a thorough page of information about all its packaging and how to recycle it. It uses many materials, including plastics. The plastics are #1, 4, 5, 6, and 7, which you should know for recycling.
The Purple Carrot Experience
A meal kit delivery service's menu changes over time, so what we tested may not be available forever. Some of the recipes we tried include:
Lemon garlic orzo
Pasta ratatouille
Portobello fajitas
Roasted sweet potato tacos
Sweet potato fritters
Vegetable panang curry
All meal-kit delivery services, including Purple Carrot, ask that you supply salt, pepper, cooking oil, and standard kitchen tools. It's a good idea to look at the recipes online before making your weekly selections to ensure you don't need something you don't have, like a blender or food processor. In addition to the ingredients, Purple Carrot also sends you printed recipes.
Purple Carrot's food is tasty and satisfying. We enjoyed the fajitas, which had a delicious filling, as well as the orzo and curry dishes. The sweet potato fritters were enjoyable, but didn't hold together well. The meals don't feel like they're trying too hard to mimic meat-based dishes. We also like that most recipes call for a few different vegetables. More meat-and-potatoes meal kits send you three-component basics: chicken, broccoli, and rice; or steak, mashed potatoes, and green beans, for example.
You can pause and reactivate your subscription at any time. It's all self-service from your online account. Customer service has been responsive in our experience. Once, we received a box that was missing an ingredient. We sent a note by email and heard back quickly with an apology and a $15 credit. Needless to say, that more than made up for the missing shallot.
Verdict: Royal Purple
Purple Carrot offers excellent variety, and we appreciate the company's dedication to making high-quality, plant-based recipes. We'd certainly eat Purple Carrot's meals again. Other vegan food companies market themselves more on convenience, which Purple Carrot provides. But at the root of the service is a meal kit that requires satisfying hands-on cooking, with delicious results. Editors' Choice winner Hungryroot also offers a vegan option while including options for animal products. Hungryroot's box of groceries has more flexibility than a straight-up meal kit, so it might be a better pick for mixed households where not everyone wants a vegan meal. Green Chef is another Editors' Choice for plant-forward meals, although it uses dairy in its many vegetarian recipes.
Jill Duffy and Molly McLaughlin contributed to this review.
Purple Carrot's vegan recipes inspire you to step into the kitchen to cook delicious, creative, animal-free meals.
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