Review: Daily Harvest

Daily Harvest is a meal delivery service that specializes in gluten- and dairy-free, plant-based, premade frozen meals. Ranging from smoothie blends for quick, nutritious breakfasts packed full of veggies and fruits to dinners of soups, harvest bowls, grains, and pastas, all of the meals use inventive, plant-forward ingredients for generally low-calorie meals that are great for the solo vegan eater like me.

I will preface this review by saying I’m a cook at heart. I love chopping, simmering, and sprinkling spices on my foods. I rarely follow directions to a T. Part of the enjoyment of eating for me is the ritual of preparation, and for that reason, I don’t love ready-to-eat frozen meals. However, Daily Harvest isn't the typical Hungry-Man chewy steak and gluey potatoes of yesteryear.

These health-conscious meals rely on the natural taste of the featured vegetable(s), pairing them with flavor profiles like curry and lemongrass for more complexity. There are also sides, like Mexican- and Indian-inspired rice, which serve as good bases or jumping-off points for a homemade meal when adding your own crispy tofu or roasted veggies. If you didn’t want to do any additional work, the meals on their own require very little prep besides reheating in a microwave or on a stovetop. The many choices of smoothies and soups are the exception, which require a blender or food processor along with water, a plant-based milk, or broth for a fuller flavor.

With a Daily Harvest subscription, you’re getting a solid vegan meal in less than five minutes with minimal work. The flavors were sometimes dull for me, and I grew tired of the mushy consistency, but if you’re a solo vegan who doesn’t want to have to think too hard about your next meal, Daily Harvest may be the service for you.

Down to Nuts and Beans

Unlike the majority of other meal delivery services I’ve tested, which use an AI-assisted shopper or tout their expertly curated meal plans, Daily Harvest gives consumers the power. It offers à la carte selection of frozen pastas, soups, bowls, and smoothies that spread from breakfast to dinner, with snacks like chocolate energy bites. You can see the whole selection online, including prices. Things like allergies are just denoted with an asterisk online, so you’ll need to read closely about the dishes before ordering to be sure they meet any dietary restrictions.

Without rotating weekly menus that the brand preselects for you, Daily Harvest offers single servings that start at $7 for something like a breakfast bowl, and go up to $11 for most everything else, like harvest bowls and pasta. You need a $50 minimum to order, and shipping is $10. Buying à la carte is kind of nice sometimes, because you’re not beholden to a premade selection. Although the menu changes periodically, switching out a seasonal or unpopular dish, I could see the limited selection getting a little boring if you were to commit to this service for a long time.

Daily Harvest also has dietitian-curated bundles, which group items focused on a specific need. There's a Mediterranean Diet–inspired collection, a protein smoothie bundle, meals that support GLP-1 diet guidelines, and meals that align with the Whole30 diet.

Unlike Thistle or Purple Carrot, which use mostly plastic packaging, the majority of Daily Harvest meals are in more sustainable cardboard bowls and packaging. The exceptions are frozen pastas, which come in freezer-safe plastic bags, and small plastic lids for liquids like smoothies. The meals arrive in a package on ice, and since they’re frozen, there’s virtually no cutoff date for use, which makes this service convenient, if only just to have a stockpile for lazy days.

Daily Harvest isn't like other meal services with strict once-a-week deliveries; you can change your delivery day via app or online to a later date. Although, if there are no available dates for the upcoming week, you'll need to wait until the next week. Once scheduled, you’ll get an email confirmation, but you can still modify your choices, schedule, and plan, including skipping deliveries. Because it’s an automated meal plan delivery service, you’ll automatically be beholden to a weekly plan, which can be adjusted, and you’ll see your next five orders online or on the app. Luckily, Daily Harvest doesn’t have duration minimums, but if you want to cancel, you’ll have to do it the week before your next order cutoff to avoid being charged.

I Miss Crunchy Veggies

I will say, when you eat Daily Harvest, you can tell it's trying to be healthy. Which is not a bad thing! I’m vegan, after all; I love vegetables! But sometimes I want to feel like I’m eating an actual rich pasta bolognese and not a vegan version Frankensteined with hemp seeds and black lentils.

I also didn’t realize that I was such a texture person. I will give credit: Daily Harvest is aware that living only on reheated or blended foods can be a challenge, and it does try to add sturdier root veggies or things like legumes or seeds when possible, to provide some textural variance. But at the end of the day, I missed the crunch, bitterness, and just aliveness of greens. Many of the pasta and harvest bowls were a little one-note, and I found myself consistently adding more texture with tortilla chips or crackers, along with heavy dashes of salt, pepper, lemon juice, and sometimes hot sauce for more flavor variety.

Breakfasts with Daily Harvest consist of different smoothies and oatmeal bowls. The smoothies are packed with greens like kohlrabi, spinach, and kale, which Daily Harvest often tries to cover up with sweet elements like cacao or banana. The smoothies were super mild in flavor, and I kept wishing they had opted for a more punchy, flavorful fruit like mango or pineapple. The cinnamon and banana breakfast bowl, made from gluten-free rolled oats and butternut squash, was mushy and bland, even when I added cold oat milk for a little more variety.

Non-breakfast items were soups, pasta, grains, and harvest bowls; these were full meals with vegetable and grain elements (this is where meat eaters could make things more interesting). The standout from these was the chickpea and coconut curry harvest bowl, a coconut cashew curry with chickpeas, cauliflower, sweet potatoes, and bell peppers that made a hearty, rich, and warm spiced sauce. I added rice that I had at home; if I had ordered this as restaurant takeout I wouldn’t be disappointed.

The rest of the meals weren’t much to write home about, honestly. A veggie-packed soup with edamame, wild rice, beans, bell peppers, and basil in a coconut lemongrass broth would’ve been better with the recommended coconut milk or broth, but I didn’t have any on hand so I added water. The lemongrass flavor was strong and worked well with the Southeast Asian flavor profile, although despite having quite a lot of sodium, it needed more oomph from something like red chili flakes. I was super excited for the black bean and vegan cheeze bowl, which was supposed to be a burrito bowl and probably would’ve been good fresh, but the whole thing turned into bland, one-note mush.

With the microwaved vegan bolognese, the strong, acidic tomato was definitely the hero flavor of this dish, while I disappointedly didn’t taste any of the mushroom. The gluten-free noodle was a bit tough, and the hemp seeds and lentils added a grainy mouthfeel I didn’t love. As a vegan, I hate to say it, but I think it would’ve greatly benefited from some deep, non-vegan umami flavoring, like a spicy pork meatball or feta cheese.

Overall, if you’re a healthy vegan who wants a simple way to jump-start solo meals, this may be for you. But be forewarned that things can get quite mushy, and I highly recommend personalizing the dishes with dynamic elements, like acidity, spice, and perhaps most importantly, living plants.